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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 31, 1987)
> I 1 OA/The Battalion/Monday, August 31,1987 •4 athollc officials: Refugee shelter will stay pul OWNSVILLE (AP) — Five and 20,000 refugees later, lie diocese officials say the new >scar Romero shelter for Cen- mericans will stay put for a as forced to leave the little >f San Benito 20 miles from sville after the city commis- ..here ordered the shelter Neighborhood residents had ained of a lack of order i the center, which sometimes cl as many as 300 Central cans. e people in the area were not ■ the Central American peo- aid San Benito Mayor Cesar iez, who first announced he d the casa out of San Benito in > “They were against having so people in a small area. Their e is different from ours, from ireas of Central America, and think there’s nothing wrong alking across people’s yards.” e new location, built on a sun- .ied six-acre tract amid scrub u just outside the Brownsville city limits at a cost of $150,000, houses more than 100 Central Americans. More than two-thirds of them are Nicaraguans who traveled 1,500 miles through Mexico and slipped across the Rio Grande, said officials with the Catholic Diocese of Brownsville, which operates the home. The Immigration and Naturaliza tion Service has a hands-off policy toward the shelter, because it is con sidered a church, said Omer Sewell, director of the INS’ Harlingen dis trict. Diocese Bishop John Joseph Fitz patrick at the formal blessing of the shelter on July 19, said, “We’ve taken care of 20,000 people who otherwise would have been out on the streets. “We pray especially for the poor est of the poor who come to us daily from Central America to seek food and shelter and hope,” the bishop told a crowd of about 400 before he sprinkled holy water around the spartan complex of cinder-block buildings. But some residents near the new site say the diocese has ignored their wishes by putting the shelter there. A group called United We Stand picketed the shelter one day and has front of my property,” King said. He and others in the group fear the shelter will bring crime and alien smugglers into the neighborhood. Maria Acosta, who lives nearby, '‘We’ve taken care of 20,000 people who otherwise would have been out on the streets. We pray especially for the poorest of the poor who come to us daily...” — Diocese Bishop John Joseph Fitzpatrick built a tower looming over the site, from which the anti-Casa Romero group says it plans to keep an eye on the place. Joe King, a nearby resident who serves as spokesman for United We Stand, said, “Of course, the neigh borhood has not accepted this thing.” The group filed suit against the Catholic diocese seeking to shut down the new shelter. “Already there’s strange-looking people walking down the street in said she worries about the safety oi her teen-age daughters. “My daughters used to be able to take walks in the neighborhood, but now they can’t” because they are fol lowed, Acosta said. Bob White, who operates the Gulf Breeze Mobile Park down the street, thinks the retired Midwesterners who fill his trailers during the winter will take their business elsewhere. But Fitzpatrick said the shelter residents make a point to stay out of trouble, because they’ll be deported if arrested. Sister Juliana Garcia, a 54-year- old nun from Spain, who is director of the shelter, said,“The majority of the people of Brownsville accept this house.” She said people from the commu nity volunteer time and some come on Saturdays to socialize. “The people of Central America are a very joyful people, and they come here to enjoy with us,” she said. The routine at the shelter in cludes early rising and lights out about 10 p.m., English classes, reli gious instruction and lessons on ge ography and civics, said Hernan Gonzalez, who heads the diocese’s Christian Services division. Refugees usually stay two to three weeks, helping with the cleaning and cooking, before moving on, he said. “No one wants to stay in a dormitory with 50 other people where there’s no privacy,” Gonzalez said. Many of the refugees say they came here to flee war, military serv ice and their government. Estela Calderon, 29, fromj Nicaragua, said, "We camel flee communism. It’s ^ inuljl state there.” Maximiliano Hernandez v |_ another Nicaraguan, saidhelS country with his wife and old son because “the goven*|j wants to militarize the populati' He said he was tortured IS, Sandinista government after wl accused of counter-revolutiomB MA tivity. fighte land ( “They hit me with sandbag Sunda gave me electrical shocks intW the Pe vulnerable places,” Hernandt; U.S.-e Casa oppements, however , towan the church of deliberatelybrtjs Irac in thousands of potentialradiJ Saturc King asked, “Are you Iran 1 with liberation theology? Ifyoi| nues t that, you’ll know why they art J and f< eling people into this country tions c Gonzalez, with the dioceit® Par agrees, and said rnostoftherefj were are fleeing a radical governs comm search of peaceful, apoliticallr*B Irar Londt ok tempts customers with homemade pies Woman trades flower store for bakery shop TDERLAND (AP) — When people are rolling over in sleep, Janet Davis is rolling re dough. 