RURAL CHAMPAIGN — Susan Warsaw has received awards and citations from New York officials and firefighters for her volunteer work in the trying days after Sept. 11, 2001. She's even on a set of heroes collector cards.

The University of Illinois retiree says none of that matters as much as the satisfaction of helping people.

"It's all about giving of yourself," she said in an interview at her Hensley Township home, north of Champaign.

For roughly 8 1/2 months after America's worst terrorist attack, Warsaw not only worked in food service and generally helped out at sites near ground zero, but recruited dozens of UI workers and others, including her husband, Ron. He is also now retired from the Urbana campus.

Together, the volunteers served 3.5 million meals to cops, firefighters, medical technicians and construction workers at the site.

With the United Way and later the Salvation Army running things, more than 34,000 volunteers were involved from all over the world, putting in more than 1 million volunteer hours, Warsaw said.

"You met people from other countries who just wanted to help so much," she said, noting people from Holland donated thousands of tulip bulbs that bloomed the next spring in the area.

Warsaw, a New York native from Astoria, Queens, did her first stint as a volunteer helping Sept. 11 workers within a month of the terrorist attack.

"That happened in my back yard," she explained.

By January 2002, she was back, bringing friends. Her third trip came in April.

Twenty-nine volunteers from Champaign, Urbana, Penfield, Rantoul, Savoy, Sidney, Tolono, White Heath and the Chicago area left from Willard Airport that April.

In all, Warsaw made five trips during the crisis and probably 15 in all since Sept. 11, 2001. By the time of her January 2002 trip, things were calmer, she said.

"When I went in October, they were still organizing. Things were an absolute disaster, but New York was pulling together and trying its best to find people as fast as possible, because there was still a chance that people were alive. The security was tighter than I've ever seen it anywhere," she said in 2002.

She said that people who haven't been through some of the attack or its aftermath don't truly understand how horrific it was.

She describes the morgue area at Bellevue Hospital. Most people think that meant the work was done inside a hospital, she says.

In reality, large refrigerated trucks — some 18 semi-trailer trucks — sat outside of the hospital while medical personnel and coroners did their best with the bodies and body parts that were recovered, Warsaw said.

The Champaign woman's face is on trading cards honoring "Heroes of The World Trade Center." Publisher Kingsley Barham chose from thousands to put 170 people on the cards — from among the living and dead — as well as 32 informational cards.

Any profits from Warsaw's card went to The Salvation Army of Greater New York, she said.

She has medallions and badges given to her by the New York police and fire departments, and an American flag flown by the Salvation Army.

She has given a set of the cards and a scrapbook to the new museum to be at the World Trade Center site. The 9/11 Memorial Museum will open in September 2012.

The museum's collection of materials includes artifacts, photographs, audio and video tapes, personal effects and memorabilia, expressions of tribute and remembrance, recorded testimonies and digital files and web sites related to the history of the World Trade Center, the events of Sept. 11, 2001 and the earlier attack Feb. 26, 1993, and their repercussions.

Ever the guide for central Illinoisans, Warsaw also led a sightseeing and Christmas shopping trip there for four days in 2002.

"I'll always be the New York native showing off the sights," she says.

Warsaw will be giving the last of many presentations she has done on Thursday.

Breakfast begins at 9:30 a.m. and the presentation at 10 a.m. in Carle Foundation Hospital's Pollard Auditorium in the Forum, 611 W. Park St., U.

Among the things she will speak about are how the terrorist attacks changed her.

"I'm more religious now," she says.

After a recent illness, she said, "I wonder why I'm still here. I'm grateful for everything that has happened."