“I wanted nothing to do with my own culture as a kid,” says CH Projects founder Arsalun Tafazoli over a plate of kebabs and manakish and a greatest hits parade of Middle Eastern sauces (toum, amba, zhoug, garlicky yogurt elixirs of all kinds) in the movie set that is Leila, his new restaurant in North Park. “It wasn’t cool to be Middle Eastern when I was growing up. Then 9/11 happened. I tried to disappear into SoCal American culture.”

In Leila’s open kitchen, a vertical log fire licks glistening fat off kebabs on massive skewers. Steam rises from a custom-made tabun, stuffed with naan and pita and barbari. The air is starchy and caramelized with rice. The ceiling is blackened, with pinhole lights conjuring stars. Every surface has been decoratively rugged, amber-lit with oil lamps. A life-sized lion head is etched in the synthetic rock staircase leading to the bar on the second level.

June 6, 2023

Pretty Little Hate MachineRELATED ARTICLE

“You have all of these ideas to try and create something meaningful, and you never know when you’re going to go too far,” Tafazoli says. “Even as we were installing the ceiling—this massive thing we’ve built because we hope it will make it a more immersive place—I was thinking Is this the thing that will make it look cheesy?”

Tafazoli’s parents immigrated to San Diego from Iran when he was young, his mom raising him largely on her own in University Heights. As both survival instinct and escape, he read—books, culture mags, music blogs, art leaflets, everything, obsessively, all the time. He forged documents to get into La Jolla High, the revered “good school” in the affluent nearby neighborhood. That self preservationist nerding manifests in the art-project hospitality concepts of CH: Craft & Commerce, Born & Raised, Polite Provisions, the LaFayette Hotel, and many others, including Leila.

When his mom passed a few years ago, Tafazoli allowed himself his own history. He went back to the Middle East (not Iran, for reasons), loitered in night markets and bazaars, and took notes on culture and how cities and towns and villages built inspiring environs. “Everywhere I went, there was water, whether a stream or a fountain,” he says, pointing to water cascading down a 30-foot rock wall into a lagoon and the creek that runs through the restaurant. “So we made sure you could hear water from every seat in here.”

Tafazoli’s base instinct is selfmockery, so he shares his favorite story. His plan was to find merchants and artists, pay them well, pack everything onto shipping containers, and build Leila out of Middle Eastern handiwork. “So, I’m at a small market, explaining my whole international shipping system to this man,” he recalls. “He looks at me kind of weird and says, ‘Why don’t you just order from our Etsy page?’”

CH brought in exec chef Wesley Remington Johnson, who led Portland restaurants (Tusk, Ava Gene’s) and worked under Michael Solomonov at the James Beard Award–winning Zahav. Even with the pedigree, they often enlist local Middle Eastern cooks, point to a bread or a batch of rice that’s not quite as good as mom’s, and ask for help. 

“I’m very clear to say we’re not claiming it to be the most authentic; we’re just inspired by the dishes and doing it our way,” Tafazoli adds. “Because no one is ever going to make tahdig as good as your mom. My mom used to say about Persian food, ‘Only men are allowed to work in restaurants, so restaurants suck.’”

They’re trying not to suck… and succeeding. In one corner, there’s a space, all flowy with gorgeous fabric, pictures, and paintings—his mom’s things, which are his things. 

The post Inside CH Projects’ New Persian Restaurant Leila appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

“One day, a friend stopped by [my job at Chrome Digital in Little Italy], and on a whim, I asked him to step into the street for a quick portrait,” Castillo says. “A few days later, another friend visited, and I snapped his portrait, too. That was the moment something clicked. I knew I was onto something.”

We’ve woven a selection of Castillo’s portraits throughout this issue because, well, we love people- watching. Humans are beautiful, unique, wild, and complicated. And fun to look at.

Richard Ybarra (above)

What’s one interesting fact about you that people—even your friends—may not know?

“My friends know me as a cowboy wannabe—they call me Buckaroo Richard. But what they don’t know is that I’m a Western TV and movie aficionado. I’m up at 4 a.m. watching my movies and shows.”

Nan Coffey

What’s one interesting fact about you that people—even your friends—may not know?

