June 29, 2015 – Today we and to the Community Center and prevention hospital in Santa Ana. Domingo, our guide and community leader in the Santa Ana neighborhood, introduced us to other leaders who also volunteer. At the soup kitchen, there were five staff members who were in charge of feeding three hundred hungry kids and the elderly. We helped set up the tables and chairs for lunch and served food to the crowd. I was so happy to take some of the load off of the women in charge.
Also we went to visit the hospital. Domingo and Julian, a hospital volunteer, told us that there was only one doctor and three nurses for the entire Santa Ana neighborhood. Julian explained that there were volunteers who went to the houses to do preventive medicine so that nurses could care for families
before they got sick.
We took a tour of Santa Ana and I was definitely out of my comfort zone. Because it had recently flooded there the houses were destroyed and people had to construct plywood houses for shelter in higher ground. There was trash everywhere, mud and large puddles making it difficult to walk. It was sad to see that people lived like this, but when we walked around people waved and greeted us as if everything were normal. Just seeing this made me feel like I wanted to help clean up the houses and help with construction.
Back in the U.S, we also have our poor, called the homeless, who beg and find shelter under bridges. There don’t seem to be as many homeless kids in the U.S. as there are in Santa Ana because Santa Ana is a whole neighborhood where everyone is poor. In the U.S. there are there organizations which help kids find food and provide shelter, but in Santa Ana there doesn’t seem to be much help for these people from the government. I find it shocking that there is so little concern for the poor and that kids are born into poverty without a choice.
Darel Gordy, E L Haynes Public Charter School