Nun Brings Wealth of Hope to Poor of Oxnard

In her tidy La Colonia office, Sister Carmen Rodriguez describes herself as though reciting a prayer.

“Wherever I am, whatever I do, I am Sister Carmen,” she says softly but confidently. “A sister, a nurse and a human being. I bring who I am, all my values and perspectives, my aches and pains to whatever situation I am in.”

Some acquaintances describe the 62-year-old Rodriguez, with her crown of white hair and gentle smile, as looking and acting like a kind aunt. But she is anything but passive.

The bilingual Rodriguez, a beeper-carrying member of the Sisters of Mercy who has a degree in nursing, is known as a go-getter.

To improve living conditions for Ventura County’s poor, she battles--albeit diplomatically --for such causes as expanded health screenings, improved access to food and clothing assistance, and more affordable housing.

“In Oxnard, there are very few areas that she has not touched,” Mayor Manuel Lopez said. “Some may feel when someone is doing a good thing that it’s just their job. With others, they know they really want to do it, and I think she projects that.”

For more than a decade, the poor and sometimes desperate have sought help from the nun who has operated from facilities behind churches in La Colonia, one of Oxnard’s poorest neighborhoods. At her office next to the alley behind Cristo Rey Church, Rodriguez directs the health ministry for St. John’s Regional Medical Center, offering her visitors food, clothing, medicine and spiritual guidance.

“They trust her,” Josefina Laurean said in Spanish. Laurean has been a ministry volunteer for 11 years. “They know she’ll help them. She has a big heart.”

Often, visitors have health or family problems compounded by poverty.

For example, a 27-year-old woman wanted to flee her abusive husband but didn’t have the money. She came to Rodriguez, who gave her food and a bus ticket out of Oxnard.

A 36-year-old mother with two teenage daughters was homeless and suffering from cancer. Rodriguez referred the woman to the county hospital for medical aid and provided the family with food and school clothing.

Rodriguez vividly remembers one undocumented family from Mexico.

“I tell you, I can still see them here,” she said in her office, which contains medical reference books, a computer and a black-and-white drawing of Jesus.

The couple left Mexico with their four children, seeking a better life. Unable to find jobs in the Oxnard fields, the family had been sleeping in the bushes for two weeks before asking for help.

“We have been hungry and homeless,” she recalled the father saying. “We have got to go back.”

Rodriguez gave them two sleeping bags and food to keep them alive on their trip: granola bars, instant soup, peanut butter and crackers. She drove the family to the bus station in her van, bought them tickets to Mexico and gave them $20.

Laurean has also watched the nun heat sandwiches in the microwave for the hungry, use her own money to help purchase medicine, and provide spiritual counseling to depressed visitors.

“Sometimes she speaks with a quiet voice,” Laurean said. “Sometimes she speaks with an angry voice. She wants them to be better. She’ll say, ‘You must work for your kids. You must send them to school.’ She does this because she wants them to be better human beings. It’s her life, her mission.”

Rodriguez understands those she helps, Lopez said.

“A lot of the people she’s dealing with, the low-income and minorities and so forth, can relate to her,” the mayor said. “They listen more to her. It has more of an impact because of her background.”

Rodriguez’s parents were migrant farm workers who traveled from El Centro to Fresno, picking grapes, tomatoes, celery, lettuce and lemons.

Rodriguez, born in Santa Paula as the eldest of four children, moved frequently with her parents. But before she entered kindergarten, Rodriguez recalled, her paternal grandmother in Bakersfield told her parents, “OK, this is it. You keep going and follow the crops. . . . The girls and I will stay here, because they’ve got to go to school.”

Her parents, both children of migrant farm workers who had never had a chance to go to school, left their children behind, visiting them during holidays and between harvests.

“Grandma always said, ‘They’re gone because they want to make a better life for you,’ ” Rodriguez said. “We never questioned their love and never felt abandoned. We knew they were doing it for us.”

