BAJITOBLOG

BAJITO ONDA CLOTHING COMPANY

2006-12-31T22:08:00.000-08:00

Go to the above link and check out all the cool things you can buy there - it is unlike any estore anywhere - with every purchase of really cool stuff - you help us help someone else.

HAPPY NEW YEARS! MAY 2007 BE OUR BEST EVER!

2006-12-31T22:03:00.000-08:00

God Bless Each and Every One of You! Especially our soldiers in the trenches of progress in a world without peace and hope. May your lights continue to shine into the darkness of others!

Love,
Del

MARKA27 AND WERC

2006-12-30T20:22:00.000-08:00

This time of year is a great reunion of Bajito Onda Old Schoolers coming together with some stand up new partners in the lucha (struggle). I don't feel like i'm alone in the struggle any longer. Don't get me wrong I still feel like and I still am struggling. Guess you could call us as my boy Raskal who is stationed for life without parole put it.... We are tha 'Strugglas' as opposed to 'hustlas'. I was a trial consultant at Raskal's capital murder trial out in Amarillo, Texas back in something like 1999. I wrote a story called 'Children Lost to Violence' for Raskal and his Mother, a broken illiterate non English speaking woman who had been handed nothing but bad hands in this life. Raskal is a product of some of those hands. He calls me affectionately "His Chingona" aka "His Guardian Angel" because even though I was paid a lot of money to consult with his attorney Kent Birdsong I pulled him out of death row and Texecution to a life without parole sentence. I guess I am a Chingona because his case was a horrible one and not only did his mother lose him to prison but the girl who was murdered was also lost forever to her parents and family. It was a bloody mess of a murder that culminated with her body being put on railroad tracks outside of town and being run over and decapitated five minutes later by a train. I will never forget those forensic and coroner's pictures - NEVER. Therefore I will never stop working in prevention and education and if i lose them to prison I will send love behind the bars and let them know that I am the Chingona for all of them - because when I was behind bars - there was no one out here to shine the light of hope and therefore I left prison a broke and angry violent person. No more. Tonite we give Thanks to God for having rescued me from the path of recidivism and further destruction. For that I give thanks that Marka27 came back into my life even though he no longer graces the walls of Dallas with his art and tagging. Because i held the first ever graffitifest here in Dallas way back around 1998 or so I met Marka27 as he goes by and I met Soutchay aka Chosen One. Marka now is in Boston living after he received a scholarship and graduated from Boston Art College, then he went on to work in California and created some wild projects. Now he's back in Boston and back here in Dallas for the weekend. We met and he is going to produce some of the art for the Official Bajito Onda Clothing Company Line soon to launch as soon as I am pleased with the art to be submitted to Changes who now holds the license I signed with them.

Yesterday we were sitting around the office here and UPS brought in a huge box. I asked our driver Marcus who it was from. He said Godiva Choclates. I said, 'come on now Marcus' who really is it from? It was our other licensee Bioworld Merchandise Corporation who now holds the license for the headwear. So pretty soon BOCC is gonna be on the racks of all your favorite stores. So start saving up now to represent the first ever Spanish name clothing company in Americas.

Our business here for the past month has been really slow, but we are praying that sales of the clothing line and sales directly to stores around the country will help us fund more projects to help more people around the world.

We are now establishing ties with other African countries in order to spread Bajito Onda Africa Foundation around to children who have known nothing in their lives except beatings and begging for their very existance. There are hundreds of thousands of children in this condition and I pray soon we will bring Senegal Director Mao Ndiaye here to train so we can take equipment back there and open training centers for women and children.

Well take care and know you are loved. We appreciate you coming here and reading about our lives and our struggle.

Keep on with yours and know if you ever need a friend - we are here.

Happy New Year! 2007

Del

DECEMBER 27 - 1982 THE DAY I WENT TO PRISON

2006-12-26T22:46:00.000-08:00

I find it interesting that after not writing in this blog for a long time except of course for the journal i just wrote below this post. I did not realize it was this date. I somehow knew when i entered prison that one day (did not figure it would be this long however) that things would somehow be all right. I feel this is finally the year that things will be all right. i hate to say it but i do have to agree with the folks who know me, i feel that i deserve a break after all this time of dedicated determination. i may not be the brightest bulb on the shelf but determined i am. i do not believe that all persons who go to prison are bad. i wasn't a bad person, i was a depressed person who got a bit too loose with my self-discipline that my Army Colonel Father Logan Brooks Hendrixson had beaten into me. What was i thinking anyway? When he died i think, well i know... a huge part of me died with him. i cried for two solid years for my dad. nothing would ever bring him back and i knew how final death finally was.

i did not realize just how good i had it being free with my depression until i got arrested with my depression and added to the paranoia, the guilt, the disbelief that it could and most definitely would happen to me .... prison.

entering prison this day in 1982 was the absolute killer. imagine two days after Christmas. well... that's enough. it just brings back memories every year that will never go away. not for me nor for anyone who ever goes through it.

God Bless you and I pray this will be a good year for you - after all you deserve it too!

Del

ITS BEEN TOO LONG A TIME SINCE I HAVE WRITTEN IN HERE

2006-12-26T21:39:00.000-08:00

Its really too late and I'm too tired to write very much of what has been going on over this entire year but I will highlight just a few of the mighty miracles that can and do happen if you stay focused (is twenty years too long to stay focused?) I realize I haven't been all that faithful sometimes to Bajito Onda. Sometimes I actually used to think I could turn away and focus on something else - but I was wrong. It has cost me many worldly luxuries such as a place to call home (for the past two years its been motel was home) cheap only $80 a month actual cash and the rest paid in printing. Thank God for my printing talents and skills. Also thank God for teaching me to barter skill for everything. Well at least we are not any longer living in the old metal building warehouse where someone was getting killed out front every few days or so - not to mention the nite I woke to flames 30 feet in the air across the street at the neighbor business place. I saved the whole block because I was living inside there then by calling the fire department.

well anyway... So this year... Wow its been a wild and woolly ride I'll tell you.

Beth has been the only constant support I have had this entire years. Armando has done a great job keeping the work flowing in and out of here as we have just tried to keep the rent paid on our new and very fancy offices up and off of the deadly and wreckless streets of Dallas in Denial Big Time Texas. Oh there's no crime here - the police chief has a rather noble goal for crime in 2007. For murders to go down 10%. With the body count rising here they will be using bulldozers to clear them pretty soon if we don't get some real help here or bullet proof vests one.

But as long as opulence and vulgar wealth rule our world here the bodies just go unnoticed unless that is - they begin piling up in the rich sides of town. Oh well, i'm not a magician so i can only do what i do and love those who are still amongst us while we got them here.

I want to say that a once very violent Aryan Circle gang member who was practically raised in prison since he was 13 has now been out about a year and a half and he's still out here - hasn't assaulted anyone lately and i think there is hope he can finally make it. he came by here and we covered up some of his swastika tattoos with crosses and he is almost acceptable to look at. Jason Sandoval. I'm proud of him and he knows i love him - no matter what.

Last year the Dallas Observer finally Observed what i was doing over here on the south side of Dallas and Rick Kennedy wrote a very good article about me. Coulda been a whole lot worse - if you know how they can blast people. I made it out pretty clean and the article actually helped my struggle a lot. Now a whole more people know who Bajito Onda and street soldier Del Hendrixson is. Since i refuse to lay down to society they better get used to looking at me and all the hundreds of thousands we now have in Bajito Onda.... around half a million strong and growing each day.

Brown and Proud records - look them up on myspace.com or go to our main site and hit the link to their page - its a little wild and i've been catching some flack about some of their records and videos.. what people gotta understand is that while i don't condone other people's actions, i will allow them to represent Bajito Onda in their world so that no matter where we are we are there for those souls lost in the madness of the violence of the world today. and i can't think of a better or safer place to be than on a webpage reaching out to all the homies in gangs, on drugs, or involved in whatever they are into nowadays. What i'm most impressed about BNP is they are producing a music video about Bajito Onda starring (not me certainly) but Mr. Pato (as in quack quack) he is cool, sounds great, dreamy looking and got none o that attitude about him. of course he's served his time in TDCJ as well so he's out here makin it in the music scene and for that i support him and BNP. Our common friend Breed as in Half-Breed introduced us and also the other boy Chucky as in Cheese - who is firing up Bajito Onda Community Car club which will be organized very quick.

SCARFACE CLOTHING COMPANY OUTTA NY has officially licensed BAJITO ONDA CLOTHING COMPANY ( www.shop.bajitoondaclothingcompany.com ) as the first ever SPANISH NAMED clothing company in the USA. My long time boy MARKA27 who used to graff on the walls of east dallas - got a scholarship to Boston Art College then graduated and headed for work in Los Angeles is working on the designs with his partner Werc of LA. Also got Chuco working on some designs and Soutchay. All have been down with BO for many years. However if you know somebody who is super bad with urban art have them hit me up at del@bajitoonda.org right away. I want to see all i can see in art for the line. Thanks to Russell Holt of the World Trade Center Dallas for discovering us one day when I walked into his showroom to ask if maybe he might want to just sell some of our shirts for us - he did us a whole lot better - he put us right in touch with Changes of NY who produces Mickey Mouse, Popeye, and all the Universal Studio shirts like Batman, Spiderman, Barney, Bart, Godfather, Superman, etc) from there it has been a very quick rise to the top - the only thing holding me back is now i want us to come up with art just for the launch of the clothing line - at all the world trade centers - miami, new york, dallas, los angeles and chicago. Seems the whole merchandise industry has been going crazy looking for a Spanish Named clothing line to sell to the raza in tha ranflas...

BIOWORLD has also signed us up to produce our lines of headwear, belts, bags, buckles, etc. all for worldwide mass market distribution. they are the ones who produce and distribute worldwide all the gear for Orange County Choppers, Miami Ink, hart & hunnington, and on and on ...corona, misfits, coke, etc. etc. so that's great news for us - just gotta get the art fitting up on each silouette of the hats. we want to launch beanies, velvet fedora, fidel castro, and baseball flatbill. thanks to bioworld and jennifer, kevin, raj, eric and dave.

In August 2006 I was invited to speak to a conference in Monterrey Mexico. it was called Encuentro Mundial Joven - World youth encounter. Wow was that a production and a half. I found out later they spent $1,500,000 - a million and a half dollars for a three day international conference. We had dinner every nite with the governor of Nuevo Leon, Gov. Natividad Paras. I told him that i can meet with him easier and more frequently than with the mayor (her goddess) of Dallas .. Laura what's her name. i've never been able to meet with her - even when i'm standing in front of her at a photo op. no access here in dallas - what a shame. the conference in Mexico was very productive and once more i met with persons from 32 different nations who all expressed great interest in Bajito Onda Educational Programs. Carlos Castresana of Spain with the United Nations office of Crime an drug prevention was on a panel with me along with my appointed director of Bajito ONda Mexico and Latina Americas, Antonio Melin were very supportive of Bajito Ondas pioneering work in the field of gang prevention and intervention.

While in Mexico i Met movie producer Adolfo Franco of Kenio Films based in Monterrey Mexico and Hollywood Cali. After sharing some conversation I was asked if i would like to sign the rights to my life story. Hmmmm, i thought about it for half a second and said sure, why not? I signed the movie deal in September and they should begin putting it together after the first of 2007. They are somehow related to Lionsgate, Mel Gibson / Apocolypto etc. Seems Hollywood is doing a lot in Mexico now and with most of my life revolving around some sort of latin something or other somehow it seems appropriate. I have to say Orale! Vamos hacerlo!

Well anyway... that is about it for now...

i'm even tireder now - and oh i completely forgot about Bajito Onda Africa - as strange as this may seem I have appointed a new Director For our Africa Educational Centers Programmes - and I am currently working with an office of Congress to bring him here to the world headquarters (yes that's what we call it now) for trainings so we can then go back to Africa and open high tech computer graphics production traiNING CENTERS IN SENEGAL / DAKAR to begin with. His name is MAO NDIAYE and for the past year and a half he has been travelling around the Continent under my direction so we could study the atrocities of African Children, in Liberia it was the child soldiers, in the Gambia it is the abused girls, and in Sierra Leonne it is the orphans of war, and in Senegal it is the beggar children like Mao used to be when he was a young boy. ... read the African Blog and you will read all about his wonderful findings and work. I pray he is here with us in the next couple months before february.

God Bless, and if i forgot it - i'll just have to come back later and write some more. I am also planning to begin writing books.... what should i call them? where should i begin?

Good Nite,

Hugs of Hope,

Del

LIVING FOR THE SAKE OF OTHERS...

2006-01-22T17:34:00.000-08:00

Many things have transpired since I last wrote. I am going to write a book this year - i feel i have to. I have aquired so much knowledge and interesting material i feel i must share it with others.

