I hucked my trash into the dumpster today and nearly hit a homeless man in a blue Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt. He was rummaging through the trash and didn’t even notice until he heard me apologize.

“I guess that’s what I get for being here,” he said, in a sad descending tone.

He was not the first I have seen at that dumpster. I have thought about making an arrangement with these scavengers, where I could leave them what they like in a special spot, but my fear of their dark moments (as I know their dark moments are the darkest) has stopped me.

Welcome mat

They call this city the “welcome mat” to the largest single-site employer in Texas, the U.S. Army at Fort Hood. With that metaphor our dumpsterdivers must be the mud the Army scraps off its boots.

The Army brings $25 billion dollars into this state, yet the homeless/ indigent problem here is extreme for a mid-sized city (pop. 132,000). I once wrote a story about a woman who gave birth in the Killeen Wal-Mart bathroom and then disappeared.

Baby Jane, as the child was called, died before anyone even knew she was in there.

People blame it on the Army, with its many hangers on, brought out from the poor communities of this nation, it was explained to me. Enlisted soldiers, hoping to live out the American dream.

I have heard stories of homeless children who live inside the gates of the Army post, sleeping in cars. Drug dealers and other nefarious activities also are conducted in the on-post community, call it a city, of 50,000 troops and 20,000 civilians.

They bring along their unemployed brother, or a pregnant girlfriend comes to Killeen looking for support. In many cases she will not find it and ends up walking the streets of Killeen homeless.

Killeen does not have a general use homeless shelter, something I have written about extensively since I found this out in September.

In the winter a korean man named Steve Chae runs a soup kitchen called  Jesus Hope & Love Mission and when the temperature drops below 32 degrees the city allows him to pull people into the atrium for the night.

Chae is a gimp, and I’ll be damned if anyone can understand him through his thick Korean accent, but he also is an inspiration.

In December, Chae boldly closed on a $120,000 piece of property in dowtown Killeen, which he plans to make into a grand transitional house and emergency shelter complex for Killeen’s homeless.

Meanwhile, at city hall, members of the Community Development Advisory Committee – the folks in charge of distributing the $1.5 million in funds the city received from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development – are telling Chae he is not likely to qualify for any funds this year due to his lack of experience.

Chae has paid only $5,000 so far on his mortgage. With a whopping $115,000 to go, not to mention the interest, things look dismal for the homeless shelter project. When I asked Chae what he thought about this he did not seemed worried.

“It’s not my shelter,” he said, in his broken english. “God started it. God will finish it.”