BAJITO ONDA AS A STUDY INTO THE GANG MINDSET AND AS A PEACEFUL ALTERNATIVE FAMILY

mark, thanks for your optimism. i'm really so sick of people in the US sensationalizing something that they do not want to take five minutes to really think about and try to understand. i have spent years, hours, days, and gotten to know the lost people. yes i am a researcher and scientist of violent behavior and breaking the prevention of someone entering the cycle and also removing someone out of it.

but the important thing is that the people i work with do not realize that i am a scientist studying them - they think i'm one of them. i have learned to talk like them - act like them and walk like them - that is what gets me into their world, their heads and their hearts. bajito onda is our vehicle to take others safely into their world, etc.

also: because bajito onda is the portal i have developed for us to enter the international underground world of gangs and especailly the marasalvatrucha - the people we interview and sit with and pray with or show love to will receive something from us -

please put in our budget shit loads of tshirts for us to take in with us - they are our sort of peace pipe - peace token - of friendship and desire to bond with them.

you see when we meet you will understand better what i cannot really think about when i'm talking on a cell phone - but....

lemme see if i can explain it to you a little more.

you see, i too am one of them in a way - i used to be the most violent fucking person on the planet - i learned how to kill people in my mind just for fun and sport - although i never acted it out - i really didn't have to - i mastered the mental sport - i lived for violence and revenge and trashing people's lives no matter how i did it. i used to imagine having a detonator and just pushing down the handle at the appropriate moment i wanted to blow people sky high either from fear or from mental shock.

when i heard that a man down the street had died from shock - i think indirectly from some of my torture games with his weak mind - i began to realize how powerful i had gotten. i'm notsaying i killed him - because i didn't - but i sure did know how to get to him and many other people around me. psychotic, yes - pissed off at the world for the way they treated me - hell yes.

well anyway.... i decided to listen to this calling i received one day when i had one hand wrapped around an uzi and the other on the doorknob ready to open that door and go splatter people all over the post office so i could just hop in a cop car, and ride down to the federal bldg - get processed and go back to prison for life. i had had it out here - matter of fact i still hate it out here - but i have learned how to turn the deadly game inside out on society and here is how i do it.

i am still very messed up mentally and emotionally probably - but over the years i've numbed my feelings so now my emotions are for the most part very calculated and formulated. now i know i cannot be around someone who mixes negative with my positive - they have to go.

i have created my own world in which i run my own life with very little outside contact with the 'real world' - that is what i mean by 'inside the gang game' - it is nothing more than a mindset.

the guys from ES and HN and Guatemala - were contaminated by violence as babies - imagine the kids from iraq in fifteen years... same thing.

hispanics in general are very jealous, very macho, hot headed and quick on the trigger, or in the Central American economically deprived nations located in jungles .... the machete. cheap, multi-purpose tool and great for chopping off heads of enemies - very effective.

intrigued by my own violent behavior and figuring if i was ever going to do something with my life I decided to listen to the words of God who I heard speak to me just as I reached for that knob – and simultaneously I also opened up my eyes from crying so hard for giving up on my life and myself and I saw this little toothpick sized ray of light coming into my darkness – I thought it was a sign of light coming into my own personal darkness – I still believe God saved me that day – and told me to go save others from the hell of prison and to be there for them because there was no one there for me when I needed someone so bad to turn to. I went for eleven long years without a hug, without anyone ever telling me they loved me and with out anyone ever telling me that ‘prison was behind me’ – I was stuck in the violent prison mindset – survivor mode referred to as ‘tiger alert’ for many many years. It was terrible being in that mindset but I didn’t know how to get out. One time I wrote down ‘I am in a box and can’t get out’. I wrote it so that I would know that I wasn’t just having mind tricks again – so I could see that I was sane enough to know that I had realized I was trapped inside a box – inside my head and could not get out. Violence had become my only friend – pain was my only real emotion I could feel and that could make me cry tears of emotion. Tears were like a sort of psychological / emotional cleansing that reminded me I was still human and still in charge of some part of my life. I was on the other side of the psychotic fence much more than on this side.

Because I had lived in Mexico way back and I spoke fluent Spanish, I had also somehow become disconnected from the white / English speaking world. I looked at them as if I was a Mexican and as if they would never accept me. Mexicans and other Hispanic races accepted me fully as one of their own. I hated white people for what I thought they thought of me – and actually I was right – they thought I was like a Mexican and they treated me like one. That drove me more and more towards Mexicans and violent persons, like the kids in gangs who society hated and they felt rejected.