Blessings have finally landed at our doorstep and actually come inside. We now have a real board of directors - not a bored of directors - as i have seen for so many years in so many other organizations. People who say they will do everything and they do nothing. i will not support that type of behavior when our work and our movement is affecting so many lives. we cannot lose even one of them from being lazy or uncompassionate. we must care and we must do something.
I recently was awarded in September 'The Ambassador for Peace Award' - it is a very prestigious honor and it has brought me into a circle of caring loving friends that i never dreamed existed. Now that i know they live and breath and are kind and loving and they truly 'Live for the sake of others' they are helping Bajito Onda even more - and BO is helping them. Mark Hernandez, Esther Vasquez, John Halsey, Lola Somemoto and Pastor Shin I want to say thank you - They have a monthly breakfast and yesterday a woman from the UN came and presented her work with the movement that Rev. Sun Myung Moon founded many years ago. I was like so many others - I judged Rev. Moon for being a kook or a weird guy with weird beliefs. I can say that no more. The lives he has affected in this world must number into the millions. And those lives were touched and saved by unconditional love of a father on behalf of God the father. He was simply doing what he was called to do as a soldier of peace and of God. I too am often considered to be slightly 'off center' in my radical work of taking the word of peace into the worlds of violence and for giving hopeless peoples hope in a darkened maddening world. I am more comfortable now in that world since i have found the light and the light has warmed my center of love and wisdom. i am greatful to God and others who have come into my once horrible and lonely existance and touched and even accepted me and loved me when my own family have turned their backs on me - they live right here in Dallas yet I am no where in their hearts. Sadly - for them and equally for me. However i must do as God leads me and continue touching other hearts that will not be sour or angry as my family is - but who will in turn continue touching others. The Dallas Observer did a great story on me and Bajito Onda as a movement. We were all surprised we were not slammed. For the past i have lived - it was a miracle to be unscathed in their pages. We have received a donation in December and others are now looking to us for funding our wonderful programs. We have received the badly needed huge digital printer plotter cutter and it is also helping us to maintain our balance of existance. We have a clean bed to sleep on (3) now at the Quality Inn and there are no snakes or rats falling from the ceiling as there were in the old warehouse. Our new facility is beautiful and spacious and it even has windows!!!! how wonderful - light and clean after all those years in that warehouse. God has and is blessing us. I went into the Roach Unit Prison at christmas time and shared love and fellowship with our faithful men up there as well as with Chaplain Nino. What a great guy! Well that is all for now - just wanted to make a few notes for you. Give me a call if you read this - or please post your valuable comments. if it moves you to send a donation please do so. The more we receive the more we can do with it. Del Hendrixson Bajito Onda POB 270246 Dallas, TX 75227 USA - 214-275-6632

MARASALVATRUCHA - MARA SALVATRUCHA - MS 13 - EL SALVADORAN GANGS

2005-09-22T18:42:00.000-07:00

MARA SALVATRUCHA - MS 13 - SALVADORAN GANGS

WITH ALL THE PRESS ABOUT THEM - I JUST WANT TO GET THEIR REAL STORY TO THE MEDIA -

WHY SHOULD WE CALL THEM TERRORISTS IF THEY COME FROM A COUNTRY RAVAGED BY A WAR THAT THE US STARTED IN THEIR COUNTRY - AND AFTER THEY SURVIVE THE ATROCITIES THERE BE PERSECUTED BY THE US WHEN THEY COME HERE TO BEGIN THEIR LIFE IN SO CALLED FREEDOM AND HAVE THEIR CHILDREN BECOME INVOLVED WITH THE GANG VIOLENCE IN LA - LEARN FROM THE GANGS IN LA HOW TO BE PROFICIENT GANG MEMBERS AND THEN OUT OF DEFENSE FOR THEIR COUNTRY FORM A GANG AGAINST THE LA GANGS - THE MARA (MEANING GANG) SALVA (FOR SALVADOR) AND TRUCHA (WATCH OUT - TAKE COVER) - THEY KNOW THEY ARE THE MOST VIOLENT GUERRILA WARRIORS OF ALL SPANISH SPEAKING NATIONS. THEY HAD TO BE TO SURVIVE! WHY DO THEY THEN ASSASINATE THEIR VICTIMS WITH MACHETES? AND LEAVE THEIR HEADS ON PARK BENCHES? WELL FOR THEM ITS NORMAL - THEY USE MACHETES TO CLEAR THE DENSE JUNGLES IN EL SALVADOR - SO WHY WOULDN'T THEY USE THEM HERE TO KILL PEOPLE? NOT EVERYONE CAN AFFORD ASSAULT RIFLES LIKE THE THUGS IN AMERICA CAN. BUT YOU HAVE TO ADMIT THE MACHETE MADNESS HAS REALLY PUT A FOCUS ON THE GANG PROBLEM AND THE DESPERATE AND DEADLY NEED TO HAVE POLICE FORCES GET OFF THEIR PEDASTELS AND GET OUT IN THEIR COMMUNITIES AND DO SOMETHING THEY'VE NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT - COMMUNITY NETWORKING - LIASIONS - HELPING - AND PROTECTING AND SERVING WHAT THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING ANYWAY!

IF I WANT PROTECTION HERE IN DALLAS - I CALL THE GANGS TO HELP ME - NOT THE COPS - BECAUSE THE GANG UNIT HERE WON'T EVEN RETURN MY CALLS - AND NPR RECENTLY HERE TO DO A STORY ON ME AND BAJITO ONDA - SAID THEY TOLD THEM THEY ARE OFF ON THE WEEKEND - WELL I FEEL SAFER IN DALLAS KNOWING THERE IS NOBODY OF A MEASELY TEN MEMBER GANG UNIT ON DUTY TO PROTECT AND SERVE THE CITIZENS HERE - NO WONDER OUR CITY HALL IS GETTING RAIDED BY THE FBI - AND OUR CITY COUNCILI MEMBERS ARE DOING THE I NEED TO LOOK INNOCENT SHUFFLE - TILL FOUND GUILTY -

I'M SICK AND TIRED OF DALLAS IN DENIAL OF HELPING US STAY ALIVE.

IN THE FIGHT TO SAVE LIVES THE OLD FASHIONED WAY - ONE AT A TIME!

DEL HENDRIXSON
214-821-GANG

COMPLICATED TECHNIQUES OF WORKING WITH PRISONERS

2005-09-08T03:39:00.000-07:00

a note about last nite. i was very pleased although you may not have picked up on my 'style of working with those guys' - but it did work perfectly - very very hard fast beginning results. i'm very pleased that my 'techniques are perfecting themselves'.

the reason i wanted to 'continue my session' i started with them was to see if i could multitask with all of them - and bring them through a partial beginning 'cleansing stage'. i was amazed at how easily they took the bait and began to open up. all of them did great. if you notice i skipped around with all kinds of questions to all of them not dwelling on anything - just looking for 'mind clues' as to how i can grab onto a 'thread of commonality' - once i grab a thread i begin to 'unravel it - and getting them to talk more and more' - once they begin to talk as did robert next to you -

we got into an area he would not talk about - at least in front of others - that is a button with him - it means i need to dig into it in private with him - it is a pain button - what shifts his life back into darkness. like a button on an elevator down to the basement.

he doesn't want to go there - but i can take him there - and then that is what i call

going into their soul and looking around where their damage and pain is - and what was the key to their demise - and how to turn that key around to unlock their freedom.

he has made some inner soul discoveries himself - his lung - the ambulance - not wanting to die claustrophobically in prison - just being outside the gates is not in prison - custody is not in prison.

white boy michael was a beginning stages of robert just give him a few more years. he had the potential to ruin his life in prison.

i see inside them through their eyes - they were talking to me - the first guy who left - he was really talking to me but had to go. horrible abuse and pain in his life - drugs, you name it - most of them had killed someone - hurt many people - wrecked many lives.

but it is not a casual thing to dig that deep into them this fast - it may take weeks or months to get into their deepest core - but to soften them up was the first step.

if they walk through my doors now - once will be another step for them - emotionaly and mentally -

now they are all doubting it was really true that someone had come into their world with them and 'connected with them' - as i did.

another 'OBSERVATION' if you will was another form of technique i performed was the instant introduction of 'foreign matter' (eva) into our beginning meeting - i purposely make the setting unlike prison or structure so their defenses are temporarily down. their balance and order is knocked off center - they were not being controlled or in control - so their 'doors were cracked open' to getting to know them.

but to have you - a reporter come in and sit in on a beginning session was really a feat - i have to think about this stuff all nite to evaluate it to analyze it to carry it further.

no as i told you - i am not about programs - i'm about rescuing lost and violent persons from themselves, prison and from society and cleansing them and sending them out to live normal healthy productive happy lives with love and hope in their hearts instead of anger and violence. the reason i know - i used to be one of them.

bajito onda is a portal into their / my past world. it allows 'foreigners' to their world to enter in a non threatening, non judgemental, non confrontational manner and sort of reach out our hand and say - welcome to the other side of your life you never realized existed until now. and not to abandon or abuse them afterwards. to actually have them trust and be trusted.

although last nite was very typical of my 'style' rambling, talking, probing, retreating, finding humor, giving hope, feeding them good food - i'm sure they wondered if i was going to pray with them - not yet - still need to keep them off center - it is the beginning of a path of transitional journey for them as well as me beside me.

if you notice the hispanic guy roland - put the shirt on when he got out of the car. he immediatly associated with it - when they put that shirt on - it is as if someone 'has their back' and it comforts them.

i bet they all are wearing them today. it is like a 'rag of love' woven with the past and the future with a message from and next to their hearts from my heart. designed with love from prisoners made with love from bajito onda (all types of past lives) and given in friendship.

gotta go.

one of my guys (ramon salcido) said i write like a journalist -

actually i am a life writer from within the world in which we live and exist.

del

MS13 - WHY DOES THE USA BLAME THEM FOR SOMETHING WE DID?

2005-08-14T22:07:00.000-07:00

THIS WEEKEND I MADE A UNION WITH THE CONSUL GENERAL OF EL SALVADOR'S OFFICE. HOPEFULLY WE FORMALIZE IT SO THAT SOMEONE 'ME' WHO IS WHITE 'ME' CAN SPEAK UP AND OUT FOR THE PEOPLE OF EL SALVADOR. IT IS AS IF THEY ARE ALL BEING JUDGED FOR A HORRIFIC PROBLEM THAT BEGAN IN THE U.S. IT IS AS IF ALL AMERICANS ARE JUDGE BY THE BEHAVIOR OF HOWARD STERN.

I WANT TO THANK THE YOUNG BROTHER MS13 WHO WROTE TO ME AND TOLD ME THANK YOU FOR WRITING ABOUT E.S. IN A POSITIVE MANNER. IT IS MY PLEASURE TO STAND UP FOR YOU MIJO....BAJITO ONDA WILL NEVER JUDGE YOU OR ANYONE BECAUSE I HAVE BEEN JUDGED ENDLESSLY BY AN UNCARING SOCIETY WITH A BLANKET OVER THEIR HEADS AND THEIR UNDERWEAR AROUND THEIR ANKLES.

NO BLANKET HERE AND MY UNDERWEAR ARE STILL IN TACT AND STILL WHERE THEY BELONG.

PEACE TO THE KIDS, THE GANGS, AND THE PRISONERS - HOPE AND LOVE TO ALL OF YOU FROM THE MERA MERA DE BAJITO ONDA. WE ALL IN IT TAGETHA HOMIES! :0

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

2005-07-04T22:44:00.000-07:00

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 -

2005-07-03T23:42:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-03T22:38:00.000-07:00

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

NPR - PRIME TIME LIVE - CNN - LA TIMES

2005-06-26T18:41:00.000-07:00

NOW WE ARE WORKING WITH ALL OF THE ABOVE - HOPEFULLY WITH SOME BIG AND GOOD PRESS WE WILL BE HEARD OF ENOUGH TO GET FINANCIAL SUPPORT FOR OUR WONDERFUL PROGRAMS.

IF YOU KNOW OF ANYONE WHO WANTS A STORY TELL THEM TO CALL 214-821-GANG

DEL

BAJITO ONDA RECORDING STUDIO

2005-06-26T18:38:00.000-07:00

YES ITS TRUE! WE ARE ABOUT TO BUST OUT WITH OUR RECORDING STUDIO - HELPING KIDS GET A START IN MUSIC - HELPING EXCONVICTS GIVE US THEIR TESTIMONIES SO THAT WE CAN PLAY THEM TO KIDS IN GANGS, ON DRUGS AND IN OTHER PROBLEMS.

OFFICER WAFEEQ SABIR FROM THE FW GANG UNIT - SINCE DALLAS DOESN'T EVEN HAVE ONE ANYMORE - IS GOING TO RECORD HIS TESTIMONY OF A GANG COP WHO CARES.

SO WATCH FOR GREAT MUSIC AND TV SPECIALS TO COME FROM BAJITO ONDA PRODUCTIONS.

BAJITO ONDA AFRICA FOUNDATION

2005-06-26T18:28:00.000-07:00

My sons Mao and Amidu as well Alex and Maz of Rwanda - Gathech in Kenya and Kanelli in Tanzania are all doing great jobs in establishing and running BO in African countries. We are now working and closing our network tighter with the United Nations which is really doing a great job around the world.

Mao, my dear son in Senegal writes to me in English - but yesterday he called me and his spoken english kept us from totally understanding each other - since i do not speak French. however we are managing to continue to grow the foundation no matter what obstacles we are encountering.

Amidu i hear is this week in France meeting with the UN - while son Antonio Melin in Mexico is meeting with UN officials from NY in assisting us with funding in the future via the UN Youth Caucus and other assists from UNICEF - UNESCO and other UN branches.

We are the voices of the oppressed - but we are not ignorant so therefore we have sought out each other - and banded together to change the world one country at a time - with my own being the hardest to even gain support from - the USA -

i was so surprised to hear members of the UN when i met with them in Mexico 2004 that they felt the USA had no social problems - at least they had not heard of them - because we have so much money - they thought money had fixed all our problems. HA!

Now they know the truth of America and how horrible our inner city crime is - how horrible our prisons are - and how dangerous it is to even try to live here.

I am ashamed when africans come here and i have to tell them that they cannot smile at strangers or they may become victimized. they are horrified.

They do not know what racisim is and my dear son Amidu when he was here - had never heard of Elvis. Well i didn't even go into who Elvis was. it was mute point.

