ORANGE : Ex-Resident Brings Sister City’s Thanks

Steven M. Rosenbery had no idea what he wanted to do when he was growing up in Orange, sneaking smokes behind Villa Park High School with his buddies. Of all his fantasies of the future, one thing he did not dream was what he eventually became--the mayor of Piedra Parada, a small city in Guatemala so poor he cannot find words to describe it.

He certainly never thought he would be in city hall handing out plaques from Guatemala’s president to thank Orange and its Sister City Assn. for sending medical supplies down to Piedra Parada. But there he was Thursday night at a Sister City board meeting, passing around snapshots of the Piedra Parada medical center staff and the examining tables, gurneys and hospital beds recently arrived from Western Medical Center-Santa Ana.

Rosenbery, 35, is a nearly native son (he moved to Orange when he was 4) and he credits his father’s sense of civic duty for getting him where he is today--and getting his city the donations it needed.

“My father said everything you receive you have to give back,” Rosenbery said. “It wasn’t his religion or anything, it was just his philosophy.” His father fulfilled that duty, as many fathers do, by volunteering to help with Bobby Soxers and Little League. His son showed that the same civic ethic can accomplish more.

Rosenbery began going down to Guatemala for work in the early 1980s. “The climate, the warmness and the openness of the people” convinced him to make it his home in 1985, he said. Eventually, he started a medical disposal business in Guatemala City. Two years laterhe married Karla, an American-educated Guatemalan, and gained dual citizenship.

Some of his employees persuaded him to visit the small town of Piedra Parada. “I had never seen anything more pitiful in my life,” he said of the poverty he saw. “I was just appalled.”

He noticed that the children played basketball on a dirt court using mangled coat hangers for rims. He made a call to a friend in Orange to send some decent backboards and rims, and before he knew it, others were asking him to help with projects.

Through his connections as a prominent businessman, he helped put lights in the school, improve the roads and finish a half-built medical clinic that had been sitting useless since 1986.

He learned about things he had taken for granted as a kid. “Growing up in Orange, I was so used to opening up the faucet and having water come out,” he said. In Piedra Parada, they needed wells and those wells needed pumps and tanks and filtering systems.

Similarly, children there are as eager as adults to learn to read and write, he said. “I used to take public education for granted,” he told the Sister City officials. “We were always trying to get out of school--and I was pretty good at it. These people are trying to get into school.”

Three years ago, residents organized a petition to have him named mayor, something of a mixed blessing, he said.

Rosenbery’s term will end next year, but he will continue to mine his hometown for material goods and strategic advice.

“I was just astounded at the different groups that did want to help,” he said. “We will ensure that the donations get into needy hands,” he said. “And there are a lot of needy there.”