Chachi Hawkins and Kerie van Zeyst

[00:03] CHACHI HAWKINS: I'm Chachi Hawkins and today's date is February 17, 2023. And we are in the Marfa Public Library in Marfa, Texas. I'm here with my friend Carrie van Zeist and she and I are going to talk about the Sunshine house. Carrie, you want to start?

[00:21] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Absolutely. Thank you, Chachi. My name is Carrie van Zeist. We are here in Marfa, Texas, February 17, and I'm here with Chachi Hawkins. She's my friend and at Sunshine House she is one of our volunteers, has done a million things around Sunshine House, drives a regular meals on Wheels route, has been on our board of directors, invaluable on our Wild west committee, which is our big fundraiser. So I'm really excited to be here with her. I'm going to tell you guys a little bit about this history of Sunshine House. It was formed in 1978 and it started as a place for seniors to come together, have a meal together, and it soon became the social hub for seniors in Alpine, Texas, which is about 25 miles to the east of Marfa where we're at right now. It was a very beautiful old historic building and it came with a lot of history and a lot of repairs needed. So in 2018, we moved into our current location, which is on Holland, one of the main streets right there in Alpine. And it took us about two years really to find the location, move in, get the remodeling done. We wanted to own our own building. We had been leasing from the city at the previous location. We wanted to own it, not have that monthly payment, have no debt. So we started the capital campaign, bought it. We are a fairly small town, a very small town, I would say. But for our size town, we have a pretty big nonprofit. We have four regular kitchen staff members. There's going to be our chef and kitchen supervisor and three additional members are baker and two kitchenaids. In the office, aside from myself, I'm the executive director. We have four in the office. We have a bookkeeper, we have an assistant executive director. We have a program coordinator. And she does all of the route sheets for the meals on wheels, volunteers to pick up the meals, how many they have, where they're going. We also have in the office Christina, our program advocate. She gets people onto the program, assesses their needs, if they need meals delivered to home or if they can come in to dine in our facility. Our mission is to provide quality nourishment and social enrichment in the lives of seniors, the home bound and disabled in alpine and marathon, Texas. Our vision is a healthy, hunger free community so I mentioned in that mission, marathon, Texas, we expanded in August of 2020. We started taking meals over to marathon. So we do have one additional staff member, our paid driver, part time. He takes the meals over to marathon every day and he has about 35 clients over there. And it's a great little town, but again, a lot of food insecurity. Not any store really to shop at over there. So there really is a need over there as well as alpine for our seniors and disabled members. And that's in Brewster county as well. So, Chachi, you've done a lot around Sunshine House. Inside, outside, all around marathon. So what is your take on our purpose?

[04:08] CHACHI HAWKINS: Well, I think that our goal is to be able to continue to meet the needs of every senior in our community, including marathon, who faces hunger. We don't ever turn anyone away, you know, due to our remote location where most younger family members move away for more opportunity. We have an ongoing aging population that are left behind. There's no nursing home, no long term care facilities, facilities in our area. And so, you know, lots of these people don't have a way to eat if it wasn't for us. It's essential that we keep seniors in their own homes. And, you know, that's kind of our motto. We want them to be able to stay in their own home. You know, the vast majority of our clients live on a meager Social Security check that ranges from $400 to $600 a month. You know, you can't do anything with that. Many have had to skip meals to pay for their living expenses, such as their heating bill or their medicine. Our service is essential to these people. We have detailed root sheets and meal counts every day so that we can see how we're doing and if we're taking care of who needs us out there. We serve one nutrition nutritious hot meal every day, every weekday. We also, on Fridays, hand out a sack breakfast and lunch so that that gives them something to eat when. When the weekend is around and we don't deliver. The sacks include a juice, a whole piece of fruit, a breakfast burrito, a sandwich, chips, and some kind of nutritious snack, whether it's a granola bar or something like that, but that. That helps them to have something to eat. And over the weekend, you know, we. We occasionally, a couple of times a year, I think we send out a survey to all of these people we deliver to. And one of the questions is, have you ever given up eating so that you could pay a bill or you could buy your medicine or whatever? And, you know, that's heartbreaking when you see, and a lot of those answers are, yes, it is, and that is heartbreaking. So do you want to talk a little bit about the statistics of how many meals and that sort of thing?

