Apartments offer assistance

After more than 13 years, Helen White has made many friends among the residents on the seventh floor of the Townhouse Apartments.
   
As director of the Birmingham Baptist Association’s Caring Hands Ministries, White oversees the operation of the Caring Hands offices and sixteen Baptist-operated apartment suites in the complex at University Boulevard and 20th Street. The apartments are available for families of patients in any of the hospitals in the Birmingam area, but are most often used with University (UAB) Hospital, Children’s Hospital and the Veterans Hospital.
   
“Most of our guests have a family member with a critical, life-threatening illness or problem,” said White of the apartments, which were created as affordable housing for out-of-town residents while their relatives are hospitalized here.
   
White said 80 percent of the apartments’ residents are referred by hospital social workers.
   
“At $12 a day for two people or $14 a day for three, we’re hard to beat,” she said. “And we furnish everything down to the toothpicks.”
   
A member of Lake Highland Baptist Church, she said most suites are completely furnished, including televisions and VCRs. The suites’ kitchenettes include appliances ranging from microwave ovens and coffee makers, with linens and towels also provided in the other areas.
   
“The most remarkable part about all of this is that it’s all donated,” White said. “Everything you see has been given to this ministry. Fourteen of our sixteen rooms are sponsored by individual Birmingham Association churches. They see that their rooms have everything that is needed.”
   
Making sure residents have “everything” includes stocking refrigerators with condiments such as mustard, ketchup and mayonnaise, along with creamer and sugar for coffee and other things. Across from the refrigerators are cupboards stacked with canned and boxed food items.
   
“You can’t imagine the lives this ministry has touched,” she said.
   
White tells of one couple who stayed in the apartments a little more than two years while the husband awaited a heart transplant he never lived to receive. Relating another story, she told of a young man who lived in one of the apartments while also awaiting transplant surgery.
   
“It’s just that this ministry is a training ground,” she said. “So many children and young people’s groups come here to minister.” She cites the “soap powder ministry” as an example.
   
White decided to purchase large containers of detergent she scooped into plastic bags when she became director. She later overheard a volunteer comment, “She won’t do that again.”
   
Within a week, she said children from different churches began bringing in detergent.
   
“The children have taken it on and the results have been incredible,” she said. “It’s one more thing that God has graciously provided for the families who stay here.”
   
The teddy bear ministry is another activity she said was begun after a 3-year-old boy reluctantly donated four stuffed animals for “the sick boys and girls.”
   
“I could see the pain on his little face as he sacrificed his stuffed animals as the Lord had led him to,” White remembers. “That young man is now 16 years old, and we are so very proud of his involvement in this ministry.”
   
In addition to the Townhouse Apartments, Caring Hands also oversees three rooms at Montclair Inn and three at Princeton Guest House. For more information on Caring Hands, call 205-975-1861.