VIDEO: Disabled Veteran Recieves a Home

FULTON, Miss. (WCBI)- The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates that there are are over 35 thousand disabled veterans living in Mississippi.

Over 200 of them are homeless.

Thankfully, for one Northeast Mississippi veteran and his wife- they are getting a new lease on life.

Timothy Adam Kahler cut sections of lumber for his new home. He and wife Nicole moved from Louisiana to this parcel of land south of Fulton eight months ago because they didn’t have any other place to go.

“Because the of veterans administration we didn’t have a whole lot of money. We had 265 a month. And we ended up inheriting this 11 and a half acres my wife did and on Christmas day we took what little bit of money that we had and we brought everything up here and we actually stayed in a tent for approximately three weeks at 36 degrees some where in that area with a cat and a litter box,” says Veteran Timothy Adam Kahler.

Since their tent experience, the Kahlers have been living in this metal shed, put together with odds and ends that they could get for free. They didn’t have electricity for a long while, until Kahler fashioned this makeshift solar panel. They are hooked up with water electricity now, and have managed to install a window air conditioner. They cook on an outside grill and this tent contains their environmentally safe toilet.

Fortunately Don Smith of Just the Crumbs Ministry lived not too far away, and learned of the Kahler’s plight, about eight weeks ago.

“We decided to take this on as a project. He’s a disabled veteran and his wife is disabled. And we felt like especially being a veteran that they deserved at least a right place to sleep and warm. So we took it on as a project and we set a goal of 30-thousand dollars to raise money to build the house. And we have reached our goal or close to it,” says Smith.

Over the past several years there have been numerous horror stories about substandard and often negligent treatment of military veterans by the Veterans Administration. And the fact that the Kahlers have to live here is a stark illustration of that.

Kahler is already thankful that the government has come through and upped his disability payment to an amount they can live on.