Living The Generous Life
The family of Joshua and Erika Caldwell, seen here with children (from left) Kory, Ciara and Alora, is named national Navy Family of the Year for its generous volunteer work with Hawaii’s homeless.
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Del.icio.usferred to Hawaii, and while he was at sea Erika was left at home with the kids and suffering from occasional epileptic seizures.
“They were enough to handicap life a little bit,” she says, while also talking about the effect on the children. “They were really young, and they knew that Mama was having bad times. There were some times I would walk around the commissary and literally walk around for hours because I would forget where I was. During that time it was really scary.”
And the outlook didn’t get better. While Joshua was at sea, Erika’s doctor sent her medical records for review and the opinion was that she had six to eight months to live, and that she would probably go blind before then.
“He came back from Westpac (a deployment to the Western Pacific) and we had a couple of days of bliss, walking around and enjoying the things that he had missed. Then I had to tell him. So we sat down and talked, and he smiled and patted my hand and said, ‘We are going to be OK.’”
He was right. But why, medically speaking, no one can say.
“I don’t like to say we are religious people. We are Christians, and our church was praying for us the whole time, but it seems that in my personal life, literally the week before, it was bringing me down. I was questioning things. I was getting bitter at that point - three little kids to raise, he was gone all the time and I realized then that I needed to thank the Lord for it,” she says as her voice begins to crack and tears to flow. “That’s something I never did before. I just turned over a new attitude ... to be thankful instead of praying for healing. There is nothing wrong with praying for healing, but it was the bitterness I needed to deal with.
“That next week is when I found out it was gone.”
As miraculous as it seems, between her scheduled six-month MRIs the tumor had disappeared. She suffered no ill effects. It was something her doctor had read about but had never seen. She has been healthy ever since.
Now that they don’t have health problems to worry about, the family can focus more of their energies to giving back - which, for the Caldwells, centers on helping the homeless. Some of their events are organized through Faith Baptist Church in Kailua or other organizations. Other times it can simply mean providing a hungry person with a sandwich, a cold person a sleeping bag or a shoeless man with slippers.
“When you see someone on the street, that is somebody’s son or daughter, maybe someone’s father or mother,” says Joshua, who during their last tour of Hawaii befriended a homeless man who had lost contact with his family. The Caldwells helped him connect with his mother, who had not heard from him in years. “When I met that man on the street and spoke to his mom, it really was somebody’s son, and they were worried about him, and now she knows he’s alive and he’s OK. She didn’t know that for many years.” The man, named Cory, remains homeless, but the connection to his mother enabled him to get some much-needed identification, which made his life a bit easier. The family continues to see him on occasion. Recently while driving near Pearl Harbor they spotted the man, and Kory, Ciara and Alora ordered their father to halt the vehicle until they could come up with a small donation. Erika says their experiences with Cory taught them a lot about dealing with the homeless.
“We always ask what do you need or have you eaten, because these people are not thinking long term. I think we’ve made that mistake before with Cory, trying to get him cleaned up and back into society,” she says. “Sometimes they have been out of society for so long they are a fish out of water and it scares them to death.”
Joshua says people need to change their image of the homeless. He acknowledges that some have mental illnesses and some abuse drugs, but he’s quick to point out that many others are just victims of bad circumstances.
“Recently I had a guy ask me for money. It was an awkward situation. I thought he was asking me for money, and when I got to talking to him it turned out he had a place. It wasn’t that he was homeless, he just didn’t have any money. He had spent all his money on his wife’s medication, and he had this bike that he rode to work and he was trying to sell me his bike to get money to buy groceries. As a kid, you see homeless people on the street and it’s easy to say they’re drug addicts or that they are crazy. But when you talk to them, sometimes that is the case - and I just didn’t like passing people all the time and telling my kids it’s OK to ignore them.”
During the interview, a homeless man, as is his habit, walks along the sidewalk on the other side of the street.
Joshua’s next job, Erika notes, is to get him a pair of slippers.
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