Seabees in Kitchen Building Goodwill

Dressed in their trademark green fatigues, the five Seabees seemed out of place Wednesday as they moved through the addiction recovery center that was filled with women.

The naval construction crew members, who usually build bridges and camps in far-off countries, were on a mission--to fix the recovery center’s kitchen as part of their ongoing community service projects.

And that made the Seabees heroes to the residents and operators of the nonprofit Miracle House.

In the past, Seabees returning home from overseas deployments have devoted much of their time to on-base projects. Now, battalions in Port Hueneme are turning their focus to community service.

“Instead of the Navy helping the Navy all the time, it’s the Navy helping people, helping the people that pay the paychecks,” Seabee crew leader Jason Dejardin said.

Until Jan. 31, five Seabees from Construction Battalion 5 will remove wallpaper, repair plaster and sand and refinish cabinets, as well as install new doorknobs, floor tiles and a ceiling fan. They will also renovate a bathroom in the house.

It’s the third project the battalion has taken on since it returned from Okinawa in August. And the projects don’t benefit only the nonprofit groups. The Navy chooses jobs based on a number of criteria, most importantly whether they offer training for construction crews.

The nonprofits provide the equipment and the projects; Seabees provide the labor.

Repairing kitchens may not seem like good training for men and women who usually pour concrete--sometimes in environments where they could come under attack, said home port project chief Marty Andrews of the 31st Naval Construction Regiment. But even overseas, where Seabees build camps to support military forces, electrical switches need replacing and kitchens need expanding. Community service jobs help prepare Seabees for those projects, Andrews said.

For the women who depend on Miracle House to rebuild their lives, the Seabees’ work is close to a miracle.

“We could never have gotten it done without them,” said Brenda Davison, Miracle Recovery Centers’ executive director and an alumna of the program. “I was really starting to get embarrassed when I did tours. This is a fun house to show people, but the kitchen was a trap.”

In the home’s rundown kitchen, dinner is a ritual. Each evening, two women cook for 11 in the cramped space. And at 5:30, each of the housemates, all women recovering from drug or alcohol addiction, sit down to eat before they disband for an evening Alcoholics Anonymous meeting or other recovery session.

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For these women, reconstructing lives spun out of control is all about ritual and structure. And like those lives, the kitchen at Miracle House showed the wear and tear.

The kitchen’s floor was covered with black marks around the edges, paint was stained yellow from years of cooking, wallpaper peeled and cabinets swung loose from their hinges.

Davison said the center, supported through grants and small fees, scrapes together enough money to survive but not enough to undertake maintenance projects such as the kitchen.

Since it opened in 1986, the recovery center has served nearly 700 women.

The program, among other things, provides housing, shelter, transportation to recovery groups and meetings for up to 10 women at a time, as well as advising recovering addicts on legal struggles and referring them for psychological evaluations.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Seabees tried to tread lightly in the home filled with women.

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But the women who have made a temporary home at Miracle House didn’t mind the noise. They appreciated that their dinners will be prepared in a fresh, new kitchen--even if having the Seabees around was a little awkward.

Those who run the center hoped to head off any problems by issuing a strict edict to the residents: No fraternizing with the men in the green fatigues. The idea is to keep residents focused on their recovery and avoid distractions, romantic or otherwise.

And the women who are recovering agreed.

“We can’t talk to men and we shouldn’t,” said Karla Bohlen, 34, who has been off drugs for 12 days and took up residence at the house on Jan. 5. “I need a relationship with myself before anyone else.”

“But we still look,” said resident Katie Butler, 39.