I just wanted to say hi and sorry for my long absence - i will try to do better.

but with our org growing so much so fast - it is hard on me to keep everyone posted all the time.

God Bless Us all and please help us where and when and how you can.

Del

BAJITOBLOG: THIS 11 YEAR OLD LITTLE BOY IS HURTING - HELP ME SAVE JOSE

2005-06-26T18:27:00.000-07:00

BAJITOBLOG: THIS 11 YEAR OLD LITTLE BOY IS HURTING - HELP ME SAVE JOSE

PROGRESS AT LAST!

2005-06-07T18:03:00.000-07:00

I as usual have not time to write but i sure want to let the readers know what is going on at BO GLOBAL HEADQUARTERS as it seems we are becoming after many forgotten years in the trenches - well not forgotten but ignored. so stay tuned because this week we are coming out in WORLD MAGAZINE and next week NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO will be here at Bajito Onda - then I will be a featured panelist at the International Hispanic Journalists Conference in Ft. Worth. What an honor after all these years of struggle. Mandalit del Barco of Los Angeles from NPR invited me to be a panelist. That is going to be so great. Last year was the U.N. and this year we have already been featured in NEWSWEEK. last year was NY TIMES MAGAZINE. so we are climbing folks. heading for that goal post in the sky! Keep us always in your prayers!
Del

THE STORY OF TWIN BROTHERS IN PRISON - ONE SAVED

2005-04-14T07:31:00.000-07:00

It is so easy to get into the habit of helping others - who don't expect it mind you - so what i tell them is 'i will invest in you - if only YOU WILL INVEST IN YOU!' it has worked. my methodology of getting persons involved in their own lives. one young man, Rene (I remember his face and i remember his life quite well - 'Rene told me long after he was in my program' for drive by shootings - he said. All the time i thought i was worthless, 'that's what my family always told me' - but when you said 'you believed in me... you made me feel like perhaps the others were wrong and maybe i was worth something after all. he said 'you made me want to invest in myself' and therefore today - i am drug and gang free - violence free - off probation and back in control of my life. no longer were gangs and drugs running his life. i remember one time KICK-FM Tejano Radio wanted to USE US for A SENSATIONAL TALK SHOW - they use us instead of giving us a voice - the sad part of radio and TV. rene and angie (that girl was a mess and i'm afraid she's still a mess - Angie is another story) well rene had been in prison.... alongside his twin brother. violence ran in their family. well sometimes these people's stories, just sort of run out of their mouths like spaghetti or chinese noodles running onto the floor in a gooey messy pile that needs to be swept up and destroyed. its like sometimes because i'm there and i care, their lives just well up inside them and they 'vomit the poison out of them in an effort to begin the cleansing of their souls and their lives' - sometimes their lives scare me, sometimes they horrify me at what they have endured at such young ages - and sometimes i just break down inside giving God thanks for saving me, such the sinner that i used to be, (not perfect but at least i'm tryin'). well rene began to tell me of how he went to prison for shootings, he was a gang banger druggie drug dealer in the very hood we are in .. Pleasant Grove, SE Dallas, etc. He was rockin along doing his time in prison - I'm talking PRISON HERE - out in the fields picking cotton in 105 degree sweltering heat, other prisoners passing out from the heat right and left - guards on horseback threatening to shoot them if they don't get their butts back up and keep picking cotton. Water breaks? what in the hell are water breaks? Texas Dept of Corrections (TDC) never heard of compassion, HA! - Snakes running in and out of prisoners legs, and they are not allowed to move, jump, scream or kill them... THEY BETTER NOT HURT A SNAKE! THAT SNAKE IS ALSO CONSIDERED A PRISON GUARD BELIEVE IT OR NOT. If a prisoner hurts a snake he can be destroyed - not the snake. Prisoners are not allowed to approach a guard on horseback with their beloved 'AGGIE / A 35 POUND PIPE HANDLED HOE'. so all this learned in prison, rene looks down at the prisoner beside him and its his twin brother, David. He knew his influence was strong but it was supposed to be in the streets, he never wanted his twin to follow his footsteps. David was too weak for prison, Rene knew HE could do the time for his crimes, but not his brother who he cherished. He looked down at David's hands trying to pick cotton in that heat, his hands were not leather weathered like his were and they were bleeding - there was more blood on the cotton than white balls. the stalks were like razors and of course in prison there are no such things as gloves or protections. Rene told me how his heart broke that day seeing his brother suffer the same future as he had laid out for him. One day when i was in the warehouse, it had come a freezing snow storm - a rarity in Dallas i know.. but nonetheless we were holed up, shivering and trying to wait out the snow and ice outside. a knock hammered on the door and i thought i was hearing things because outside (i was watching on the camera monitor outside since i cannot 'see through a steel door) but i saw no one, no car, nothing. I went around to the door and there was standing Rene. He had taken a bus all the way from Irving (30 miles) to tell me his story of him and David. David was back in prison and he was free. He said that Bajito Onda and My love for him had woken him up and made him see that he was worth something now even to himself. He and I prayed as we cried for his brother to wake up before we lose him again and again to the pits of hell in prison or even worse. For me I am not interested in anything except saving people from prison, young and old. well prison, wheelchairs, addictions and death to name a few. i do not care if they are in Dallas or Houston, I just want to save lives. I'm curious to see what happens next. Del

COFFIELD PRISON ART PIDDLERS SHOPS

2005-04-09T19:09:00.000-07:00

You are probably wondering what is a piddler? well its a person in prison who has time on his hands (usually life or a long long sentence) and he is allowed to pay $150 to get his startup tools and supplies in order to make art or crafts or other items that someone would pay for as a way to make money and spend their time doing productive creative things. Well since I have found the way to make a prison art gallery at Bajito Onda where prisoners can send us things and we sell them for them as well as we get the public involved I received a phone call a few weeks ago inviting me down to Coffield to go into the shops and meet some of the men who have been sending a lot of leather and wood and art and other crafts to us to sell. It was very very cool as well as a true blessing to meet those men. It was like putting a face to a number i guess - and meeting the men behind the beautiful items they create so painstakingly. I invite you to call me and come by so you too can experience their work and buy some of it at very cheap prices like $20 for a beautiful hand tooled wallet.

Take care i'm very tired tonite!
Hugs, Del

ACTIONS CAUSE REACTIONS - NOT ALWAYS WHAT WE ARE READY FOR

2005-03-19T13:58:00.000-08:00

This week was a very tragic one. Without going into so much detail, I only have to say that I have frequented a restaraunt called Gordo's Pizza for many years. This week I was not shocked but saddened that yet another murderous rampage was the only one to hit the front page with victims friends crying for their loved ones. it was another EVERYONE LOST on this one. A club here in Dallas holds Monday nites for the workers who work in restaurants to party there - it is a small pub and after they close often fights break out - i think it is sort of a ritual in fact. People work all week in hot kitchens, they gather together, they drink like there's no tomorrow and in fact there may not be a tommorow for them any more. Well this Monday nite, they partied and one thing led to another - someone bumped into someone - on purpose or accidentally. A beer bottle was thrown hitting one of the someones in the face and causing a bad injury to his face. His friends rushed him to the Hospital and left him there while they took off to 'settle the debt for him'. He had no idea they were off to do that. They took his car, since he was in the hospital and it was a late model white Jaguar with a sunroof. They cruised back to the club and waited for the bottle thrower to leave with his friends. Two guys worked at Gordo's. one was the chef - the other was his helper. In fact they were cousins. They gave a ride to two more guys who were also in their car. As they pulled out of the car the jaguar followed and the shooter raised up out of the sunroof with an SKS ASSAULT RIFLE and pumped fifty or so rounds into the car the bottle throwers were riding in instantly killing the driver, his cousin and one of the two in the back seat and critically injuring the other.

Their car then careened into the bridge crossing a major freeway in downtown dallas Interstate 75 / Central Expressway and crashed with the dead and injured in it. The Jaguar sped away and was found the next morning two blocks from where I live. Our zip code where our old place is is the most dangerous zip code in all of Dallas - 75217. It seems like a sleepy neighborhood but when the sun goes down the arms come out and the wars begin. The car was found there - the search was on for the shooter and driver.

Not surprisingly enough they found the young boy, Mexican, at home watching TV in his mother's house. she was getting grocieries out of the car when the police pulled up and asked her if he was inside. they told her he was a suspect in a murder of three or four people. She said - 'oh no, that couldn't be my son, he's a quiet shy good kid' - well she was right on all of those things but as they entered the house armed to the hilt - he tried to run up and into the attic. They easily caught him and it was over. Now he is in jail with over a $1,000,000 bond and most certainly his future is now looking like the Texas Death Penalty will inject him and kill him for what he has done. And the most ironic thing is that the young man who was the victim of the bottle injury is the one who told the police who was the one who did the murders. They called him at the hospital on his cell phone after the murders and told him 'we took care of those guys who hurt you'. Now one of them is in custody and the other one is on the run. Now the one who told the police on them is now in hiding from his own cousin, afraid now he will kill him.

Where does this senseless tragedy ever end?

Saddened once more, in Dallas

NEWSWEEK

2005-03-19T09:58:00.001-08:00

This week i was contacted by Newsweek for an article they are doing about the Marasalvatrucha or MS13 Salvadoran Gangs. I would never disrespect the gangs because all gangs are made up of human beings. I am more of a modern day anthropological socio behavioral scientist and researcher working in the field of prevention and intervention as well as rehabilitataion than I am a judge of anyone. However I am looking forward to any mention Newsweek will give Bajito Onda and my work. I think the article comes out this week. They had seen the article that came out in the NY TIMES MAGAZINE back in August so that is why i was contacted. Thanks Newsweek reporter Jennifer Ordonez of Los Angeles.

A PROGRESS REPORT

2005-03-19T09:58:00.000-08:00

Hello to all who are reading this weblog. Please feel free to leave comments wherever and whenever you want. Your feelings are important to us in this work.

It is great that we are finally feeling able to grow into our new place and new space here at our new office and production as well as Global Empowerment Center for the training of social trainers worldwide so that we may take our fine programs out into the world wherever they are needed to uplift the lives of young people of all ethnicities and cultures as well as languages and give them an opportunity to one day have their own businesses in their own community and to become leaders of their peers who are searching for a better life, a peaceful and productive life as successful human beings and respected for their good work and good lives not as mere survivors in the jungles of madness around the world that us as adults have caused such grief and loss to exist in their young and upcoming lives.

I must commend the great work of my two dear sons in the struggle - both are true soldiers who are 'against all odds' proving that we can truly play by society's rules and beat them at their own game in the name of youth, women and prisoners around the world in order to give all oppressed peoples a face, a voice and to welcome them into loving arms with encouragement for them to leave their problems and pain behind and come into a Good and Loving Family of Bajito Onda Self Sufficient Social Programmes.

I just realized i run my sentences into long ones becoming paragraphs but it is my writing style so please forgive me. Afterall, I am 'one of my people' whose life has been changed by this wonderful peace ministry and educational outreach. I am not perfect although I am in the difficult position now of Global Founder and Leader. My dearest goal is to become humble as the earth itself so that in being on the level of the earth that others walk on I am able to lift up all those lives who have come into our path. In lifting them up, some of them will join us in this movement to lift up others who have fallen, and together we will form a 'red' in spanish / web or network in English and we will soon perfect our methodologies and processes so that saving lives and futures is as effortless as having them wrecked senselessly.

The nonstop hours spent in true dedication to this movement by my African son, Amidu Mansaray, Global Outreach Director and himself the humble Chapter President of Bajito Onda Africa Foundation, a member in excellent standing of the African Commission of Human and Peoples Rights. Amidu came to the USA two years ago when my struggle was at its hardest. He slept on the floor of our old warehouse space, it was freezing cold and he was freezing. There was no place for him to put his clothes he brought and we had very little to offer him even in the way of food. He was shocked that here in America our foundation had no support or even volunteers. He hugged me and told me he was here to learn and serve so that he could return to Africa and implement my work there. He was able to see the miracles that could be performed by his joining me in the struggle. He went back to Africa and immediately began recruiting social soldiers to help us form a great movement in Africa. Amidu's great love for children and the oppressed drives him to continue establishing ways to reach the children of the war torn regions of the Continent. Amidu was born into the war torn area Sierra Leonne and due to that war moved to The Gambia where Bajito Onda now has the Official Observer Status, a very high working status. As a young man he was also a victim of the wars and destruction left behind. At only 27 years old he now has three college degrees and his heart is to go back and save the children of the world through our educational outreaches. amidu.mansaray@bajitoonda.org We from here in the US were able to get some people to help us send Amidu a laptop, digital camera, scanner and other supplies so that we can communicate our work better. Antonio Melin, my Mexican Son and President of Bajito Onda of the Latin Americas has been working tirelessly to develop global relations as well as to continue to empower the children of Mexico, who because they have joined gangs, or children who ever so sadly have become the street vendors selling everything they can from stolen merchandise, to washing the busy traffic windshields when cars stop for a red light to even prostitution at such young ages as seven years old. When I went to mexico on all my trips i have been taken to all the districts where they children are reported to be so violent and out of control. At some times I was afraid to go into the groups of up to 200 kids all with puzzled angry faces, often quick to make gang signs or act sneaky around me - but after talking to them like they are human beings and that i am not there to judge them or harm them, they quickly become a multitude of little persons deserving of so much love and compassion. Antonio and I cannot understand why they are so mistreated except for the pure economic fact of a population that is becoming younger and younger and having less and less parental or community guidance. It is a division that is becoming greater and greater today. Bajito Onda is not afraid to bridge that division and bring those children back into a loving and empowering mainstream society. please feel free to let Antonio hear from you as well at antonio.melin@bajitoonda.org .