By the time Rodriguez was in high school, she knew she wanted to become a nun. God had nudged her in that direction, she said. But she delayed her calling because her parents asked her to take care of her grandmother, who had suffered a stroke.

After her grandmother died in 1963, Rodriguez, then 27, entered the Sisters of Mercy in Burlingame. In 1970, she received her bachelor’s of science in nursing at the University of San Francisco.

Rodriguez worked as a nurse in Arizona and California before taking over the health ministry at St. John’s in 1985.

At first, she worked out of St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard, giving free medical referrals and screenings. The problem was that few came.

That is when Rodriguez decided to go to the needy. She understood that language barriers, transportation difficulties and financial problems often made it difficult for the poor to get to her.

In her blue Chevy Citation, Rodriguez cruised the streets of La Colonia. She stopped people in alleys and on sidewalks and talked to residents in their yards, asking what services they needed.

“She did a lot of outreach work from the bottom up that not a lot of people are willing to do,” said Jesus Rocha, co-founder of El Centrito, which runs a children’s literacy program in La Colonia. “She walked the streets and alleys. A lot aren’t willing to do that because they feel it’s demeaning or scary.”

The people Rodriguez spoke to asked for food, clothing, shelter and medicine.

Within a year, she had moved the St. John’s health ministry into a 40-foot trailer, which she parked behind Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in La Colonia.

Hope Dominguez, an administrator at the church, said Rodriguez used to give medical advice and screenings and hand out sandwiches from the trailer. She recalled how the priests sent parishioners to Rodriguez for assistance.

“A lot of people responded to that,” she said of the trailer health ministry.

After seeing the popularity of the trailer program, St. John’s allowed Rodriguez to expand in 1990 and operate out of a three-room building behind Cristo Rey Church.

Last year, the ministry reported that it had filled 33,000 requests for service. St. John’s provides $100,000 annually, which pays for supplies, operating costs and the salaries of one part-time and two full-time employees. The ministry last year also collected about $30,000 in donations from businesses and residents.

In addition to her health-care work, Rodriguez is an advocate of affordable housing in Oxnard. Between 1989 and 1997, documents show, the city provided less than half of the low-income housing it had proposed.

So Rodriguez will continue her fight. In response to those who question the need for more affordable housing, she says, “I want you to go with one of those families with six to eight people living in one bedroom with one kitchen. I invite you to live there one week.”

To fight for her cause, Rodriguez writes letters to the city’s planning commissioners, speaks to Oxnard council members and comments during City Hall meetings.

“Her track record is very good,” Oxnard City Councilman Tom Holden said of Rodriguez’s consistent push for affordable housing. “If she was a baseball player, she would be an all-star. She would far surpass McGwire.”

Rodriguez recently helped push two affordable housing projects through the City Council. One is Casa Merced, a 42-unit senior housing complex being constructed on 5th Street. The other is the adjacent Casa San Juan, a 64-unit apartment for families that was completed a year ago.

But the 94-unit Vineyard Gardens, proposed for a 5-acre tract in the unincorporated area of El Rio, was rejected by the council because it did not conform to planning guidelines.

“The majority of times we said yes to Sister Carmen,” Holden said. “You don’t say no to Sister Carmen. . . . Unfortunately, even with divine intervention, sometimes it’s hard to move around the city’s planning guidelines.”

Rodriguez said she will not fight to reverse the decision--she has enough to juggle. She is developing an outreach program to create health programs at churches throughout the county. Under the program, church officials would ask their members the type of health services they need. Rodriguez’s ministry would help the churches coordinate those services.

At Holy Cross Church in Moorpark last year, more than 300 people came for free health tests that included blood pressure and cholesterol screening as well as hearing and vision exams.

Rodriguez does not know when she will retire.

And when she looks back at her work over the decades, she has no regrets.

“I’m human, and I still think men are attractive,” she said, laughing. “But I don’t doubt my vocation. I know God wants me in this way of life.”