“When I was 12 years old, I carried the torch in the 1984 Summer Olympic Torch Relay. I ran my segment in Carmel, CA. I still have the torch.”

Drasko Bogdanovic

What’s your favorite SD memory?

“I work as a State Parks Lifeguard. I got to rescue a sea turtle during El Niño years back.”

Sofía Tannenhaus & Elena

What are you thankful for?

“I was widowed while I was pregnant and I am profoundly thankful to have a healthy, vibrant, and caring daughter. It is such a privilege to be her mother. I am forever grateful that my husband chose to marry me and for his last gift to me: our sweet girl.”

Denise Pomplun

What’s your favorite SD memory?

“Definitely going to breakfast and the swap meet on the weekend with my family. Me and my dad used to go eat at Jimmy’s Family Restaurant, then hit up Kobey’s. I always remember having the best time and getting so excited about what I would find.”

Chenoa Scalora

What’s one interesting fact about you that people—even your friends—may not know?

“I played the alto saxophone when I was in junior high. I played it because of Lisa Simpson—and because the teacher told me my hands were too small to play it, so I wanted to prove him wrong.”

Tone Anderson

What’s one interesting fact about that people—even your friends—may not know?

“My mom calls me Boo, still.”

Daniel Rodriguez

What are you thankful for?

“I’m thankful for the San Diego cycling community. Many people in that community invest their time and energy to host free local events that bring so many different cyclists together. At the same time, I appreciate the effort of local political leaders who have worked on improving city infrastructure to [make biking] safer and easier around San Diego.”

Lety Beers

What are you thankful for?

“I’m thankful for my music and skate family. Keeps my life rich and full of action and amazing friends.”

Vayunamu Bawa

What’s one interesting fact about that people— even your friends—may not know?

“I have always wanted to be a fashion designer and release a clothing line.”

BJ & Pete Jezbera

What’s one interesting fact about that people— even your friends—may not know?

“I have performed plays on three iconic stages in San Diego—The Old Globe, the La Jolla Playhouse, and San Diego Repertory Theatre.”

The post Photos: Portraits on Kettner appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

I pray we don’t topple over onto a stingray, thinking maybe kayaking isn’t the best tactic to get acquainted with our coast. Though I’ve lived in San Diego for four years, I have an embarrassingly flimsy relationship with the sea. In summer, I occasionally paddle board the bay, boogie board Moonlight Beach, toss tennis balls for my dog in OB, or amble along Sunset Cliffs. But after reading that La Jolla Cove boasts the densest variety of animal life at any US beach—even those in Hawaii or Alaska—I couldn’t help becoming curious about our front yard, a destination that over 4 million people visit annually.

Which is how I found myself here, battling the surf with Mulligan, an ocean conservation coordinator for local nonprofit Wildcoast, an environmental organization co-founded by whale scholar Serge Dedina and turtle conservationist Wallace J. Nichols 25 years ago. Today, Dedina still helms Wildcoast, but he’s quick to give credit for the robustness of La Jolla’s marine protected areas (MPAs) to his staff—70 percent of which are women.

November 28, 2022

Consider the WhaleRELATED ARTICLE

“Look at all these people recreating,” Mulligan exclaims, motioning at the clumps of kayakers and paddle boarders mingling outside the caves in the MPA that Wildcoast actively monitors. “They’re here because they know they will see marine animals.”

She points out silvery bait fish darting amid kelp forests, along with orange Garibaldi (California’s state fish), leopard sharks, cormorants, and pelicans, all markers of ocean health. “Look for the green sea turtles,” she adds, tying her hair into a knot and peering into the water. “La Jolla has four.”

Dedina calls the Eastern Pacific green sea turtle one of Wildcoast’s biggest success stories. When he and Nichols were young PhD candidates surfing southern Baja, they only ever saw dead turtles. Over 30,000 were slaughtered annually to serve as a pre-Viagra food that purportedly increased male virility.

Wildcoast’s earliest campaign, masterminded by communications and policy director Fay Crevoshay, rallied the pope to speak out in support of protected places for nesting mothers. The team put up signs on beaches, on billboards, and in newspapers; on them, a model posed beside the words “My man doesn’t need turtle eggs, because he knows they don’t make it more powerful” in Spanish. This got locals educating their neighbors about not eating turtles.