It seemed the only people who would talk to me after I told God to give me that damn calling and let me see if I can be good at something other than just printing and making money and spending it again.

Soon I became known as the gang house, the gang hide out, the gang mom, whatever, at least I had some friends and they had someone who would go pick them up and let them sleep at my little ole house in the hood. I had no furniture, slept on the floor but I worked every day in my backyard printing shirts and decals by hand pulling them – hard ass work that wore me out and let me sleep a little at night then I did it all again the next day.

Me and those kids all around 17 to 22 years old kept growing and growing. The kids would help me in the print shop and I would feed them and buy them beer or whatever they wanted. Back in the days we even did drugs together. We shared everything except sex. They were all screwing their cousins and whatever but I just acted like – ‘oh well’ and let them live their lives since they let me live mine… mostly working all the time – just didn’t know what else to do and I didn’t want to mix with people outside my personal space because I was afraid I would go off on them and ‘it’ would happen and then my little game would be out of my control.

One thing I really hated about prison was those damn keys – the way they jingled reminding me that each time I heard them how it was me that gave them to my keeper who was making about $8 an hour to torture me and make me become a violent animal whose focus was only on surviving the time I spent there (like the maras) and just being able to get what I wanted however I could get it from then on.

Well… so I lived with violent gang kids – whose brothers were getting shot in the chest and killed while others were killing someone and ending up doing life in prison while begging me to help them – I was losing them all around me.

Then in 1993 or so my best friend Woody died (me and him were together for 27 wild and insane years – he weighed 600 lbs so if I ever wanted to have someone hurt – he was like my own personal destructor robot and he did beat them into a bloody pulp’ and that was just what we did.

So when he died the people who I had bought the house from where I lived and worked kind of stole it from me – they swindled me and had a lawyer accuse me of forging my own deed to my own house that I was paying a mortgage company the mo payments. It was a mess and I lost – I was so unable to talk for myself, defend myself without a gun or violence, so I just let them take it from me.

I was very very mad about it but I was also trying to break away from that whole messed up scene over that house so I figured just let them have it and someday I’ll have another damned house. Well I was wrong – its been a long time and still no house. But whatever, so I was so mad I said, I’m getting out of Oak Cliff and I’m moving across town to Pleasant Grove where we from OC used to make fun of them calling them ‘grove-ites’ like it was a worse ghetto than O.C.

So I had a pastor who worked with exconvicts and drug addicts so he offered to have his guys living in his half-way house to help me move out of there before they stole all my printing equipment I had amassed when they took back the house.

I moved over here to what is known as East Dallas / a bit north of PG and I’ve been here ever since. I decided to try to make Bajito Onda a nonprofit charity because other charities thought we were low class and I was even lower for siding with the kids in gangs and other losers in Dallas.

It became a personal matter with me and it consumed my every waking moment which was good because it kept me from having too many violent thoughts and it kept me out of society and for the most part them away from me. I managed to get my 501c3 number and it made me and BO some sort of a ‘respectable group of citizens’ even though we were unruly as hell.

I went down and signed up with the straight laced ‘volunteer center of Dallas’ and they started sending me people on probation for DUI and other cases. I told them to send me the worst ones they had because I didn’t mind – I was one of them too.

At first they kind of scared me knowing that they came to BO because they had stabbed somebody 17 times or they had murdered somebody, raped or kidnapped their child – or whatever. So I invoked for the most part the prison rule – its not polite to talk about your crime because its probably a lie anyway.

So the community service court ordered ‘volunteers’ kind of became my friends, and then I realize that I could actually use them as a captive work force to help me keep BO alive and well. So I used them to weld shelves, move things all over the place, chop down trees, haul stuff and everything I could think of… including printing.

After a while some of them really took an interest in the printing and money making opportunities so I kept my promise to the guy who taught me how to print that if he taught me I would someday teach others…

They frustrated the hell out of me – but when some of them had to do 1,000 hours for shooting people and robbing stores we really got to know everything about each other –

But after about six years of seeing them work like a dog under my now almost half prison guard – half exconvict like mentality do their hours, I got sick and tired of seeing them not give a shit about their future in and out of the courts and ultimately in and out of prison when they would violate. I got to know the probation officers and even became respected by them as well as judges and attorneys for my strict disciplinarian methods that most of the time woke the probationers up and made them change their lives for the better – stop drugging, stop beating their wives, stop stabbing their boyfriends, and the like. The girls were more violent than the guys.

