Comunidad Para Baja California

“Kick it!  Kick it!”  The Kumeyaay children of La Huerta shouted at Maya Hogan, who was holding the first American football they had seen.  Maya swung her foot, the ball arched towards the kids who then scattered, screaming and laughing at the ball’s unpredictable bounces.

Maya was part of a Comunidad volunteer team that went down to work with the Baja tribes June 18-20.  The trip had multiple purposes:  to distribute Becas (scholarships) to the Nativo children, to install an electrical system in the kindergarten at La Huerta, and to make connections with the Ensenada Rotary Club to help with future Comunidad projects.

On the Beca front, Comunidad President Tom Hogan and Horacio Moncada, our ‘man in Ensenada’, accompanied by photographer Dan Figueroa, Ysabel Gimenez (a visiting lawyer from Venezuela), and Ensenada-based volunteer Guillermo McConnell, visited La Huerta, Santa Caterina, and San Antonoio Necua to distribute scholarships to students completing this school year.

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A group of Comunidad volunteers recently conducted another Salud (Health) program to the tribal community of Cucapah.

During the weekend of February 27-March 1, 2009, our team treated over 40 patients, with our four dentists working nonstop, performing multiple procedures on each patient.

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All three components of Comunidad were at work over the Halloween weekend this year:

• Salud (Health) was represented by our quarterly dental clinic, where we treated over 100 tribal members.
• Our Infrastructura group was out at the local orphanage sheet rocking the dental clinic we’ve been constructing over the past year.
• And the Escuela-a-Escuela program continued with the distribution of scholarships to over 125 tribal students.

October 31 was a long day for the tribal students.

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It was a scene reminiscent of an old winery, but instead of stomping grapes, the five Los Gatos children were stomping straw into mud.

The occasion was an adobe brick-making workshop sponsored by the PaiPai tribe of Santa Catarina. The children, joined by their new tribal friends, were up to their knees in a mud pit created by a natural spring.

Their job was to mix in the straw, then shovel the adobe into wheelbarrows and transport it over to the area where it was poured into brick forms.

The occasion was Day Two of Camp Comunidad, a program that brings together Northern California families with the leaders, elders and children of the PaiPai and Kumeyaay tribes.

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