WATT MAKES DIFFERENCE OFF GRIDIRON, TOO
One hurricane Harvey survivor’s message to Texans’ star: Muchas gracias, Big Muscle Man
She never did CHANNELVIEW, T E X AS say much when she came here, figuring the women and men she prayed with and ate alongside and cried to were, like her, here for a reason.
That was always enough for Maria de Jesus, and maybe that’s the one thing that hasn’t changed in the nearly 16 months since she began coming to Iglesia Cristiana Vision Divina, a tiny roadside ministry and food pantry east of Houston.
Even on a sunny and celebratory Sunday like this, when a few dozen congregants and neighbours have gathered under tents to watch the red-hot Houston Texans on television, she has not asked a woman named Joaquina about her four dogs that drowned when hurricane Harvey dumped 33 trillion gallons of water on southeast Texas in August 2017.
“Those memories come back,” Maria will say, and it’s hard enough keeping her own memories at bay.
Which is why — so many months after floodwaters rose and receded, her home was damaged and repaired — Maria still comes here. The volunteers and locals help distract Maria from thinking about the things she lost and the fear that persists, and week after week she returns to celebrate and give silent thanks to the people whose kindness helped push her a little closer toward normalcy.
Speaking of, there — on the TV in the corner — is one of those people, and though Maria has never met him and assumes she never will, they are connected. One is a 66-year-old hair dresser and former refugee from El Salvador, the other is a 29-year-old mega-millionaire from a small city in southern Wisconsin. They are from different worlds, but he is the reason Maria wore her Texans T-shirt on this day and now sits at a folding table, once used to distribute food that he helped provide, watching a game she barely understands.
And just then, the television shows Texans defensive end J.J. Watt standing on the sideline at NRG Stadium across town. Abigail Saucedo, the pastor’s daughter, taps Maria’s shoulder so she will see him, but it’s too late. The camera has cut away.
Maria dramatically drops her head in comic disappointment. Watt is a three-time NFL defensive player of the year, but she enjoys watching him for different reasons.
“I don’t know his name,” she says. “But it’s a big muscle man.”
She smiles, and Abigail points out she’s blushing. Maria shrugs.
“I like the way he walks,” she says, and a moment later everyone at the table is laughing.
During those first hours after Harvey made landfall, Maria stood at her window and watched the rain. She prayed for it to stop, but the Category 4 storm was unrelenting: a steady downpour that dropped 150 cm amid 210-km/h winds on coastal Texas. Creeks and bayous swelled, their banks became overwhelmed, and water crested and spread across the area’s flatlands and crept eventually under Maria’s front door.
A puddle became a few inches, and by the time Maria’s youngest son came home, the water had reached their thighs. Brian wrapped his arms around his mother’s chest, pushing against a current as they made their way to a neighbour’s home on a higher plot.
“Thank you, God,” Maria would later remember thinking after they found shelter, “because I’m alive.”
After five days of rain, Maria returned to her home and began taking inventory of her possessions. Twenty-six years earlier, she had left El Salvador during the worst of a civil war marked by the nation’s clandestine and merciless “death squads.” Maria would later say she departed her homeland with such haste that she brought only her four children.
She found Texas to be colder than she was used to, so her first purchase was a grey sweater that draped to her knees, then a pair of plain sneakers. Buying things felt, to her, distinctly American, so she soon found herself collecting clothing and shoes. Maria later identified a wood bedroom suite, and she promised herself that someday it would be hers.
“Everything is something you worked for,” she would recall much later, each item a trophy of her long hours at the hair salon, something beyond the food and security for a family that grew to five kids after Brian was born in 1993. Sometimes she’d walk into her bedroom, admiring the dresser’s dark metal hardware and textured inlay, and tell herself she’d made it.
But then the clouds gathered, the rain kept falling, and all those possessions absorbed water from creek beds and sewers, lacing the walls and everything in them with a brown tint and a musty smell. In those first moments back in her house, she found a garbage bag and dumped her grey sweater and sneakers inside, the first of about a dozen bags.