I began to see that if I sat down and spent some time talking to them instead of working sometimes I could begin to understand why they did what they did – what they did – to whom and how they felt inside and what it would take to hear them out and actually give them something nobody gave me – love, understanding, compassion, even if it was only research – they never knew it. Before long I was actually caring about them and their lives, and they were bringing me their families to meet and so on.

Now I have actually ‘raised’ two and a half generations of kids and people.

I got so good at working with them – that I kind of got bored. I wanted a harder group of people to study and get to know why and how they ended up where they did – I wanted to go back into prison but as an outside / insider with privileges and access.

I had been asked a couple times to speak at the closing ceremony of Kairos Prison Ministry and I thought it was cool – being in prison – but being free at the same time. The prison I spoke at is a hard core heavy gang prison – but I was walked in and walked out with no close contact at all. My being there though had an impact on their lives. Some of them started writing and I wrote them back but it was a correspondence type of thing and not really access to their minds and hearts.

I got my prison official volunteer status and the chaplain and a Sgt that taught the class for volunteers eally liked what I told them about my program BO. They said it was perfect for prisons because really there is nothing like it for Spanish speaking inmates.

The chaplain asked me to go to services and I did. I found myself however very identified with the prisoners and detesting the sight of prison grey guard uniforms. The Sgt that also taught the security part of the class intimidated the hell out of me. That was a first – but she was so hard core scary I was sort of intrigued by her genuine no BS toughness. She was the real deal and I didn’t want to deal with her. She asked the class all kinds of trick questions to see what they would do in a crisis hostage situation, etc. and I got them right to the point she told me to let somebody else answer. It was the first time I excelled at something even though it was prison.

About a month after I took the class the Sgt herself called me to ask me some question about printing or a sign for her office. I was knocked over. I thought it might be my ‘ticket to the inside’ and behind the scenes. I was right. I made her a sign and also the chaplain wanted a door sign so I made him one – after that other people saw them and wanted them on all their doors – even the warden wanted signs so I started making them like crazy and applying them all over the prison. That gave me that inside access I wanted so I could study the inside workings.

After a while of hanging out with the Sgt as she made her rounds and we talked and slowly gained each other’s trust she even came over to BO and freaked the guys on probation out – a prison guard in uniform coming over and mixing with them. She let me run my place and I followed her lead in prison. it was her way of teaching me about it and all the games from her side of the coin.

After a couple months we decided we would like to try a sort of program with the inmates. I told her to choose any guys she wanted to and I would experiment with them to see if I could make sense of a prison program that could change lives.

I went out to the prison very often like one to three days a week. She and I walked around the units and she took me inside. I talked to some guys who had DWI and had killed whole car load of little children and found out how they were coping. I nervously waded through units locked inside with up to 80 – 100 men. Soon she would allow me to be locked in there by myself with them. I just had to pray nothing happened and it didn’t.

After a while we decided to choose some guys – about fifteen for me to see if I could bond with them and start to study them. She chose all races.. Indian, white, black, and Hispanic. The first nite was really tense. She locked me in a control room not the chapel. I did my best and I think I was so crazy for them that I scared a few of them being so hard core acting.

After that the only ones who wanted to come back and meet with me were the Hispanics and I was fine with that. The others just didn’t ‘get it’.

After about five months of repeatedly going into prison and being locked in with them about a group of seven or so – I finally had the nerve to ask if they still thought I was a cop or an investigator because they always would say ‘why you wanna come out here and see us anyway like this?’ – what do you get out of it? And they would always say… ‘you won’t keep it up – you’ll forget about us – everybody else has’.

And then the same night I told them… okay can I ask you a question then? They said ‘yes’ – I said so do you think we’ve actually bonded? And they said ‘yes’ – I said so then… ‘if you won’t feel like I’m a cop then I won’t feel like one of you is going to kill me anymore… okay?’ They let me know – I had earned their trust, their respect and that I had also earned something very hard to get – prison protection based on reputation for being real and not a sellout.

