It's not uncommon for Rosa Torres to don personal protective equipment when she walks into a hospital room.
She never imagined that wearing a body suit would become routine, since she's not a medical professional at St. Anthony Hospital. But it has become routine nonetheless.
Torres is among the many care providers at the medical facility who are helping battle COVID-19. She's an environmental services professional who sanitizes patient rooms and other areas of the hospital.
Often working behind the scenes, the Oklahoma City woman is perhaps one of the unsung heroes of the pandemic whose work disinfecting medical facilities became even more important in the wake of the deadly coronavirus.
More houses of worship are partnering with health agencies to help broaden accessibility to the COVID-19 vaccine.
Two Oklahoma City churches, OKC First Church of the Nazarene and Emmanuel Tabernacle, hosted vaccine pods on Saturday.
The Rev. Jeffery Goldsmith, senior pastor of Emmanuel Tabernacle, said his church, 1015 NW 96, is affiliated with the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World denomination, with about 25 churches in the state, eight of them in the metro area. He said he has served as the denomination's bishop since 2017 and his church is the faith group's state headquarters.
The minister and several other pastors in the predominantly Black denomination were vaccinated publicly on Saturday at the vaccination pod.
Sugar, flour and chocolate morsels came out of the pantry and multiple mixers were plugged into electrical outlets. Numerous cookies sheets were placed on the counter and ovens were preheated.
Just like that, the kitchen at ReMerge of Oklahoma County was transformed into a pop-up bakery of sorts on a recent Monday morning.
ReMerge participants were celebrating the one-month anniversary of Catalyst Cookies by baking up batches of Triple Chocolate, Salted Caramel Pecan and Snickerdoodle cookies. The aroma of Double Chocolate Mint and Gluten Free Monster cookies also filled the air, along with a few dozen Red Velvet which were being baked for all the customers who missed getting a taste of Catalyst Cookies' Valentine's Day
Members of a northeast Oklahoma City church met at another house of worship Sunday after their church building sustained extensive water damage due to burst water pipes.
The Rev. James Harris Jr. and his Antioch Institutional Baptist Church congregation gathered for services at Ebenezer Baptist Church while efforts to clean out and assess the damage to their church continued.
Harris said Antioch's church secretary and a building trustee called him Thursday to say a homeowner near the church, 507 N Bath Circle, noticed water running from the church and spilling out onto the street. Burst water pipes commonly occur when the pipes freeze during the kind of record-setting frigid temperatures that recently beset much of Oklahoma
TULSA The expression on her face said it all.
The Rev. Deron Spoo walked with one of the Black members of his predominantly white church as she and her young grandson visited a specially designated area of First Baptist Church of Tulsa for the first time.
It was the Tulsa Race Massacre Prayer Room, which Spoo, the church's senior pastor, helped create to aid his church and the local community reckon with Tulsa's painful past. He said its focus is on healing the wounds of yesteryear and taking a stand against the ugliness of present-day racism.