Sing A Song Of Hope Spiritual Group Victory Outreach’s Street-Corner Rallies Use Rap Music To Help Draw Gangsters, Addicts To God

Hannah Dalager was standing on a street corner when she found God.

She had bottomed out after years of smoking marijuana, slamming down drinks and dropping her bags at the doors of gang members in Yakima.

“I went looking for trouble and I found it,” the 16-year-old Spokane teen said. “I was an angry little girl.”

On that unnamed corner, two years ago, she wandered up to a group rapping some tunes.

What Hannah said she found was an outstretched hand and faith in God, which she instantly traded for her beer bottle and anger.

On Thursday, Hannah returned the favor by coming back to the Hillyard streets where she grew up.

At the corner of Haven and Columbia she joined more than a dozen performers from Victory Outreach, a Spokane spiritual group that focuses on reforming gangsters and addicts. It all starts with the lure of rap.

While the music boomed and bodies swayed, Portland rapper LG Wise told it like it is:

“If I didn’t trust my mother; If I didn’t trust my father; who could I trust?

“So I turned to the streets.”

Wise rapped about watching his fellow gangsters being buried in closed caskets, and staring at death down the barrel of a drug dealer’s gun. When the dealer lets the trigger go, Wise knows it is God who saves him.

“All of us look like nobodies out here,” Wise called out to the crowd. “We serve the type of God that takes nobodies and makes them somebodies.

“I gave it up to Christ, but it’s still a fight. It’s still a fight.”

Victory Outreach is lead by Pastor Alvin Moreno. “We target a lot of the hard core gangs before they can get a strong base in a place,” Moreno said between performances and testimonials on the street corner. “Our interest is not to shove the Gospel down your throat. We just tell people not to give up hope.”

Moreno, himself a former addict and gang member from Fresno, Calif., often brings pieces of his past to the rallies - usually in the form of other California converts - former addicts, gang-bangers and street people.

Take 19-year-old Wil Ybanez. Growing up on the streets of Fresno nearly killed him, he said.

“I always had somebody comin’ in trying to be my dad,” the member of Eternal Life Gangsters called out to the crowd. “They were always leaving. But you ain’t got to be out there no more.

“You don’t have to worry about going into the room and crying and crying. That’s just the power of God.”

It wasn’t clear if Victory Outreach made an impact on the crowd or the Hillyard neighbors who couldn’t help but hear the amplified message.

Although traffic along Haven stopped occasionally and a few curious people wandered by, no one seemed to stay very long. But that doesn’t phase Moreno. People need to take notice, he said.

“I think it’s everybody’s business to care,” he said. “We might reach out to one of their teenagers. A lot of times we’ve been written off.

“But as long as there is breath, there is hope.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 color photos

MEMO: The Victory Outreach rallies continue today at 4 p.m. at the corner of Broadway and Nettleton; at 6:30 p.m. Saturday at the YMCA gym, 507 N. Howard, and at 1 p.m. Sunday at Victory Outreach, 3011 E. Wellesley.