Success Story - Jose

By Monique Sandhu

Jose, a soft spoken and thoughtful man, has been a Texan his whole life; he was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. He came to Austin quite a bit in the 70’s to visit friends, and decided to move here in 1985. He was a chef for many years, working at restaurants all over Austin, ranging from Burnet Road to 6th Street. He then went into a BBQ trailer business in 1995 with his roommate. The business stayed alive for seven years, and Jose enjoyed cooking brisket and potato salad, serving his customers and doing what he liked. His potato salad was even so famous that local women would buy it and pass it off as their own!

Success Story- Harold

Imagine being six years old, in a new country where everything was unfamiliar. If this life wasn’t challenging enough, imagine being stripped of all your rights and losing everything you have. He had no forms of identification, so he wasn’t legally living here. This was the life of a child named Harold. His mother married an American man and moved here from Germany to start a new life for herself and her six year old son, Harold. As the years went on, Harold suffered abuse from his step-father and at the age of 17 he ran away from home. He led a life full of darkness, loneliness and sickness. He had a long history of heart attacks, congestive heart failure, a pace maker (this was his second one), hypertension, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cirrhosis of the liver, among other things. 

Diotsis, a thoughtful and frank man, begins his story by explaining the environment he was raised in while living in a small town in Texas. Like many of the folks we work with, he was part of a large family with 11 other siblings and was surrounded by poverty, alcoholism and violence. Though he considers these factors to have negatively influenced him and his choices, he notes how his mother tried to explain that not all places in the world were like that. As he grew up, he suffered from substance and alcohol addictions which ultimately led to a 17- year prison sentence.

Having just moved into his new apartment in early September, Jesse is certainly excited about having completed his journey out of homelessness.  While he now thinks about things such as taking cooking classes, decorating his new apartment, or going out for karaoke, Jesse’s 44 years of living with disabilities and 5 years of homelessness made his journey from the streets to his new home very hard, yet all the more inspiring.