I must leave you now to leave one more important post - Blessings to all of you. Please pray for our continued growth and strength in this movement so that we may reach thousands upon thousands of innocent lives and empower them for their future. THEY ARE OUR FUTURE!

IT HAS BEEN A HARD MOVE BUT WELL WORTH THE WAIT!

2005-03-06T08:26:00.000-08:00

Well we are finally into our incredible new huge space! We call it the PRINT HOUSE / PENT HOUSE. Well deserving of so much work for so long of a time. And we are getting it done by our hard work and strong efforts not by begging for donations. Yesterday we moved our darkroom! we had to enlist the help of 11 mexican strongmen to help us. whew! moving a 47" steel table into a doorway only 28" took some meskin engineering and then some! it about killed us to do it. no hands were crushed - no egos bruised when they it just would not budge or be lifted. finally we conquered it! check out some pics on the site for more of a view. hugs, del and crew

GETTING IT TOGETHER AT LONG LAST! WE ARE MOVING!

2005-02-18T04:42:00.000-08:00

Before i finish... i must add that yesterday was so momentus. We signed the new lease for our new 4,500 square foot office and production creative space. We will actually be paying less money for more space that is so professional and cool i cannot believe it. it all has just happened in God's Greatest Grace! I felt that if i could just survive - God would reward us. It is all happening in one week. Debi in Houston, Betty Helton, and Our new space!

JOINING FORCES....CASA DEL HISPANO

2005-02-18T04:36:00.000-08:00

I am too tired to do this justice, however i will report that I have met another Angel of Angels that God has placed in my path - to light my way as well as her's. Her name is Betty Helton and she is also a Gringa Activista Mexicana (Latina/Hispana, etc). She is a 'corporate dropout' who is now changing the world in the lives around her. We met last week or maybe it was this week. I can't remember - all i know is she is wonderful and has the heart of a mother i wish i had had growing up. those of you who know me - know i am towering - amazonish powerful in appearance and often that is what i look like on the outside when on the inside i am actually a scared afraid (same thing but doubly insecure) child needing the love and compassion of a mother figure - and well i never get that secure feeling that my brain and my heart has found a kinship. all in our lives have meaning in the way we tie ourselves together in knots of strength, but when i met Betty - i was so curious to see if she would be like the thousands before her - distrusting of me and Bajito Onda's intentions to collaborate instead of devour others efforts. it seems when i have met more insecure warriors than betty they immediately ran backwards thinking my strength would surely eat them alive... instead of thinking as she did... what a great team we can make together! I am always looking for strong souls who are as equally bright and innovative who can compliment my efforts and bring strength to my weaknesses.. such as our new Angel in Houston, Debi Schneider. Well when Betty sat there in front of me - i was thinking .... she looks wonderful, sounds wonderful but when is the communication going to break down? that is the norm in my life. most people think i am a millionaire (very not true) who can continue doing this with no help forever. also not true. Well Betty and i had a wonderful visit that only got more wonderful the longer we were together. I swear i could not let her go. i wanted more of her calming motherly energy that put me at ease and made me realize how lucky those lives around her were to have her on a daily basis in their lives. i also could feel her own frustration with her struggle to help Mexicans or other Hispanics and today i heard the reason she does it. well today i packed up Armando, Daniel, Rob, Beth and myself and we just closed up our operation and went to visit Betty and www.casadelhispano.org - we had an invite from Betty so we could see how we could get married and help more people and reinforce each others works and agencies. i totally forgot about all the usual things i would have been doing at BO because it seemed petty in comparison to the relationship we were building today. she invited many people to come to the meeting of the minds... there was a psychologist from Mexico - a pastor from the Baptist church in some town around her place - she is located in Lewisville, Tx north of Dallas. well there were a lot of folks coming in and out - and after about five hours me, Betty and Beth sat down and began to talk about the seriousness of our bonding. I need some help from the top management angle - she needs help from the support angle - which i can easily supply. i need clients for the printing and she is tied into several hundred trucking companies for over 25 years when she was in that industry. instant what i need. i am so tired of having to go sell, sell, sell and then work work work. i need that kind of help also. she also can get me the type of volunteers i need ... the kind from SMU - she is already plugged in. I am already doing skills training - something she wants to offer but had no clue how to do it. i can easily plug in a program into her agency with no effort hardly at all. thus compounding her efforts in her community as well as tying us together as a true collaborative partnership for social and humanitarian good. she also has located immediatly many grants that together we can share and prosper with - utilzing Debi in Houston to also come into play with us also tying our combined efforts into the new Houston Chapter to let them know what is heading their way!
I am too tired to continue - just knowing though that all is coming together is incredible!

BAJITO ONDA RWANDA AFRICA

2005-02-18T04:30:00.000-08:00

This is a leadership letter to my new sons in Rwanda - both students at the university - that does not matter to me - what does matter is that I recognize leadership qualities in Alex who is now bringing in more young soldiers in our Army for World Change. This is how Bajito Onda Foundation is now growing worldwide. Young people are wanting to have a hand in the shaping of their personal world as it applies to the global one. We are reaching across our own struggles and holding hands with one another in order to keep ourselves and those around us from sinking lower into society's traps of oppression and dysfunction. If we work as though we are sitting in one room together, enjoying our lives and our efforts as one small group who believes that together we can be one big force for lives in the darkness we can indeed change the world we as well as they ... live in. Together as one family - as one force we can not only survive, but we can flourish. Although it seems that those closest to me - understand me the less - it doesn't matter. I only know that i am true to this movement and to the work God has blessed me with - and I also know that each day provides new opportunities as well as hardships which we must utilize to the fullest and endure and conquer. So far my record has been excellent in both of those. Of course I get tired, but i never cease dreaming about the 'what if's .... what if i was not doing what i do for others across the globe as well as in my daily walk of life? what if my work didn't matter at all? (it would always matter to me because i am the first life it led out of the darkness when all around me was so hopeless for so many years). Here is a letter - well instructions for Alex (rwandan chapter president and recent son to the family) - he is now bringing in his best friend Maz. together i want to see if they can begin selling products in Rwanda that I can produce here - send to them - have them sell them and we all profit and progress - thus growing the movement by self-sufficient social programming methods which i have developed for this very purpose.
----------------
Del, if i am going to travel to The Gambia to hold meetings with Amidu I need an official certification document from you as global head of the foundation - stating that i am a member in good standing and that i am the leader or president of Bajito Onda Rwanda African Foundation - not much more is needed. This will cover me to work in this country for the initial beginning startup organizing work i have to do. Please also mention that the Foundation is international not only African.

Del, i would also like to ask that you produce a certificate for my right hand who i told you about last time. we always work together in everything. His name is MAZIMA GEORGES. For him just say he is an active member of the foundation,
Your son Alex

Tell MAZ, welcome to the family and a big hug from the USA! He is a welcome soldier in the struggle.

HOW DO WE SAY IN FRENCH - 'peace soldier' - or 'youth army' something like that so that we can make up shirts and i can send to you all to wear to represent Bajito Onda in french -

also: how do we go about having you guys to help us raise funding there in Rwanda? i have some ideas....but i need you to be very flexible in your thinking...

you need to remove your traditional african thinking and let me put some Western thinking into that head of yours ;)

Alex, you are becoming quite dear to me - the reason is you are communicating as if you were sitting here next to me and actually you are.

listen, and amidu will tell you - i have many ways we can all make money and help each other as well as to continue to recruit true entreprenurial soldiers in the struggle (fight) for equality for those of us under certain forms of oppression and hardship.

now listen,

you africans (AMIDU I AM WRIITNG TO YOU AS WELL SON) YOU MUST NOT LEAD THESE BOYS BACK INTO AFRICAN TRADITIONAL THINKING BUT YOU MUST LEAD THEM INTO MY FORM OF THINKING WHILST THEY (YOU ALL ARE STILL INSIDE AFRICA)

I AM ADDING THIS TO THE BLOG - BECAUSE IT IS NECESSARY I FEEL THAT WE SHARE WITH OTHERS.

i want you to sit down and tell me

ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS

WHAT INFLUENTIAL COMPANIES YOU KNOW WELL
....
WHO DO YOU KNOW THAT WORKS AT THESE COMPANIES WHO CAN ORDER THINGS OF A GRAPHIC NATURE SUCH AS TRUCK LETTERING - OR DECALS WITH SLOGANS ON THEM?
..........
DO EITHER OF YOU HAVE A CAR? OR A FRIEND WITH A CAR OR TRUCK?
.........
WHAT SIZE SHIRTS DO YOU WEAR? (ARE YOU FATTIES OR SKINNIES? ;)
.........
DO YOU LIKE TO WEAR HATS? - WILL YOU WEAR A BAJITO ONDA CAP IF I SEND THEM TO YOU?
.........

WHAT I'M THINKING HERE IS THAT I NEED TO BEGIN TO ARM YOU WITH OUR PRODUCTS THAT YOU CAN REPRESENT THERE IN AFRICA TO OTHERS WHO WILL BEG YOU TO PRODUCE THE PRODUCTS FOR THEIR COMPANY - AND THEREFORE YOU WILL MAKE MONEY - WE WILL PRODUCE THE PRODUCTS AND SEND THEM TO YOU - AND YOU WILL SELL THEM AND SEND ME MONEY AND KEEP YOUR PORTION -

I CAN PRODUCE PRODUCTS HERE THAT I CAN SEND TO YOU THERE AND YOU CAN SELL TO YOUR CLIENTS THERE - BECAUSE PRODUCTS LIKE I CAN MAKE HERE DO NOT EXIST THERE - YET.

YOU CAN BE ON THE ENTREPRENURIAL FOREFRONT OF SUCH WESTERNIZED PROGRESS.

HOWEVER YOU MUST BE PREPARED TO DO SO. IT WILL NOT BE AN INSTANT MAKING OF OUR COMPANY BUT WE CAN DO IT IF YOU ARE CONTINUALLY ACTIVE AND PARTICIPATING AS YOU HAVE BEEN.

YOU ARE ACTUALLY BEING MORE ACTIVE THAN YOUR BROTHER - GATHECHA -

THEREFORE YOU MAY TAKE THE INIITIATIVE NOW AND THEN GATHECHA CAN COME IN WITH YOU LATER AND SUPPORT YOUR EFFORTS AS A LEADER IN INDUSTRY AND PROGRESS.

YOU MUST SUPPORT YOUR OTHER TEAM MEMBERS SUCH AS BABA - AND ONCE YOU HAVE 'IT' IN YOUR HEADS AND WE ARE WORKING IN COORDINATED EFFORTS WITH EACH OTHER THEY WILL THEN BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND THE METHODOLGIES AND THEREFORE JOIN US AS A STRONG AFRICAN TEAM.

AMIDU HAS GOTTEN SLEEPY I THINK ((((( :) ))))))) AND LET AFRICAN TRADITIONAL THINKING BEGIN TO SLOW HIM DOWN IN THE FINANCIAL RUNNING OF THE GAME OF LIFE.

AMIDU IS A WONDERFUL HUMANITARIAN WHO DOES A GREAT JOB OF MAKING MIRACLES OUT OF THIN AIR. HOWEVER HE NEEDS $$$ THAT CAN EASILY BE SUPPLIED BY ALL OF US WORKING TOGETHER.

YOU CAN BE THE ONES ALEX AND NEW SON MAZ - THAT PROVIDE THE STARTUP FUNDING FOR THOSE OTHER GROUPS - AND AS WELL YOU CAN BECOME THE 'EDUCATIONAL TRAINING FORCE' IF YOU CAN LEARN MY METHODS VIA THE INTERNET. I WILL DO WHAT I CAN TO WORK WITH YOU AND PUT THAT KNOWLEDGE INTO YOUR BRAINS...

YOU WILL HAVE TO THINK THOUGH - BECOME IMAGINATIVE - EXPAND YOUR THINKING PAST THE LIMITS OF YOUR AFRICAN BRAIN - FORGET ALL LIMITATIONS AND OBSTACLES... THEY DO NOT EXIST IN MY WORLD - NOW BECOMING YOUR WORLD.

YOU HAVE MANY ADVANTAGES - OVER AMERICANS - YOU / WELL WE - CAN NOW WORK IN MANY LANGUAGES - AND YOU CAN CROSS MANY CULTURAL LINES OF BUSINESS MAKING - I AM ASSUMING YOU LIKE TO MAKE MONEY - AS WELL AS HELP PEOPLE LIKE MAZ.

.....ANSWER ME THIS.....ARE YOU PREPARED TO BE LEADERS AT THE HEAD OF OUR KNOWLEDGE REVOLUTION?

IF YOU ARE ANSWER ME THIS...........
DO YOU HAVE ACCESS TO A
....DIGITAL CAMERA? (VERY IMPORTANT) - CAN YOU GET ONE - OR USE ONE?
....REGULAR CAMERA WITH PHOTO PROCESSING (NOT ADVISEABLE - TOO COSTLY - TOO SLOW)
....SCANNER IN WHICH TO SCAN THINGS AND EMAIL IMAGES TO ME?
....WHERE DO YOU WRITE TO ME FROM? (SCHOOL, HOME, INTERNET CAFE, ETC)
....WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS DO? ARE THEY PROFESSIONALS - WHERE DO THEY WORK?
....

THAT IS ALL FOR NOW...... TAKE THESE QUESTIONS ONE BY ONE AND HAVE MAZ ANSWER THEM ALSO - INDIVIDUALLY OF YOURSELF.

