2 March 2023
It was one little sparrow. It flew in through the doors of the Mahurangi East Community Centre and made itself at home in the rafters. Every time it looked like it might fly back out the doors it would veer round again, loop the hall and head back up into the rafters.
“Try as we might, we couldn’t get this sparrow out,” says Harbour Hospice volunteer Val Aston, who was there setting up for a funeral. “So the service went ahead with this little sparrow in our midst and all I could do was stand guard over the tables of food.”
Val and her small team of fellow volunteers cater for funerals and social occasions in Warkworth/Wellsford, and what sets them apart from other caterers is that they do it all for love. The hours they put in to preparing food for these occasions are voluntary and the proceeds they make, they donate to Harbour Hospice. In the past 12 years the team has catered for more than 360 occasions and raised tens of thousands of dollars to support hospice services in their local community.
Val couldn’t imagine life without this charitable work and says she chose to support hospice because her late husband had been “taken such lovely care of” when he went into hospice care.
Each of the women has her own specialty dish – Val’s is asparagus rolls, for the others it’s beautiful cakes, sandwiches or sausage rolls. “And we work together like clockwork,” Val says. “I might get a phone call for a funeral for Saturday then I’ll just ring all the girls. We can swing into action with a few days’ notice and we love it - we all get a lot of joy from doing this.”
The funeral that day at the Mahurangi East Community Centre was long, Val recalls. “Because it was for a wonderful man who had helped so many in the community. So I ended up standing at those tables for an hour and a half waving my arms at this little bird. And then I had all the women in the kitchen busy rotating the mini pies in and out of the oven, so the pastry wouldn’t go hard.
“There is always something like that, that happens at a funeral,” she laughs. “And we just do whatever we can to look after everyone. We love to make people happy.”