The latter became a key part of Wildcoast’s approach: Start small by encouraging residents to protect their wildlands. Rather than having some outside wonks policing fragile ecosystems, collaborate with folks on the ground, teaching and inviting them to become invested in safeguarding their backyards from harm. Turns out that working with Mexican communities to protect sea creatures south of the border benefits the overall health and diversity of San Diego’s coastal regions, too.

After seeing too many stories of blue whale sightings off San Diego’s coast to ignore, I book a summer whale-watching trip. Eager faces peer into the blue, seeking an Instagrammable moment. As La Jolla’s palaces shimmer atop fragile sandstone cliffs, docents wax poetic about San Diego’s rich waters. It is possible to see whales year-round here: gray, humpback, orca, fin, Bryde’s, blue.

“Whales rebounded because we stopped whaling,” says Russell D. Moore, whale-watching boat captain with Xplore Offshore. “Today, our waters are a testament to a well-managed biosystem. Wildcoast has contributed to that.”

It’s true. Twenty-five years ago, a coalition of conservationists, including Wildcoast, stopped Mitsubishi from constructing a massive salt mine in San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja, an important gray whale breeding site. Five years later, the team helped to permanently safeguard 450,000 acres there. Today, that space is a marine protected area and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. With their breeding site preserved, the whales are thriving.

“More whales mean we have another problem,” Moore says. “San Diego is the Wild West of whale watching—boats are harassing whales by getting too close.”

So, in response, Wildcoast’s Ann Wycoff, Annelise Tappe, and Devon Lukasiewicz developed the Protect the Locals campaign to educate whale-watching guides and visitors on the importance of keeping a safe distance, so our beloved whales’ breeding and migration patterns aren’t disrupted by our adoration.

On my whale-watching venture, none grace us with their presence. Surprisingly few visitors appear disappointed. Rather, people seem energized by the salty wind on our faces; the pod of dolphins that swoops in to say hello isn’t a shabby consolation prize, either.

Another morning on the water, this time on a speedboat gliding north from Mission Bay. The resident dog, a mutt called Captain, sits next to Joe Cooper, the boat’s true captain, barking whenever she spots a sea lion or dolphin.

Despite my kayaking struggles, Mulligan and Cooper invited me on one of their monitoring excursions to educate fishers about marine protected areas. San Diego County boasts 11 MPAs: Tijuana River Mouth (Tijuana Estuary), Cabrillo (off southern Point Loma), Famosa Slough (between Old Town and OB), two in south La Jolla, Matlahuayl (La Jolla Caves), San Diego-Scripps (La Jolla Shores), San Dieguito Lagoon (Del Mar), San Elijo Lagoon (Escondido), Batiquitos Lagoon (Carlsbad), and Swami’s (Encinitas).

In 2012, Wildcoast teamed up with NGOs and government officials to designate and protect important keystone coastal regions, like rocky reefs, kelp forests, and wetlands. Matlahuayl State Marine Reserve, which roughly translates as “land of many caves” in the area’s Indigenous Kumeyaay language, houses pregnant leopard sharks who come to bask in the warm waters, a tactic that shortens their gestation period by two months. Swami’s is the only kelp and eelgrass habitat between La Jolla and Palos Verdes.

The health of MPAs depends on compliance of no-take zones—areas where you cannot pull anything from the water, including fish. MPA Watch, San Diego’s citizen science group, monitors on land. Lifeguards and state park officials also supervise from shore. Wildcoast uses boats and radars to ensure no one fishes inside the MPA boundary.

For now, Wildcoast’s efforts appear to be mostly working. On a recent holiday weekend, Mulligan explains, they’d encountered a few boats fishing in the MPA, but most folks said they just didn’t know there was a boundary they couldn’t cross.

Mulligan often approaches these teachable moments with data, citing a 2022 Decadal Management Review proving that species diversity in MPA intertidal habitats is higher and more stable than outside MPAs and fish are more abundant, are larger, live longer, and produce more offspring. Another study showed MPAs may be more resilient to heatwaves, too. And, because species that become abundant in the MPAs leave the areas’ boundaries and increase populations in the surrounding waters, their success creates a domino effect.