The guys I had in that ‘core group’ we decided to call ‘family’ – that nite was the first time we ever prayed and held hands in a circle. It was a beautiful prayer and it was the beginning of BAJITO ONDA PRISONERS FOR PROGRESS – A PEACE MINISTRY.

That was when I began introducing BO into their lives as a form of ‘another choice’ for them to just have in their lives.

Actually what occurred from then on out is what made history. The more they got involved in BO – the more peaceful they became – and the more they began to open up for the first time in their lives – even to Sarge and even Sarge began showing them favor – a first also for her.

What evolved was that I was holding groups with the main gang prison leaders and after about a year – they were leaving the gang leadership alone – turning their backs on it – and beginning to think about life after prison – peace – their families and their children – even accepting other members of BO as their own new family in peace.

So what now is happening is that worldwide – once violent persons are now accepting BO as a gang family for and on all levels it is spreading where the gangs are – and changing lives for peace.

If we can just get some word out about the lives in the violence I know we can reach some of them before its too late.

del

THE HISTORY OF BAJITO ONDA -

I am trying to get things in line in order to receive major funding through grants. Here is something i have needed to put together for a long time. Del

HISTORY OF BAJITO ONDA

Raised in rural Arkansas I was 17 and just entering the tenth grade in 1962 when I was hit by a car driven by a fellow classmate who swerved trying to scare me and a neighbor girl as we walked towards my house down a narrow country road, causing an injury that narrowly missed the tire running over my left arm and causing a skull fracture concussion when my head landed on the road top. The twisting motion and impact caused such a blow it lacked about an eighth of an inch from severing my spinal cord and snapping my lower spine. I missed an entire year of school in and out of the hospital for my injuries while the boy who hit me devastated me by never once coming to see me or even calling to see how I was doing. He lived only a half mile further down the road from my house. I spent the whole tenth grade at home and in bed or in the hospital. Four surgeries on my leg and hip followed as my studies and athletic weekends playing tennis and swimming were substituted for long days of rehabilitation and doctors painting a future of doom and gloom with paralysis playing a major threat to my future and physical well-being.

My dreams of leaving Arkansas for a life of adventure and new lands and peoples did not include the image of my being disabled although I knew that one day anything could happen that could put me in a wheelchair forever.

Although my studies were changed from algebra, Spanish, Latin and psychology to just trying to graduate the best way I could, embarrassingly I was moved to remedial classes for slow students. Due to missing practically the entire tenth grade I did graduate in 1965. Before graduation my school counselor told me and my parents that I most likely would either join the military or end up in prison. My parents and I were shocked to say the least. Especially since President Bill Clinton had been in the class before me. My accident kept me from graduating with him.

After graduating I took a summer job at the Sentinel Record Newspaper in Hot Springs. I was only hired to run ad proofs around to all the advertisers, and I did. But I managed to become totally entranced with the whole printing process. It was in the old days, so the darkroom cameras were huge and the whole process from editorial to make up of ads and on to the typesetting done with lead on ‘hot metal’ linotype letter by letter cast in molten lead somehow really got under my skin. Although my parents wanted me to go to college or to business school I knew in my heart that I would excel at anything graphic design or printing. It was in the darkroom that one of the bosses taught me how to make birth certificates so that I could get into nightclubs when I was only 18 and the drinking age was 21. We made me one and it worked like a charm.

In 1967 I moved with my best friend Woody to Dallas, Texas. It was only 350 miles from Hot Springs where our families lived. I left Hot Springs against my parents will so therefore they did not give me a penny of help to take with me thinking that if they made it hard on me I would surely give up and come back to Arkansas. I was determined although it hurt me tremendously -- to make it against all odds. Woody paid for my gas money to Dallas and that was the beginning of our big adventure in a big city. It was a fascinating new land and cultures of new peoples. I was immediately intrigued by Mexicans and the Spanish language.