3 a.m. most days, the lights a at J&J Homemade Pies, and n’t be long before the smell of namon rolls fills the little e-turned-bakery off Twin lighway here. er the cinnamon rolls are hed, several employees, . y members of Davis’ family . nt different fillings in the rolls and top them with a glaze before putting them in ven. d in another room, someone x.ing the dough that will be- fried pies — Davis’ hottest- g item. he employees try to get the ot of the work done before the comes up, the phone starts ing and the regulars start stop- by for a bite of breakfast on ir way to work. it there never seems to be gh time to get everything before hungry customers coming in. “It’s pretty hard to be right in the middle of a batch of something and them have to go and wait on a customer when you’re all covered with flour,” Davis says. “But sometimes that’s what you have to do,” she says. Davis owned a flower shop for years until she stopped one day and figured just how many com petitors she had. “I started looking around and it seemed like there was a flower shop just about everywhere I looked,” she says. “But there weren’t any bake ries,” Davis says. “I raised four sons and all I ever did was cook, so I figured I al ready had the training,” she says. So she cleared out the flower ar rangements two years ago and re placed them with the items she needed to start her bakery. And when the bakery moved from its former, out-of-the-way lo cation on Spurlock Road to Twin City Highway last February, she had to start ordering twice the amount of ingredients to keep up with orders. “People don’t realize the volume we deal in here,” Davis says. “We go through 300 to 400 pounds of flour a week.” Cecilia Bevins, the only J&J em ployee who isn’t a member of Mrs. Davis’ family, remembers her first day at the bakery during the holi day season. She was helping Davis make pe can pies. “She told me to crack 98 eggs into a bowl and I just looked at her and asked her how many eggs she really wanted me to crack,” Bevins says. “I thought she was kidding,” she says. The bakery is open from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Satur day, Davis says, “but if someone calls ahead of time and wants to pick something up at 6:30 — or even 5:30, we’ll have it ready for them.” Davis lets customers dictate her store hours to a certain extent, and she also lets them dictate her wares. You name it, they bake it, she says. “Sometimes, somebody will come in and give me a recipe and ask me to fix it for them, which I do,” Davis says. “And people are always suggesting new recipes for me to try.” Davis also prepares non-dairy desserts and convincing “sweets” for diabetics. She says she wasted countless eggs trying to make a diabetic an gel food cake until someone told her that angel food cake is one of the few regular desserts diabetics can eat. Davis started out by baking tra ditional pies. But it wasn’t long before her four sons talked her into making fried pies for them to take to work and sell. They “went over like gangbus- ters,” she says. So she bought thq necessary equipment to make large quantities of fried pies. That equipment comes in handy now that she sells more than 1,500 of the pastries a week from deliv eries to stores and walk-in busi ness. Davis follows two rules in her business: Don’t skimp and don’t get in a hurry. Getting in a hurry usually re sults in wasting materials, she says. And she doesn’t skimp on ingre dients because that’s just plain good business. She prides herself in the home made filling she puts in her cus tard pies: coconut, chocolate, sweet potato and lemon. She says she refuses to use pre pared filling she can buy by the bucket. It’s a lot more work to use homemade fillings, Davis acknowl edges — enough to keep every body busy — her four sons, three daughters-in-law, husband and mother. “But I’ve had older people come in and say, ‘I used to buy fried pies like this years and years ago, and you don’t see them like this any more,’ ” she says. And when that happens, Davis says, all the early morning hours spent stirring pie filling amid clouds of flour are worth it. Iraqi shells 'Paradise brightens of inventor Iraq’s rget It a uck bad: Th« monk Ir stn Ab. i ■ns main! 1>I \ ION' (AP) — The:. W()un , is half hidden by an ancien.- those and the collapsed remains til front porch. A refrigerator and stove appliance purgatory neat door. The yard is testimony I years of never discarding thing that might bear sob ture use: buckets, planks, of tires, wire cable and dozen aged vehicles. John Davis, 85, calls it Pari Hill. Davis has raised cattle irf on a farm a few miles wej town most of his life. Davis is an inventor, a ho turist and a builder of muss struments. ) BOJ autom Sunda womai tires b He’s experimented withrf - ^ y ing on fruit and pecan trees hy nol "If I could go ’roundI u L ee ; world, I’d spend money q 0 {, er n fast,” he says. “But I can'tr|^ on a [; can’t get nobody to stay he::.» take care of this place forme J T1 — a ho rum - said. I INTERFMATERNITY COUNCIL fore cc ofi wii Robert The leased held. presents *‘Fraternity Life Seminar But 9 9 gunm; aunt, t 24-vea Dur ports: other, gunm: identil I She Come Find Out What It’s All About Im; This will be your only chance to visit the 22 Fraternity’s at one time at which time you will be able to obtain rush schedules and information from their respective tables. 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