YOU ARE TWO PEOPLE ALTHOUGH YOU AFRICANS SEEM ALWAYS TO WORK WITH A 'TWIN' SUCH AS AMIDU HAS JOSEPH AS HIS RIGHT HAND MAN - YOU ARE TWO PEOPLE - GIVING US DOUBLE SUPPORT - STRONGER EFFORT - BUT YOU WILL HAVE INDIVIDUAL ANSWERS....

GO THROUGH THIS AND GIVE ME YOUR ANSWERS - AND MAZ YOU DO THE SAME...

I SEND YOU MY LOVE AND STRENGTH - STAY TRUE AND LETS BUILD A LEADERSHIP TEAM - THAT YOU CAN THEN BRING IN OTHERS UNDER YOU AND THEY WILL MULTIPLY YOUR EFFORTS.

ALWAYS,

MUM

BO BOTH SIDES PRISON NEWSLETTER - FEB 2005

2005-02-14T21:25:00.000-08:00

Monday, February 14, 2005

Dearest Guys – I am writing after what seems to be an eternity. I apologize for not having answered some of you back in your personal requests / demands  for me to personally write each and every one of you! Red you know who you are .

I want to thank you guys for your wonderful participation in the Prison Art Gallery. Some of you have been hitting home runs financially if you know what I mean. I know one of my brothers has been sent around $250 or so for a period of about sixty days. Some of you new guys are coming on with us and sending us incredible work, especially your leather work.

I want to have a heart to heart with you – so go get a cup of java and sit down for a minute and kick it with me. You all have been filling me in on your lives, whats going on etc. I need to do the same but I cannot do it individually I hope you understand… and no it does not mean that I am selling out on you.

I need to let you know how much you all mean to me and to this foundation. Afterall it is for you – that is why I do not keep one cent of the money I get when I sell your items. I send it all to you minus the 50 cents or whatever for a postal money order.

Let me get a few things clear…. MS. HALLMAN OF THE PAROLE OFFICE IS NOT HOOKED UP TO THE PAROLE BOARD. SHE DOESN’T HAVE A THING TO DO WITH IT. When I mentioned that I work with her sometimes I meant that she refers me some parolees to do community service with BO and to learn printing skills in the meantime. DO NOT SEND ME TO GIVE TO HER ANYTHING ABOUT YOUR CASES. SHE WILL THROW IT AT ME IF I WAS STUPID ENOUGH TO GO DOWN THERE AND STAND IN FRONT OF HER AND ASK HER TO LOOK AT IT. She does not know you unless she knows you already and if you are in prison that is not what she wants to hear so she will only get frustrated at me. I already suffered this thing with my now good buddy Louis S. and after me and him butted heads (that boy has got one hard head – not to mention mine as well so we might as well just forget about it and get along) – Louis really got under my skin with all that crap about me being a professional art gallery – now LISTEN TO THIS… I AM NOT ANYTHING NEAR A PROFESSIONAL ART GALLERY. I AM AN EX CONVICT AND I CARE ABOUT YOU SO THEREFORE I’M JUST TRYING TO SHOW THE FREEWORLD WHAT WE ARE MADE OUT OF – I’M NOT OUT HERE WITH SOME SNOOTY FOLKS WALKING AROUND SIPPING WINE AND EATING CHEESE. I made a tattoo studio where all kinds of folks are getting tattoos and while they are there – I have hung your art and collections on the metal urban walls and sometimes they are buying it. When I sell something we run to the PO and we fire off a MO straight to your hands. If you ain’t getting money its cause we’re NOT selling your crafts. Its not cause I’m not trying or cause I don’t want to or cause I don’t think your art is great but its just because enough people have not heard about the gallery yet to begin to collect and support it. Now some of you are sending in a lot of pieces. Frankly I have nothing against that. I love your work and as long as it is thoughtful, artistic craft work (not cookie cutter mickey mouse and tweety bird patterns) then I am honored to receive it. My boy Alberto Perez sent in three ladies clutch purses and bam! They sold in five seconds… plus I need you to hear me on this one… I THINK THAT IF WE CAN GET SOME BEAUTIFUL BIBLE COVERS AND THIN TALL WALLETS NOT REAL THIK ONES – with the Virgin of Guadalupe on them and ALSO WE NEED SOMETHING BLACK ON THEM IF YOU WANT TO MAKE MONEY. SOME OF YOU MESKINS MAY NOT WANNA DO BLACK CRAFTS BUT IF YOU WANNA MAKE MONEY THE BLACKS OUT HERE AIN’T INTO THE VIRGIN – IF YOU GET MY DRIFT. They are requesting some black type theme art – like MLK – family scenes, etc. I am not creative you are - but I do hear what they are telling me – now Big Red bless his little pointed head sent me the most beautiful Desk Plaque for my desk – its so big I can hardly see over it but its on my desk! Red you just gotta get in there somehow… While I’m picking on Red I do want the brother to have some of my deepest respect and love for his earnest and always fired up efforts to get the piddlers behind this gallery. Me and Red have been kicking it for a long time – and this I think is a joint effort between us. Red you done good my brother. I have been talking to the sister now my good friend with Prison Fellowship Kathy Maltz and maybe I’m going to go down to Coffield and do one of my in prison prison scared straight talks …… I’m just kidding – lighten up already will you guys???? Sheesh I know that already ruffled some of your hair on the back of your neck… yeah right, eh?

I have been asked back at the Roach Unit up at Childress, TX sometime here in the near future. I love to get into prison every chance I can and let our guys know how much you mean to me. I used to be there myself and therefore I want you to know that I do know how it feels and I will never sell out on you or turn my back or walk away from you. Your light is shining brighter out here than ever before. Please I ask you to have patience with me and not to jump to conclusions as sometimes ‘convict thinking’ will cause us to do. That deep sinking insecure feeling when we feel like someone has left us for good or cheated us or stolen from us when we are down. I know that feeling my brothers… I know it all too well. No matter if I am out here – it hits me in the face all too often and each time it hurts like the last time. We have all been burnt – but know in your heart that I will never burn you – we may not always get along… but I am trying the most I can do out here with not much support. If you are in Cali or Texas – know how much this organization is growing because of your love and support.

The kids out here want me to tell you hello and thanks for them – because you are giving of yourselves to let others know you do care about these kids and the ones I’m out here trying to keep from heading into the gates. Today some juniors at Molina HS in Oak Cliff brought over some Valentines Balloons to Bajito Onda for all we do for kids. It made me so proud and happy that we are truly making a difference in kids lives!

Well anyways, so I have another thing I want to ask you guys – can you please send me a list of all the crafts you know of so I can try them out out here. I do not know what you have access to or what you can get to make things out of. Now I’ve got everything from paint can birdhouses from my buddy Esteban – and No I am not going to take those into the parole office either – they will once again kill me. Those women are so particular on what they allow into their offices – if it isn’t about their college sorority and all their children’s and family’s pictures, it ain’t gonna be from me either. Man I already know those women down there. It took me about two years homies to even get through their tough walls enough to just get them to talk to me like I’m FIRST) NOT A CONVICT SECOND) NOT ON PAROLE THIRD) NOT IN PRISON FOURTH) NOT AN IDIOT FIFTH) NOT ATTACKING THEM VERBALLY AND SO ON AND ON. YOU GET MY DRIFT – turn around to that friendly CO OR SGT down the hall and think of striking up a friendly conversation with them… and that is what you are asking me to deal with out here.

Now I want to fill you guys in we now have a new office we are trying to move into – pray for us that it happens. It will be 4,000 square feet for $1,200 a mo. Where we are now is in three different offices and its killing me paying so much and not having any help.

Now I met this woman from Houston, and she has signed on to become our full time grant writer, funding director and disbursement officer. The woman has studied grant writing and is actively working with us to push us over the top this year. I cannot do what she is doing for us – I do not have time or brains to do it. So if any of you want to write her and say thank you for helping us – I’m sure she will be touched. Please leave the ‘lonely prisoner looking for a sexy single hottie penpal’ out of it cause she’s married with two little ones – but I would like you to write a sincere and of course respectful note to her – her name is ‘D’ – and no its not me just wanting an ego stroke!

I was on tv a while back on Fox 4 news and a homie from Chi saw me and he has written two books about his life in the gang lifestyle. He contacted me and is now writing my life story as Bajito Onda - in book form. His publisher in chi already is interested in publishing it so I’m happy we are getting that going also. This is gonna be our year homies!

Say Esteban I wanna tell you I really enjoy you sending me the Echo paper – its refreshing to hear your news too – not just always mine.

Say Andrew and Mita Mita – what’s going on up your way?

Rev Ramon Salcido in San Quentin, I send my love out your way and I pray the doors of Q will open for me this year – it is one of my goals this year is to make it out your way…. Another scared straight talk eh? ;) just kidding homie…. Say thanks for the great artwork – please see if you can send some more from some other homies also and put something in them if you can with Bajito Onda – San Quentin - I think we can get more press and more public interest with it like that.

Any of you doing some art with a big Bajito Onda into it at the top of it in ink will most likely end up with it on a shirt for our clothing line. I’m trying to get some art like Rollin Hard if you know what it looks like… cars, women, guys, jesus, brick walls, whatever, but keep it clean and cool and we should be fine…. Esp if you can design it with a black background and white ink or lettering – then I can print it firme on black shirts.

Till later…..

Now even though I do not write you all the time back and forth does not mean I do not love each and every one of you. Bear? How you doing? Sorry I too have not had a chance to write you. But I’m out here trying to get a real penpal thing going for you all – but its gonna take like a mini department to do it. Also I have met finally with Pastor Rose of Rose Ministries – last week she came over twice. I think she was afraid to come meet me but we had a nice lunch and visit and she hung around with us for most of a day. I think she has been sick and not over again. She is welcome to come and hang out – but with all she is trying to do with her ministry I doubt she can devote much to helping BO.

Now I got you handled Adan in regards to your arte. Pastor Rose is supposed to bring it over tomorrow to me…. Same day I try to mail this out. For those of you who got a Valentine’s Card – I hope you enjoyed it – for those of you who didn’t please forgive me – I’m trying to perfect a way to be more efficient. Now let me once more tell you Adan, that even when I have all your art here – I cannot do the list upon list thing – or all you needed from Rose. So let me know and I will simply box up your things until I hear from you what you want me to do with them knowing that I am too busy to do a whole lot of cataloging and all that that should go with being a real gallery owner. Since I am not – I need some sort of legal exemption from all those requirements. Its like this… I mark your stuff and put the price on it – I do not want a penney other than the MO cost. Do not insist… it is more problem than I can deal with to start deducting percentages out of each sale – If I like your art that much and if I have the time and money I will simply print some shirts of it and send your family a dozen of them – but other than that I am so busy I can barely think straight.

About the Houston thing…. I am considering seriously either opening a branch office there since D is already stepping up to the plate and forming the Houston official chapter. Or else I’m even considering if it works out – moving there lock stock and barrel. Still not sure about that one but its sure a possibility at this time in my life and struggle.

Now guys, take care,

I’m sleepy and tired and its late, but I did want you to know I was thinking about you and I care about you – so please return the favor… your prayers are always welcome!

Hugs to each of you!

Del

BAJITO ONDA HOUSTON

2005-02-12T21:24:00.000-08:00

I want to welcome to our growing family of concerned residents who care for the future by a very aggressive, bright, uplifting, hopeful, knowledgeable, compassionate as well as PASSIONATE Houston Chapter? Our newest chapter President, Debi Schneider - concerned mom who is on fire with a mission! Bajito Onda does not seem foreign nor too complicated or intense for Debi who like myself, is white. So many people when they meet and even know me think i am some form of Hispanic. Or at least mixed. Wow, she is really awesome! Her degree is in early childhood education and she was a teacher - but she somehow wanted more out of life for others. she wanted to make a big difference in the lives of kids and others. as i have been wearing my knees out praying for God to send me Angels, especially in the grant writing department / funding development, etc. Debi has been praying for God to send her an agency with the meat and passion that Bajito Onda has evolved into over the past 20 years. She has her own two small children, who she treasures like the rest of the children of the world. She has a supportive husband who allows her to give and to grow with us. My world is very blessed to have met such an Angel such as Debi. Our meetings in one day alone have planted an entire field of seeds that will one day be harvested into such a valuable crop of good that together we will do. Who will receive the fruit of the crop? I pray that i will meet soon the same kind of movers and shakers in Dallas so that we can prevent so much crime DALLAS IS THE NUMBER ONE VIOLENT CITY IN AMERICA - a city so violent with so much youth destruction, community loss and politicians and so called city leaders (JOKE - DALLAS SO CALLED LEADERS ARE SELL OUTS WHO WALK OUT ON ALL THE LIVES THEY STOMP ON ON THEIR WAY UP AND OUT OF THEIR OWN DENIAL). Why has no one in Dallas come to me like Debi has and offered something, anything to help us. Why must they sit there and judge us as they judge the lives we help on a daily basis? STAY STRONG DEBI AND SOON OTHERS WILL FOLLOW YOU!