In 1972 Woody and I went to Mexico to visit a friend he had made there. I knew then I could not bring myself to leave so I came back to Dallas, packed my bags and headed back for what I thought would be for good. I stayed on with the woman and her children. She was an award winning Mexican painter and artisana. I was fascinated with her work and all the things she created in the name of traditional Mexican art. I lived there from that day on for about a year. I learned to love the rich heritage and culture and I awkwardly learned to speak Spanish fluently through learning processes I created in order to become self taught.. I also learned upon moving back to Dallas what a difference there was between Mexican Americans and Mexican Nationals. I had been living with Nationals and went back to live with Mexican Americans who made fun of me for my good Spanish. I began to sympathize with the Nationals who I could relate to their difficulties of living in a foreign land and trying to learn to just survive the culture differences plus they were illegal and I hadn’t been. I also began to understand what I thought was an injustice in that as well. They could work in this country and build our roads and be our maids and gardeners but they did not have the right to be citizens and send their children to schools, go to our hospitals and go home to Mexico to be with their aged and ill relatives. In my heart I became a silent activist for the Mexican people, their rich heritage which I had learned to appreciate and their language which now had become second to my own.

In 1982 my Army Colonel father, Logan Brooks Hendrixson passed away leaving me in a terrible state of depression and not caring about life or my future. I became very suicidal and in need of help. He was my guiding light and I would have never been ready to let him go. My mother and sister wanted to keep my share of the inheritance and stopped communicating with me entirely. I felt totally abandoned and alone in the world and allowed who I thought were ‘friends’ to persuade me to use my creative talents to forge counterfeit documents for illegal Mexican aliens who I felt I was helping to work in the United States and be able to ‘legally’ enroll their children in school and to return to Mexico to be with their families. It played into what I already felt in my heart was sort of the ‘thing society should do to an oppressed group already living amongst us.’ I went from being a silent activist to making over forty birth certificates for what amounted to total strangers. I soon realized something was going to ‘give’ but I was still very depressed and really needed counseling and perhaps medication but in those days nothing like that existed that I was aware of.

The Federal Government did not feel so compassionate however. Twenty-two federal agents arrested me, and two months later after I took a plea bargain instead of facing a possible 555 year prison sentence, a judge sentenced me to three years in prison. While inside prison my depression only worsened. I literally had no one to turn to and quickly realized that prison was not a place I had ever dreamed of being sent, let alone having to face the reality of how I could or would survive it. No matter how I tried, each day got darker and more hopeless. In prison is where I made a vow that upon my release I would do whatever I could to prevent others from making the same mistakes I had when their thinking was confused, they were depressed or influenced by their so-called friends.

When I realized that I was truly heading for prison I was scared to death. They kindly gave me two months to get my affairs in order. I was to turn myself in two days after Christmas. All I had heard about it kept flashing through my head. I found myself every two hours nervously vomiting all day and all night. The day came for me to turn myself in I knew somehow I would not leave the doors the same person who entered. I knew I would have to learn new things but I had no idea what or how. I tried to tell myself that three years would be like a stint in the military – but it wasn’t the same. I knew nothing about parole or the parole board. I tried to tell myself I was going inside prison ‘undercover’ like an investigative journalist and that I would write about it and take notes to keep myself occupied . When I was released I would write a book about the experience. Something happened to me however that I cannot explain. The things I witnessed first hand in prison. The lives and their families I saw crumble after only weeks in prison began to affect me. It was so real it began to spill over into my own life. I began to see the violence – I began to become an innocent victim of it. The games convicts play are cruel games and I soon became a victim of those games as well. My best friends and confidants became women who would eventually die in prison with life sentences for their part in the murder of judges. I lost my business. I lost my friends. I lost my family. I lost everything. And soon, I too was so lost that I gave up counting the nervous breakdowns I was suffering from the stress and the fear. I saw the bloodshed, the cruelty, the torture and the lives who no sooner had left who returned right back again with a smirk on their faces. We oddly welcomed them back. Prison became our home and under the same tight spot lived our enemies and what we thought were our confidants, but we were never sure who was who through the lies and the games.

In order to survive prison I became one of the most violent and controlling prisoners. It was a terrible feeling being changed from a nice happy go lucky person into what prison had created – a programmed hopeless violent convict.

I forgot about how hard it would be to turn it off after my release and frankly I got to where I didn’t even think of being released – all I wanted to do was ride it through and make it out of there in one piece.

On November 30 1983 I was released from prison – a month later than parole had given me. I had been in a fight that cut the side of my neck open even though I did not fight back. I allowed myself to be beat, kicked and laid open so that I would not be blamed for fighting so I would be released on time. I was beat and I was still delayed leaving for one month. It was a racist fight – an everyday occurrence.

