By Major Anita Caldwell

Homelessness could involve my son, your sister, your father who just didn’t want you to know about their problem and didn’t want to be a burden to you.  Homelessness is not caused by The Salvation Army or any other organization; but our goal is to end homelessness by all means possible.  The homeless belong to Waco and McLennan County.  They belong to all of us.  They are the people created by God who walk a broken road.  They are the broken souls of our community, our county.

While at our community kitchen, I had the privilege of interviewing five of our homeless citizens of Waco.  They represented our veterans, college students, mentally ill and those waiting on disability.  Here are their stories.

As a teenager, Ellen had experienced a difficult time and was sent to the Methodist Children’s Home.  At age eighteen, she was released and with nowhere to go, she chose to live on the streets of Waco.  As I sat with her on the green grass beside the Community Kitchen, I asked her how long she had been on the streets and her reply was ten years.  She felt safe in Waco and besides, all her resources were located downtown including the food stamp office, the health center and her lawyer, who was working on her disability case due to a car accident.  She said she really didn’t need The Salvation Army but appreciated the clothing we provide her from time to time.  She wanted to talk with her grandfather, so I called him, but her grandmother had just had a stroke and he could not invite her to come home.

Bob is a veteran with PTSD.  He admits that he can’t keep a job but says that he can hold signs for stores going out of business.  He has family in Waco and this always brings him back home.  He said that The Salvation Army was the only safe place to stay.

Jake has COPD and was approved for disability two years ago but so far had no received any support.  All his resources are located downtown Waco, so he lives in his car and eats one meal a day at The Salvation Army while waiting for payments to begin.  He worked all his life as a welder, but his illness no longer permitted him to work.  He is angry with life and not open for much conversation.

Peter said that he was a foreign exchange student who left school and had been homeless for four months.  All he wanted was a job, a bed, and a shower.  He is only nineteen years old and had studied at TSTC.  From his experience, there are just too many rules.   He recognizes rules are not always easy and they are a choice necessary to reach goals.

Peter’s father had been a veteran but died and his mother is in a nursing home. He had lived with his parents in Waco much of his life, but that home had been sold.  His greatest fear was the Illuminati who had set dogs to chase him and bite him.  His one goal in life is to create signs that make people smile.  I quickly realized that Peter would not be able to work but needed the care of PATH and Mental Health.

When these people cross the path of The Salvation Army, we encourage them to enter a true program for change.  We invite PATH from MHMR to meet with those who are mentally ill.  We contact our veteran’s liaison to meet with the veterans who need help (and we work together to find them housing when possible.  If individuals are suffering from addiction, we offer to take them to a free Salvation Army six-month rehabilitation program.  We provide safe shelter, hot meals, a place to shower, and refuge from the streets.  Our case managers also provide guidance and work to identify the underlying cause of crisis, finding ways to resolve these issues and implement permanent solutions.  Our goal is to help mend the broken road they’re on.  Those we serve are created by God; they are His children. The Salvation Army is committed to meeting human need without discrimination and without judgement. We don’t ask their religion, heritage or orientation.  Our call is to walk with them from a place of street life to permanent housing, regardless of what that might take in time or patience.  Jesus asks that we care for the “least of these” as if it was Himself.   This we will continue to do with honor, respect and diligence thanks to a supporting community which recognizes that the faces of our homeless, and how we care for them, reflects the character of our community and the character within ourselves.

Major Anita Caldwell was born in Olean, NY, to a family of ministers.   She attended and graduated from Kentucky Mountain Bible Institute with a BA in Religion.  Her MA is in Pastoral Leadership from Olivet Nazarene University.  She and her husband, Bradley Caldwell are Majors in The Salvation Army and are Regional Coordinators for this area.  They have served as ministers of the gospel in The Salvation Army for 24 years.  After serving in three USA appointments, they were transferred as Regional Leaders in Moldova, Romania, Russia and the country of Georgia over a twelve-year period.  They received their Waco assignment after serving at International Headquarters in London, UK.

