Sam Gurwitt Photo
John Cabral Jr. and Claudette Tracey at Tuesday’s giveaway.
As Claudette Tracey stood between stacked boxes of frozen turkeys and tables laden with green bags full of cranberry sauce, yams, and rice, she described the expected fate of the bird she had just picked up.
“I’m Jamaican,” she said, “so I do a jerk turkey.”
She starts by washing the bird in lemon and lime juice, and then soaks it overnight in a brine of apples, cinnamon, lemon, oranges, bay leaves, and salt. The next day, she drains the brine, and seasons the turkey with jerk sauce and other seasonings. She has to be ready to feed not only her own family, but also the people who drop by unannounced to taste her famous turkey.
Tracey was one of 400 people who came to the Keefe Community Center in southern Hamden on Tuesday to pick up a donated Thanksgiving meal.
The Keefe Center gives out Thanksgiving meals every year to those who need help paying for it themselves. This year, it handed out significantly more than in years past. It had 623 turkeys to give to families, and 623 families signed up to receive them, said Employee AnneMarie Karavas. On Monday, 195 families came, and on Tuesday, 400. On Wednesday, those on a wait list and those who did not sign up can come take whatever remains.
On Tuesday, the turkey operation was a well-oiled machine. Each family had been assigned a specific time slot in which to come. One by one, a volunteer like Quinnipiac Senior Sara Hios (pictured above, left, with Luz Gonzalez) would take their name, and point them to another volunteer who would grab the appropriate bag from among a sea of bags depending on how many people were in the family. Next, they walked to the turkey end of the room, where former Keefe Employee John Cabral Jr. would give them a frozen turkey in another reusable green Keefe Center bag.
As the morning progressed, the empty boxes that had once held turkeys piled up in the corner of the room.
There were as many recipes as there were people picking up bags. Annie Moore said her favorite part of the meal is the stuffing. She makes it with cornbread, onions, celery, carrots, turkey sausage, eggs, and seasoning. She doesn’t stuff in into the turkey, but rather places it next to the turkey on the pan so it still soaks up the meat juices.
“My kids say they could eat it all day,” she said.
Tuesday was her first time picking up a Thanksgiving meal from the Keefe Center. She recently retired from the Department of Social Services, and without that income, she said, money is a little tighter. “I can afford some things, but not all things,” she said.
Slava Berahin (pictured above) carried two bags out to the school bus he drives. He said he’s doing Thanksgiving at his mother’s house this year, and that he leaves the cooking to other people.
The Keefe Center serves a low-income, largely black and Latinx southern Hamden population, and provides a myriad of services. It hosts food banks and diaper banks, provides activities for kids and holds finance, computer, and other classes for adults, holds job fairs, provides financial assistance to people struggling to pay for heat or rent, helps people find housing, hosts health screenings, and much, much more.
And, of course, it hosts special drives like this week’s Thanksgiving operation.
“We’re very fortunate to live in a community with so many generous families,” said Keefe Director Adam Sendroff. He added that he “would love to get to a place where we don’t need so much charity.” The Thanksgiving drive, he said, is “an opportunity to look at the bigger picture” of income inequality in the region.
Tiffany Dukes (pictured) walked out of the Keefe Center with multiple bags laden with food. She has a family of seven — herself, her husband, and five children — and has friends and relatives coming in from out of town. She said she only discovered the Keefe Center and the services it provides after she gave birth to twins over the summer. She now comes to the food bank and diaper bank, and gets energy assistance and vouchers for summer camp for her kids there.
Helping people at this time of year, she said, is particularly important. She is a mental health worker for Continuum of Care in New Haven, and she said the holiday season is particularly difficult for her clients.
“It’s difficult for them to cope when they hear other people talk about family gatherings, things they used to do,” she said. Or, she said, they hear the music, “and if you don’t have no one to share the holiday with, you don’t want to hear the music.”
This year saw a surge in the number of families coming for Thanksgiving meals. Last year, said Keefe Center Employee Luz Gonzalez, she helped serve about 350 meals. This year, by the end of Tuesday, she and her colleagues had served about 600, and more would come on Wednesday.
Sendroff said that in general, more people are using the Keefe Center’s resources. He said he doesn’t know whether it’s because more people know about them, or because there is a greater need.
This year’s turkeys came from a number of donations, large and small. The Hamden Police Department’s K‑9 Unit brought 125. The Fire Department’s Station 2 donated some, as did the volunteer fire department, Evolve Yoga, Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd, Mount Carmel Congregational Church, the Elks Club, and Grace and Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church.
The volunteers that helped this week’s operations run so smoothly came from all over Hamden. Quinnipiac Professor of Occupational Therapy Tracy Van Oss brought a few of her students. She and another professor are planning to bring their students back to the Keefe Center in the spring to teach free classes on physical education. On one wall, Van Oss had put up a survey of the types of classes people wanted to see. They would mark their preferences in the boxes for injury prevention, exercise guidelines, diabetes, heart health, and fall prevention, then the type of exercise they wanted to learn, and the times that would work best for them.
Deborah Clark (pictured above, right) stood next to the posters, explaining what they were. She said she started volunteering at the Keefe Center after it helped her find a place to live in 1996. “I’ve been coming here ever since,” she said.
