Unlikely pairing makes effective team serving the homeless
By Mary Kaye Ritz
Religion & Ethics Writer
One's a sparkplug of a man. The other has the long, taut physique of a distance walker. They know their turf; they know tough. And they know their people, the homeless.
Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser
What made Rev. Richard Rubie, the rough-and-tumble Irish priest who has been feeding the homeless in Hawai'i for more than two decades, bond with Earl Standberry, who has chosen to be homeless for the past five years? Well, they're both former Marines.
The Rev. Richard Rubie, right, prays with Daya Nand before distributing food. Nand's group, Baba, helps feed the indigent.
Beyond Semper Fi, however, this is a study in contrasts:
Rubie, 72, a priest of the Celtic Catholic Church, tells you his business — and everybody else's. He gets in trouble for "telling it like it is," he admits, but that truthfulness clinches people's loyalties.
Which is why he can talk just about anybody into or out of just about anything. At a donated apartment house, he houses addicts, ex-cons, ex-prostitutes. Some are putting their lives back together, like the pregnant 25-year-old who kicked a $350-a-day cocaine habit with the help of a 12-step program and is working to reunite with her 5-year-old daughter. Others are just trying to stay off the streets.
Abide by the rules ("no drinking, fighting or women," Rubie says) and pay the $300 rent, and one of the nine single rooms plus shared bath is yours. Of course, it's not an easy walk to the restroom at night, because your neighbors tend to steal lightbulbs.
Rubie repairs scavenged appliances, keeps the place spiffy and drums up donations for his weekly meal service. Right now, four groups take turns each Sunday to cook and serve his legions, and he's looking for a fifth to take the months with an extra Sunday in them. He's been doing this for 22 years, and some weeks he draws more than 300 people.
He knows most of those who wander down to St. Andrew's Parke Chapel come for grub rather than God. Still, he says, they hear about God all the same.
Rubie also worked with the Rev. Claude du Teil, the Episcopal priest who founded the Institute for Human Services. "Send me the alcoholics, because I'm a drunk," he remembers du Teil saying, "and I'll send you the nuts, because you're crazy."
You'd be crazy to call Standberry "nuts," however. He arrived in Hawai'i in January because he wants to make his future in the place where the military once sent him. He went to the IHS emergency shelter when money ran low. His wife came from Seattle after getting things in order — they're about to come into a chunk of change from a medical settlement. They want to set up their own homeless shelter for married couples, with resident staff.
Add a black robe and white collar to Standberry and he could probably pass for a priest easier than Rubie. Even standing across from the IHS men's shelter the next day, hailing potential employers who drive by at a snail's pace, looking for a cheap day's labor of dry-wall or rock-wall building, it's hard to imagine that Standberry's worldly goods can fit in the pack on his back.
"When I got back from the (Persian) Gulf, I was really depressed, into drugs, etc." he said, not as an excuse but as an explanation. "I started being a hobo."
You can about his trans-America peace walk in 2000 at geocities.com/earlwalks4peace/.
He extols the virtues of his lifestyle — "homeless is a state of mind, and I'm probably the richest person you'll ever meet" — and says it taught him something about the human condition: "I'm not as judgmental as I used to be."
So when Standberry says with conviction, "We're going to make it in Hawai'i," you believe it, even while you wonder how.
