HARLINGEN — Moonlight.
That’s what Meizie Salinas’s name means in one of the tribal languages she encountered in the Congo during a missionary trip to that West African country.
It was 1994 and Salinas, now 71, was praying with several local clergy under the moonlight.
“You have a bright smile,” one of those in attendance told her. “The moon is bright tonight and I give you the name Meizie, which means moonlight.”
And so it was that on her return home she respectfully asked her parents for permission to change her name from “Rita” to the new name given by her Congolese friends. They gave their blessing, and she made the change. She’s worn it proudly since that time.
Meizie, a retired Army chaplain, has spent the past three decades doing extensive outreach and missionary work to several African countries. Her home is decorated with a broad array of African motifs. Fabric zebras graze along walls, wooden elephants raise their trunks, and giraffes peak over boxes of wall hangings and other crafts she’s created in her retirement. Those crafts she often converts into cash to support mission work she and her husband have carried out for many years.
Her crafts are many and varied, as are the techniques she’s learned during an entire lifetime, including decoupage, sewing, embroidery and quilting.
How did this all start?
“Well, my mother, she was somewhat of an artist,” she said. “She started me out in sewing, and then later I got the bug for quilting. After quilting I wanted to learn how to do embroidery and then just one craft after another and then making jewelry and, just, you name it.”
She’s decorated her home with an artist’s flare, not surprising when you consider she has a degree in interior design which she has utilized well. But in her professional life both in the military and in the civilian sector she was always a chaplain.
Meizie hails from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she attended a Catholic high school with only two or three other African American students. It was not a pleasant experience.
“They just didn’t like me,” she said. “That was just the message to me.”
The feeling was further aggravated by her understanding that her only option was to become a nun, and that was definitely “not for me.”
“I begged my mother, ‘Please don’t make me go back,’” she recalled.
Meanwhile, as the youngest child, she often accompanied her mother to visit the sick and the shut-ins, and her mother impressed on her the need to serve others.
So in 1970, she attended an Episcopal seminary in Austin and thereafter, in 1974, joined the Army as both an active duty officer and reservist. She served at a number of installations throughout the country. Curiously, she even took Special Forces training at Ft. Bragg, South Carolina.
Why would an Army chaplain want to take Special Forces training?
She laughed and replied, “I like challenges and when you’re young you want to sign up for everything.”
Fast forward to 2008 and she moved to the Valley where she worked as a hospice chaplain and continued her missionary work to Africa. Around this time she met Eddie Salinas, a retired teacher from Brownsville, and it was love at first sight in both directions.
“Immediately I said, ‘This is what I’ve done in the past, doing missionary work,’ and he said, ‘Count me in’ and he’s been by my side all the way,” she said with a smile on her face.
They married in 2013, and they’ve spent their married life serving others both near and far, and will continue to do so as long as they can.