The Act Locally Waco blog publishes posts with a connection to these aspirations for Waco. If you are interested in writing for the Act Locally Waco Blog, please email [email protected] for more information.

*Names changed throughout to protect privacy.

(March 6, 2018 is the Joint Primary Election.  Polls are open from 7 AM to 7 PM.  For a list of polling sites, click here: McLennan County Election Day Voting Centers.  If you are a registered voter in McLennan County, you can vote at any center, regardless of where you live.  – ABT)

By Diamante Maya

The United States is a country that prides itself on being a democracy.  We see it as so important that we like to help establish democracies in countries around the world.  One of the most basic principles of a democracy is that the people vote for who they want to represent them in the government.  Despite the importance we place on our value of being a democracy, we as a country have low voter turnout.  In the 2016 Presidential election, 40% of the eligible voter population in the U.S. DID NOT show up to vote.  And this was actually a higher voter turnout than has been the case in recent history.

I remember graduating high school, turning 18 and being able to vote.  I remember how overwhelming it felt because I had never been taught how to vote. I had so many questions about the process.  Am I registered? How do I register? What am I voting for? How do I pick who to vote for? It’s been almost two decades since I was 18 and I have yet to be taught how to vote.  I’m not aware of any classes or how-to manuals on this.  It wasn’t taught in high school and it’s not taught in college.  Instead, I have had to teach myself.

When I lived in Los Angeles in my early 20’s, I remember receiving a booklet in the mail. I had not requested it.  It just came automatically. I don’t know if the city sent it or not because I was not paying attention to that at the time.  It was a non-partisan booklet and it would, for example, list a particular proposition and what those “for” say and what those “against” say.  It was up to me to decide what I believed.  I remember how much relief I felt receiving this booklet in the mail.  Otherwise, I would not have known an election was happening or what it was about.

Then I moved to Waco and in the 8 years I have lived here, I have never automatically received a booklet in the mail to help me out.  In fact, many times, I did not even know an election was happening.  I had to be proactive to find out.  The first year I was here, there was an election.  I went online trying to find information and I clicked around trying to figure out what was on the ballot.  I couldn’t figure it out and I consider myself quite adept at navigating the internet.  I wrote to some friends that were more knowledgeable than I on the topic and they gave me a link to follow to the city website.  I remember clicking on the link for a sample ballot and seeing a bunch of letters and numbers. It was not straight forward.  I randomly clicked and it pulled up a ballot, but it only told me what was on the ballot.  It did not tell me what each person stood for.

As I have talked to people, I have realized that my experience is not the exception.  It appears to be the norm. Out of curiosity, I looked it up and discovered California had a 75% voter turn-out compared to Texas’ 43% in the 2016 Presidential Elections.  These numbers vary each Presidential election, but stay in a similar range.

Fast forward to February of this year, 2018. I again asked if there was a useful, simple, comprehensive website.  This time I asked some people from the League of Women Voters.  Finally, finally, I was led to a website that I wished I had discovered many years ago when I turned 18.  It’s a non-partisan, comprehensive, easy to navigate website that only requires your address. It gives some basic information on candidates and, for those that provide information; it gives you links to learn more about them.  You can access it from your computer or your smart phone.

So, if you are like me and you would like a comprehensive, easy to navigate, website, I highly recommend www.vote411.org.  Here are the questions the website answers:

• Am I registered to vote?
• Where can I vote?
• What if I can’t go in person?
• Who and what is on the ballot?
• What does each candidate stand for?
• What are the dates for voting?
• How do I register to vote?

In Texas, we don’t just receive information automatically in the mail about elections, unless it’s a candidate trying to get you to vote for them.  It’s an area we could improve; however, until then, each of us has to be proactive.  A democracy can’t possibly have representatives for the people if people do not show up to vote for who they want to represent them.  Election Day for the primaries is March 6, 2018.  Those candidates that get the most votes from each party will run against each other in the November elections.  Check out www.vote411.org, exercise your right to participate in selecting who represents you in our government, and spread the word.

Diamante Maya is social worker by trade and a political activist by hobby.  Inspired by the life of Jesus, she is an advocate for the marginalized in society.

