Feeding the Spirit : Needy Receive Thanksgiving Dinner and Words of Hope From Boy

Alex Mojica Marshall circulated through the disheveled crowd of homeless people Wednesday, offering orange soda and a bit of advice.

“I told them how I used to be homeless and told them there was hope,” said the 12-year-old, who now lives in Westlake with adoptive parents Jim Marshall and Gail Parker-Marshall. Alex was among 100 volunteers helping to serve a free Thanksgiving dinner at the Ventura County Rescue Mission on Wednesday in Oxnard.

Alex’s story was just one of many at the mission on Wednesday, but unlike most of the others, his had a good ending.

Born in Mexico, Alex was brought across the border to the United States in 1986 when he was 6. He lived in a cardboard house in a valley in San Diego’s North County with his mother and some of his seven older siblings.

Three years later, when his mother became terminally ill with an AIDS-related disease, she advertised in a La Jolla church bulletin for a family to adopt Alex. By the time she died in 1990, Alex was already living with the Westlake couple who met the boy through Jim Marshall’s parents’ church.

“It was hard living in the bush, but it was nice, because I was with my mother,” Alex said as he finished eating leftover pumpkin pie with his adoptive father and sister Jessica, 7. “I’m thankful for being here with my new family.”

Throughout the afternoon, Alex kept the drinks coming as an estimated 600 homeless and poor people ate a full-course dinner in an outdoor lot at the Oxnard mission. The Steve Hill Country Band played violins and guitars, and a volunteer dressed in a bear outfit circulated among the crowd, encouraging people to dance. “I wanted to give something back,” Ligia Pena, 26, a laid-off beauty consultant, said of her appearance in the bear costume.

The mission has been a reliable source of food for Ventura County’s homeless for 20 years, serving three meals a day to up to 300 people, said Phill Wehry, the mission’s chaplain. The day before Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving, the mission serves a bigger meal than usual and buses in homeless people from around the county, Wehry said. The mission also provides shelter to 54 people and runs a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program for 27 men.

“People hear about the big dinners by word of mouth,” Wehry said as he looked out at the crowd. “It’s a time to catch up with people I haven’t seen for a while.”

Wehry pointed to a man in a blue baseball cap eating his meal. “That man’s brother has been calling asking where he is,” Wehry said. “I’m happy he isn’t dead. So that’s the answer to a prayer right there.”

Chester Herron, who ate his Thanksgiving meal with a friend, Lanny Robinson, 54, said the turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce were the best he has had for a while. “I was so hungry. I had something last night but it’s been a few days before that,” Herron said.

After the meal, Robinson said he was thankful for “being alive and having the strength to face another day.” He and Herron have big plans for the coming new year, he said.

“We’re thinking to go to Arizona,” Robinson said. “It’s cheaper to live there. Maybe I’ll save some money and try to locate my son.”

James Pickney, 23, said the mission provides a stable place to eat. Born in the Philippines, Pickney was raised in San Diego and Los Angeles before moving to the streets of Oxnard when he was 18, he said. He has been looking for work for several months now, he said. But it isn’t easy.

“I’ve learned my stuff on my street,” Pickney said. “If I didn’t have this place, I’d probably go to jail. Even though there are three hot meals in jail, at least here you’re not giving up.”

But for volunteer Joey Butcher, 27, a maintenance worker who used to be homeless, the meals are just a stopgap measure, filling stomachs but not addressing the real problems of homelessness and poverty.

“For today, this is great,” Butcher said. “But tomorrow these guys will be hungry again.” Butcher attributes his success to “God and sobriety in my life. Without sobriety, I’m out here again.”

Alex said it was the first time he had been with people who are in the same predicament he was in once. “My parents have given me something now,” Alex said. “It felt good inside to be giving something back.”