At 6-foot-5 with tattoos and a mohawk, Dan Fastuca looks like a tough guy. But he — and everyone who knows him — will tell you quickly that he’s not.
“He’s my favorite kind of person,” said Mike Dowling, pastor of Leeds Community Church. “He not only helps people — he’s a mediator to get people help. The ministry he has is hard to even put into words.”
And that ministry all started with a lion.
Several years ago, Fastuca was living in California building his brand, Jet Black Racing — a brand affiliated with auto racing, animal rescue, stunts for the film industry and music. Then he found out about Vatani, a lion cub in need of rescue from a desperate situation.
Rural land
As Fastuca saw it, he didn’t have an option. He had to save Vatani.
And as the lion grew, Fastuca knew he was going to need space — and lots of it. But it’s almost impossible to get that in California.
So he and his wife moved to Alabama, a state with lots of rural land, a place where Vatani could have a good life.
“It would’ve been selfish of me to continue my life without saving his,” Fastuca said.
Freshly settled as a transplant in the Gadsden area, he dedicated his life to making Vatani’s life comfortable and happy. He built a 40-acre USDA-accredited compound with a 5-acre enclosure where Vatani can roam free. He cares for the lion meticulously and, as he puts it, doesn’t make him do anything he doesn’t want to do.
“You can’t force a lion to do anything,” he said. “Vatani interacts lovingly every day because he’s happy, and because our relationship is built on love and respect.”
Fastuca is a “big softy,” and he says he loves that lion like a son. As he started posting videos on Facebook of their relationship, he found something else happening — not only was Vatani happy, he was making other people happy too.
Helping people smile
Cancer patients began messaging Fastuca to let him know they’d decided not to give up on their treatments because Vatani had made them start to smile and laugh again.
“One of them told me, ‘The way I get through my treatments is I watch Vatani videos,’” Fastuca said.
Person after person reached out with their own Vatani stories. And a famous stunt man Fastuca knew messaged him and told him he felt more at ease about his daughter being on the internet because all she wanted to do was watch lion videos.
“He said, ‘How can we help the lion?’ and I said, ‘Well, he eats,’” Fastuca said.
Vatani does eat — about 55 pounds of meat every day. That was stretching Fastuca a little thin. That is, until his friend from the stunt business made some calls, and suddenly Fastuca had access to hundreds of thousands of pounds of quality meat that, for economic reasons, is usually discarded by the food industry. Once Fastuca proved he could meet the necessary protocol, the product was made available to him at a more manageable cost.
“I had to scramble to take advantage of that opportunity,” he said, and he moved quickly to figure out how to get freezers, trucks and trailers.
What opened up from there was a partnership between Fastuca and food ministries all over Alabama in which he was able to take what he’d been given and supply them with large amounts of protein products, in part thanks to funds from the Alabama Hunger Offering. That includes the ministry Dowling runs in his community in Leeds.
Dowling gets emotional talking about it.
“Dan has been a champion of all champions for the ministry we have,” he said.
Between the chicken from Fastuca and funds given through the Alabama Hunger Offering — which is collected all year round but emphasized specifically on Feb. 21 — Dowling is able to distribute food boxes to the housing authority in his area.
The people there have deep physical needs, he said, and taking them food has built bridges for him to share the gospel and bring them into the church family.
Building relationships
“It’s people like Dan who have made this possible,” he said.
Dowling also has something else in common with Fastuca other than their shared burden for the hungry — he knows what it’s like for an unexpected move to open new doors.
Several years ago, someone burned down the house where Dowling lived in Trussville. So he and his wife, Sandra, moved to Leeds, and over time, it was clear God had a new ministry for them there.
Nonprofit ministry
Fastuca understands that.
He sees so many ways he can help people through V and Me, his nonprofit — from helping to provide food to the hungry to teaching animal conservation to helping make people smile.
The move to Alabama has been good for Fastuca’s faith too. He grew up Catholic, but when his mom died he began to struggle, he said. “It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in God — it was that I had prayed for her, and I felt like I must not have been worthy to be heard.”
But as he took long walks in the woods with Vatani, he began to pray again for the first time in decades. And then he visited The Church at Wills Creek, Gadsden, and they welcomed him with open arms.
Rick Hagans — founder of Harvest Ministries, which runs His Place and Hosanna Home in the Opelika area — said it’s interesting to him how, even though God saved Daniel from the lions in the Bible, He’s now using a lion to save people’s lives in Alabama.
During the COVID-19 pandemic when Hagans’ ministries were struggling to feed their residents, Fastuca came through with chicken to help them put food on the table.
“He’s been getting us 1,000 pounds of chicken quarters per month, and it’s a big, big help,” Hagans said. “Between him and Kristy Kennedy working in a partnership with Alabama Baptist hunger funds, Dan is able to get a lot more meat. We’ve gotten more meat from him than any single source we’ve ever gotten meat from.”
Kennedy, an associate in the associational missions office of the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions, said the partnership between the Alabama Hunger Fund and Fastuca has been an amazing way God has provided for so many people over the past year as needs have been even greater than normal.
“Giving to the Hunger Offering is a way that we as Southern Baptists can work together in meeting the physical and spiritual needs of those around us,” Kennedy said. “Just like Dan was willing to give of his resources to help others in need, we are all called to do the same, and what a joy and privilege it is.”
To find out more about V and Me, visit vandme.net. To learn more about the Alabama Hunger Offering, visit alsbom.org/hunger.
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