Kevin Goode
Every person has a story…

There were three of us Franciscans who came to Minto in 1998. The three of us were here for six years and after that, 18 months ago, Dan moved away to another place and Mario came. So there are still three of us.

When we first came, we were three men moving into a house. The residents were very curious and suspicious as to who we were. At one stage they thought we might have been three gay guys. Then another suspicion was that we were undercover police setting up here to flush out problem people. That was a bit of a shock to us but a joke.

We were offered this house. It wasn’t fully prepared when we came; there was a broken washing machine and a big heap of rubbish in the backyard. That was a bit of a shock but we were really quite happy with it. We felt it was the same as everyone else had and we didn’t want to be different from anyone else.

One of the projects we started was the street clean-ups. The thing that I’ve learnt is that the people here are put at a great disadvantage because they can’t afford new furniture. Just about everything they own is secondhand, already starting to break down, so that within a year or two, it’s broken and they’ve got rubbish. And rubbish left lying around becomes depressing. You can help people clean-up the area but the other big thing is that people work together. They meet one another and you’d have a sausage sizzle at the end. People who’ve worked together for a couple of hours are then happy to stand around talking for a while and get to know one another.

The soup kitchen is another little initiative that was started by three residents, a husband and wife and another lady, probably about six years ago. Between them they decided they’d come down and ask us would we join them, which is what we did and it’s evolved since then. More people have become involved particularly Jeff and Sandra and it continues on now and it’s been on every week virtually for six years now.

Another thing we initiated is the furniture exchange; we collect furniture. One source is furniture left in houses when people leave. For whatever reason, they leave the furniture and the Department has to clean out the house. They invited us to take the furniture that’s worth recycling. Then other people that we know in other suburbs, even people far away, will bring us furniture or tell us it’s there and we’ll go and get it. The farm out on Hanson’s Road had a shed there that was half-full of junk. We were offered the use of it, we’ve cleaned it out and we store the furniture there. So that’s sort of something where you can really help people.

Up until the time of the announcement of the renewal, which was 2002, there was a change taking place where people were working together more. The community was working together slowly on projects, and particularly the Kid’s Park was something very visible. More people seemed to know one another and you had a certain sense that things were slowly improving. But then with the announcement, well that threw everything up in the air because people thought they were going to be here and continue in the same circumstances until their dying days.

I can remember the first time that I came into the Mall. It was like walking into a foreign country. I didn’t know a single person and when you don’t know people, you sort of judge them on the externals that you see, and there were lots who seemed to be rather tough looking people or angry people or lost people. Whereas now I see them as people that I know and I don’t really take much notice of what they look like because I know something about them. Every person has a story.