Family Will Make a Second Trip to Help Needy Group in Mexico

For the children of a few Baja California towns and one encampment, Santa will be arriving this week. Seal Beach resident Gerry Kyle and his family leave Tuesday to deliver toys and other gifts to children of isolated, impoverished areas.

For 30 years Kyle, 72, and family have been making the trips to Baja on the weekend before Christmas. This year on a pre-holiday trip, after discovering a colony of about 300 Oaxaca Indians camped in an area the size of half a football field, Kyle decided to wait until he could gather more gifts for those he said are the “poorest of the poor.”

The Kyle family will make its usual trip 40 miles east of Ensenada into the mountain towns of Guadalupe. On this week’s trip they are adding a journey 20 miles south of Ensenada into Maneadero, where the 300 people who are indigenous to southern Mexico live.

The Oaxaca Indian families are living under tarps on muddy ground, Kyle said. A Catholic Irish immigrant who came to the U.S. in 1949, Kyle has a heart for all of them.

“Coming from a humble beginning myself, I really feel like a part of them,” he said. “These are hard-working people with a strong family bond.”

In Ireland during the late ‘40s, Kyle was making $5 per week as a baker supporting a wife and two children. After coming to New York and living there for three years, Kyle, with $200 in hand, moved his family to Southern California in 1952. By 1966, the Irishman owned a milk processing plant in Santa Ana. He bought land and built a home close to Ensenada. The first Christmas after the establishment of his Baja home, Kyle brought gifts to poor children of the area.

His desire to help children in Baja goes beyond the holidays. Kyle has been instrumental in helping nearly 500 secondary school students in Guadalupe graduate. His work and donations have prompted the school he helps to name a classroom after him.

Kyle and his wife, Celine, who reside in Seal Beach, have four children, eight grandchildren and two great grandchildren. One of the motivating factors in making the annual gift-giving trips was to show his children a different lifestyle and culture than the one found in California, Kyle said.

“The thing that I noticed here in California 1/8is that 3/8 neighbors press the button for their garage doors and disappear,” he said. “You never see them again.”

*

Alex Murashko can be reached at (714) 966-5974.