Students from St. Charles Elementary School and St. Michael's Elementary School 4-H Clubs play a quick round of pool while volunteering at Jeanerette’s Pre-Thanksgiving Community Gathering, where community members came to eat, and where meals were cooked and delivered to the elderly and disabled Monday afternoon. 

JEANERETTE — Late Monday morning, in a small kitchen at the Ward 8 Community Center in Jeanerette, Emmanuel Butts Jr. was stirring a big pot of stew.

Butts is the housing director for the city of Jeanerette. Behind him, Paula Hill, Edriane Williams and Kawanee Tena — the city’s billing clerk, payroll clerk and accounts payable clerk, respectively — were packing food into Styrofoam trays. 

All afternoon, Jeanerette city officials, city employees and volunteers were busy cooking and serving, and also packing for delivery, Thanksgiving meals for the third year in a row. It was the city’s pre-Thanksgiving Community Gathering — a free meal program and get-together open to anyone but targeted, mainly, for the benefit of the community’s elderly and disabled residents.

“This is a chance for the city of Jeanerette to work in combination with other organizations in a group effort to help feed our elderly and disabled,” Jeanerette Mayor Aprill Foulcard said between trips from the kitchen to the parking lot, where she was filling the bed of an idling pickup truck with bags of cooked meals.

Foulcard said there were so many civic and social service groups, churches and businesses that came together that is was difficult to name them all. 

At least one New Iberia business, M-pire Entertainment LLC, donated to the event and was on site helping the mayor deliver meals. 

“We appreciate our elderly and our disabled and we love them in this community,” Foulcard said. “This is a group effort, and it’s all volunteer. It just shows how real that love is.” 

Also helping were members of the 4-H Club of St. Charles Elementary School, chaperoned by sixth-grade teacher Sarah Olivier. 

Olivier said she saw a flyer for the event last year and contacted the city to see if they could get involved. Monday was the club’s second year volunteering at the event. She said the city of Jeanerette thanked them by offering its facilities to the club for a roller skating party for the kids. 

“It’s something positive for them to do, especially right now, with all this shooting and everything, all the negative stuff out there,” Olivier said. “And it keeps them out of trouble.”

Angela Gray, a Jeanerette native, was there enjoying a meal with sisters from her Delta Sigma Theta sorority.

“The food was delicious,” Gray said.

The sorority was donating Thanksgiving baskets to senior citizens at the event. 

A couple tables away, Delphina Lockett agreed. 

“The food was good. It was good last year and it was good this year,” Lockett said.

Lockett said she had come the previous year with members of her church, St. Peter United Methodist.  

Foulcard said volunteers cooked 500 meals on Monday, with 300 of them being delivered to elderly and/or disabled residents at their homes.