When I got out of prison, I left with my check for one month’s work as an unloader of the trailer trucks carrying the food for the chow hall. I unloaded those trucks with no gloves, no carts, nothing but some duct taped metal toed work shoes that were too big for me but I wore them in order to work there. My check for all that work for one month was $7 per month – 16 cents per hour. I could not believe I was working that hard for that little – but that is prison.

When I left there I vowed never to be so broke again – so for seven long years I worked like a dog to come up again. I drove a $400 car for five years so that I could never be broke again. I met a man, Don Hazard who taught me how to screen print. He said he would be my mentor and teach me to ‘give back’. He fronted me some equipment and taught me – how to use my counterfeiting talents to do signage and t-shirt printing and to make legal money that was well past my $7 a month. Some jobs would be a profit of more than $2000 for one afternoons work. I though I was in heaven making money like that.

After seven long years of working so hard just to make money – I still had such emptiness in my heart and soul that money could never fill up – vacations to Cancun only made it worse. I spent so much money trying to relax and spend the money I was making that after a while it was only a vicious money cycle. But it was legal. One day I was so depressed and miserable with mood swings out of control and my mind filled with black rages of homicidal / suicidal tendencies. I honestly that day figured that the only place I could ever just be who I had become was in prison. I wanted to go back to prison – for life. I knew in order to do that I would have to kill people at the post office and then I could return easily. Prison only taught me more about prison and the inner workings. It is a place that losers in society can feel at home with the dysfunction and have a little job and a little ‘house’ of a cell and well as bad as it is – compared to being released back into society with no programs to reintegrate prisoners it begins to seem like it is the ‘only solution’ – when really now I know it isn’t.

It was that day – that God spoke to my heart and stopped me from going to hurt innocent persons – He asked me to take on a new job – that of keeping young people and other innocent persons from going to prison.

I decided that it was something I could easily do in a few years. It has now been over fifteen years since I began what has become my mission in life.

Creating specialized vocational education for persons who are either at-risk of going to prison, or the persons who have been in prison and are trying to make it back through the social maze into a productive future and career treated as a worthwhile person with a purpose in their life. Through my own successful battle to become reintegrated into society I have, developed the programs that build self esteem, make a person feel like they are contributing back to the society they took from in order to regain social graces among their family or their peers, and to earn their dignity through working and creating products that once in use and seen afterwards provides enormous personal satisfaction in a life who may have only known failure and rejection in their past.

Today is 2005 – it has been twenty long difficult years of ‘walking the vision’ as I refer to the mountain of obstacles I have had to overcome while at the same time knowing the daily struggle of a person on a journey from prison who is determined to be a success story for others to follow instead of another statistic of recidivism.

I printed my first t-shirt in a portable building in my back yard in Oak Cliff, a little neighborhood called Cockrell Hill. It was what back then we called ‘the ghetto’. It was a raw and humble beginning – where the battle along with all the neighbors fought daily just to survive another day in poverty. My daily dream was ‘how do I escape this nightmare’ and make it back to where I was when I left to pay the price for my crime.

Through it all I have remained faithful to the calling and stayed doggedly dedicated as thousands of lives have come in and out of the doors of Bajito Onda Community Development Foundation. What started as a simple thing has become a complex tapestry of once broken people coming together to form a family of support and love in peace.

MEDIA RECOGNITION, HONORS AND AWARDS

Bajito Onda has been awarded as the Most Innovative Prison Aftercare Program by the National Transition of Prisoners Conference in Detroit / 2004.

1996 Bajito Onda is awarded $1000 and a crystal award for winning the JCPenney ‘Golden Rule Award’

2004 / Bajito Onda, nominated for the Dubai International Best Practices Award.

September 2004 / NY Times featured Bajito Onda in an article referring to Salvadoran gang members in the USA.

In March 2005 we moved into a 10,000 square foot facility complete total turnkey creative vocational training departments ranging from website design, signage and vehicle lettering and graphics to t-shirt and offset printing.

March 2005 / Newsweek featured Del Hendrixson in an article referring to Salvadoran gangs. 'SALVATRUCHA - THE DEADLIEST GANG IN AMERICA'

June 2005 / World Magazine featured Del Hendrixson / Bajito Onda in a story about Salvadoran gangs. 'SALVATRUCHAS - THE CRIMINALS NEXT DOOR'

June 2005 / NPR - National Public Radio features Del Hendrixson / Bajito Onda in a piece for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists - NPR actually recorded at our facility in E. Dallas.

