She Helps Children Escape the Project

With summer only days away, Virginia Lopez is completing a ritual she performs each year, asking civic and business groups to help send children from the Ramona Gardens public housing project to amusement parks or museums--anywhere, in fact, that’s away from the drug-ridden apartment complex.

But this year, as in the past, Lopez has steeled herself against the inevitable disappointments. Last year, only three of her 43 letters seeking help were answered. An aide to one city councilman curtly told her that there were children needier than those at Ramona Gardens. Then, a well-meaning local official gave Lopez tickets to a circus, but through a snafu they turned out to be a week old.

So Lopez spent several weeks raising money. Using a handful of donations that did come in, plus a rummage sale and a raffle that brought in $112, she sent 35 children from the aging project in Boyle Heights to Knott’s Berry Farm.

Sees Need for Generosity

In a city of wealth and bustling commerce, Lopez said: “If there’s generosity here, we don’t see it.”

This year, she has sent out 16 letters and is preparing to send more, “but we might just have to take them to the beach--that’s what I do when things fall through.”

The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, a public-interest group, has donated three buses for beach trips this summer. “I am grateful,” Lopez said, “but the beach is not the same as an organized activity that really lights up their eyes, so we’ll keep trying for more.”

Lopez, 59, is volunteer director of the housing project’s Toy Loan program, a county-assisted effort that lends out toys--just as a library lends out books--from a brightly painted playroom that the city Housing Authority recently expanded. She is well known to Housing Authority officials, who said she is among only a handful of residents in the city’s 21 projects who has started a Toy Loan or begun other programs to keep children off the streets.

As in most housing projects, children at Ramona Gardens have little to do as the summer lingers on, and there are no government funds set aside for getting children out of the projects for recreation. Nor can their parents, many of whom are chronically unemployed, afford anything as extravagant as a family vacation or summer camp.

So, Lopez said, children hang around streets frequented by tough-talking youths, and some are eventually drawn into the gangs or drugs.

In an attempt to reach them before they drift into that life style, Lopez invites dozens of children to events during the holidays and in the summer. She avoids the most hard-core older youths who are already running drugs or swaggering in gang colors.

The children know her simply as Virginia, the friendly lady who will give toys to children who stay out of trouble, and who always seems to have something on her calendar for children to do.

“Every time in December we have a big party and get gifts, and on Valentine’s we get candy,” said Becky Galindo, 12. “In the Toy Loan, the little kids stay and play, and see what they really want, and then they check it out from Virginia. I come here whenever they’re open.”

A longtime resident of the project, Lopez calls the 40 children who frequent the project’s Toy Loan room “my kids.”

She keeps an honor list of children who return their loaned toy in good condition after one week’s use. At the end of 18 weeks of borrowing, each child on the honor list is presented with a new toy to keep and is invited to other events.

But, Lopez said with a chuckle, “if one of the kids keeps checking out the same toy, really gets attached to it, sometimes I give it to them way before 18 weeks. I don’t follow any rules here, even my own.”

Disinterested Parents

Reina Galindo, Becky’s mother, said Lopez befriends many children whose parents “are not interested in their child, or where he has been, or who his friends are. There’s a lot of that here in Ramona Gardens.”

Lopez has already talked over her plans for this summer with the children, and even the younger ones know that some sort of trip will take them out of the neighborhood, where street toughs in hair nets and baggy pants openly discuss drug deals on street corners.

“I want to go on the freeway,” said Rickie Rodriguez, 3, after he finished zooming a tiny model car along the floor of the Toy Loan room. “Then I could see my friends.”

“I want to go somewhere like Raging Waters,” said Elvis Galindo, 10. “But even the beach would still be fun.”

To Lopez, the excited voices of the children are proof that she is making a difference.

“If only I could make the leaders in business and politics, who talk about changing things, understand what it’s like for these little kids,” Lopez said. “The only way to keep them off drugs and out of jail is to show them there’s something to life besides Ramona Gardens.”