[06:35] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: I will. And also, you know, you're talking about the survey, and that's a really good point. And we're sending that out this month, actually, so it'll be a new year and new results coming out. But every year we do it. And it's really important to note that it's, while food insecurity is really our focus, we do so much as far as checking on people. You know, when that survey comes back, a lot of times, I would say about 35, 40% of people, the only person they see in a day is our volunteer that delivers their meal. So if they don't answer, we know that they need a welfare check. And we've saved lives doing that. Last year we saved a man's life. He had fallen, broken his collarbone, could not stand up, and had been on the floor all weekend. And they said if he did not get to the hospital, he was elderly and not in very good health, he wouldn't have made it. So, you know, it's also that just checking in with them. But yes, like I said, our main focus, what we spend most of our day on is doing the meals. And we deliver around 200 meals every weekday. And then we serve an additional 30 to 60 meals in sunshine House to our congregate diners. And these are seniors and disabled members of the community that may be able to get out and about. They're not homebound, but they're still food insecure. So they need that meal to supplement their nutrition. We deliver emergency meals, boxes that we do every October, get them out early to mid October. And when we have weather, like we do some times out here in west Texas where it'll be like 75 beautiful one day and covered in ice the next day and melted off the next day. We obviously can't risk our volunteers being out on the road and delivering in bad conditions. So we get an emergency box ready and we have things like a couple cans of soup. We have tuna or canned chicken. We have peanut butter crackers. We have snacks like granola bars in there. We have powdered milk, cereals, oats, things that they can with limited energy and resources. You know, a lot of them can't cook, so we deliver to them. You know, they may have a hard time cooking because of arthritis in their hands or all different things that may happen, but something that's fairly easy for them to prepare so that if we aren't able to get there that they can still have something to eat. So we deliver those in December of 2022. Last month of last year, we did 6178 meals. In our last calendar fiscal year, the 21 22 fiscal year, we delivered 50,674 meals. So, you know, our little kitchen staff of four, they do, they crank out.

[09:50] CHACHI HAWKINS: A lot of meals.

[09:51] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: They do. They do an amazing job. They, you know, sometimes they're there at five in the morning, but they get every tray in there, every tray sealed up, packed up for the volunteers and out the door. By 1030 every morning, the volunteers pick up at 1030 and it's anywhere from about 20 to 25 people on a route. And some of them are couples. So it's not necessarily 25 stops, but about 25 people. And they get back within an hour. So it's roughly 1030 to 1130. We have this army of volunteers show up, you know, rain, wind, whatever, they're up for it and it's, you know, 110 degrees. They're ready to go. So it's really good. We have 35 people that are very regular volunteers. Our drivers that drive a route every week, they have a day or two. Our board members that go to the board meetings regularly and we plan events together and things like that. Throughout the year, though, it's certainly a lot higher than 35. I would say throughout the year we probably get 60 total. You know, there are sometimes college students that grew up in Alpine, come back from college and volunteer over the Christmas holiday break. We have people like this. Last December we had a guy that came to visit his mother who was one of our clients for two weeks over the holidays and he ended up taking a route. So he did that. I have had people in town and I just been like, you know what? We're going to do a meals on Wheels route today. You're going to see what I do. Bishop Hun, the bishop of the diocese of the Rio Grande at the Episcopal Church, he came down and I knew he had some free time and I said, you know what? Let's go deliver meals on wheels today. And he had a fun time. It was one of those west Texas one day, so we were chasing stuff all over, but it was good. So, you know, we have people that volunteer from the community, people that are visiting, that volunteer volunteers we've had for 1015 years. Volunteers that we might only have for a month and then they go back to their permanent residence and we don't ever see them again. But, you know, we have a great, great volunteer base, and they're just invaluable. And, you know, they volunteer insight as well as doing the routes, delivering routes. And, Chacha, you've volunteered inside before. Yeah, we have a lot going on inside.

[12:31] CHACHI HAWKINS: People identify sunshine House with meal deliveries, but it goes way past that. Besides just making sure that seniors have enough to eat, we keep them entertained. At the building itself. The building is huge. There's all kinds of room for. There's a dining room and the kitchen, but there's places for people to. We have a library, a big, wonderful library, and a retired librarian who takes care of it. And there's a computer lab, a tv room, a quilting room. We have exercise classes two times a week, silver sneakers. And Carrie told me the other day about something called Cherry yogo yoga, and I don't have a clue what that is.

[13:18] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Oh, it's fantastic.

[13:19] CHACHI HAWKINS: We do that. I mean, it's an exercise deal I.

[13:21] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Do with the seniors. It's great. And it's a really good time out in my day, you know, it's just a time to breathe and relax, and then you're centered again and get back to it.

