A place for people with no home to heal

Imagine being ready to leave the hospital after a heart attack or a major surgery, but having no home to go to finish recovering.

That's a reality that Kate Bradley often saw firsthand when she lived and volunteered at the Loaves and Fishes Catholic worker community in Duluth, which provides shelter to people without a home.

"Folks would get a cab voucher from one of the hospitals and show up with drainage tubes hanging off of them,” Bradley said, “saying ‘the hospital said you'd have a place for me.’"

Bradley now lives in a new home in Duluth called the Bob Tavani House for Medical Respite, which provides a place for people experiencing homelessness who are too ill or frail to recover from an illness or injury on the street or in a shelter, but who no longer require care at a hospital.

It’s part of a growing network of medical respite centers that now numbers more than 130 around the country — including four in Minnesota. More than half have opened in just the past 10 years, with a goal of disrupting what is often a sad cycle.

Plant spokesperson Andriy Tuz told Ukrainian television that shells were falling directly on the Zaporizhzhia plant in the city of Enerhodar and had set fire to one of the facility’s six reactors. That reactor is under renovation and not operating, but there is nuclear fuel inside, he said.

A government official told The Associated Press that elevated levels of radiation were detected near the plant, which provides about 25 percent of Ukraine’s power generation. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the information has not yet been publicly released.

Tuz said firefighters cannot get near the flames because they are being shot at. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted a plea to the Russians to stop the assault and allow fire teams inside.

The attack renewed fears that the invasion could result in damage to one of Ukraine's 15 nuclear reactors and trigger another emergency like the 1986 Chernobyl accident, the world’s worst nuclear disaster, which happened about 65 miles north of the capital.

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