(In this post Rudy Solano shares thoughts and memories about the neighborhood where he grew up, known to those who lived there as “La Calle Dos.”  If you would like to learn more about La Calle Dos, you may enjoy this link from the Waco History Project: Calle Dos. – ALW)

By Rudy Solano

Some years ago, one of the early astronauts was interviewed about his experiences in space.    I am paraphrasing, but the interviewer asked him:  “What did you feel when you went up in space and saw what no other person had ever seen—planet Earth from that perspective?”  “What was going through your mind?”  His answer, so simple but so meaningful,   has stayed with me all these years.  The astronaut thought  about the question for a moment and then replied,  “I couldn’t get over the feeling that our planet Earth looked so small. “  “That in the vast universe  this  tiny little speck  was our home and  we all lived here!”  Implicit was the notion that we all must learn to get along with each other.

From time to time I have visited the small corner of the world that we affectionately called “La Calle  Dos”—we moved away  in 1950.   Invariably, I am   overcome by similar feelings.    I ask myself:   Did we really live here in this tiny little space?   Could this be the same place where all those homes used to be?    Where are all the people lived?   Trying to orient myself, I look for something familiar.  I should be standing where Don Marcial’s grocery store was, I tell myself.  Instead, I am confronted by an immense   building complex covering an area where several neighborhoods would have been.   The large marquee by the road tells me this is now a middle school named Indian Springs.

In a way, “La Calle Dos” is a misnomer.  Although the phrase literally means “Two Street,” or “Second Street,” in Spanish, the name came to represent   an amorphous area that around the 1900’s became an enclave for primarily –but not exclusively–immigrants of Mexican descent.  The red-light district of Mollie Adams notoriety gradually gave way to families of modest means who were seeking to provide for their families as best they could.  In the case of my maternal grandfather, who was born in Aguascalientes, Jesus Maria, Mexico, all his children (with the exception of an infant daughter who stayed with her grandmother in Mexico) were born in the United States.  During the years that we lived there,  a preponderance of the residents were Mexican, Latin, Latino, Hispanos, Hispanics, Chicanos—take your pick—and  several  Negro, Black  or African-American families.  We were also blessed with at least one American Indian family and an Anglo-American, who– as far as I know– was single.   Mr. Cooper, as we referred to him, was an entrepreneur—a one-man Lipsitz*, buying scrap metal, rags, bottles or any article of value.

La Calle Dos, was by financial measures, a place of modest circumstances. By a curious coincidence, as I write this I am reading a book titled Being Rapoport, Capitalist with a Conscience.  Mr. Rapoport, a Waco icon who founded the Audrey and Bernard Rapoport Foundation, traces his roots to a very humble beginning.  His father, an immigrant from Russia, was a street peddler on the streets of San Antonio, Texas.  This man of great renown, who was known to have conversations with people in the White House, to be a personal friend of ambassadors and powerful people in politics and business, never lost that precious virtue so rare and so highly prized: humility.

Referring to the ethnic makeup of our old neighborhood, I have always believed that this experience, limited as it was– with  African-Americans in particular–  served me well in later years in the Community Relations Division  of  the Waco Police Department.

Reminiscing about the years I spent in La Calle Dos as a youth, I am aware that some might wonder why this ordinary-seeming place could be considered special at all. It is a fair question. Assuming agreement on two basic points, I would gladly attempt an answer by sharing my thoughts.  The two presuppositions would be:  One, that we are all the same, different and unique. Two, that Will Rogers had a valid point when he stated, “We are all ignorant; only about different topics.”

Few people outside of our family and a small circle of friends have ever heard of Martin C. Solano.  I am aware of two separate monuments that bear his name.   At Rosemound Cemetery a small granite tombstone quietly announces to the visitor:

Here rest the remains of
Juanita Colmenero Solano
Died   Oct 17, 1930
at the age of forty
Rest in Peace
A remembrance from her son
Martin Solano

At St. Francis of the Brazos Church are fourteen large wall sized murals that mark the Catholic “Stations of the Cross.”    The seventh mural, which was donated to the church by my grandfather, has a small plaque on the bottom that reads: “In memory of Martin Solano.”

