Organization Shares Spirit of the Season With Needy

It may not have been much, but the cardboard box filled with vegetables, meat and other food brought a smile to the face of Seang Muy.

Since fleeing a communist labor camp in her native Cambodia several years ago, the 32-year-old refugee has known little joy in the United States. Unable to speak English, she has never held a job. Muy’s husband abandoned her in April.

Today, she and her four young children live in a cramped, unheated garage in San Diego, subsisting on a meager monthly welfare check.

So when Muy was presented a box brimming with the staples of a holiday feast Saturday, it cast a ray of hope on an otherwise bleak existence. She stood in the mist and gazed down at the new-found bounty, her tiny daughter, pixyish in a hooded pink windbreaker, clinging at her legs.

“I’m happy,” Muy said through an interpreter. “This can feed us for four days. I’m thankful for that.”

Special Holiday Effort

Muy’s clan was among about 500 families in San Diego and Imperial counties given free food as part of a special holiday effort sponsored by SHARE, a San Diego-based non-profit organization.

With the aid of two local beer distributors, SHARE volunteers passed out tons of food to churches, social service agencies and other community organizations, which in turn parceled out the boxes to the less fortunate.

The bulk of the 680,000 pounds of produce, meats and other necessities went to the thousands of families who take part in SHARE’s monthly food distribution program. Each member family pays $12 and donates two hours of community service at a local nonprofit agency or other outfit in exchange for a box of food worth about $35.

Founded in 1983 by Deacon Carl Shelton and the Catholic Diocese of San Diego, SHARE (Self Help and Resource Exchange) has grown today to include chapters in New York; Milwaukee; Newark, N.J.; Phoenix; Philadelphia; Peoria, Ill.; Fresno; St. Paul, Minn., and New River Valley, Va.

In the San Diego area, more than 145 churches and other organizations serve as “host agencies” to help distribute the food.

“We’re not a charity, we’re not a government organization,” said Ed Catano, a coordinator for the local SHARE branch. “It’s the philosophy that you contribute for what you get.”

But with the holidays at hand, the Coast and Markstein beverage distributing companies donated money to SHARE to sponsor the 500 boxes of food that were distributed free to those families who can ill afford the typical $12 fee. In addition, about 40 employees from the firms spent several hours earlier in the week stuffing the food into cardboard boxes.

“I think it’s been great,” said Tony Carbajal, special market manager for Coast Distributing Co. “When you don’t have any food to speak of and don’t have $12, this is a real blessing.”

Out at SHARE’s headquarters, an aging warehouse jammed into a nook beside Interstates 5 and 8, volunteers milled about Saturday morning, loading boxes of food onto flatbed trucks or pickups manned by workers from each of the host agencies.

Amid the chaos of forklifts and bodies, Sal Saucedo supervised volunteers from the Metropolitan Area Advisory Committee (MAAC), a nonprofit social services agency, as they hefted boxes into a battered pickup for the trip down to National City.

“This food is very important, especially with Christmas just around the corner,” said Saucedo, a MAAC volunteer and a job development specialist with the Private Industry Council of San Diego. “You’re talking about a basket worth $40 or $50. That’s money these people can use for something else, like a toy for their kid.”

The Rev. J.L. Whitmill of San Diego’s Mount Zion Baptist Church, which got 50 boxes of free food for the needy, agreed.

“This place has really fed a lot of people,” Whitmill said, watching church elders load a flatbed with food. “We’ve got one fellow who was laid off six months ago and is trying to feed eight kids. So this means quite a bit to them.”

Loi Huynh, a job trainer at the Union of Pan Asian Communities (UPAC), filled a truck with enough free food for 70 families, including Seang Muy and her children.

“It’s a very important program,” Huynh said. “Many of these families we serve arrived in the United States only recently. They have a low income. This, at least, can support them during this season.”

At UPAC’s offices on the eastern edge of downtown San Diego, Huynh and others supervised distribution of the food to various families that had signed up ahead of time. With the demand far exceeding the supply, a lottery was held to determine who would receive the boxes.

Among those was Sy Ngoeun. Since arriving in the United States two years ago, the 41-year-old refugee has been unemployed. He has five children, ages 7 to 23, but four others died in Cambodia during the bloody regime of the Khmer Rouge.

Ngoeun, his wife and children now share a cramped, two-bedroom apartment in San Diego with another Cambodian family.

“I feel so happy and glad for this food,” Ngoeun said through an interpreter. “Because we have so many mouths to feed, the money we get from welfare is not enough to last through the whole month. This means a lot.”