BAJITO ONDA HONDURAS - PRESIDENT TEDDY

2005-02-10T20:41:00.000-08:00

Teddy is a lovely young man. It was love at first sight when we were introduced at the UN Conference in Monterrey in October. It was at the Governor's Palace and quite the palatial setting...When the tour buses carrying all of us arrived outside the pristine compound we were ushered into the courtyard with fountains, waiters in white gloves carrying around the snooty little trays with ordourves (sp?) wine, whiskey (as the Mexicans said) and of course all the overly made up, dressed up Mexican dignitaries.... as i looked around the garden setting it was if i was in my dream home / office. Lots of round tables sitting all under the surrounding overhangs and something I will never forget - faces of all races, literally - all sprinkled at the tables with around 5 or six persons at each table. I could not dare sit still and miss knowing everyone there. I sat down for one second, grabbed a few handfulls of hordourves (how do you spell that word anyways?) and i was off to network. I was dead tired from my BUS TRIP! down there to Monterrey (how embarrassing) but hey, i was there! As i went from table to table, meeting people who were from Chile to the tiny 3,000 inhabitant island of Saba in the Caribbean, i met people from the UN offices around the world from Kenya to Brazil and Mexican governmental officials from the Governor of Nuevo Leon to the City Purchasing Director.

It was about that time that Antonio Melin, my first official "Bajito Onda Son of Mexico" and the President of Bajito Onda Mexico and Latin Americas - (A title I gave him a few years back and he has slowly grown into).... well Antonio came up to me and (as he has always done... he took me by the arm and said - there is a special table i want you to meet - I said 'wow! really?' I thought surely it was President Fox or someone higher than I was already schmoozing with. He and i speak only Spanish to each other since Antonio is sort of a wannabe English speaker..... He took me over to a table and he proudly presented me to the table of MARASALVATRUCHAS - Ahhh, Salvadoran gang members... As we approached their table they were sitting there in formal looking attire throwing gang signs. Hmmm, i thought, Antonio loves these guys because these are 'our guys' who we love to see turn their lives around and help others. Me being white, they thought.... What tha????? But when my Spanish came out and i shook hands with them street style their eyes opened up so bright and smiles covered all our faces and they said.... 'oh yea!!!' That was when Teddy from Honduras became my soldier for the whole event. I could not get him away from me no matter how hard i tried. He wanted to serve me and Bajito Onda as if it were a lifesaving gang mindset. He had played right into it. Teddy and i spent much time together every time we saw each other. I went to their presentation at the Conference - 'From the inside of the Marasalvatruchas' - understanding the needs of true gangmembers and how to reach us. Teddy and Ernesto from El Salvador (another true love) both had been immigrants from their countries, both were recruited innocently into the vicious LA gang life of their families before them, both were shot many times and both spent time in the courts and in prison until finally both were deported to their countries. Ernesto became the Salvadoran branch of www.homiesunidos.org based in LA and strung to ES. A great guy older than Teddy and walking with crutches due to his rough gang life in LA. Well Teddy and Ernesto really bonded. Teddy still writes as i have placed his letter below. It is in Spanish.... central American spanish - a bit different from Mexican but if you use www.bablefish.com to translate it just copy and paste it into Bablefish and it translates it pretty good. you will see that Teddy is becoming a point of light in the darkness of Honduras where he is trying to help prisoners and gangmembers to find employment, get real help in a court system that IMPRISONS PERSONS JUST BECAUSE THEY HAVE TATTOOS - NOT BECAUSE THEY COMMIT A CRIME - i plan someday to go to Honduras and walk side by side with Teddy in his lucha / struggle to help others like himself. God Bless You Teddy - Stay Strong!
-----------------here is his letter - he's quite funny and forces me to pay him special attention as you can see here! And of course i do because he is such a special son to me - to count now - i have probably over a thousand sons around the world.... and growing!
----------------------------
ok Del asi si megusta que te espreces no solo un pinche saludo amiga - :)

Hola corazon saves estoy muy alegre por que te allas dedicado un poco de tu tiempo para contestar mis caprichos de que tu me escribas mas de un saludo saves te boy amadar fotos de todo lo que estado asiendo en Honduras bueno luego te escribo on poco mas por que mañana es un buen dia iremos a la capital de Honduras que se llama tegusigalpa a defender unos homis
que los capuraron la policia por un pinche articulo de la ley penal anti maras que acreado es este gobierno y tenmos todas las ventajas y savemos que no los madaran a prision por que los fiscales conocen nuestro trabajo y me siento muy alegre cuando el proseso legal de esta ley les ganamos estos casos luego te cuento lo que paso bueno mira mi celular es 373-09-72 y el de la
oficina es 550-20-69 horas de oficina de 9;00am,a 5;00pm
ok
saludes a toda la raza de bajito onda
(GREET ALL THE FOLKS OF BAJITO ONDA!)

By him giving me his phone number - that means now i have to call the boy - who i will do but also puts a drain on me because international calls can be very expensive. More why we need donations to help us.

here is my reply back to him.... sorry i don't have time to translate for you....
--------------------
Saludos Mi querido Teddy,

Que fantastico que eres haciendo gran differencia en las vidas de tus homitos alli - favor de dales un gran abrazo departe mia - diles los cabrones que algun dia mi van aver alli en tu mero turf de los maras. yo mero. :)

pues tambien cuentame que le paso siempre a Ernesto, mi otro querido homie de los meros homiesunidos.org ????? dile el que mi escribas, eh?

pos entonces te voy a hablar por un rato nada mas para escucharte en vivo y en color! tan guapo que eres!

bueno soldado frente y fuerte,

te mando mi carino, mi respectos, y todo mi apoyo mijo por la lucha mas dificil que ningun pandilla - la lucha por los rechazados, oprimidos y los prisioneros....

a mis prisioneros diles que les mando un saludo muy especial y que nunca DIGO NUNCA!!!! PARES DE MARCHAR POR LA PAZ Y LA UNIDAD DE NUESTRA GENTE!

Quiero un retrato donde tienes mi playera amarillio puesto!

hasta despues mijo...

del

BAJITO ONDA AFRICA FOUNDATION

2005-02-08T07:03:00.000-08:00

I often find it impossible to believe that a humble work such as Bajito Onda (the underground or lowrider scene) has now spread around the world. I am so burdened here in the struggle just to keep our printshop flourishing and the doors open that i forget how my sons and daughters around the world are moving ahead like steam rollers. Their 'Bajito Onda Global Chapters' are amazing me weekly. I am so tempted to go to Africa that somehow i believe it will happen this year. One of my goals is to speak at San Quentin California State Prison Death Row 'Bajito Onda Chapter' - and another is certainly to visit one or more of the Chapters in Africa. Wow! God is really moving us all over the place. I must remember we are now touching lives around the world! And those lives are now empowering women and children and youth to do the same. Take Care, Del

WOODY I MISS YOU

2005-02-08T03:06:00.000-08:00

It was 12 years ago January 19, 1993 that i found my best friend of 27 years dead on the floor of our apartment in Grand Prairie between Dallas and Ft Worth. He was 49 at the time and i was 46. I thought I was going to die that nite because as me and him used to say ... end of an era when something would close down or stop that had gotten under our skin over the years. Like our favorite Meskin food restaurant 'El Gallito' down on Ross Ave. That place was such a dive that people used to break in and steal their tortillas, and all the food on a regular basis. You had to show your money before you could even order and you had to pay before they would walk away to the kitchen with your order. Everybody stole their silverware so you had to ask for a knife and you had to turn it in when you finished eating. But man was the food good. So was me and Woody's lifelong friendship. Its when i start missing him so much that i begin to reflect on my life after him. i feel sometimes, well most of the time that i am here now in a sort of dreamlike state trying to do good for all the bad i did when he was alive. i was known back then as Dangerous Del and he called himself Wonderful Woody. People were always afraid of me and we just laughed about it - girls would flock to him because he called himself Wonderful Woody! - His family hated me because we moved here to Dallas to get away from Arkansas where at least I went to HS with Billy Clinton (who yes always was stuck up and he was not poor he drove a Convertible Buick because his parents owned Clinton Buick) - so anyways... my life was always doing something adventurous which meant skirting all kinds of danger and havoc. I'm so lucky just to be alive no wonder i work so hard to save others from the streets of adventure. i really think kids join gangs because it seems like one big adventure. i was trying to sleep while ago and i saw Woody saying goodbye to me and I was wondering where all these new people came from in my life... they seem to come and go and go and come but none last like he did - 27 years. He used to tell me that he did not know how he could live without me in his life. Now i know what he meant. I think this whole thing started because I'm reading a book about yet another new friend and he wrote a book about his life in Chicago - his gang life. from the time he was a little boy growing up in Puerto Rico. his life and my life are so similar yet so distinct that it is haunting me. i'm thinking what if i hadn't done all the things i used to do? i'm thinking what if 'he' didn't do them either - although his were much worse than mine - i still gave these streets hell 24/7. My later nickname after prison became Del from Hell. Now people talk to me and never see that - i'm very glad - it took years to wash that image off my exterior and interior...
My new friend is known to me only by his pseudonym Reymundo Sanchez - at www.nogangs.com - i'm reading his first book right now and i'm trying to 'live his life with him' to walk his streets and run his life with him and his friends if thats what you call them. He made the best of a screwed up life. But its haunting me. I wish i could have been there for him, or here for him. so he never lived the life he has led. that is what i'm doing for all i can get ahold of while there is still hope in their young lives. i see what happens to the ones who fall through the cracks of society and fall onto the streets of hell and devastation. society is sweeping up the streets and throwing them into prison cells to hide them away - when really they are boys and girls fighting for their lives in the battlefields of modern America. it is nobody's fault - we have to put our guilt behind us and the stop the blaming. we just have to SAVE MORE CHILDREN NOW! i began to see that my life after woody has had a purpose that is much higher than the one me and him had for ourselves... we were street driven, money driven, power driven, adventure driven and destruction driven through violence, thieving and drugs as well as taking advantage of persons that woody used to use up like kleenexes... women. what i heard women did for him for only a pack of cigarrettes or a ride across town. but that was woody. and i always loved him as my dearest brother and confidant. times have changed now though and reymundo sanchez is now my friend, and i'm reading this book about him and its haunting me. i'm seeing that my life after woody has been a heaven and a pure unadulterated hell of hells. i never dreamed i would have slogged on this long alone without my sidekick. its as if i have been in a socially induced stupor all these years and i'm not even sure if i have awakened yet or if i ever will. i see that in my path along the journey to the next world that i have walked a million miles and encountered the same amount of lives out here wandering around in the world. children, elderly, alcoholics, drug addicts, convicts and exconvicts, wife beaters, drug dealers, murderers, rapists, drive by shooters, armed robbers, gang leaders, gang followers, prison guards, cops, teachers who by the way i have since found out buy and sell drugs with the kids they teach - so do parole officers and prison guards of course - all folks who do not have to take drug tests and the school bus drivers who also provide a great distribution network for drugs... in dallas... as well as around the country. the whole world is in on it - but they just don't say anything... Me? Whose side am I on? i'm on the side of the kids - the gangs and the prisoners. Why? they have no voice in society, where they also have no place. I know i was there. i'm still there because i still care.
So in this dream i see myself reaching out to everyone i come in contact with - i reach out but some are not the good people.. they are the takers or the liars or the 'smiling do nothing fakes' that really hurt my soul. oh and the ones who when i reach out to them they look at me like i'm insane for caring about the ones who are so appreciative for me having touched their soul and led them into the light. we are doing it - slowly and one life at a time. i pray that wherever you are right now that you will turn to someone and begin reaching out to them and planting seeds of hope and love - you never know which ones will be the 'savers' and who will flourish because you were there and you care.

WHAT IS GOING ON IN YOUR WORLD TODAY?

2005-02-07T20:20:00.000-08:00

Please feel free to express yourself? We have just been joined by a Sociology Major going for his Professors Title and he will be coming up with an evaluation questionnaire so that we are able to track our successes and our losses in this work to educate not incarcerate those who have passed through Bajito Onda's Global Doors. I figure over the years i have worked with thousands of persons and you may be one of them. If you are, please let me know how your life has been affected by my work and my dedication to this work. I am the first life Bajito Onda turned around so it is very important to me to share the love with others in hopes they will get something out of it and also change their life before they end up like i did, in prison or even worse off. Its winter time and some days are cold and some are not. i love all weather, even when it rains or snows it never really matters to me. i learned that when i was 'sans freedom' that even when it was a sunny day - it seemed gloomy to me inside of that razor wire. the day i was let free the air just seemed cleaner and lighter - i know it sounds crazy but that was the way i felt inside there. yesterday i was sitting here typing and i heard something rustling in the dog's bowl and i went to see what it was. it was a huge Texas style rat. it looked like a mini me possum i swear. i shooed it out of here and back into the warehouse. i tossed the dogs bowl out with it so it would not be invading my personal space. this place is like living in a terrerium (sp?). we have geckos, lizards, rats, spiders, and well this one is the killer... we even have snakes. i know, i know... it freaks me out too, but there is really nothing we can do about it until we get out of this building. and believe me that has been my goal for about the last five years. pray for us that someone helps us get out of here. i just hate it. last nite was great, we went to a Marriott Courtyard up by the Dallas North Tollway. My friend at Ballys Corporate office donated it to me and Beth. Poor Beth, she is disgusted by all this, after coming from a state (Maine) where there are very few bugs, no snakes and other mini wildlife doesn't exist in the cold weather. Also since there is only a metal roof here - there is no TV either. something we both miss and yet don't miss. I am expecting the African delegation to arrive one of these days and they really freeze coming straight from Africa to a Texas winter! It was kind of funny when my 'son' Amidu Mansaray came here the first time (only time so far). He practically sat on the gas heater the whole time... finally after three weeks he started adjusting to it and then he had to return to get the chapters in Africa started. He has done such a great job. I"m so proud of him.
Well that's all for tonite... Take care of yourself and thanks for stopping by. Leave your info so we can get you to take the questionnaire (its not personal) its about your life - even if you never met us before... you are important to our future works for kids and communities. God Bless, - Del

YA KNOW....

