Countywide : AIDS Care Groups Recruit Volunteers to Get Latinos Help

When volunteer Deby Welty drops hot and cold meals off for the AIDS patients on her route, she believes she can feel her brother cheering her on.

“I know my brother looks down on me and says, ‘Go for it,’ ” she said. Her brother, who was one of more than 3,000 AIDS patients in the county, died recently of complications from AIDS. Welty volunteered to help Laguna Shanti, a nonprofit group that delivers meals and other services, because she can no longer help her brother, she said.

Officials for Laguna Shanti and Casa Delhi, a new nonprofit group for AIDs patients in Santa Ana, are desperate to recruit people, such as Welty, to help them undertake an ambitious expansion of the meals program to Latino communities in Santa Ana and Anaheim.

“The need in this community is unbelievable,” said Javier Lara, a services specialist at Casa Delhi. “With this bankruptcy situation, it’s going to be even worse. . . . Sometimes I am just speechless.”

Casa Delhi, an arm of the Delhi Community Center, opened in December to cope with the growing demand for AIDS services among Latinos, many of whom are both sick and undocumented, Lara said.

“At this point we are recruiting anybody,” Lara said. “They don’t have to speak Spanish. We are willing to teach them the basic words in Spanish.”

That is a need Laguna Shanti tapped into when it opened its doors in 1987 to offer support to dying people and their families.

The number of meals it serves grows each year, said the group’s director, Sarah Kasman. Last year, it served 8,000 meals, and that figure could jump to 10,000 this year.

Most of the volunteers, like Welty, have in some way been touched by AIDS, but that is certainly not a requirement, Kasman said. Schedules vary, and each volunteer generally delivers meals to five or eight people on each route.

“What you need to be is a person that is caring, that can listen and wants to network with and be a friend to the client,” Kasman said. “Many times a client will say something they are uncomfortable saying to a family member.”

That role is particularly crucial in the Latino community, where gay males face the cultural perils of machismo, denial and homophobia, Lara said.

And the rewards of volunteering far outweigh the pain of getting close to someone dying, Welty said.

“I would think they would just get such joy and satisfaction,” Welty said. “It made me think more than it made me sad and angry with this disease,” she said of her friendships with clients. “I can say I knew this person who had such courage.”

For information about volunteering, call Casa Delhi at (714) 568-0496 or Laguna Shanti at (714) 494-1446.