Key points:
- At the Well, a weekly spa day program for women without housing in Austin, Texas, offers its clients a shower, meal and pampering.
- Men are not welcome upstairs at the church that day so the women aren’t intimidated and can lounge in their robes after their showers.
- The ministry is the brainchild of the Rev. Cathy Stone, associate pastor of First United Methodist Church.
Zeta is missing.
She is the sister of Regina, who did turn up March 28 at First United Methodist Church of Austin for the weekly women-only spa day ministry at the church, called At the Well. Regina and other regulars were worried.
“Regina … said (Zeta) didn’t come back to where they were staying last night,” said Judy Breckbill, a retired nurse who has volunteered with At the Well each Friday at the church since the program began in 2019.
Zeta has been attacked before, spending six weeks in the hospital. She’s got a large scar on her head and braces held her jaw together for a time.
The concern is that Zeta was assaulted again. At the very least, she is missing out on the highlight of the week for many women living without permanent housing in the Texas capital.
Fridays at First United Methodist are a time to get a meal, take a shower, get some laundry done and pick out something new to wear from the clothes closet. Once a month, a hair stylist donates her time and gives haircuts.
The women can do all this for a few hours while feeling safe and secure — unlike the rest of their lives on city streets.
“It’s just love extended,” said Sandra, a homeless woman who is at the church most Fridays with her grown daughter, Valerie. “The food is scrumptious, like an extravagant buffet. Then you leave with a bag of snacks, and that lasts you for two days.
“It just makes you happy, and you can share some with another homeless person out there.”
On the other side of the equation are the volunteers, who get the joy of serving.
“I had been looking for a ministry, and this one fascinated me,” said Evelyn Gullalt, a member of First United Methodist Church and a retired special education teacher who started out making a donation.
“So I gave money; I would do my donation and walk away and feel justified.”
But it wasn’t enough, and she decided to try volunteering on Fridays.
“I immediately fell in love with it, and it’s just become my passion,” Gullalt said. “It feeds me more than about anything I do.”
She especially loves it in the winter, when women visit to get a break from the cold weather.
“They come in and they’re all bundled up, and to be able to set a cup of steaming coffee in front of them, it’s just a gift from God,” Gullalt said.
At the Well is the brainchild of the Rev. Cathy Stone, associate pastor of First United Methodist of Austin. She observed before the pandemic that many more men than women showed up at the church to access its resources. It turned out that many of the women found the men intimidating.
“We started talking and planning, so it started in 2019 right after the breakfast on Thursday mornings,” Stone said. “The breakfast, everyone’s usually out by 7 a.m., and so the women’s time was like 7 a.m. to 11 a.m.”
They soon switched to Fridays for the women because the overlap time when women and men were both there didn’t work.
“On Fridays during the pandemic, we’d have like eight women all spaced six feet apart, and then we took them up one at a time to shower,” she added.
Nowadays, 30-40 women without residences show up each Friday. It benefits everyone involved, not just women who are homeless, Stone said.
“It builds you up,” she said. “Being able to care for the women that we serve, to hear their stories, to share my story, to connect, it fills me up so that I can do the other work that isn’t as fulfilling like the paperwork.”
Stone knows many of the regulars by name. She calls them “clients.”
“If I’m gone from the breakfast or gone from At the Well, they ask me, ‘Are you OK?’” Stone said. “That is the gift of drawing close.
“I’ve seen it with some of our volunteers who step into serving here because they want to make a difference and they want to help others who need help, and what they quickly find out is they are poured into and cared for in surprising ways.”
As you spend time with them, the clients quickly take shape as individuals.
There’s Sandra and Valerie, the mother-daughter team.
“We’re very close,” said Sandra, the mom, who does much of the talking for the duo. “She never married, so I said, ‘Well, it’s too late. Now you got to stick with your mom.’”
They lost a duplex they were renting in San Antonio because of a carbon monoxide leak, then moved to Austin.
“I got sick; she got sick,” Sandra said. “We got through it, but barely.”
Dependent on Sandra’s Social Security check, they generally rent a cheap hotel for one week of each month, and sleep on the streets the rest of the time.
“I was assaulted out here,” Sandra said. “We both were. We got hit in the face in a food line here. … We can’t go down to the food sources around (the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless) in the south, because the people are a lot rougher there. There’s bullies and things like that.”
Valerie and Sandra have been keeping up with politics, knowing that government cutbacks could impact them.
“I’m seeing all these Google sites are saying what Elon Musk is doing to Social Security,” Sandra said. “People are kind of scared. What’s going to happen to Social Security?”
Another client is Jones, sometimes called “Jonsey.” She will buttonhole anyone she can to talk about conspiracy theories.
“I had never heard of Project Bluebird, and I thought she was probably making it up,” said Breckbill. “But she’s not. It was apparently some mind manipulation studies that were done in the ’50s or ’60s.
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“I try not to get too into it. But it did exist.”
Jones had been absent from At the Well in recent weeks, after she stopped taking her medications and got aggressive.
“I don’t think she would hurt anybody; there’s just behaviors we can’t tolerate,” said Mary Jones (no relation to Jones), a volunteer and former nurse. “You’ve got to look at the greater good, so we’ve had to ask her to leave.”
Now back on her medication, Jones had gotten permission to return.
“She needs to assimilate back with the group,” Mary Jones said. “If she can’t do that, then we can remove her. But so far, knock on wood, she’s doing well.”
Things went so well with Jones that day that she sat down at the piano and sang for the other women.
“She’s extremely gifted, oh my God, with the piano,” Breckbill said. “She writes songs. She’s brilliant; she’s really brilliant.”
Staring down problems like homelessness “is heavy, and there are times when I do feel weighed down,” Stone said. “I’ve been reflecting and thinking about this, whether it’s unhoused neighbors, but also the harm that’s happening to a lot of our neighbors, to immigrants, asylum seekers, the LGBTQ community.
“I trust in God and believe that good will win. In the meantime, we are called to do everything we can to care for those that are hurt and suffering and to do work to help change things.”
Checking back with Stone recently, Zeta had turned up, alive but in the hospital with an infection in her leg.
She is “recovering well,” Stone said.
Patterson is a UM News reporter in Nashville, Tennessee. Contact him at 615-742-5470 or [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the news digest.
