- April 19, 2024
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Corrections made Dec. 22, 2017. See the end of this story for details.
The day after Christmas in 2002, Cayti Recker got a phone call from her husband, who was at work. He said, “Check your email.”
In her inbox was a short message that read, “I’ve filed for divorce. I can’t make this work.”
Standing in their bedroom, she thought it was a joke at first. Then she opened the dresser drawers: empty. The closet: empty.
Recker was 35 years old, a stay-at-home mother of three girls, ages 10, 7 and 2. She taught Sunday school at church and home-schooled her middle daughter. No income. And as she thought more about it, she also had no real friends: All of her friends were people she had met through her husband.
Just 24 hours earlier, they had all been sitting around the Christmas tree, and there he was, a normal dad.
Was this really happening? Her family and friends — even his family — called Recker and said, “Oh, he’ll be back. He’s going through something. Midlife crisis.”
Then she started getting letters from lawyers, and, four months later, the divorce was final.
Recker was given everything: the house, the camper — and the bills. She was to receive alimony and child support, but she felt life was starting to fall apart. The house — which she had considered her dream house — had to be sold, and she instead bought an inexpensive house that had formerly been an assisted-living group home. She walked in for the first time and discovered that it smelled like urine and had food splattered on the walls.
“Are you kidding me?” she thought. “This is my life? This is where I’m bringing my three daughters?”
She was a wreck. She felt that her girls needed a tough mom, but she didn’t feel so tough. Meanwhile, in the months that followed, her ex-husband picked up the girls on schedule and brought them on adventures to Disney World. They couldn’t wait to see him, and she would do her best to smile and wave as they left.
The months crawled by, and Christmas was coming up again, Recker’s first as a single parent. She was getting groceries at the food bank; how could she afford presents for her girls?
Recker’s own childhood was a happy one. She lived in Stratford, Connecticut, and she recalled playing outside with friends and never worrying about her safety as she kicked a ball back and forth in the street.
One of the girls in the neighborhood made a lasting impression on then-6-year-old Recker: A deaf girl lived in a house on the other side of a chain-link fence. They played with Barbies and rode bikes, and Recker learned a few gestures to communicate. Her friend would pick up the ball, and Recker would nod her head, and they’d kick the ball back and forth. She learned to say “thank you” by holding her hand near her lips and moving it forward and down toward her friend.
Recker felt sad that the deaf girl couldn’t speak well or hear her, but she didn’t want to pity her. So Recker decided to do something more to connect with her.
Recker’s mother was a school librarian, so Recker asked her to bring home books about sign language. She read stories about deaf children. She read about a gorilla who learned to sign. She was intrigued, even as a child, by the language.
Then the deaf girl disappeared. Recker learned that the girl’s parents got divorced, and so her friend moved out of the neighborhood. She never saw her again, but she thought about her often as she grew older.
Years later, when Recker was pregnant with her oldest daughter, she had to go to a chiropractor, and, while waiting in the office, Recker noticed that another mom with a toddler was deaf. She got excited and thought, “Oh, I can do this!” She did her best to strike up a conversation in sign language, and the woman later gave Recker a book about baby sign language. Recker eventually taught all three of her girls the signs for things like, “I’m hungry,” “I’m tired,” “I’m done.”
The passion for sign language grew through the years as a hobby — until it occurred to her that it could become a career.
Lorraine Vickery, now 63, calls herself “a bit twisted” physically. She had polio at 5 weeks old — not many months before the vaccine was invented — and one of her lungs doesn’t open all the way. To make matters worse, she started smoking at age 11 and didn’t stop for many years.
"It changes lives. Not just for today but for tomorrow. We are not temporary. We walk alongside those who want support and need that encouragement."
Lorraine Vickery, founder of Samaritan Ministries
Vickery has been involved in the Flagler County community for decades. Because of her own experience with “toxic, abusive relationships,” she helped open the Alpha Pregnancy Center, a nonprofit that provides education and support for women with unplanned pregnancies, in Bunnell. But as she helped the women, she knew that as they walked out the doors, they had nowhere to go, no way to pay rent. The center offered only short-term help. So she went to the board and suggested they start providing transitional housing.
“The board said, ‘That’s not part of our vision, but maybe God’s calling you to get that started,’” is how Vickery recalls the meeting. And so, in 2001, Samaritan Ministries began, a nonprofit to fill in more of the gaps for women in transition.
Vickery formed a board and began a car care ministry, in which women — including, eventually, Cayti Recker — could get advice and maintenance for their cars. Vickery took donations and arranged for hotel rooms for women; she even let some stay at her own home. Temporary housing was provided at a Samaritan Ministries house in Bunnell, beginning in 2006; but in 2011 the Great Recession caused donations to dwindle, and the organization had to give up on the house.
When Vickery first met Cayti Recker, as Recker was struggling to make ends meet after the divorce, she listened to her story and could relate. When a woman in the community offered to buy Christmas presents for Recker's girls in 2003, Vickery made the arrangements. Recker at first objected, but Vickery told her, “She has chosen you, and we can’t tell her no.”
In a later conversation, Vickery asked Recker, “How are you going to survive? How does your future look different?”
Recker, feeling hopeless, recalled saying, “I’m going to sit in the closet and cry for the rest of my life.”
That wasn’t going to work.