[13:33] CHACHI HAWKINS: We have weekly bingo games. There's a Marjon group. They play dominoes. There's always a jigsaw puzzle out on the table. And there are people in there all the time working on these jigsaw tables. We have a chess club. We are starting a garden club. Also. There's a registered nurse who comes every week, every Thursday, and she checks people's blood pressure and, you know, make sure they're healthy and that sort of thing. The Beltone hearing aid place from Odessa comes over once a month, does hearing checkups. They make sure that everybody's got their right kind of batteries and, you know, all of that sort of thing. So it's more than just feeding seniors, but it's helping them have a quality kind of life. And when Covid was going on for two years, our building was closed now only so that no one could come to the building, but we still delivered. And, you know, it was hard on everybody to have the building closed because these people, you know, they were stuck in their house, and they didn't have anywhere else to go.

[14:51] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Yeah. And, you know, it was hard on the staff, too, because we were used to spending so much time with them. And it, you know, the hardest thing, the very hardest thing was two years later. You realize once you open the doors, how many people don't come back because a few of them have passed away. And you never got to see them during that time.

[15:10] CHACHI HAWKINS: Yeah we have. You know besides we have hundreds of donors. Just people who you know, give us a regular donation from their paycheck every month or you know people who do all kinds of things besides those people. We exist on grantsd but the local grocery store porters gives us food. The West Texas food bank gives us food. The local hospital district helps with walkers and wheelchairs. You know. Again these people, they don't have any way of getting the things they need. I take diapers every week to one of my people and you know we're ahead. We're there to take care of their needs and we'll figure out how to, you know, whether it's food or whatever. We'll figure out how to help them.

[16:08] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: We do. We have. You know and there are lot of people that are in need and they're not seeing a. I don't know if everyone knows where alpine is or Marfa or our area but we are literally over an hour from a stoplight and there are no other places to take care of seniors in our community. So we do our best. We have some seniors too that you know like Chachi was talking about earlier. Most of our seniors get paid $400 to $600 a month. Social Security and we have some that are homeless. We have some that can't afford anything. We have a great community. We have a housing authority. We have the ministerial alliance which will help put people, you know in an emergency situation in a hotel or whatever. But we have all sorts of people with all varying levels of needs. Some of it are people that are very very food insecure. Some of it are people that could afford food but can't make it and they don't have anyone to help them make it. Just a really fast client base. Just like our volunteer base and just like our community. Chachi talked a little bit about how the local grocery store and the food bank, the hospital district help us. And some individuals and our corporations are amazing. Last. Our. Last October. Well okay. Our wild west side is our largest fundraiser of the year and we put that on in our own facility. It's a lot of fun. It's a Chuck wagon dinner. It's a couple of bands that play dancing, great music, a bake off. We have a silent auction and kids games and photo booths and the quilting group sells their quilts there. It's just a lot of fun. And our community comes out like you would not believe for. For that. Sponsoring us. I mean people, the cattle women donated meat for the event. We had so many corporations, businesses around alpine that sponsored us. And I think, you know, it was amazing. We had it for the first time in two years because we couldn't have it in person because of COVID The whole town came out. It was just incredible. Such a highlight of the year.

[18:39] CHACHI HAWKINS: You fed 300 people.

[18:41] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: I think we did. And, you know, in the university, they sent basketball players, the coach sent them down to set up all of our tables and chairs that true value donated for the night for us to use. And, yeah, it was amazing. I forgot how quickly you do things when you're young. They had all those set up. They had them set up six minutes.

[19:02] CHACHI HAWKINS: Yeah, no time.

[19:04] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Yeah, seating for 300 just like, popped up and popped down. It was crazy. But, yeah, it's amazing to have the love and support that we do. And yet at the same time, it's interesting because a lot of people think that we're just for seniors. And while that is our focus, we also help the disabled members of the community. We have. I was just doing these statistics this morning. We have 16 home delivered and twelve that come in in person. So 28 members of our community that are disabled, under 60 years old, and, you know, all different disabilities. And so, you know, like Chachi said, we never, ever turn anyone away, whether they're a member of our community or someone passing through that needs a meal. If someone tells us that they're hungry, we're there to help. Absolutely.

[20:06] CHACHI HAWKINS: We even take care of their pets. You know, these old people, they have pets. And I carry a bag of dog bones in my truck. So every time I go to. At least one person right now on my route has a dog and he gets milk bone, and he knows when I drive up that I'm there with the milk bones. So. And I take cat food to another one. You know, you got to take care of the human. It's not just one more name on the list, but it's a human who needs help. And, you know, I've been delivering to some of these people for, I don't know, ten years, you know, so you know them better than their own family knows them.

