Sherri Yoder plays with a baby at Angel House. (Clay Jackson Photo)
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Sherri Yoder plays with a baby at Angel House. (Clay Jackson Photo)
By LIZ MAPLES
lizm@amnews.com
SOUTH FORK - Sherri Yoder squeezes a cotton mop through the ringer of a bucket and sighs.
This is the last time she'll mop the floor of the Angel House nursery.
The 19-year-old left her family and tightknit Mennonite church community three months ago to come volunteer at the Galilean Home in Casey County. Her time here is finished, and the next day she will go home to Maryland.
Yoder knew of Jerry and Sandy Tucker but never saw a picture of the home before she came here.
The Galilean Home is an extension of the Tuckers' family. The couple, with the help of a large staff and volunteers, care for those the world has forgotten. They open their doors to infants and the handicapped. The motto here is that there is always room for one more.
One of their most well-known, endearing endeavors is keeping babies for incarcerated mothers.
Yoder, like many young women before her, has come to help.
"I wanted to do volunteer service, branch out ... get out of my comfort zone."
Sleeping in a dormitory with 14 other women, helping to clean a nursery for 16 babies, and visiting with incarcerated women is, to say the least, outside Yoder's comfort zone.
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She has found a common bond with a woman named Patricia Clay. Yoder wakes up every morning and puts on a plain, handmade dress and pins a square of black lace on her bun. Clay wears khaki uniform pans and shirts.
Clay is serving a three-year sentence for second-degree assault at the Kentucky Correctional Institute for Women. Yoder has grown attached to Clay's son, ZaZa.
"I was trying not to get too attached, but I think I fell," she said, referring to newborn ZaZa.
In the midst of her journey, while learning to put aside self for others, Yoder has found love. Each volunteer tends to single out one baby for extra love, sometimes buying outfits for the infant and writing the mother with news of her baby.
Still, volunteers at the Galilean Home switch frequently between their duties and are counseled about not getting too close. Sandy Tucker makes sure of this.
She has seen her own daughter's heartbreak after being separated from one of the newborns when the baby was reunited with its mother.
Yoder said when babies leave the Angel House, it is bittersweet. It is a struggle to see the babies leave, but a joy to know they will be back with their mothers.
Every month, in a newsletter to Galilean Home supporters, there is an ad for young women to spend three months to one year volunteering for the ministry. This labor of love helps the ministry stay afloat.
Medical card but no income
The infants have a medical assistance card for medical care but no other income when they come to the Angel House.
There are no funds set up for their care, said Michael Burton, who for years has shuttled babies back and forth from Casey County to prisons to see their mothers.
"Their clothes and food are donations from lots of churches, private businesses, residents and fundraisers," Burton said.
The Tuckers leave the issue of money to care for these babies, like everything at the Galilean Home, in the hands of God.
Tangerine Kratochvil believes that God led her to volunteer.
It is afternoon in the Angel House. Rocking chairs are lined up in a large, common room where the babies spend their waking hours. Volunteers can be found day and night rocking the babies and holding them.
Kratochvil has Jacobi in her arms and is singing along to a tape of hymns.
God's plan
She said she didn't have a lot going for her in Missouri. She was baby-sitting at her Independent Baptist church and waiting to meet her future spouse. There is no Mr. Right in the picture, but Kratochvil said she knows that is God's plan for her.
In the meantime, she said God asked her to come to the Galilean Home.
"Until the point when I get married, I am learning how to be God's bride."
A friend of her family read books about the Tuckers' story and kept giving Kratochvil copies of Sandy Tucker's monthly newsletter. Kratochvil decided to come, and here she found Jacobi.
Kratochvil spreads extra attention on him and exchanges letters with his mother, Kelley Coles.
Coles is serving a one-year sentence for possession of marijuana in prison at Pewee Valley. The sentence was handed down because she violated her probation.
The letters are how Coles knows how much Jacobi eats, how much he weighs and that he seems to like to pee on people.
Kratochvil believes that Jacobi will remember some things from his time at the Galilean Home, whether it's conscious or not.
To make sure he has a keepsake to remind him, Kratochvil is marking a Bible with special scriptures for him.
Her favorite verse to quote him is Psalms 23:
"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want ... Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death; I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me."
Kratochvil said, "It talks about how there will always be God. God will be with us even in the darkest times."