Vickery encouraged Recker to go back to school and get an education, and that was just the thing Recker needed to hear: for someone to tell her she was worth investing in.
Vickery helped arrange for Recker to meet with a guidance counselor at what is now Daytona State College. As Recker looked through a list of potential college majors, she started panicking. She was afraid that after she would work hard and get an education, she would end up in a job she would hate.
Then she saw a major that changed everything: sign language. With a degree in sign language, she could become an interpreter for the deaf.
Her spirits rose immediately. “That’s a job?” she asked. She had never considered it. And in fact, there was great demand for people who could sign.
She began taking classes, and she thought of the young deaf girl across the chain-link fence. She later said, “I felt that the seed that had been planted in me as a child had come to fruition. That passion and that love that I had as child was the missing piece for me to climb out of that hole I was in.”
One person who has observed Samaritan Ministries since the beginning is Roseanne Stocker. After joining the Rotary Club of Flagler Beach in 2000, Stocker became a board member and has helped the club provide volunteers and donations to help Samaritan Ministries since it was founded in 2001.
“Lorraine calls me from time to time saying, ‘I have an emergency case,’ saying, ‘Someone needs a refrigerator,’” Stocker said. “ … As generous and supportive as our community is, there are people every day that fall through the cracks. And many times, those people are single moms. … And Samaritan Ministries is there to pick those people up.”
“Because she’s walked a mile in those moccasins, she’s the perfect person to help.”
Roseanne Stocker, speaking of on Lorraine Vickery
Stocker said she respects Vickery’s approach to helping others, which always includes an opportunity for growth, so that the young women can learn skills that will allow them to help themselves in the future.
“Because she’s walked a mile in those moccasins, she’s the perfect person to help,” Stocker said. “She has the heart and the experience to help get these women on the road to being self sufficient.”
Since 2001, Samaritan Ministries has helped more than 430 women. And now, a major part of the ministry has been restored. Thanks in large part to an anonymous $75,000 donation, Samaritan Ministries was recently able to buy a house again in Bunnell, which is already being used to house women. Volunteers are present at all times at the home to provide some supervision and safety.
After the donations, the mortgage on the house, built in 1952, costs about $350 per month, so more donations are needed. In an illustration of the generosity of the community, Vickery said some people have sponsored a month’s worth of mortgage as a way to honor their anniversary.
“It’s wonderful,” she said.
Meanwhile, today, Cayti Recker is the ears and voice for deaf people. With a contagious smile, she helps children at schools. She has worn a hospital gown and gloves to provide interpreting services in operating rooms and in birthing rooms. She has interpreted for deaf people in jail cells.
"I feel like God has walked me through some of these trenches so that I can reach back and help pull you forward."
Cayti Recker
“I’ve been in hospice as a husband dies, and it tears your heart out, but you’re so thankful that you’re there to help in whatever way you can help,” Recker said.
One day, Recker was asked to interpret for a deaf woman who had just been divorced. The woman’s life was in complete upheaval, and she had nowhere to turn. It was a parallel for her own life, Recker felt, as she was now providing services through Samaritan Ministries, when she had been a client herself.
About 14 years after she first received help from Samaritan Ministries, Recker became a board member in March.
In June, she learned of a woman who had a simple request that some people might not have taken seriously: The woman was so overwhelmed that she hadn’t done laundry in a month and a half.
“As silly as that sounds — it’s usually a normal part of your day — but to someone who’s got 15 things to handle, laundry’s not something you’re thinking about,” Recker said. So, she picked up nine loads of dirty clothes and brought them to the Laundromat. She described the attitude of Samaritan Ministries this way: “What can we do? It’s your laundry? We got it.”
Some day, Recker hopes to become licensed as a counselor as well. She’s always looking for a new way to help others.
“I want to go into counseling and say, ‘I’ve been through any one of those situations, and I can empathize,’” Recker said. “‘I feel like God has walked me through some of these trenches so that I can reach back and help pull you forward.’”
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Corrections
The following corrections appeared in the Dec. 21 edition. Changes were made in the web version of the story above to reflect the corrections, as appropriate.
In “Compassion and Hope,” published Oct. 26, Cayti Recker retells the story of how surprised she felt at receiving an email from her husband, informing her the day after Christmas in 2003 that he had filed for a divorce. However, Recker’s then-husband said in a Dec. 14, 2017, interview with the Observer that he did not send such an email and that the two were separated weeks earlier. Cayti Recker maintains she did receive the email but did not have a copy to show the Observer.
Also, the Christmas mentioned in the story should have been 2002, not 2003. Therefore other dates and ages should be corrected: Her daughters’ ages were 10, 7 and 2 at the time; Samaritan Ministries helped arrange for Christmas presents to be delivered in 2003, not 2004; and Recker began taking college classes in 2003.
Recker said in the story that she found that the alimony and child support were “not enough.” However, her ex-husband disagrees; he said he fulfilled his alimony and child support obligations and provided additional funding. (This line was adjusted in the web story above.)
Recker’s ex-husband says that her supposition that he was visiting a girlfriend on the day after Christmas is incorrect. He says he was not seeing anyone at the time. (This line was deleted from the web story.)
Recker said the van she received in the divorce was refinanced; however, her ex-husband said it was not. Divorce documents show the van had a loan of $2,226 to be paid. (This line was deleted from the web story.)
