Serving homeless veterans in our city on one of the coldest days of this past break, while others spent their break indoors and cozy, MACTeach had students helping out the homeless in downtown.
“We were downtown at a church for BWA (Broken Warriors Angels),” senior Erica Pasquale-Davis, the event’s coordinator, said. “The event was specified for homeless veterans, but we were helping out just all homeless people in general.”
Through these acts, countless people benefited from the several services and items provided at the event.
“We were passing out clothes, food, hygiene supplies, and the BWA was offering medical support through free eye exams for the homeless veterans, ” Pasquale-Davis said.
The homeless were also receiving items such as backpacks to help them carry everything they needed with them. But backpacks weren’t the only thing they were able to be provided with.
“We didn’t have any belts, so I gave a man I was helping out mine, and my pants were falling down the rest of the day,” senior Klaus Dita said.
Apart from being able to give to the homeless, an unexpected turn happened when senior Brenna Leal-Faz received something special.
“I helped this one guy by taking his cat for him because he was unable to care for her anymore,” Leal-Faz said. “It was definitely [memorable] when I got Foo [the cat]… he had recently become homeless, and in order to work at the job that he got at the restaurant, he couldn’t have her, he had no home to put her in.”
With the impacts that these students had on these people. They already start making plans for improving and planning a new service opportunity to benefit the community.
“I think we could have worked longer, and I think we could have maybe spanned it over multiple days, and maybe multiple areas, not just the downtown area, to get to more of the population of homeless,” Leal-Faz said. “Cause there are so many homeless in San Antonio, not just downtown.”
With more ideas coming for the future of MACTeach, improvements will come to ensure a better experience for the homeless through the aid of MACTeach.
“It’s important to address immediate issues, but a lot of the things provided that day are short-term issues,” Dita said. “If at all possible, I think it would be neat to bring in people, like social workers, to provide them with more resources and even provide assistance with employment.”