A few hundred miles north and west, Watt was in a Dallas hotel following the constant news coverage. Homes flooding, soaked families on the run, the most basic essentials disappearing.
“It was everywhere,” he said more than a year later.
When he finally turned away from the television, his social media feeds were similarly overcome.
At one point, the former walk-on at the University of Wisconsin who used the chip on his shoulder and tireless work ethic to become one of the NFL’s most feared players and — after signing a contract extension worth as much as US$100 million in 2014 — richest stars, signed up for an account on the crowdfunding site YouCaring. com. Then he closed the shades and pointed a phone at himself.
“That’s our city,” he said in that first video, posted to Twitter Aug. 27, 2017. “It’s very tough to watch your city get hit by such a bad storm and not be there to help.”
Watt set a fundraising goal of $200,000, contributing half that amount himself. Two hours later, his goal had been eclipsed. Donations would top $500,000 within 24 hours, $1 million shortly after that, $10 million within four days.
“We’re gonna leave the link open; we’re gonna see how high we can get it,” Watt said in a followup video, and as the weeks passed, the fund would generate $41.6 million — the biggest crowdsourced fundraiser in history.
Watt’s charitable foundation oversaw distribution of the funds to eight non-profits, one of which was the Houston Food Bank. That organization would divide portions of its two rounds of funding — in addition to improved resources, such as warehouse space and tractor trailers to deliver food — to 30 member agencies, one of which was Iglesia Cristiana Vision Divina.
That family-run ministry, which helps the homeless and needy not far from the tributaries of Burnet Bay, expanded its refrigeration and storage space so it could, every day for four months, open its gates to a few hundred people, one of whom was a shaken and silver-haired woman named Maria de Jesus.
Each day she’d leave her house and wait in line, which often snaked down Market Street, to again collect things: necessities now, not trophies. She stood under a tent next to strangers who’d lost their homes, across a table from volunteers who offered food or spare rooms or empathy.
Abigail, the pastor’s daughter, assigned her then-four-year-old, Jasslyn, to stand beyond the gates and hold a sign that read “FREE FOOD.” The pastor, Ana Carreon, filled tables with canned goods and fresh produce, opening her arms to embrace visitors for as long as they needed it.
“We did a lot of prayer,” Carreon now says, and the six women who run the mission sold tamales to raise extra money, combed social media to find neighbours who needed an assist, held occasional Facebook Live discussions to announce that the food pantry was, despite water on the road or threatening clouds, open.
The months passed, and Abigail says more than 9,300 families passed through the gate. One individual kept returning, even multiple times a day, though it was sometimes to distribute something of her own. Maria, often using repurposed items she had gathered at the food pantry, brought meals for the volunteers that she had cooked on a friend’s stove or, one time, with a hot plate plugged in at the church.
Maria’s home, which she shares with her son Brian, is mostly back to the way it was before the storm. Her azalea is blooming, and neighbours have decorated for the holidays. Work remains on the inside; electrical outlet covers and baseboard trim haven’t been installed, and Maria’s walls hold no picture frames. Eventually they will, she says, but memories and the feeling of security are often the hardest things to rebuild.
On this December morning, however, she points to the tan boots she’s wearing — $10 to restart a new collection — as a symbol of her climb back.
“With patience, you can buy those things again,” she says.
For now, there is more work. After she’s finished here, Maria will head to the hair salon to begin her shift. But when the line weakens at the food pantry, the discussion turns briefly to the Texans and Maria’s favourite player, who is enjoying a resurgent season. What, by the way, would she tell Watt if she had the chance?
She smiles.
“Muchas gracias,” she says, adding she’d wrap her arms around the big man as a way to say thank you, and maybe it’s the dull light inside the storage facility, but it again looks like Maria is blushing.
It’s very tough to watch your city get hit by such a bad storm and not be there to help.