A sampling of the vegetarian food prepared by Hindu Temple youth volunteers. TNS

Imagine being ill with a terrible and often deadly disease, living miles from home at an institution while receiving treatment that can be agonizing and leave you weak and exhausted.

Now imagine coming back from a day of radiation treatment and being welcomed with a home-cooked meal or food made with love by a local restaurant.

Hope Lodge St. Louis is essentially a hotel for cancer patients. Run by the American Cancer Society, it provides free long-term lodging for patients and their caregivers who have to travel here to receive their treatment.

The whole process can be physically and emotionally draining. So the residents’ spirits are lifted when they are served a taste of home. Families, business people and organized groups from the community come to the Central West End location to bring or prepare meals.

The youth group at the Hindu Temple of St. Louis has been coming to the lodge once or twice a month for three or four years, said volunteer coordinator Sasi Ravichandar.

Volunteers prepare a meal at the Hope Lodge for cancer patients. TNS

“Charity is definitely part of the Hindu religion,” Ravichandar said. “’Annadhanam’ means ‘to offer food to others.’ That’s a part of Hindu life.”

The teenagers and two parent volunteers fix fresh vegetarian meals for the residents and also clean the kitchen when they are done.

“If somebody needs help, then we serve. If not, we let them serve their own food, but we are there to tell them what the ingredients are, if they want to know,” Ravichandar said.

The Hindu temple youth group serves Indian cuisine, starting with their most popular item, a garden vegetable soup similar to mulligatawny, but with more vegetables. They also make a carrot and mung bean salad and upma, a dish of toasted semolina or durham wheat pan-fried with vegetables. Dessert is a fruit salad.

The youth group teens “really like to serve, so there is a satisfaction there to help others. They also get to work in a team. And I’ve seen that they like to chat with the residents there,” Ravichandar said.

Kathy Roden’s family also comes to the Hope Lodge once a month to serve food, for a very personal reason: Roden survived a bout of breast cancer in 2017.

Mani Sivaraman, one of the Hindu Temple youth group coordinators, places a salad on the serving table. TNS

Roden lives in Lake Saint Louis, close enough to the hospitals that she did not have to travel far. But every day for eight weeks of treatments, she would see fellow patients in the waiting room who had driven hours to be there. She did not hear of Hope Lodge until after her treatments had ended, but when she did, she realized that she wanted to help out. Up to a point.

“When they said (they serve) from 50 to 60 people, I said I don’t want to cook for that many people,” she said.

So each month, beginning early this year, she and her extended family have been buying food at restaurants and bringing it to the residents. They tried a few different places before settling on Ethyl’s Smokehouse in O’Fallon, Mo., where they know the owners.

On Monday they will be serving smoked turkey breast, potatoes and apples. They have also brought barbecue, chicken salad sandwiches and other delights.

But they bring far more than that. Roden and her sister, who is also a cancer survivor, “give them hope that you can beat this, and you can survive this,” she said.

The residents’ faces light up when the family walks in with food, she said. But perhaps the family gets as much out of their time there as the residents.

“It brings us joy just to meet the people. It is a beautiful place,” Roden said.

“It’s brought a change to our life.”

Tribune News Service