LOS ALAMITOS : Ensenada’s Poor Will Eat Today

Students from St. Hedwig’s School packed 800 grocery bags Friday in preparation for this morning’s trip to help a community of impoverished orchard workers and their families in Ensenada.

This is the ninth year that the students and other parishioners at St. Hedwig’s Catholic Church have collected tons of food and loaded their vans, cars and other vehicles to make the six-hour drive to Mexico.

Between 50 and 75 parishioners were planning to leave at 6 a.m. with a 15-vehicle caravan of food, said James Morrissey, 44, during a break Friday while he and students at the school loaded the 20-pound bags into parishioners’ cars.

The group distributes the food with the help of Corazon, a Mission Viejo charity that focuses on feeding the hungry locally and in Mexico.

In past years, volunteers from St. Hedwig brought food to people in Tijuana, Morrissey said. But since several aid groups now concentrate on Tijuana, the group chose Ensenada this year.

“These are some of the poorest people in Mexico, almost forgotten,” Morrissey said. “They live alongside the road outside the orchards, where they look for work. They live in cardboard shacks. They don’t have heat, electricity or running water. There are entire families living in these (boxes) and they’re about 4-by-4” feet.

Food collected by parishioners will be distributed from about noon to sundown today. The bags are enough for about 8,000 meals, Morrissey said. Students at the school collected canned vegetables and fruit, and members of the church donated money to buy beans, rice, oats, chickens and fresh fruit.

Katherine Summers, a volunteer for Corazon, said the people working in the orchards in Ensenada live in the tiny cardboard shacks and under tarpaulins donated by people from Orange County.

“Every second, every minute, these people are hungry,” she said. “These people are very, very destitute.”

Among one of the luckiest people there is a woman Summers calls “Abuelita” (an affectionate word for grandmother ). “She said she’s either 94 or 104, she’s not sure,” Summers said.

She lives with her children and grandchildren, 12 people in all, in an 8-by-10-foot wooden room on land given to her by the government.

“It breaks my heart to see that (her children are living) the same way she grew up,” Summers said.

Two vans from Corazon will make up part of the caravan.