Just before we head back into Mission Bay, Captain the dog lifts onto two legs and starts howling. A massive pod of dolphins leaps into our wake. There have to be 50 small cetaceans surrounding us, playing together, finding the dolphin equivalent of joy. Mulligan kicks off her shoes, gleeful.

“This never gets old,” Cooper says. His sunkissed face explodes into a grin.

Mulligan points at the dolphins vaulting around the boat. “They are why we do this.”

My tour of San Diego’s MPAs takes me to all but one: the Tijuana River Mouth State Marine Conservation Area. Once a gorgeous southern California wildland with perfect surf, today the area is an environmental travesty plagued by pollution.

Despite Wildcoast’s knack for pulling off feats of conservation in unlikely places, even Dedina, former mayor of Imperial Beach, cannot yet do away with the 60 million gallons of raw sewage seeping into the ocean each day. This year, South County waters have been too polluted to enter for more than 1,000 days. The situation is now the longest-lasting environmental disaster in US history.

Still, Wildcoast is doing what it can. The nonprofit’s marine debris manager in Tijuana, Rosario Norzagaray, is leading an educational campaign to teach locals not to toss garbage into the river. In addition, in 2021, her Wildcoast team installed a trash boom, a durable structure that catches river debris before it reaches the ocean. To date, they have collected over 250,000 pounds of garbage, repurposing old tires into playgrounds, building materials, and even structural foundations to halt hill erosion. In October, they placed a second boom, with hopes to add more in the coming years.

In addition, Norzagaray and her team have incentivized plastic as currency, adding a financial benefit to encourage residents to fight pollution in their neighborhoods. “Educating locals and installing trash booms doesn’t just empower communities,” Crevoshay says. “We’re stopping trash from floating up to San Diego.”

All this traveling through our region with Wildcoast shifted something in me. I’m no kayaker, but I’ve started regularly snorkeling, swimming, and paddle boarding in La Jolla. The ocean is no longer a stranger to me. There’s treasure here; I like to engage with it. And when I do, I often remember something Dedina told me.

“We cannot allow the problem to overwhelm the solution,” he said. “You can support efforts to safeguard and steward the place in San Diego that brings you joy, or you can ground yourself in despair. Why not ground yourself in solving the problem?”

Editor’s Note: The print version of this article, published November 2024, mistakenly stated that San Diego has six MPAs and misstated the amount of garbage collected by Wildcoast’s trash boom. We have also removed an incorrect quote.

The post How Wildcoast Keeps Our Marine Protected Areas Teeming With Life appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Potato gnocchi with red sauce, beef meatballs, and spicy peppers are on the menu. It’s all homemade, mostly with ingredients grown at her house in inland North San Diego County. I nibble on the appetizers—a hot plate of prosciutto stuffed pizza and freshly baked biscotti—as I watch the 5-foot nothing, 73-year-old, bespectacled Prezio dart from one corner of her kitchen to the next.

It’s clear this is her domain. With Frank Sinatra crooning in the background, Prezio roams the kitchen like Fernando TatÍs patrols right field, deftly moving back and forth between the stove, the cutting board, and the fridge.

“I like to have two or three things going at the same time,” she says. “I could stay in the kitchen night and day and always find something to do. Always.”

That’s easy to see. Prezio—who was born in Roggiano Gravina in southern Italy and moved to Toronto as a teenager in the ’60s, before she and her husband, Gigi, followed their adult kids to SD about 10 years ago—makes sure to explain the key to good gnocchi: You have to push tiny holes into each one and roll them on a grooved board to allow for maximum sauce pickup.

Before my eyes, she whips up hundreds of gnocchi in the span of a half hour. (That’s not even close to her personal record—she says she once made 972 in a single day.)

Once the gnocchi is plated, she hands me a fork to try my first bite.

“It’s good?” she asks, anxiously leaning forward.

Yes, it’s good. Actually, it’s great. In fact, I tell her, with all due respect to my late grandmother, it’s the best Italian food I’ve ever had. And I mean it. If potato angels existed, these gnocchi would be the fluffy pillows where they laid their heads.

