Editors Note: In this 24/7 environment of COVID-19 news, I thought I'd share an article now-and-then highlighting ordinary people reaching out to help others. Enjoy.

By Michael Hollan

A pizza place in New York City has dedicated itself to feeding health care and hospital workers who are struggling to keep up with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Now the restaurant's landlord is joining in to make sure that the food keeps coming out of the kitchen and into the hospitals.

Sauce Pizzeria owner, Adam Elzer, says his restaurant is making 400 pizzas per day and sending them all to the city's hospitals, NBC New York reports. He told the news outlet that he wanted to make sure that the workers were still able to get something to eat while dealing with the outbreak.

"They’re running around from room to room, the hospitals are packed, and if we’re not sending food, a lot of them are not eating," Elzer told NBC New York. "Basically anywhere that we get a note from a nurse or a doctor telling us that they’re in need, we figure out a way to get them on the schedule and then we deliver to that hospital."

Sauce Pizzeria has reportedly delivered pizzas to over 40 different hospitals across the city's five boroughs, all for free.

Ben Kraus of A&E Real Estate Management, Sauce's landlord, found out about the donations and decided to help out. The real estate company donated $20,000 to the pizzeria and froze rent payments for the next three months.

"It made it a lot easier for us to keep doing what we’re doing and to feel really good about that," Elzer said. “Pizza makes people happy. That’s what this started from, that we wanted to give them some reason to smile when it’s kinda hard to smile with what they’re currently doing."

"I saw what Adam was doing on social media honestly and when we noticed what he was doing it was very clear that we needed to help him," Krause told the outlet. "We set up Adam with logistics to be able to deliver en mass to hospitals all over New York City."

Editor's Note: This is the fifth annual appearance of What It’s Like, a proven favorite with readers inside and outside Rotary. - The Rotarian

Joyce Azzam - Rotary Club of Beyrouth, Lebanon

I started hiking in 2005 and got serious about high-altitude climbs a few years later, when I won a scholarship to study in Europe and spent a lot of time in the Alps. In 2012, I developed this big dream to complete the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on each continent. But it wasn’t something I ever expected to do.

I was born during the civil war in Lebanon, and what I remember from my childhood is moving from bunker to bunker, living underground. I was one of five kids in a very modest family. My dad painted buildings and did construction. For us, the focus was just to eat and survive, and later to get a good education and make a living. Nobody was thinking about climbing mountains.

I always feared heights, and I was never a sporty girl. In fact, I have a physical challenge called hyperlaxity, which is a condition where the joints in my legs are loose. My knees would bend backward. It looks very odd, and when I was young the other kids would bully me about it. They even called me “alien.” I couldn’t run more than 50 or 100 meters. I would challenge myself every day to run a little farther, using the pillars on the playground. I wanted to say to myself that I am strong in front of all those kids. Maybe it started there, my desire to climb mountains. It’s become a mission for me to tell everyone who has a physical problem, or another kind of challenge to overcome, that they can do the impossible if they want it badly enough.

I hope all of you are in good spirits and trying to get outside as much as possible. There are plenty of places to go and keep our distances. Rotary Park, Pukaite Woods and Mequon Nature Preserve to name a few. The birds are coming back to nest and there is plenty of activity to help us see that Spring is on the way. I pray that the spread of the virus begins to die out with the birth of Spring. If anyone needs some type of help or support please reach out to members of our club. We are all in this together.

Above are two photos from the Nature Preserve. They have planted over 10,000 trees and shrubs on the property. Go see the transformation from Farm Land to Woodlands.

David Schlageter

Editors Note: Our own Lance Parve and his wife Julie are featured in this WTMJ4 story on Hope Without Borders.

A local husband and wife who've devoted much of their lives to volunteer work overseas are gearing up for yet another trip to assist people living in severe poverty in the African country of Kenya.

Lance Parve, a Wisconsin DOT engineer, and Julie Parve, a nurse practitioner, started Hope Without Borders in 2007.

"We founded Hope Without Borders to do humanitarian, charitable, nonprofit work as volunteers," Lance Parve said.

The organization has put together roughly 30 trips to countries in Africa, Central America, and South America since its creation.

Lance and Julie Parve fundraise and apply for grants to fund their work and projects, but they don't ever get paid with the money raised, and neither do the volunteers they recruit.

In May, they'll take a group of 15 such volunteers, who all paid for their own airfare, to Kenya.

The group is monitoring the global COVID-19 pandemic, but currently still plans to make the trip. Hope Without Borders previously traveled to Africa during an ebola outbreak.

"It always amazes me how people are willing to give up their vacation time, and open up their wallets," Julie Parve said.

"Though the years we've probably raised, with people volunteering, and with money, over $3 million," Lance Parve added.

The trip to Kenya in May includes many volunteers who are students in nursing, or nurse practitioner students. The group will begin their volunteer work by assisting with poverty relief in the Nairobi slums.

"These slums are in conditions you can't even imagine," Lance Parve said. "There's human waste everywhere. There aren't enough toilets for million-person slums."

"The people there, maybe they only eat one meal a day," he added.

One of the biggest challenges the impoverished locals face: A lack of clean drinking water.

Source: CDC, Drew Harris
Credit: Connie Hanzhang Jin/NPR

As the coronavirus continues to spread in the U.S., more and more businesses are sending employees off to work from home. Public schools are closing, universities are holding classes online, major events are getting canceled, and cultural institutions are shutting their doors. Even Disney World and Disneyland are set to close. The disruption of daily life for many Americans is real and significant — but so are the potential life-saving benefits.

It's all part of an effort to do what epidemiologists call flattening the curve of the pandemic. The idea is to increase social distancing in order to slow the spread of the virus, so that you don't get a huge spike in the number of people getting sick all at once. If that were to happen, there wouldn't be enough hospital beds or mechanical ventilators for everyone who needs them, and the U.S. hospital system would be overwhelmed. That's already happening in Italy.

"If you think of our health care system as a subway car and it's rush hour and everybody wants to get on the car once, they start piling up at the door," says Drew Harris, a population health researcher at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. "They pile up on the platform. There's just not enough room in the car to take care of everybody, to accommodate everybody. That's the system that is overwhelmed. It just can't handle it, and people wind up not getting services that they need."

Harris is the creator of a widely shared graphic visualizing just why it is so important to flatten the curve of a pandemic, including the current one — we've reproduced his graphic at the top of this page. The tan curve represents a scenario in which the U.S. hospital system becomes inundated with coronavirus patients.

However, Harris says, if we can delay the spread of the virus so that new cases aren't popping up all at once, but rather over the course of weeks or months, "then the system can adjust and accommodate all the people who are possibly going to get sick and possibly need hospital care." People would still get infected, he notes, but at a rate that the health care system could actually keep up with — a scenario represented by the more gently sloped blue curve on the graph.