By most l accounts Martin Solano was a caring person who loved life.  At the height of the Great Depression he told his sister, my Aunt Jessie, “Don’t you worry none, I’m going to take care of you.”

He was a boxer.  He was in the Civilian Conservation Corps with another Wacoan, Nieves Rodriguez.   Joe   Nieves  Rodriguez, who later  became a Waco police officer, graduated from the  FBI Academy and retired with  the rank of Assistant Chief of Police, related to me that Uncle Martin had helped him out of a tough spot while in the CCC.  It seems that Captain Joe was boxing with another person and getting the worst end of it.  Thanks to my Uncle Martin giving him some timely tips about his opponent, he said, he was able to come out on top.

Like countless others, Uncle Martin was called to serve his country after the consequential bombing of  a faraway place called Pearl Harbor. The only time I remember seeing my uncle alive was when he knelt on the bare wooden floor at 538 North Second Street to receive his father’s blessing.  My mother recalled that, on the eve of his departure, her brother was saying goodbye to his friends, playing the guitar and singing a popular song of the day, “El Soldado Razo,” a plaintive song about a young man going to war who is ready to die for his country, but laments leaving his mother behind.

Uncle Martin entered the service on July 4, 1942, and remained on active duty until he was mortally wounded by an enemy hand grenade in an Italian campaign.  He succumbed to his injuries in a California veterans’ hospital.   On April 30, 1945, PFC Martin Colmenero Solano of Co. F, 349^th Infantry gave up the spirit.   Another native son had been sacrificed as fodder for a cruel and senseless war that shook the global village to its foundation.  By an ironic twist of fate, on that same date, 5,280 miles away, a man named Adolph Hitler inside a Berlin bunker died as well.  This is part of what gives La Calle Dos relevance.   At Oakwood Cemetery in Waco, Texas, a monument marks the gravesite of a Texas son who died too soon and came from a place called La Calle Dos.  Our family and a few friends mourn his loss yet.

I see the river–El Rio Los Brazos de Dios—Spanish for “the arms of God.”   It’s still there, I think to myself, somewhat amused at my unspoken reaction.  Looking westward, I spy another familiar sight, the Spanish mission, San Francisco de Assisi.  I don’t remember it being so close!   St Francis is on Third and Jefferson Street.  There is Jefferson Street.  So, if I follow it till it meets up with the Brazos River…Yes!  There it is!  I cannot believe my eyes.   La Pila!    The artesian water fountain we called La Pila (Spanish for “basin”) is still there!  It’s been covered over, but part of it is still visible.  I don’t remember that pecan tree growing almost on top of it.  Riverside Drive, now called University-Parks, is virtually at the outer rim of the fountain, encroaching into what was once a large lawn area.   The lawn around the water fountain, always green and well-maintained, extended farther out to First Street.  Through the years, I am almost sure, the Brazos River (now renamed Lake Brazos) has eroded the bank, forcing the road to be constructed closer to the fountain.

Standing at the Pila site, several Waco historical landmarks are within view.  A few hundred yards away is the suspension bridge designed by the same person who designed the famed Brooklyn Bridge, the bridge that was a crossing for the Chisholm Trail cattle drives of the storied wild West.  Literally a few feet away from the bridge is located a freshwater spring in the aptly named Indian Springs Park.  This was a source of fresh water for the Huaco Indians (from which the name “Waco” derives).   Finally, the viewer can see the building which was the tallest structure West of the Mississippi River when it was built.  We called this building “la veintidos.”  Why?  Probably because the Alico building is twenty-two stories high and veintidos means 22 in Spanish.

Rudy Solano is retired from the City of Waco. During his career at the City of Waco his role included Community Relations Specialist for the Police Department a position he treasured. He and his wife Adela are Waco natives where they raised their four children. He is a proud husband, father, and grandpa!

*The Lipsitz Scrap Metal Company is a well-known, highly successful  Waco business known for its philanthropy and many civic endeavors.