‘I do matter’: Holiday dinner a welcome pause for Dallas homeless, but struggles on street as real as ever

After months of sleeping in an abandoned building, Nicole Ogilvie and her girlfriend, Tammarra Culpepper, were kicked out with only a downtown bridge for shelter.

For a short time, they had a mattress of their own. It kept them off the increasingly cold and wet pavement near the Deep Ellum neighborhood where they rested their heads each night. But just this week, they were forced to give it up when some government official types told them it had to go.

“A lot of people had other things too, you know? And they took all that as well,” Culpepper said of her neighbors. “I guess they say, ‘No getting comfortable.’”

Ogilvie and Culpepper recounted the loss of their one worldly possession as they cut into turkey and scooped up mashed potatoes with Michelle Elsehsah and her two children, Adam and Hana, at the annual Thanksgiving Day dinner put on by OurCalling homeless ministry.

The Elsehsah clan — and dozens more like them from throughout the Dallas area — donated $50 and a part of their holiday to share a meal with hundreds of homeless Dallasites at the OurCalling campus, a modern two-story building just south of downtown.

OurCalling is a faith-based, daytime outreach center for the homeless of Dallas. Unlike other Thanksgiving Day dinners where volunteers serve food in an assembly line, the nonprofit pairs families with people experiencing homelessness in the hope they forge a bond.

“It’s more about the relationship than the food,” said Pastor Wayne Walker, OurCalling’s executive director. “The homeless community can find food every single day. But they can’t find a family meal.”

The dinner features many of the usual Thanksgiving staples: Each table is decorated by a host family. Some have candles and flowers. Others are covered by festive tablecloths painted with orange and red leaves. Suzanne Rowntree, a Plano resident, brought a pair of rag dolls that decorated her family’s Thanksgiving Day table for decades.

Plates of pie and cake are passed around after dinner by children carrying dessert trays twice their size.

The room is thick with chatter and laughter, especially at Derrick Scott’s table. He moved to Dallas just six months ago from Louisiana in search of a job — he found one — and is living in a tent community with his girlfriend, Linda Davis.

Scott has Tracy De La Rosa, her husband Philip, and friend Sandi Banks in stitches.

“We all have the same sense of humor,” De La Rosa said.

“This one,” Banks says, pointing at Scott, “is very quick.”

They laugh over a game in which each is given a Thanksgiving Day name based on the first letter of their given name and birth date. Davis, for example, will be forever remembered as “Butter Messy Dressing.”

And like all Thanksgiving Day feasts, it ends with a nap for most. Only, for Ogilvie and Culpepper, they’ll recover from their tryptophan-induced coma without a mattress.

Growing homeless population

For two years in a row, Dallas’ homeless population has increased. The total homeless population counted in 19 cities that make up Dallas and Collin counties was 4,538, up from 4,140 in 2018, according to an annual census. What’s more, the number of people without shelter in Dallas has risen 725% from 2009 to 2019, according to the Texas Tribune.

The annual count found that the chronically homeless — people with a disability who have experienced homelessness for at least a year — grew by 11 percent. And the number of veterans without a home also spiked. As of 2019, one in every 10 homeless people in the area is a veteran.

Observers point to a number of factors contributing to the jump in the city’s homeless population. Chief among them is the region’s booming housing market and a dearth of affordable housing.

And more recently, the Dallas City Council has been wrestling over how to change rules that prohibit churches from offering their buildings as shelters during bad weather, something OurCalling’s Walker has been fighting for at City Hall.

“Our beef is not with the city,” Walker said. “Our beef is with some of the political motivations by politicians who are more interested in answering to a few constituents rather than the need of the entire city. Individuals who are experiencing homelessness are as much a citizen of the city as a homeowners.”

‘They have the resources’

The 63-year-old, who has a striking resemblance to the actor Jamie Foxx, has been staying at a shelter and volunteering at OurCalling for two years now. It helps keep him out of trouble, he says. It’s hard to find a job and an apartment given his record and disability. He’s a chef and would be a welcome addition in any kitchen, he says. But standing for too long hurts too much.

When asked what the city can do to help him and others in a similar situation, Elias’s answer is simple and echoes many of the peers in the room: housing.

“All these empty buildings are just sitting there, boarded up,” Elias said. “They can renovate these buildings — rooms and apartments for these people. They have the resources to do these things — if they wanted to.”

The lack of housing options makes him feel unwanted.

“If I don’t have the money, I don’t matter,” he said.

Monet Mercer, who has sponsored a Thanksgiving Day table at OurCalling for three years, looks on.

“You do matter,” she tells Elias.

“Oh, I know I matter,” he replies with a smile. “I love me. And I have a God that tells me every day that I do matter.”