With that, the concern in her brown eyes washes away. She flashes a massive smile and claps her hands.

Recipes like this, coupled with her effervescent Italian nonna vibe, have propelled Prezio to social media fame. On Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, where she’s known as @thatladyanna, she’s racked up more than 700,000 combined followers since last November, when she shared her first cooking video.

And it didn’t take long for Prezio to get used to working with her “producer”—her son, Reno, a hairstylist based in North Park.

April 24, 2024

Who is Jordan Howlett When the Camera is Off?RELATED ARTICLE

While Prezio grabs more Parmesan for the table, Reno tells me their operation is a simple one: Each weekend, he comes over to visit his parents, and while he’s here, he films his mom cooking on his iPhone. No fancy cameras, no extra lights, no input from some “creative” at a social media agency.

Then, he edits the clips together on Instagram—something he was already used to doing for his hair account—before sharing to her accounts, complete with a full recipe breakdown. Each visit garners him two or three videos to post during the week.

“The hardest part is keeping up with her. Sometimes she’ll do something [in the kitchen] before I film it,” Reno says, drawing another laugh from his mom.

Neither one of them expected to hit it big on social media. They posted their first video on a whim, Reno says, after he recorded his mom cooking for one of his clients. He figured an Instagram account full of videos of her dishes would be “a good visual recipe book for me that I can go back and watch 30 years from now,” he says.

It turned out to be much more than that. Prezio’s recipes built up decent traction in the first few months, nabbing tens of thousands of views, but her following exploded in June. That was when @chefreactions, a popular Instagram and TikTok account with millions of followers, reviewed Prezio’s meatballs.

“One morning, I woke up and saw that he started following her,” Reno recalls. “And I got really excited—but then I got really worried, because he talks smack on bad recipes. I was like, ‘Oh my God, he’s going to talk about my mom!’ Thirty minutes later, he dropped the video, and he loved it, just praising her.”

“Look at this absolute angel of a lady,” @chefreactions said in his review. “Making meatballs [with] perfect portion control. Like I could eat this every Sunday and not complain.”

“From there, it really took off,” Reno adds. Now, Prezio’s videos routinely draw millions of eyes. In July, her eggplant parmigiana recipe was viewed 6.7 million times on Instagram, and earlier this month, her saltimbocca veal dish received 14 million views in its first week.

Her ballooning social media following now includes an eclectic mix of celebrity fans waiting to check out her latest dish. Prezio is especially tickled knowing chef Emeril Lagasse, who she loved watching on Food Network, has seen her posts.

“I used to watch him, and now he watches me,” Prezio says, getting choked up for a moment.

But her recent success hasn’t gone to her head. When I tell her she’s now a social media star, Prezio chuckles and quickly brushes off the assertion.

“I don’t think I’m a star. That’s a big word,” she says. “This really surprised me a lot, because when we started, we didn’t do it to become this. I had no clue whatsoever.”

August 30, 2023

San Diego Food Influencers to Follow Right NowRELATED ARTICLE

Reno and Prezio have recently started to monetize her account—he shows me she pulled in about $500 from YouTube in August—but they both view this more as a labor of love. As I help myself to my third serving of gnocchi and meatballs, Reno says they’d like to do a pop-up restaurant in San Diego soon, if only to have more people try Prezio’s recipes out. She loves the idea, because it’ll be an opportunity to break her gnocchi record of 972.

When I excuse myself to leave, my belly is bulging well past my belt, and I have only one question left for Prezio: After all this, are you going to take a day off from the kitchen tomorrow?

“For what?” she asks. “I love to cook!”

The post Your New Favorite Cooking Influencer is a Local 73-Year-Old Italian Mom appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Then, Rosinsky came to roost in San Diego in 2012, building her nest in a most unusual location: the Fairmont Grand Del Mar.

Following a health scare in San Miguel de Allende, where she’d briefly moved after the death of her husband 15 years ago, Rosinsky was diagnosed with hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT), a condition that can cause excessive bleeding. Doctors at UC San Diego Health were among the top experts on the disease, so Rosinsky traveled here for treatment, taking a room at the Fairmont. Initially, she says, physicians gave her four months to live—but, following seven months on a lung medication that kept her virtually immobile, she became the first HHT patient to survive past 73. The treatment has since saved others. “God gave me work to do in San Diego: to find the cure for HHT,” she adds.

