By Marty Weybret
On January 8 and 9, The Lodi-Tokay Rotary Club helped feed 903 families in Ensenada, Mexico.
“When will they come back?” Martina Valles Pimental asked. She is like hundred of her neighbors. She rents a plywood hut with a dirt floor, two beds and a gas-fired burner for 300 pesos a month — $23. There is a bare lightbulb and a TV so she needs electricity. That’s $38.50 a month. She has no regular employment.
Rotarians from Ensenada, Catalina Island, San Diego and Montebello brought 25 or 30 bags of food and blankets to Los Olivos, where Martina lives. And yet, she said, there were still those who need food. When were we coming back?
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I think next year.” She thought a moment.
“A year — if God permits it. Thank you.”
The Lodi-Tokay Rotary Club donated $1,500 to help the Ensenada Centenaria Rotary Club feed the people at Los Olivos, displaced people at the San Vicente Shelter and many, many other impoverished places in Ensenada.
Ensenada is a town of 350,000 an hour and a half’s drive south from the U.S. border. It is not the sprawling metropolis full of would-be migrants that Tijuana is, but there are many thousands of people looking for work, battling illness and short of necessities.
Every year at the end of the Christmas season, the Rotary Club Ensenada Centenaria joins with several Rotary clubs from southern California to feed some of those needy families. Lodi-Tokay joined that effort for the first time this year along with members of the San Diego, Montebello and Avalon Rotary Clubs.
New Lodi-Tokay Rotarian Kevin Donnalley, his wife Cathy and I flew to San Diego, drove a rented car to Ensenada and on Friday night helped load the food gathered by the Ensenada Centenaria club into pickup trucks for distribution the following morning. On Saturday, we joined other Rotarians and distributed the food at the San Vicente shelter and Los Olivos.
We each made a financial contribution as did Rotarians Scott Dasko and Dave Akin, who couldn’t go with us. Our gifts were matched by the Lodi-Tokay Rotary treasury. The Donnellys and I presented the $1,500 to the Ensenada Rotarians Saturday afternoon at a luncheon at the home of Dr. Eloy and Charito Perez.
It was an emotional finish to our Christmas. Thank you, Lodi-Tokay Rotarians, for helping us serve and be part of a wonderful Rotary International experience.
Julio Casas (left) and Kevin Donnelly (right) load the last of 903 bags of food into a truck to be dispensed throughout the Ensenada area.
An unidentified Ensenada woman recieves a bag of food from Hector Ramos (left), a past president of the Ensenada Centenaria Rotary Club. To the right are Anne Ahlering daughter of John Ahlering of the San Diego Rotary Club and Cathy Donnelly, wife of Lodi-Tokay Rotarian Kevin Donnelly.
Marty Weybret of the Lodi-Tokay Rotary Club (right) exchanges Christmas wishes with Leonisa, a resident of the Los Olivos district of Ensenada. She lives with her husband and five children in a 20-foot by 20-foot room with a gas stove, two beds and a dirt floor.