ministry please
Donate Online
(Visa, MC, AMEX, Discover)
Christ Kitchen Helps Women Repair their Lives
The following article is reprinted with permission from the Spokesman Review
dated May 29, 1999, by Nina Culver, Correspondent.)
The 10 women line the sides of the table, laughing and talking as they scoop
and measure ingredients for cookies.One talks about the jail sentence an ex-partner recently received for assaulting her. Other life details bubble around the room as several conversations go on at once. In the corner, a mother comforts her restless baby as she works quietly.
The women are poor. Many are recovering from addictions, and some have been victims of domestic violence. All are trying to repair their lives.
These women are all working in a program called Christ Kitchen, which they describe as a life-saver.
They earn minimum wage making a variety of dried mixes with enticing names, such as Prayerful Pintos, Blessed Bean Soup, Converted Rice, Heavenly Cocoa, Testament Tea, Omniscient Oatmeal Raisin cookies, Peaceful Peanut Butter cookies and Charismatic Chocolate Chip cookies.
"When I got here, I was absolutely beaten down and broken in spirit," says Kari George.
She has been coming to the weekly Christ Kitchen mixing sessions since March 1998, a month after the program started at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Spokane's West Central neighborhood. Methamphetamine was George's drug of choice, but she would take anything she could find. She lost her job, house and children.
George quit drugs and started rebuilding her life. She found out about the Christ Kitchen program from a neighbor.
"Initially what I came for was the $30," says George. But she soon started coming for the fellowship and moral support. She's been drug free for 16 months.
"Having a relationship with God has really helped me," she says. ``It's been a great place for me to start over again.''
Before each mixing session, the women gather for prayer and Bible study, learning to form a relationship with God as they learn to form a relationship with each other.
"That's what's so important about the Lord in this thing," says Jan Martinez, the program's founder and director. "God comes through where nobody else does."
Martinez also works as a counselor at Westminster's Christ Clinic, which offers medical care to the poor.
The jobs at Christ Kitchen, while important, were deliberately designed to allow maximum interaction among the workers, says Martinez.
"The idea behind that is to leave energy and concentration and time to be able to work on relationships and to talk about important issues going on in our lives," she says. "If it was very intense or isolating work, that wouldn't be a possibility."
There are usually between 10 and 12 women working each week, with the number occasionally ballooning to two dozen around the holidays as more women seek extra money. While some come only once, many return again and again. No one is turned away.
The program recently received a $14,000 grant from the Northwest Synod of the Presbyterian Church. The money will be used to implement training classes so the women can gain job skills in areas such as computers.
With the grant, Martinez suggested a new pay scale by which women with seniority would get paid more. The women turned it down.
"What they were refusing was a concept of hierarchy in favor of all being together in this and all working together without somebody being over them," Martinez says. "These are really issues of power. It really had less, I think, to do with money."
Instead, the women decided on a rotating supervisor position, with the women being paid more only if they worked more hours as part of that position.
Like many poor women, these women have been locked into high-risk, low-paying jobs, such as being late-night convenience store clerks. Part of that is due to few job skills, but some is because of the attitudes many employers have about women on welfare, Martinez says.
"Political contention says that either these gals are too lazy or there's no work for them,"she says. "I really don't believe that that is true."
"I think that nurturing work environments and nurturing employers are going to be what gets people back to work."
"That is the concept - that if someone is poor, they must in some way be unintelligent or unmotivated or something - and it just really isn't true."
Martinez says the women are dedicated workers, often taking work home or doing extra work on their own.
"They're never late. They come on time," Martinez says. `"They're the most reliable workers I've ever had."
Her goal is to teach the women how to work well with others, how to be good employees, and how to work through their problems.
"I think that this is a way station on the way from very fractured lives to self-sufficient, whole lives," she says The products they make are sold through area churches, with word spreading by word of mouth. The project, supported by donations, is not yet self-sustaining.
Martinez has plans to expand sales and start offering products in local stores.
Eventually, the operation would like to move into other food products, says Shannon Miller, who runs the cookie division. The problem is that the program doesn't have the money to build the required commercial kitchen.
"We need some angels to come along who want to remodel the kitchen as a project," Miller says.
A new kitchen would make the program more profitable and able to help more women, women like Susan Ramsey. She brought her 10-month-old daughter to a recent food packaging session and credits the program with keeping her on track.
Ramsey kicked her drug habit when she discovered she was pregnant. She now plans to attend Spokane Community College and find work as a legal secretary.
"It's given me peace of mind, a place to go, and people to talk to when I needed it," she says. "It makes you feel good to see the stuff you've made and people buying it."
© Spokesman Review, May 29, 1999
by Nina Culver, Correspondent.
