When Svetlana Kusmiy goes shopping at Food City, she looks for half-price pasta and day-old Italian bread loaves that can be sliced into a dozen portions.
Every dollar the professional housekeeper saves on food purchases means another mouth she and her husband can feed on the streets of downtown Chattanooga.
Five days a week Kusmiy cleans houses for a company called Nooga Home Cleaning. On weekends, she and her plant-worker husband, Glen Cox, cook and distribute meals to homeless folks while sharing their Christian witness along the way. They call their ministry the Hands and Feet Homeless Mission.
Kusmiy, who lives in McDonald, Tennessee, figures it’s the least she can do to honor her hard-earned religious freedom. The 54-year-old came to America from Ukraine in 1989 when she was 19 years old. Her family was fleeing persecution in the former Soviet Union, where their Christian faith was putting them at risk, she said.