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.
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.
posted by DEL HENDRIXSON | Sunday, July 03, 2005
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