Somewhere along the way, Rosinsky realized she’d need more long-term housing. But when she informed the Fairmont she’d be checking out, she recalls, a receptionist asked, “Why? We love you here.”

“My dear,” she replied, “I can’t afford you.”

The general manager, however, suggested she make a deal—and then accepted her offer. “Welcome,” she recalls him saying. “This is your home now.”

As the hotel’s only permanent guest, she spends her days practicing pilates in her room; writing her memoirs; and dining at the resort’s onsite restaurant, Amaya, where the staff members all know her by name. “I’m the grandmother of everyone here,” she says.

The post Meet Fairmont Grand Del Mar’s Only Permanent Guest appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

“Equitable access to tech education is vital for Indigenous students to make sure we don’t get left behind,” she says.

Boyer’s second robot, SkoBot, is her baby, born to help teach the endangered Ojibwe language, Anishinaabemowin, and other Indigenous languages. SkoBots are about 10 inches tall, wearable, and pretty freakin’ cute. The latest generation includes a makwa (bear) and a waabooz (rabbit) designed in collaboration with an Ojibwe tattoo artist from Boyer’s home state of Michigan. “Kids love them; kids relate to them,” Boyer says.

SkoBots sense motion and say “boozhoo” (hello) and other phrases in response. Boyer’s nonprofit, STEAM Connection, provides the kits for free, and students build the SkoBots themselves. Boyer is currently recording more words in the voices of Ojibwe children and elders (including her grandmother) to expand the robots’ repertoire.

Boyer takes her robots on the road to demonstrate technology as a tool to communicate, advocate, and relate while imparting hands-on engineering skills. But, she says, she hasn’t always felt welcome in STEM.

During her childhood in a tribal community in Sault Ste. Marie, MI, it took Boyer two years to save $800 to join the public high school’s robotics club. She was the only girl and the only Indigenous student.

“People in my community experience financial and other inequities in education, and that was a barrier to my own STEM education,” she recalls. “And then there’s the troubling energy around women in STEM. Even my own dad said women weren’t meant to be engineers.”

So, she’s here to prove that Indigenous women do belong in STEM—and wherever they choose to showcase their talents and make their voices heard.

Boyer has already racked up an impressive list of accomplishments: She was part of the White House Tribal Youth Forum and received the Echoing Green Fellowship and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation prize. She moved to San Diego three years ago and travels frequently. With trips to Poland, the UK, Ghana, and China coming up, she’ll show people all over the world how tech can help preserve cultural history for the next generation.

October 28, 2024

November Pub Note: Rising to the OccasionRELATED ARTICLE

“To be Indigenous is a protest and a constant advocating for the future of your community,” she says. “There’s a myth that Indigenous people exist only in the past. But we’re here now and we will be here in the future.”

The post 23-Year-Old Invents Wearable Robot to Preserve Indigenous Languages appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

In 2016, during a council meeting about racial profiling by the San Diego Police Department, Cole made comments seemingly condoning the practice. Not long after, Montgomery Steppe quit Cole’s office. In 2018, she challenged Cole and won the District 4 seat.

“I left her office because that was the line that I didn’t want to cross,” Montgomery Steppe says. “I knew that I would have to represent her and what she said, and I was not able to do that. That was really one pivotal moment that helped me to have the courage to stand on my own values.”

Last year, Montgomery Steppe was elected to the County Board of Supervisors in a special election, becoming the first Black woman to hold the position. She has already helped bring home a deal between UC San Diego and the county to convert the former Alvarado hospital campus in the College Area into a psychiatric facility with 30 behavioral health beds and a crisis stabilization unit.

“I want to make sure that we are considering people who we have never considered before in San Diego’s history when we’re crafting and implementing these policies,” she says. “It really has been America’s Finest City for a select group of people—so, every day, my work is to make sure we can all say this is America’s Finest City, because we’re all being treated fairly and we’re all at the table making decisions.”

