Riverdale resident Deborah Bonelli has come up with a simple - albeit unusual - way to honor soldiers who have been injured overseas: she serves them tea. She transforms veterans' hospitals into a teatime setting, complete with tablecloths, fine china and pastries.

By N. Clark Judd

From the cluttered office in her Henry Hudson Parkway apartment, Deborah Bonelli manages a far-flung, informally organized group of people from California to her hometown of Glastonbury, Conn., all focused on a simple - some would say eccentric - but now time-tested idea.

Each year since 2005, they have descended upon a distant army hospital with boxes full of tea, pastries, tablecloths, fine china and handmade decorations. In 2005, they did it at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Since then, it has been Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas.

Ms. Bonelli takes over one floor of the hospital, where she does something unexpected - she, and the small army of volunteers with her, makes tea, then serves it to wounded soldiers and their families.

Ms. Bonelli, a library director at St. Barnabas Hospital, stood nervously next to the window of her makeshift command center on an April afternoon, as she explained her operation.

"This makes it all possible," she said, putting a hand atop the Dell laptop sitting on a table at the center of the room.

That laptop is her line of communication with the Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter in Glastonbury, the Friar's Club, which sends musicians to her events, volunteers in Texas, helpers in New Jersey and elsewhere in New York, tablecloth donors in Missouri and California, and the administration of Brooke Army Medical Center.

The laptop, surrounded by worn old cookbooks, is one of her tools. Volunteer experience at a children's hospital is her inspiration.

As a volunteer for the weekly tea at the Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian, where, for years, parents have been served on the same floor where their children await surgery or other medical care, Ms. Bonelli learned something about what it's like for families supporting a child with a traumatic injury or illness.