[20:52] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: You do a lot of them. And like Chachi was saying about the dog bones, it's so much fun. Once in a while when a volunteer cancels last minute, I'll take the route. And I've done every route. And there are a couple routes. You can tell which volunteers spoil the pets because they're happier to see you than the person. They're like, yay, my lunch is here. My treat's here. So they really have a good time. Yeah, we spoil them. The seniors and all of our clients, the pets. Everything we can spoil, we do.

[21:31] CHACHI HAWKINS: The Sunshine house has been an alpine a long, long time. But I think that the longer it's there, the better it gets. And the more things we figure out that people need and we figure out how to get for them. And, you know, every do, every day something new comes up. It does figure out how to. How to get it to them. And that's what we do. That's what we're there for, is to help these old people.

[21:56] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Yeah. And we go, you know, even just a little bit outside of town. Not just an alpine and marathon, but, like, out to Sunny Glen, which is just to the west of Alpine. I think we have six people out there, but we take the drive out there and we have volunteers that are more than willing to do that. What is it, about 20 minutes round.

[22:15] CHACHI HAWKINS: Trip or so, something like that, to.

[22:16] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Get out there to the neighborhood and. Yeah, it's. It's fantastic.

[22:20] CHACHI HAWKINS: I used to deliver to a lady in the double diamond.

[22:23] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Okay. Yeah.

[22:24] CHACHI HAWKINS: And that's a development south of town. And then before you get to there, there's a trailer park just on the south side of Big Hill.

[22:33] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Oh, right.

[22:35] CHACHI HAWKINS: That's about 10 miles out of town. And I delivered to a man there for a long time. Oh. But he moved to El Paso.

[22:43] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Oh, he had the little pony. There's a little tiny pony there at one point.

[22:48] CHACHI HAWKINS: Oh, goodness, no.

[22:49] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: I would have spoiled him. I would have brought carrots on that rack.

[22:51] CHACHI HAWKINS: Well, yeah. Yeah, I did take bones to his dog.

[22:56] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Fantastic. Yeah. So, you know, we are looking to expand as the need expands. We are certainly within Brewster County. I think we're one of the larger nonprofits. I think, you know, we really serve a lot of people. And we are absolutely prepared to keep going, keep meeting the needs. We'll keep fundraising. We'll keep, you know, getting outreach to as many people as we can.

[23:30] CHACHI HAWKINS: We kept getting requests from marathon. Marathon is 30 miles to the east of Alpine, and they have, for sure, no services. And we figured out a way during COVID there was a grant available that we were able to buy a vehicle and hire somebody to do it. And we've been doing it ever since. For two years now. Easy.

[23:59] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Two years. We even upgraded the vehicle this year. And a couple months ago, we bought a new vehicle. And so hopefully now we are, you know, we own that vehicle outright. We have wonderful warranty on it. So hopefully, for the next ten years minimum, we can guarantee you know, service over there.

[24:21] CHACHI HAWKINS: And while we were in the process of changing our vehicles, I made that route a couple of times. And, you know, I knew people on there, and, you know, it was really cool to see marathon in a different way than what you typically see. I like to do it.

[24:40] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Yeah.

[24:40] CHACHI HAWKINS: I don't want to do it forever, but I did like it.

[24:43] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Well, that's why we have a paid driver. I don't know if anyone volunteer wants to go over there every day. Yeah, but it is. It's fun. And we had one ranch way outside of marathon down the road, and people on one side of marathon, then you go to the other side of marathon, then you kind of zigzag around, and the streets aren't really labeled very well over there, so you have, you know, a clipboard full of notes on where to turn and how to do that and who wants their meal there. And, you know, they have a lot.

[25:14] CHACHI HAWKINS: Of dogs in marathon.

[25:15] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: They do.

[25:16] CHACHI HAWKINS: Every yard has, like, four or five dogs.

[25:20] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: And we have one client that even has a little baby javelina.

[25:23] CHACHI HAWKINS: Oh, well, okay.

[25:24] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Guards her house and David spoils it.

[25:28] CHACHI HAWKINS: Very good. Very good. If it's got four legs, we're gonna take care of it.

[25:32] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Absolutely. Oh, so I guess.

[25:36] CHACHI HAWKINS: Do you wanna tell real fast about some of the special events we have during the year?

