Mission of Mercy : Ventura Woman Stricken With Cancer Buys and Distributes Food to the Homeless

Katalina Um approached a group of homeless people at a park bench in Ventura on a recent afternoon, carrying a huge cardboard box loaded with McDonald’s hamburgers and Cokes.

“I’ve got some extra food today. Anybody hungry?” she called out.

Um has made it her personal mission for the last three months to carry food to Ventura’s homeless.

And during most of that time she has also been carrying a secret: She has a type of cancer so aggressive that doctors say she will probably die in the next few years unless a match for her bone marrow can be found.

But for this moment in the park, Um has pushed her personal concerns from her mind.

Um, 21, has been distributing about $40 worth of fast-food to Ventura’s homeless twice a week since mid-July, shortly before she was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Despite her illness, which requires her to submit to draining chemotherapy treatments four times a week, the Ventura resident is determined to continue her service to the city’s less fortunate.

“People need to share their wealth,” said Um, a sometimes actress who carts her booty around town in a light blue Mercedes-Benz. “And it’s the best natural high. I feel great.”

She finds inspiration to maintain her upbeat spirit and to help others, Um said, by listening to speakers at motivational seminars she began attending a couple of years ago.

She also buys motivational tapes and reads books on how to live a full life by such New Age gurus as George S. Clayson and Zig Ziglar.

It was after finishing Clayson’s “The Richest Man in Babylon” that she hit upon the idea of helping to feed the homeless, Um said. In the book, Clayson advises readers to spend 10% of their income on charitable causes to enrich their lives, she said.

She decided to buy bagfuls of hamburgers from the McDonald’s on Harbor Boulevard because “they are the cheapest and people trust them.”

Then she treks down to the beach at the end of Seaward Avenue or to Hobo Jungle at the Ventura River bottom or Plaza Park--where homeless people gather--and hands them out.

The response has been enthusiastic, she said. Some of the city’s homeless even know her by name.

“They say, ‘Hi, Kat, God bless you, Kat,’ ” she said.

But even as Um puts up a cheerful front, the cancer inside of her threatens to take her life.

The type of leukemia that Um has occurs most often in children and is much less curable in adults, said David Reese, the cancer specialist at UCLA Medical Center supervising her case. Doctors will better be able to tell if she has beat the disease after she has completed a year of chemotherapy, he said.

But Reese is not optimistic about her chances for complete remission without undergoing a bone marrow transplant.

“The chance of a cure for this type of leukemia with chemotherapy alone is not great, about 20%,” he said.

Um’s best chance for a marrow match would be with a full brother or sister, Reese said. But Um has lived most of her life in foster homes and does not have any full siblings. Her father is dead. She does not know where her mother lives or if she is still alive, she said.

She was born out of wedlock in Seoul, South Korea, Um said. Her mother was ostracized from the family shortly after her birth, Um said. Um lived in her father’s home and was raised by her grandmother until her father died when she was 9 years old.

She was then sent to Tulsa, Okla., to live with relatives there, Um said. It was the beginning of being bounced around to a series of foster homes until she finally landed in a boarding school in Arizona.

“By the time I was 11 years old, I had already had three sets of parents,” she said. “I didn’t know who to trust.”

She came to Ventura three years ago to live with a friend after graduating from the boarding school. She landed occasional jobs modeling and acting.

She didn’t give much thought to whether her mother is still alive until she found out she has leukemia, Um said. Now she is exploring a tip from Korean relatives that her mother, Kim Sook Ee, is living in Japan and has other children.

Meanwhile, her name will be placed on a registry of other patients waiting for a bone marrow match, Reese said. It will be harder for her to find an unrelated donor than most because she is Korean, he said. There are not a lot of Koreans enrolled in the registry, so the chances of finding a match of her own ethnicity are less, he said.

Despite the strikes against her, many of Um’s doctors and nurses have commented on her good spirits, Reese said. “She is certainly one of the most optimistic patients I’ve ever had.”

On a recent afternoon, Um appeared healthy and full of energy as she bought 63 hamburgers at McDonald’s. The McDonald’s manager agreed to kick in 60 small sodas for free.

The first woman that Um encountered, walking on Seaward Avenue near the beach, was suspicious.

“They don’t have razor blades in them, do they?” asked the middle-aged woman.

After Um assured her that there was no danger, the woman took one gratefully.

Over the course of the next three hours, Um handed out all the food and drinks to about 20 homeless people. Not one person turned down her offer of free food.

And their gratitude seemed to buoy her spirits.

“I feel I’ve been blessed,” Um explained. “I could have turned out a prostitute, a drug user or a welfare mother with 20 children. But no, I’ve got a great boyfriend, loyal friends. Something went right for me.”