“If he didn’t make life so pitiful in that shelter I wouldn’t have moved on,” said Peter Kabbage of the shelter’s director Ray Severn. “If he had given me a nice bed and soft blanket I may have not decided to turn my life around.”
The city plans to close Martha’s Kitchen on Monday for building code violations that include electrical and plumbing problems, bugs and rodents, lack of sanitary conditions in the kitchen and restrooms, as well as structural problems.
Severn said this week he has until today to file an appeal to prevent the closure.
Kabbage said all he got at the shelter was a mattress on the floor from which he could stare at paint peeling off a ceiling.
“When I heard that the shelter was closing I felt a relief,” Kabbige said. “I had felt guilty knowing those guys were living in those conditions. I didn’t know it, but I was feeling guilty. Now they will get the help they deserve. And they do deserve it. They are being treated worse than dogs in there and they accept it. They accept it because they don’t know any better.
“You can have a huge heart, be well-meaning,” he said. “You can have the soul of a saint and give people a roof over their heads but that isn’t helping anyone, that is prolonging a problem.”
Charitable organizations have been working with the shelter’s residents this week to find them housing and meet their other needs.
Temple Police Cpl. Chuck Borgeson, who has spent the last two and a half years concentrating his efforts on reducing crime in the area, believes that when the shelter’s tenants see what other shelters have to offer they will understand what they have been missing.
“There is no path out of that shelter except for these drastic measures,” Borgeson said. “Once they see other shelters, if that is where they go, once they see that they can’t just stay there without filling out job applications or completing a GED - all these things have been available to people, just nobody told them.
“In two or three weeks they are going to step back and think ‘why didn’t I do this before?’ he said.
Martha’s Kitchen was establilshed in 1985 with an eye to giving people a fresh start.
Its founder, Fred Bandas, in 1992 said, “We feed them and shelter them, but let God do the judging. We don’t care where they’ve been. Our only concern is where they’re going.”
Bandas was a deacon in the Catholic church, which ran the shelter.
Borgeson said that in those early years there was concern for where the people, who were housed there temporarily, would go next. He believes Martha’s Kitchen residents deserve job training, their own housing and a chance for guidance.