[25:40] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I'd be glad to. So when we opened back up after Covid, you know, we decided. I decided that I wanted to get people back into socialization, since that is part of our mission, along with the food. I really felt like that during COVID we couldn't fulfill that part of the mission very well. It was just really difficult. And so we opened back up in March. It was just about two years after the shutdown. And so we decided to kick everything off with a. With a grand opening kind of party. But people had a social distance. And then in May, we lightened up a little bit. In April, and in May, we lightened up a little bit more. And in May, we finally had this huge, fantastic cinco de Mayo party. And people were painting with tempera paints, and we were eating chips and salsa, and she had them back there dancing. It was a lot of fun. So at that point, we decided to start having minimum quarterly social events. And so that summer, we did a 4 July ice cream social. It was the Friday before the fourth on the first, I believe, and then did that again the next year. And especially it gets so, so hot in the desert in the summer, and we can have harsh days in the winter. I mean, it doesn't last long, luckily, but, like, this morning, it was 13 when I was driving to work. So, you know, and some of our seniors are a little bit frail, certainly, you know, can't stand up to things like they used to. So we. I decided I wanted to try to keep them inside when it's hot, hot summer and inside when it's cold, cold winter. And so we do a Cinco de Mayo celebration. We do the 4 July ice cream social. We have several events at Christmas, but we try to do. We have a crafts group, and so they take on cookie decorating, and we have an angel tree. We do a lighting. It's always in our front window. We turn it on the first Friday of December. It stays up through New Year's, and it has an angel for each client that we've lost that year. And we have a star for people that we honor, people from the community. Come and put those on. Our clients put them on. Our volunteers put them on. We put them on. And so we honor and remember everyone at that time. Then, of course, you know, in the fall, we have our wild west fundraiser, which is the best, most amazing event. Some of our clients come to it. Some of them are already in bed by then, but we have some that just dance the night away and don't stop dancing. And we have people at the salon auction that guard their items they want, make sure no one else outbids them. It's a lot of fun, but, yeah, we have special events, and we're adding more and more. We're going to do the volunteer Fiesta coming up, too. And I cannot tell you at all how valuable our volunteers are, the miles that they do every week. But when you add it up for the end of the year, the volunteer miles and the in kind donation of their labor, it's just amazing. I mean, we could not operate without our volunteers. And our volunteers are the most wonderful people in the world, you know, from our librarian to our drivers to people that facilitate bingo every Tuesday. And so, you know, they're the best. So we're going to have a volunteer fiesta coming up, and we're going to have a pinatas and volunteer of the year award, and we're going to unveil a super secret, interesting thing. That should be fun. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. So it'll be fun.

[29:58] CHACHI HAWKINS: Before you totally cut us off, I just want to, you know, we've talked a lot about a lot of things here, but it all boils down to these seniors. And, you know, like I said, I've been delivering for a long time. And some of them, you know, have gone on. Some of them have gone to a nursing home. One of mine that I had for a long, long time, she moved to a nursing home in San Angelo. And of course, they're not going to take her cat. So I have her cat now. And I tell you, it's the best thing ever. This is, Taco is the best cat. We both hit the jackpot.

[30:38] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: That's fantastic. Yeah, it's. If, that's why we get up and do what we do, the staff, the volunteers, everyone is so strongly entwined in our mission that it's incredible. I drive over an hour each way to work every day, and I just can't wait to get there. I mean, I want to see people and I want to find out how things went. And, you know, if you, if you.

[31:03] CHACHI HAWKINS: Miss one, one day, if they're not on your list that day, you're like, well, what happened to, you know, Joe or. I mean, it's. They become someone you see all the time and they become a part of your family. You know, they're in my birthday card list now and, you know, it's.

[31:23] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: And we. We celebrate their birthdays.

[31:24] CHACHI HAWKINS: We do. We do celebrate their birthdays.

[31:26] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Our quilters, the lovely busy bees and desert sky quilters that meet at Sunshine House. One's a hand quilting group and one's a machine quilting group. They make placemats. We give them a placement and have their birthday lunch on balloons and a card and. Yeah, it's, you know, and some of the. Just getting that little gift when they don't see anyone else, sometimes they are just incredibly thankful and happy and makes their day. We sent out Valentine's last week to everybody.

[31:58] CHACHI HAWKINS: Very nice.

[31:58] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Yeah. And, you know, just a little thing and hopefully it made some of them smile. I'm sure it did. I know our clients, they're very happy when they get little surprises.

[32:11] CHACHI HAWKINS: They get, they are. Everything is important to them.

[32:14] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: It is. Well, thank you, Chachi, for coming over here to Marfa with me today.

[32:19] CHACHI HAWKINS: Thank you.

[32:21] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Thank you for Martha, for having us at the library.

[32:27] CHACHI HAWKINS: Thank you, Storycorps.

[32:28] CARRIE VAN ZEIST: Thank you.