A little bag of dignity

MOSES LAKE — Lynn Logan said it took some time for Serve Moses Lake to get ready for Tuesday’s big donation of hygiene kits for the homeless.

Because 200 kits – complete with toilet paper, washcloth, soap, shampoo, razors, a little tube of toothpaste, a toothbrush and then further customized depending on whether the recipient is male or female – take up a lot of room.

“I spent a week actually cleaning this room out to make some space,” said Logan, the interim director of Serve Moses Lake. “So we actually have room for it. I wouldn’t have last week.”

“So, it’s perfect timing,” responded Dennis Draleau, the communications director the Moses Lake Stake of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which made the hygiene kits.

Serve Moses Lake, which provides assistance to area homeless as well as helping individuals and families in need with rent and utility bills, asked for 100 of the kits – 100 for men and 100 for women – so Draleau said the church organized a stake-wide project complete with an Amazon registry and an assembly line staffed by nearly three dozen volunteers to put the kits together.

In all, Draleau said volunteers – not all of them with the church – put together 400 kits on a work day right after Christmas, with 100 each going to HopeSource, which runs the sleep center, and New Hope, a local shelter for women and children fleeing domestic violence and abuse.

“We had some (volunteers) from the high school, five or six kids, I think they were part of the Key Club,” Draleau said. “They were a big help.”

Sheryl Ulnick, a volunteer with Serve Moses Lake who is handling the hygiene kits, said their ability to give these helps people care for themselves with a little dignity, allowing them to take their own toiletries to the showers at the sleep center.

“We make it our policy to give out one of these every other week,” said Ulnick. “There’s a big demand for them. The homeless know they are there, so they come in and it just makes them feel a little better, makes them feel more human.”

Ulnick said the kits will last a while and they come at an opportune time, since donations of travel-size shampoo bottles and tiny tubes of toothpaste are down. The softer economy means fewer people are traveling and staying at hotels, she explained.

“This will help a lot,” she said.

Draleau said assembling and delivering this year’s hygiene kits was delayed mainly because supply-chain bottlenecks meant they couldn’t get everything at the same time, especially the small bottles of shampoo, which kept selling out on the online marketer.

“It would ship to my house and sit in my garage until we got everything in, which took two months,” he said.

When asked about why it was important for the church’s Moses Lake members to put these hygiene kits together, Draleau chokes up a bit.

“The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is all about service,” he said. “The scripture says what you’ve done for least of these my brothers, you have done it unto me.”

The church has done a number of major projects this year, Draleau said, including working with the city of Moses Lake, the Alliance Church and the Patriot Church to improve the median strip on Grape Drive, delivering blankets to New Hope and furniture to Serve Moses Lake. The Moses Lake stake has even arranged for the delivery of food and emergency supplies from the church’s storehouses in Salt Lake City.

“We can do quite a few things,” he said. “If we are made aware of the need in the community.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.