The Orange County Register, July 6th, 2007
In those days, Roy Ketring never had any desire to visit south of the border.
Spending a weekend in a dusty pueblo northeast of Ensenada had about as much appeal as spending a weekend touring the local DMV.
“It’s not that I had a prejudice against the people. I just didn’t want to go,” Ketring said.
It was 1979. Ketring sat on a committee at Placentia Presbyterian Church that would decide where to direct church resources for the poor and disadvantaged.
At one of Ketring’s committee meetings, four women from a missionary group told the committee about a group of children in the small town of San Antonio de las Minas who desperately needed the church’s support.
At the end of the women’s presentation, the committee met them mostly with silence. The committee thanked them for their time, but said they couldn’t make any decisions at the time.
The women were turned away.
Feeling guilty, Ketring signed up to travel to El Sauzal Hogar para Niños Necesitados.
He thought that once he got there, he would look around and praise the women for their work. He would make up for the church committee’s chilly reception, and that would be the end of it.
He was wrong.
• • •
After a long stretch along the winding Highway 3 in Mexico, Ketring arrived at a small house filled with the family of Ramón and Magdalena Espinoza and the 40 orphans who had no place else to go.
When the Mexican government shut down an orphanage farther south, the pious Espinoza household was the last barrier between these children and the streets of Ensenada.
The boys and girls at the Espinozas’ were packed in bunk beds, and the babies slept in cribs in the center of the home, which served as a chapel for Ramón, his wife and children.
The house had no electricity, and the only running water was supplied by a rickety Briggs & Stratton gas engine that pumped water out of a hand-dug well. The engine broke down frequently, forcing the Espinozas and their charges to gather around with a rope and bucket, hauling up the stagnant water five gallons at a time.
On the hillside behind the home was a cistern filled with collected rainwater turned rancid. Pipes from it were cobbled together to flush the two toilets in back of the house.
A Mexican social services agency was threatening to shut down the Espinoza home because it didn’t have the facilities required by law to house an orphanage.
“The Mexican government got on their case because they didn’t meet the floor-space requirement,” Ketring said.
Ketring started working to help the orphanage less than a week after he returned from Mexico. Over that first summer, he persuaded the committee at Placentia Presbyterian to take up the cause.
Within a couple of years, the church’s governing body voted to expand their reach to the orphanage, making it a project that involved the entire church. Church members started picking individual children, buying them clothes and birthday presents.
More churches started sending workers through other missionary outfits, and soon new facilities started rising out of the dusty soil around the Espinozas’ cramped home.
• • •
Of necessity, the first words Ketring learned in Spanish had to do with woodworking tools and hardware. The cooks began teaching him the names for all their dishes.
Over the years, Ketring’s visits to the orphanage became more and more frequent. Children who grew up there to this day affectionately call him Papa Chico.
He started speaking Spanish in the course of building kitchens, dining rooms, nurseries and dormitories to house the orphanage’s growing population – children subject to abuse or neglect, or whose parents were dying of wasting diseases.
Three decades since the Espinozas, Ketring and Placentia Presbyterian started their work, El Sauzal Hogar para Niños Necesitados has become a cheery compound of nurseries, dormitories and offices that house and serve the three dozen children who live there.
A visitor center lodges volunteers from around the world who come to help refurbish and add to the property.
One church member set up a dental clinic on the property. Others are talking about creating a computer lab.
And now, Ramón Espinoza’s son Josue is the director of the orphanage.
• • •
Ketring, retired now, set up a foundation a couple of years ago to handle and direct U.S.-generated funds to the orphanage.
He often spends four days a week in San Antonio de las Minas, handling paperwork, dealing with the Mexican government and overseeing the foundation’s facilities commission to continue improving the orphanage grounds.
Ketring still believes that it was God who forced him to look at the children of El Sauzal and compare their lives to his privileged one.
“I came against my will,” he said. “You can still see the tracks in the sand from my feet dragging as they pulled me down. Bit by bit, I became part of the family. At some point, I became the orphanage’s liaison to everybody outside Mexico. I told myself, ‘Roy, you are responsible to right whatever is not right.’ ”
To see a slideshow and video, go to ocregister.com
Organizer: Roy Ketring, founder of El Sauzal Foundation, gives instructions to American volunteers before delivering food to residents of San Antonio de las Minas in Baja California.