2005-02-05T11:35:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about sheltering some of you from my real world - all of it that is... but then i decided that all of you who are involved in or with or around Bajito Onda / Del Hendrixson's world might need to know about each other. I cannot do it quickly but i can piece it together bit by bit. My weeks run together in a blur. Almost like they did when i was in prison. i hate it and i love it at the same time. i sit here with my heart pounding out of my chest at times from the confusion and the stress of how much longer i can continue to hold it all together, and then i realize. i am not restricted in any way and if it were not this way i would be craving it back into my blood stream instantly. this work is my drug, it is my high - i'm high on life and the living of it from minute to minute. if it doesn't drive them crazy, the people in this world with me also become addicted to it. we never know where or how each day will end. who will enter our doors and what will be accomplished each day. but i know in my heart that each day something will definitely be accomplished and throughout the day we will help someone, share love with someone, sell someone something we have printed or produced or created out of nothing and that those lives will feel good about having passed through our doors. sometimes i rant and i complain and i usually do it to those who are in prison... poor guys. i know they love me though so they bear the burden of having to hear it when i get frustrated in the struggle to keep opening doors for the oppressed in society... myself being one of those lives. when will the doors open we all ask ourselves... then i look around and i realize that not only have doors of opportunity opened but they are opening daily and slowly we are entering society through those doors. i used to call myself a 'corporate dropout' because i tried after returning from prison to 'fit in'. i'm not sure i ever fit in but somehow i was trying to re-enter society as i thought i had known it before my year in prison. i know it seems to some of you as if i spent an eternity there. actually i didn't. i call it a 'bounce' now into the just-us system. that bounce was in slow motion and it was the slowest days of my life. i never realized how many steps i would count on repeated journeys to the chow hall, to the pill line to get my legally dispensed tranquilizers which i actually became addicted to from inside prison, and to the chapel which also affected my life from 'inside' and so forth. i realized from within prison i was learning about a society that has long since left the freeworld. camradrie, living under a microscope as it seems of the federal government - true paranoia at every step of the way. the friendships that were built inside prison have never left my heart... my friend 'china' as i called her. the hours we sat sharing our lives.. hers from taiwan of a japanese mom and a chinese dad, a cultural oddity at odds within their own family as she told me, and her marrying the Columbian ambassador to Taiwan, moving back there with him, having two children who spoke spanish, her learning spanish and leaving her royal nest in Columbia with a boyfriend that talked her into swallowing 'globos' or balloons filled with cocaine to finance their journey to America where upon arrival in the port of New Orleans, she panicked when told to have a seat off to the side while they verified her documents and she confessed to having swallowed six globos of coke - where upon she was immediately arrested. she was afraid of dying without ever seeing her children again - of dying from the drug meant to finance her journey and of course to party with along the way. China and i became friends and we spoke in spanish because english was not a language she knew - we will never forget each other although we will never find each other again on this planet either. The freeworld does not provide for wonderful friendships like this to flourish and remain in our hearts forever. i miss that part of prison. i miss the closeness. the finding humor in the sickness of it all. the hiding from the catlike guards always treating the mice as little children who are always in trouble - keeping us in some sort of fear mode until we just get sick of it and fight it tooth and nail. until we became as sick as they were. until we became smarter than them... until we 'learned to play the game' and win. i learned - believe me - i learned to play the game and win - after losing so many rounds to all the evil forces around me - they had me reeling like a spinning top. they had me dizzy with trauma and nervous breakdowns - i counted seventeen total nervous breakdowns and then i realized... why was i even counting - for sure more were going to come... i laid down mentally and emotionally to the damage prison was doing to the old me and i only could ride the waves out into the darkness of depression and fear as i began to literally feel as though i was drowning in the ocean of prison life. If you have a comment please let me know. Take Care, Del

BAJITO ONDA PRISON MINISTRY - LOUIS' PRISON PAINTING OF THE CHILD AND THE BLANKET

2005-02-02T21:11:00.000-08:00

In November the Parole Division had their third annual Prison Art Show. Somehow I inherited the lead position of freeworlders making it happen for the parole office. A position I certainly never imagined me having. I would have rather died than to ever get involved with the inner workings of the in-justice system. But since I had gotten 'fired' (another long story for another time) from my (mind you it was a volunteer - time taking up on every wednesday morning) in-prison prison ministry at Hutchins State Jail - two years ago, several persons had told me to try my luck at the parole office. well they must have been desperate for bodies other than the ones filling their steps and offices and faces who are on official parole... well i went to the meeting for the first time and i was right. they were very desperate for real soldiers who actually backed up what they said they would volunteer for. being depressed that i had been fired from prison ministry - from that prison anyway - personality clash with the so-called chaplain out there. (another long story). so i see what i can get involved in and the prison art show was perfect for me - they tried to get me involved in the job fair and employment committee, etc. and when i went to one of the meetings with my so-called committee members one of them said that the name of my beloved organization needed to be changed so others than Hispanics could say it and understand it. well little did she know that i even have a Bajito Onda tattoo on my arm just for people like her. I got so mad, I told her that she as a black person was being racist towards the name of my foundation and that we were not racist like her. we accept all colors, creeds and so forth and always have. what she was was ignorant. well i got so mad and it caught me so off guard thinking here i am out there in south dallas at some other organization and all they could talk about was how i need to change the name of my foundation after twenty some years. now those of you who know me would never believe it but it hurt my heart so bad it made me cry in front of those fools, and that made me even madder and more upset. i told her that if they were predjudiced against me and i'm white.... then what would they be with the people i represent.... like me. well anyway, i forgot about the uppity snooty south dallas (that in itself is an oxymoron) and i decided i could handle the art show project. there was this real nice lady who was very rich and she helped with every project that involved donating money to help it along. she also was very kind and generous to Bajito Onda donating a lot of things like 3,000 garments brand new from JCPenneys that she worked a deal to help us get. she also donated several times of $500 and $1500 just as she was leaving to move to Florida. so she and i basically put the whole thing together with a bit of help from a few others. of course i got my whole crew involved is what made me look like i really did something. but it was nice. but this year... 2004 - when they decided to have another one - i was left alone to do it with the Parole Officer from Hell who shall remain anonymous... but man alive - that woman makes prison guards look like girl scouts. the guy prison guards that is. well i put up with her ordering me around like i was on parole all the way through things - she gave me the wrong date to take all the paintings down there - she gave me the wrong time. did she care? you gotta be kidding. well we finally got the day and time straight and we got it up and rolling at Downtown Dallas City Hall - i managed to get all my guys stuff inside glass cases so nobody would steal it. are you kidding me take my personal art down there and have it be gone in a flash... no way. well word got into prison just about time for the show, so we got some really good pieces... (nothing like i'm getting now for our prison art gallery). so this one guy had sent me his art and somebody stole it - or i never got it back. she would not let me put it in a case. she assured me very abruptly 'ain't nothin' gonna happen' to none o your stuff' and she snatched it out of my hand away from me. okay fine. i left and came back for the snooty preacher yakking, city councilman guest appearance to say how he almost forgot it but he managed to swing by on his way to a party or some rather uneventful happening. that guy. i have tried to get him to help us over here in the hood but he really forgets to come to the meetings i scheduled with his office. so i gave up on him a long time ago. not even worth saying his name. but there were some great artists there and i was even more encouraged to promote prison artists, also hoping that it might bring in a new breed of freeworld art afficianado (sp?) and maybe some help for us someday. well i was right, and i was so happy except that this one inmate's painting did not make it back to me when i picked up the pieces after the art show ended three weeks later. i figured he would get over it and i was sincerely ticked off about it after she had assured me it would survive and it didn't.

When this guy also was one of the prize winners... his art was very good. well i published a newsletter contratulating all of them on their efforts and accomplishments and he was one. man i got a letter back accusing me of everything under the sun along with telling me what a lousy gallery owner i am / was. now how was i supposed to know how to run a gallery if i'm just trying to do it to help other people? well the way this man chewed me out was pitiful. i was so hurt by it - if convicts only could see how hard us freeworlders formerly known as convicts out here. well he got me so good i took a copy of his letter accusing me of stealing his art - and i showed it to Ms. She Devil at the parole office. she made me wait about an hour and then about spit in my face telling me she could care less and so on. i gave her the copy and she threw it on the floor and walked right over it. that was it for me and him and i went back to my office and i deleted his name off all mailing labels and other places. i never have done that in all my years but this guy really got to me. my life went back to semi-normalcy and here comes another letter from him. it too was still ragging on me just in case i hadn't gotten it the first time. i ignored him. a week or so goes by and i get another letter from him. this one was different. i didn't even look at it - my assistant read it for me out of curiosity and she said, 'its from louis - and he's had a change of heart'. wow... okay he sucked me in... hmmm i thought it was a trick. i mean convicts are there... and i am here and we are writing all this stuff back and forth and we've never even met each other and we've somehow managed to have this really big fight... words are powerful and hurtful. i did let him know that i usually get nice and decent respectful letters so his was really a zinger. so as i read his begging for forgiveness letter i realized that we both had allowed this third party thing to come between our good start. he went on and on and of course i had to accept him back.... i had to go make a new mailing label for him - i am way too ADD to address envelopes and ever get them mailed by hand so i bought for my birthday last year this great Dymo label maker... works great for me. so i wrote him back this long (i do not have that much time but i took it) letter and we got back being friends again. he is a Godly man, but he admitted he slipped up and fell backward on that one. So last week i got this other letter from him... and the most incredible piece of art of a little girl holding a blanket... he wrote on the back of it that it was for my 'private collection' which i guess his is the first piece to go in it... it is in those prisma colors and is just incredible... he calls it the child and the blanket. it is a little girl so sweet looking and she's holding a blanket so pretty. he said that my work is like a security blanket for the children it reaches and i was / am honored by it so much i put it right on my desk. he now is signing up to become a permanent artist for our gallery. he is sending in more pieces of the caliber i cannot even describe.

here is the letter he wrote:

Sister Del,
Del, i think a lot of you, i like your forgiving spirit in light of my sharp tongue, that really meant something to me. This painting is my most prized possession, my very best! out of my private collection to be exact. my own mother could have asked for it and ... no dice. however she abandoned mewhen i needed her the most. i spoke to you like a common dog and you dug down deep and gave me love. so
Del i'm loving you also, you own a piece of my heart. this painting is yours. the second reason its yours to show that i am in this with you for keeps i am not giving lip service, my calling is helping our kids, drug addicts, prisoners & gang members and giving them hope, showing them the love Jesus commanded us to give. i hope you find a good place for it in your casa. this painting represents the kids tyou have loved over the years. you have been a security blanket to them (as depicted in the painting) and you have brought back sunshine through the storm also as depicted in the painting. this painting was made for you even before our paths crossed and now it is in the right hands. the painting is ready for framing.
Always, Louis

MY NEW RWANDAN SON - ALEX

2005-02-01T17:36:00.000-08:00

From now on when i receive a great letter that touches me - i'm going to blog it so all can come and read my incredible mail...

amahoro means peace, this is a greeting in the kinyarwanda language.

hug for me all the team that you are working with there in the US, and receive greetings from my new member of bajitoonda called mazima georges who is also a student at national university of Rwanda and an active boy.
yah ,i plan for having training in gambia at the end of the month of march, i 'll have 2 weeks of days off (small holiday) so i want to profit it ,and go to achieve some knowledge about the foundation.
.
Rwanda still have this need of bajitoonda because we have many prisoners who commited Genicide in 1994 and a large number of old released prisoners who are unemployed.

so bajito onda is very needed by me and my whole country. please forgive me for many mistakes of my english because i'm a french spoken person.

hope to read next

your son alex

VIOLENCE IN DALLAS IS KILLING OUR CHILDREN -

2005-01-31T23:41:00.000-08:00

HELP ME HELP STOP THE CRIES OF MOTHERS LOSING THEIR SONS AND DAUGHTERS TO THE VIOLENCE IN DALLAS. those of you who know me, know i do not even watch television. matter of fact i can honestly say i appear on tv more than i watch it - i usually come out on some news story or other about something else rediculous they are wanting to sensationalize in Dallas, but not do anything about. I have been promised the moon by reporter after reporter if i will just help them set up a 'gangie' looking 'feeling' news piece. i do it time after time and they come and film us and whatever gangie guys i have at my fingertips that day and off they go again, on to their next sensational story. meanwhile are they not looking at or listening to what they are even interviewing? when the lights go down and the cameras are packed up - the killing and dying continues as a river of blood is filling our highways and streets and sidewalks and everyone is just saying to themselves... 'well, i am still alive and so are my immediate family' well except for a few of them, and well most of my friends and neighbors all have sons or daughters in prison, on drugs, running around with the evil crowd but their children are not the guilty ones... its their bad friends who they always admit are really not 'THAT BAD' either, they just make bad choices. I had a guy over at my office a few weeks back and i wanted to slap him. WAKE UP!!!!! HELLO!!!! your daughter who you say is really a good kid with bad friends... i don't even know her and i already know by my 'i hate that feeling - feel' that she is most likely not only smoking pot, but using the date rape drug, and more than even more likely shes snorting heroin. now i really hope i'm wrong - but when i used to think surely i cannot be really thinking that about somebody's kid or kids, the next thing i know is some tragedy strikes the household and well... i was just afraid to think what i was thinking could really be true time and time again. What i'm seeing in Dallas IN DENIAL - TEXAS. is that the more affluent a neighborhood is the more the problem with the kids is hidden by a wall of money and influence as well as all the rehab hospitals and clinics getting rich off kids on drugs with wealthy parents who 'just want him to stop and want the problem to be overwith' once and for all.