July 2005 is the realization of yet another dream. Bajito Onda Productions is underway now working with underprivileged teens and persons with music talent but no one to turn to for development of their talent and evolvement as a music entrepreneur.

July 2005 we are initiating a program to develop graffiti artists into professional air brush artists and muralists.

July 2005 HBO is discussing the possibility of doing a special about Bajito Onda and Del Hendrixson.

August 2005 Bajito Onda launching Bajito Onda Community Outreach Magazine in order to directly communicate with at-risk persons with intriguing stories, testimonies and artwork from prison in order to let them know what programs or services are available to them and where and when they are located or offered.

August 2005 - Bajito Onda receives five dignitaries from Texas Dept of Corrections to reinstate us as a prison ministry with broader privilges to take our message of peace and hope to more prisons and larger audiences of inmates.

September 2005 - DALLAS OBSERVER - 'Jesus in a Mullet' - Feature Cover Story - 8 pages very indepth investigative and accurate positive reporting on Bajito Onda by Rick Kennedy. On newsstands for one week Sept 22-29. Now online at www.bajitoonda.org

September 2005 - DALLAS GANG GURU - From Dallas Observer observations of what little Dallas Police is doing for gang reduction and prevention Del Hendrixson will now begin holding global gang conferences.

THE CHALLENGE

Dallas, Texas seems to be a city that does very little in the area of prevention of crime and incarceration by educational programs and outreach materials, which are our specialty. Therefore we have had to fund all our programs with the profits earned by the printing jobs of clients such as Office Depot Nationwide, Verizon, Univision, and many other corporations, oddly enough including the N. Texas Parole Office as well as the Mexican Consulate.

But the funding we are able to generate is not nearly enough to keep our doors open ‘and’ continue to design and implement creative programs that ‘put lives back together’ so we must continue to turn away persons desiring a life changing opportunity to participate in Bajito Onda Programs.

WOODY MY FRIEND FOR LIFE'S BIRTHDAY - HE WOULD HAVE BEEN 62

Today is your birthday Woods, my dear dear friend for life. You would have been 62. I would have taken you out to eat at Aw Shucks and we would have had oysters and crab legs like we used to. Those were the good ole days. I miss you so much it still hurts my heart to be out 'here' without you day after day, year after year. I dedicate this writing to you because even though you have gone on before me - I know you will be waiting for me when I get there. You have never been out of my heart or out of my laughter zone. You were always with me for our great 27 years running up and down these streets from Arkansas to Mexico, out to Las Vegas and Los Angeles and elsewhere in between. I'm so sorry you couldn't have gotten enough help to save you from your obsessive compulsive eating problem that I feel robbed you of your life at only 49 years old. It was too young for you to die Woods, we had so much more life to live as best friends for life. I remember the day we were driving down I-30 and you told me you didn't know what would happen if something happened to me before you - well now i know how it feels and it is very painful. For so many years after you left back in 1993, January 19th at 11:30 Pm when i found you on the floor dead and cold I used to couldn't stand it when friday afternoon rolled around and you weren't calling me nonstop 'Hendrixson!!! where are you??? Let's go to the movies and out to eat" - we were always together - do you remember how we used to joke about being siamese twins? and how if i really believed in something and i asked for your approval and you laughed at me - it would be successful - but if you liked it - it would fail. well so it went and so it goes. well my friend for life you just would not believe your eyes at what your little 'ant as you used to call me' while calling yourself the 'grasshopper who played and fiddled all day' has or is accomplishing.

i just wanted you to know that i have your pictures right here and i am always thinking of the many years we spent backing each other up no matter what it was that was going down. thank you for being there for me when i was locked up. you were the only one who was there for me - and when i got out. it meant the world to me. God Bless Your Soul and May You Be Resting In Peace. You were the kindest soul on the planet, the funniest and the strongest - you could figure out anything and you knew your history much more so than i ever could. I remember always going to you and asking you to 'tell me what was going on in the world for the past several months' because as you know - I don't keep up with it. I send you my love, my dearest friend - there will never be another friendship like we shared. I'm staying strong and using all the knowlege and strength you passed on to me.
Forever, Hendrixson