by Alayne McGregor
For Abbis Mahmoud, the smiles and thanks are what have sustained him during the first month of the current pandemic.
Mahmoud is the founder of Operation Ramzieh, a program that delivers food boxes to seniors and other people stuck in their homes. When he was delivering boxes last week, “I knocked on a door and this woman insisted on speaking to me. She just told me how wonderful. She was in a wheelchair and she just insisted on talking to me for a while. She said, ‘God bless you! This is amazing what you guys are doing. And we’re so grateful.’ ”
Mahmoud would normally be running his two restaurants, The Waverley on Elgin Street and the Moscow Tea Room in the ByWard Market. When they had to shut down in March, he and his staff shifted to delivering food boxes. Boxes are designed to last 12 to 14 days and include staples like oatmeal, soup, bread, jams, peanut butter, fruits, and vegetables.
The project is named after Mahmoud’s mother.
His family came to Canada in the 1970s, fleeing the Lebanese civil war. As they prospered in Ottawa, his mother didn’t forget her village back in Lebanon.
“We came from a very poor village, and my mom used to support a lot of that village. It is still fairly poor. My mom, every time she’d go back there, she would feed people, as many people as she could.
“And she’d always [make] a point to feed the mother. She thought if you give the money to the women, the women would take better care of it and make it stretch a lot further.”
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When his mother died last July, she was buried in that village.
“I left the village when I was four or five years old, so I didn’t know much about it. When I went there, a lot of the village elders were talking to us about how much my mom would just always feed them. She just arranged, between all the women, who needed what and who could share what.
“So she helped a lot of people in the town who went to her for food when they didn’t have any. Every year, she’d go back and we’d send money with her and she would just give it to people. Or if she couldn’t go, she would send it. She took care of a lot of families there, sending money to the mothers.”
Mahmoud had planned to return to the village this year to help some of those families. When the pandemic made that impossible, he looked for another use for the money. He thought of his aunt, in her 80s, and of his older landlord who lives alone.
“I called them to get groceries, and I dropped it off to them, and the idea came from there. There must be a lot of seniors sitting at home, too afraid to go out or maybe they shouldn’t go out.”
To start up the operation, Mahmoud donated $40,000 and has continued to donate; he has also started a GoFundMe campaign. Volunteers, many from Centretown, have stepped up to sort food into boxes and deliver them to shut-ins.
The city health department and a nurse from Public Health inspected their operation, he said, and volunteers are washing their hands every hour.
“We all wear masks and we wear gloves as well, and when we pack the boxes, we try to stay a good six feet apart from each other. Then, when we deliver the food, we just knock on doors. We try to avoid contact [although] a lot of the seniors want to come out and say hello and talk to you or at least thank you.
“But the idea is that the volunteers will pull up in their cars and fill up their cars with boxes and then they go deliver them.
“Every time I get a new person coming to volunteer, we’ll go do a run and they’ll come back in tears. Like ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe how people are thanking me’.”
Budget Rent-a-Car lends trucks for deliveries. Food donations have come in from farmers–eggs, milk, potatoes–and from closed restaurants and hotels.
“We’ve been on their websites asking them, before your food goes bad, please give it to us. We reached out to them first to help us, and then we started to fundraise after that.”
Besides money, they “desperately need diapers because we have a lot of single mothers. In Ottawa, we’re starting to get some pet food as well, to keep people’s morale up. But we can use anything that people can use. So we’re looking for baby milk, diapers, all kinds of food.”
The project started with seniors: “they’re the most at risk. But then it just snowballed into a lot of single mothers, people not having money, and from there it went to people with compromised immune systems.”
It’s been a revelation. “I didn’t know that there were this many people in need, to tell you the truth. I didn’t know about these drop-in centres and crisis shelters for women and stuff like that, until we started this project.”
They’re coordinating with local food banks because many don’t deliver food, as well as working with organizations ranging from Interval House to the Canadian Mental Health Association to the Wabano Centre to the Ismaili Council Ottawa to the Somerset West Community Health Centre to the Bruyère Centre.
The operation has expanded to Toronto, because they were getting many phone calls from there: “people just pleading for food. They’re petrified.
“I used to have businesses in Toronto, and I called up a friend of mine who has a warehouse and a restaurant. He was, like, come do it here right away. He lent us his site.”
When The BUZZ interviewed Mahmoud he had just delivered to two seniors’ apartment towers in Toronto–knocking on every door to deliver to a few hundred residents in less than an hour.
“As we pulled up, there were people on their patios cheering us, because they were waiting for the food. As we dropped off each box, those people are just so happy.
“It’s sad that we’re in this, but it’s fulfilling to help people. Every couple of days I like to go on a delivery because almost every day I want to give up. I get home and I think I can’t do this anymore.
“And then I go on a trip and it invigorates me. Today was a rough one for me. I was about to give up and when I got to this woman’s house who insisted on talking to me, she just had the greatest smile, and she thanked me relentlessly.”
The operation has expanded far beyond his initial hopes.
“Honestly, I just thought we’d feed a few seniors. And then when your phone starts ringing, and you have mothers crying that they don’t have any food to feed their babies. Or you have seniors that are alone and they’re petrified. You just keep going.”
Mahmoud said he hoped for goverment funding to help Operation Ramzieh grow. But with volunteers and donations, “we’re going to keep going for as long as we can. There’s a lot of people right now that are feeling scared and lonely and isolated.
“We started adding some flowers for a little bit, until we ran out, and that really made a difference. I’m trying to make cards that we can put little notes in. But I think people just need to call people, to tell that they care, that they’re there for them, even if they don’t need anything.
“I know people need food, but the isolation and the fear–I really felt a lot of fear in that building today.”
Request a food box:
- operationramzieh.org/request
- 1-800-321-5973