I have a young boy who i swear if i could have written a script it could not have come out any better. i'm sitting in the back of my store, showroom, office whatever and i hear the door chime - i was begging a so-called religious woman with all the Lordy Hallelujas going on and all the talk about all she wants to do since she is retired is to help small ministries... HELLLLLLLOOOOO I'M THINKING AND EVEN SAYING OUT LOUD..... WE NEED A PLACE IN THE WORST WAY - A BUILDING THAT WE CAN HOUSE ALL OUR PROGRAMS UNDER ONE REAL ROOF - so while she has my mouth quasi watering / now i doubt everything they tell me about wanting to help knowing that they just promise me the moon and then walk outside get in their Lexus and turn on the loudest gospel or christian station and they drive out of our hood and into their good neighborhood and well they forget about me, us, and our problems.... which are once again, 'my calling' THE CHILDREN. so while i'm sitting back there talking to her and thinking 'now why am i even talking to her about her helping us out because it will not happen anyway?' this little boy comes walking around the wall of t-shirts i have hanging all over the place hoping someone will place an order so we can keep the doors open yet another day or so.... (okay i exaggerate - but i have to paint a serious picture or people then think i am a millionaire philanthropist).... so back to the little boy... he walks around the corner and he's carrying a skateboard. .... okay, i'm game... what does this kid want? why is her here? how did he get here? obviously on his skateboard. so he comes in closer and he tells me, 'i have been looking for this place for a long time' - why i told him? 'well i've seen you on television several times and you help kids don't you?' ouch... another kid in dallas who needs help! and nobody to help me help him either.... ouch... my pain starts to burn for him and for me thinking there is just NO WAY i can help another sad story. he continues.... I need to talk to you please.... i leave the woman sitting there and i go into my office with a door on it. i tell him to sit down and well... 'what is it, then i call him Mijo (my son) i call them all Mijo because sometimes it just helps them relax and talk better. he says, 'i have a horrible anger problem... and i fight a lot at school. i hate everyone except my grandmother who i don't hate. i'm thinking.. great another violent kid on my hands... i want to think .. this kid is heading for prison... he's just a mini convict skating his way to a future in hell.... but i stop myself from thinking that... instead 'why do you say you're violent Mijo? he says, finally that he thinks he's a horrible person and he wants to take out his anger on other people who don't deserve it - (now i'm thinking... is that person me?' - but i don't say or think that either for very long).... 'what makes you feel angry indside? he then tells me that he doesn't feel loved. that the only person he ever felt loved him is in prison now for crack cocaine. - how old are you i ask him? eleven years old. wow, i'm thinking and he knows about prison and crack cocaine and even how it is smoked from his uncle's bad example in front of him. then he continues that step his father hates it when the kid watches him shoot up heroin... yikes the kid is now trusting me and bearing his soul to me... i hate that part too because this is the part where i get sucked into trying to begin thinking and praying for a plan to come to me as the plot thickens... but its not a plot i have to remind myself...its this little boy's life... tragic life in Dallas, Texas where he feels he cannot talk to anyone about his life except someone he has seen on TV who he honestly believes cares about him and his hard life. he continued with 'when his father shoots up heroin, he wants the kid to help him tie off his arm, and the kid hates to watch him do it. so he refuses - the stepdad gets angry at him - and after shooting up his mother who also uses drugs fights with the step father who by now is crazy high on heroin and she is high on whatever she is high on and they begin to fight about something all the time. the step father starts beating on the boy's mother and unreported or unaddressed or what has become a very common daily occurrence in Dallas (not in all homes i know... so don't start... but in thousands of homes all over the city) and as they begin beating and defending and screaming and cussing and destroying the things in the room and around the house, the little boy's mother screams for him to rescue her from his stepfather. bear in mind the boy's size.. he is a wisp of a thing, no muscles yet, just frightened sad eyes looking at me as he tells me this story that by now i am fully sucked into it, my heart is crying from the inside and i'm trying to be brave for him, strong for him to know he has indeed come to the right place, where someone really does care about him, his future and his life, totally. we must get through this initial 'damage evaluation' period though. i told him... so what makes you - YOU - angry? he said that he feels so incapable of helping his mother when the drugs make them crazy - and when he loves her no matter what happens he always tries to pull his stepfather off her and to stop the beatings even by putting himself between them and causing the stepfather to then start beating him... i began to then look past his deep set and worried eyes at his face. i then noticed brown scars and i think he saw my attention begin to encompass more of him... he said 'i'm so afraid, please do not tell anyone i was here or what i have told you'. i promised. i told him that i would be here for him, no matter what. and that Bajito Onda is a safe place for kids and all who come here. and that we are not sickos or violent people. we're not perfect but he was in good hands. he told me that his anger towards other is caused by what happens when he tries to rescue his mother... he is beaten badly. oooooh i hated that part. yes, i wanted to go kill his parents or at least give them a taste of what they give him. i wanted to do many things, but i cannot and still hold his trust. i told him he could tell me more and that it would be okay. since that day he has come back many times - about once every two weeks, from his grandmother's house... and since then i have met her and even his little brother, who i also worry about, but i cannot save the world alone, so i must share their hardships with them and pray that someone someday will come and rescue all of us and help us help each other. on another day when he came he told me he was happy he had a 'friend' who was so cool that he could tell his problems to and who would not be mean to him. over the course of those visits to my place, we even exchanged Christmas presents... i gave him $20 which i took to his grandmother's house. then a couple days later she brought him by with a present for me and the sweetest card. it said something like 'to my friend who makes this world a better place for kids like me' ... it was kind of kid scrawled up in the corner and i loved it... i read it after they drove off... but i treasure it. since i never had a kid of my own, i never had those cards and scrawled 'I love you' things around to care about. Now he has brought three other friends who also are going through the same abusive problems... they are just little boys like him. I feel so bad for them, i can see why they form gangs, join gangs and hurt other people when hurt is all they were raised with. on one other visit he shared a deep dark secret with me and as it hurt me terribly i was proud that i am 'stand up' enough to take it as if i am not shocked or that he is a bad person. He told me how one of his uncles friends had 'touched him' and come into his bed with him and he stopped short... 'he said, i'm glad my uncle is in prison because his friends don't come around anymore'. i told him, it was behind him and now we have to move on - i gave him a 'good hug' and rubbed his back a little and told him we would get through these things... together. the last few times i've seen him he says he wants now to be a leader and to help troubled people like himself... he's doing a great job of it too, because as his friends see him changing and becoming stronger he is becoming a point of light in all of their darknesses. he told me that his school grades are getting better and now he's trying in school when before he didn't. i pray that he never becomes a statistic... and remains a silent vote of prevention - i pray he makes it through the maze of deadly dallas in denial. Please pray for all the little children out there tonite who need to know someone like us loves them and cares for their futures. Good nite.

THE MOVIE CHORUS

2005-01-29T22:28:00.000-08:00

If you haven't seen it - you must! It is in French and subtitled, but an awesome movie.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT FRIDAY AFTERNOON AND DRUGS IN DALLAS?

2005-01-28T23:20:00.000-08:00

Well i thought i really had a great assistant... and i did. for at least 24 hours anyway. yesterday i was bragging about what a great guy billy whatever his last name was... i didn't catch it. well this morning i noticed billy was kinda jittery. someone kept calling him back that i didn't know he knew. then in traffic he said.. oh that car looks like someone i'm looking for... when he lives 40 miles from our store.then he messed up putting the transfers onto heat patches for some sportsbags for our great client (great means they pay their tab when we deliver the goods) All Smiles Dental Clinics - and he was fumbling around and messed up all the patches i had left. He about died and stood there with his hands in his pockets like a statue... of course i wanted to kill him but since they aren't due till next week i decided not to. then i noticed he was really acting kinda crack cocaine strange... i called him over to the side... and i said, 'bro... are you fienen? you for sure act like it? he said 'oh heavens no!' ... hmmm.... i thought, then i said, billy come outside and lets have a talk. i usually get five phone calls a minute so while i was out there i tried to talk to him. then i decided to hold him and i told him to pray to God right then and there and he said he was praying... i said, 'if i can't hear you i don't know if God can hear you so lets pray out loud' - now mind you i had billy outside in the front of our store with traffic all over the streets and people coming and going in and out of the places next door and here's me and billy praying... i made him repeat after me... God I am a sinner, I have lied to you, to myself and to everyone around me, I beg you to please come into my heart and cleanse me of this filthy habit and all the habits i have become addicted to. We went on for about five minutes, meanwhile he held me very tight as i felt him become weak i'm sure with guilt and burden of sin. He began to cry and it was real and i'm sure he hated knowing that i knew him so well. about that time Rob came out and handed me the phone because they are used to taking it around to where i am at in the buildings and when he saw that i was praying with billy i waved him back inside. Rob's a good guy so he just widened his eyes and went back inside with the phone. i told him to go to the store and cash that check and bring back the money for Anthony but i warned him that i would not try to protect him from the world because i knew that the drug dealers would be surrounding the liquor store check cashing place. i really had no other choice because they have been cashing our checks for many years - and only a weak person would not make it in and out of there. Dallas is a city filled with temptation and sin, and it is not a city for the weakend. however i cannot and will not be responsible for someone else. they must do it on their own. i feel bad but there are some folks that until they are tired of their lives they will not do anything about it. so today he's gone. seems he was too tempted with the idea of drugs on a friday afternoon. i think i spooked him when i showed him a drug test kit and told him i would be springing one on him regularly. he thanked me profusely because as he said 'i certainly need it'. then i sent him to the closest place around to cash a check so that i could give Anthony a few dollars for his bus money because he has been volunteering from the parole office since he was having trouble getting a job after coming out of prison over three years ago. anthony is a great guy and he has been learning a lot. not much motivation but at least he's quiet until i need him and then he helps a lot. today i decided to bless him with a few bucks and i sent billy to what i call the Barrio Bank and Trust Co - aka Lone Star Liquer Store. at first i said... oh no... i'm not gonna send you billy but then i wanted to see what he would do since he assured me he was fine. that was the last i saw of him. i kept thinking maybe he went to the store, to get a bite to eat, something... but no, he never came back or called.

BAJITO ONDA AFRICA - AMIDU MANSARAY

2005-01-28T22:51:00.000-08:00

I have the sweetest son i never imagined having. He is a chip off the old block. He is from The Gambia African Continent as it is called. We met on the internet about a year and a half ago. He calls me Mum which i think is funny and cool at the same time. He is a great young man of around 27 or 28 who is making an incredible contribution to humanity in Africa as well as other countries and continents. He has been here to the US last year for only three weeks and although it took us almost that time to learn to communicate and bond and trust each other - we finally achieved our goal of 'taking the first global step' together the day before he left the US. He now has founded chapters of Bajito Onda in countries in Africa such as Senegal, Dakar, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, where he was born. When i went to the U.N. Habitat for Safer Cities in Mexico in October I met Nydia Baba from Senegal who now is co-director. In the country of Kenya I have appointed Gathecha to establish our strong country ties there in that country. In Tanzania, an incredible woman i met in Mexico is Kaenelli and she is now director of Bajito Onda Tanzania Africa. all are countries I would like to visit one of these days. i feel i may be extended a formal diplomatic invitation to either Senegal or Kenya very shortly and i intend to go there to establish chapters of operating social programmes under the direction of myself and that country's leader along with the guidance of Amidu Mansaray...

i am getting very excited about the progress in Africa. Since working with the always smiling and equally wonderful Juma Assiago of Nairobi, Kenya who is the world director of the U N Habitat I am now understanding much better how the whole world is able to work in tandem and support peoples and children everywhere in their struggle to be heard and seen in society.

WHO DO YOU SERVE?

2005-01-28T05:20:00.000-08:00

I recently realized that we can only have a choice of serving in three areas of life. OURSELVES, OTHERS, GOD. I believe that in our lives we start out serving ourselves, then we switch to serving others... and finally after realizing the first two were mistakes... we begin to try to serve God, not really knowing how to and knowing for sure that we are trying to slip in a side door because we have been outside all those years of mistaken service which in my case led me to prison and almost to return. God Bless You in your service to Him.

BAJITOBLOG

2005-01-28T04:12:00.000-08:00

PARTY LAST NITE AT THE CAVERN ON LOWER GREENVILLE IN DALLAS... STRANGLEWEED, THUNDERBIRD PRODUCTIONS, MY NEW ASST BILLY (FORGOT HIS LAST NAME BUT HE'S HELLA GREAT) HOPE HE LASTS MORE THAN TWO DAYS :) (SERIOUSLY!!)

PRINTING FOR PEACE

2005-01-26T22:50:00.000-08:00

IF YOU OR SOMEONE YOU KNOW NEEDS ANYTHING PRINTED - WE ARE EXPERTS IN TSHIRTS, DECALS, STICKERS, SIGNS, YOU NAME IT, BANNERS, BUTTONS, WHATEVER. JUST CALL ME AND WE CAN DISCUSS YOUR NEEDS. WE ALSO DO ARTIST PROMO PACKAGE MARKETING PIECES.

TAKE CARE AND CALL 214-275-6632 ASK FOR ME, DEL

WELCOME TO BAJITOBLOG!

2005-01-26T21:37:00.000-08:00

Well i never thought i would be doing a blog. i'm not even sure i know what it is but it seems like a combination of fun, work and my adventurous world all wrapped into one. so please be patient while i figure it out ... okay?

i write so many letters to guys in prison and others to people on the internet - this may be a quick way to keep everyone posted. i think you can also reply to it if you like to.