"Down here in Puna, there's a big huge elephant just sitting here that's horrible, and nobody seems to care," believes Kathy.

Kathy doesn't want her full name in print, because she's locked in daily combat with the "elephant": family and child abuse. She nearly lost her own life to the beast, and she's seen it threaten other members of her family. Now she's busy helping to rescue others.

Kathy was the primary organizer of the Angel Festival, a monthly craft fair in Pahoa where victims of family violence marketed their own handicrafts as part their efforts to start over. Using the skills she gained as a former advertising executive, she helps the women--and the occasional male family violence victim, as well--to set up their own businesses, cataloguing and marketing their crafts. She also serves as a networker and scrounger, locating basic supplies and services for women in the local family crisis shelter, and for those who are leaving the shelter to start a new life.

"I want to be able to know every resource I can, to be able to assist families in the Puna area," she says. "On a daily basis, I get people calling, saying, 'I've got this. I've got that. What do the women need?"

This month, her "ministry," as she calls it, will take a new turn. She's reached an arrangement with the owner of Pennies from Heaven, a plant and herb business that occupies part of a former warehouse at 340 Kawili St. in Hilo. Instead of taking their wares to the monthly craft fair, former abuse victims can sell them at Pennies from Heaven. The rest of the large warehouse space can become repository for public contributions of goods that abuse survivors can use to start new lives. Eventually she hopes that the building's kitchen can be certified commercial, so that it can be used to prepare meals for abuse victims and food products they can sell. And she's seeking legal or monetary help to register the Community Angel Festival as an official non-profit corporation.

On December 16, she's planning to hold her network's first "Community Angel Festival Benefit," when community members can bring in donations for domestic abuse victims who are trying to start over. "It's going to be a day when the community can be the angels and donate to families in need at Christmastime," she explains. "Food baskets, toys for children.... If they're wrapped, put labels on them: what age, whether it's for a boy or a girl...' She hopes to make such events a monthly occurrence, and is currently making the rounds of church and civic groups, raising awareness on the issue and asking for help.

What do abuse survivors need?

Practically everything. "When women go to the shelter they usually have nothing but the clothes on their backs," she says. Often abuse survivors lack such basics as soap and shampoo, business clothes, a working car and a job. The state's social services can supply some of those needs, but is badly overstressed and underbudgeted. And after women leave the shelter, the safety net often snaps.

"After they leave the shelter, they don't know that they're going to be on their own," Kathy says. "I'm a networking resource for them."

Right now, she's hunting for Christmas trees and gifts. "The shelter at Christmas time is packed. Holidays are the worst time," she says. "Right now is the time when they should be creating sweet memories for these children...."

Among the most important things that abuse victims need is knowledge. "The first time I went to the shelter, I didn't know there were other women like me," recalls Kathy.

That lack of knowledge almost killed her. Her first marriage ended 17 years ago in Orange County, when her husband was ordered out of the house on a three-day notice, leaving her to raise four children by herself. She moved to Honolulu, pursued a successful advertising career--and took up with a Waikiki beach boy who subjected her to twelve years of escalating violence.

"I was too terrified to leave," she recalls, remembering her former lover's threats. "'I'm going to kill you and your children if you're going to leave.' Those are the kinds of things that keep people in that situation. And if there's no outreach, they can't get out."

It finally ended, for her, in the emergency room. "I was KO'd, gone. Two broken eardrums, my nose completely smashed, too blackened eyes, and a totally broken spirit. Here I was, a successful businesswoman, owned my own home, but I lost track of who I was."

Her face required reconstructive surgery. Her spirit required other healing. She got it at Oahu's Hale Ola domestic violence shelter, with the help of a woman whom she calls by the pseudonym of "Rita Martin."

"When I went to the shelter, not only did they help me learn what boundaries are about, they developed my self esteem," she believes. "If someone cares about you, it kind of makes you care about yourself...You know what changed me? These four words: 'God don't make junk.' When I realized that God didn't make junk, it changed the whole way I thought about myself.

After she left the shelter, Kathy continued working with Rita to help other women--delivering food, toys and supplies to families living on the beach, working with women in the shelter. "I used to go back to the shelter just to paint the ladies' nails and give them a pedicure, because I knew how good it had felt when they did it to me," she recalls.

Last year she moved to the Big Island--and was so horrified by the conditions she found in Puna that she dropped the advertising accounts she'd been developing to launch her battle with the elephant. Puna, she points out, has "the highest welfare rate, the highest rate of spouse abuse, incest, child abuse--it goes on and on....

She doesn't get paid for what she does, and her only income currently is a part time job at an herb farm. It has been a big change from her former career, when she was earning $2500 to $3500 a week. Now, she says, she sometimes prays for enough gas to drive home.

But she's getting other rewards. She speaks proudly of one woman who sold Hawaiian quilts and other crafts at the Angel Festival. "She was on SSI, and she'd lost custody of her four children," Kathy recalls. "She did fabulous crafts but she didn't know how to sell them. She had no car, she lived in Leilani Estates."

Now the woman has her own business on Oahu, and has reclaimed her children.'

"That's what made the difference--to see how she could change, because she discovered that she had talents and people loved her talents," Kathy says.

She thinks such stories are well worth the sacrifices she's made. "I know when I reach the top of that mountain," she says, "it's going to be worth all the struggles I've gone through."

Author’s Note: The above headline, and all Kama`aina Shopper headlines, were written by an editor at the Hawaii Tribune Herald, and not by the author.