The post Supervisor Montgomery Steppe Is Helping Ensure SD’s Policies Serve Everyone appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

The kids at Eunime Por Tijuana orphanage are just like other children. Their deep belly laughs, sweaty games of street soccer, and ambitions and dreams for the future are the same. However, one difference sets them apart: Most of the kids at Eunime are HIV-positive.

Just a few miles south of the San Diego-Tijuana border crossing and framed by a rainbow fence, Eunime serves as a safe haven, providing orphaned children the necessary medical care and resources to live a life as unaffected by their diagnosis as possible. Founder Juana Ortiz started Eunime 20 years ago in honor of her sisters Eunice and Noemi, who, according to Juana, were among the earliest diagnosed cases of HIV/AIDS in Tijuana. Ortiz now serves as the general director.

“Eunice did not have the opportunity to receive treatment and be in good health,” Ortiz explains in Spanish. “It is in her memory that we do our best to give attention to all children that may need it.”

While Ortiz and I talk, I hold a 22-day-old baby, still unnamed, in my arms. His fate remains unknown, as the bloodwork that will determine his status hasn’t come back yet. His mother is HIV-positive and doesn’t regularly take her medicine. After he was surrendered at a local hospital, the hospital reached out to the National System for Integral Family Development, which contacted Ortiz for placement help. The baby’s eyes, big and brown, catch mine. He gurgles contentedly and falls back asleep, nestled in my chest.

“Do you think Sebastian fits him?” Ortiz coos, pinching his fat tummy.

“I do,” I reply, trying to swallow the growing lump in my throat. Ortiz and I walk to the abandoned lot next door which, thanks to a recent donation, now contains a playset. The children flock around her with their incessant chirps of Juana, Juanita, Ma.

A little boy swings on the new playset, pumping his legs with all his might to achieve the highest possible arc. The other residents race under him, nearly keeled over with laughter, trying to avoid colliding with the pendulum.

Despite support from donations and government assistance, Eunime is increasingly more expensive to run. Ortiz cites the increased minimum wage and decreased government support following the pandemic as financial stressors.

“We are operating with 70 percent of what we need,” she says. A rotating staff of caretakers and volunteers allow for around-the-clock care and supervision. Between looking after newborn babies, doing laundry for 20, helping with homework, and distributing the children’s medicine, there is never a dull moment.

Once, Ortiz tells me, the kids managed to sneak around 20 dogs into the orphanage, moving the pups from room to room trying to avoid her, hoping she wouldn’t hear the pack.

January 19, 2023

PHOTOS: The Growing, UCSD-Backed Migrant Community in TijuanaRELATED ARTICLE

“We have to have some sort of rule in place,” she laughs. “There can’t be more dogs than kids.”

Since 2004, nearly 70 children have called Eunime home. Eight have been adopted; the rest have grown up entirely under Juana’s wing.

“We will never match the attention [a child can get from an adoptive] family,” Ortiz says. “So we feel deeply grateful that God may grant them the opportunity to have a family.”

Ortiz works closely with the kids to create a life plan for when they age out of the orphanage at 18. Residents have gone straight from Eunime into university. Others have joined the workforce or started their own families.

Ortiz motions to a wall of photos in the waiting room. Alongside images of her sisters are records of all her residents’ young lives, from baby pictures to middle school sports team shots to college graduation photos.

“Here, we are a big family,” she says.

The post Eunime Por Tijuana Provides Refuge for Orphaned Children with HIV appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Determined to help, Ferrigno started distributing pads—only to realize that the plastic-loaded products were solving one problem but causing another. She partnered with a factory and, after much trial and error, developed a compostable pad that degrades within six months.

During the pandemic, “I spent a lot of time in the sanitary hygiene aisles,” Ferrigno says. “I recognized that there weren’t compostable products readily available for menstruators [in the US].” In 2022, she began selling her sustainable period products under the name Moon Pads, a certified B Corp operating with a “buy one, give one” model to distribute free pads in Tibet, India, Nepal, Nigeria, Mexico, and the States, where, according to Period.org, one in four students struggles to afford necessary menstrual products.

“Giving people access to these products helps improve public health,” Ferrigno says. “It helps improve school attendance, which helps improve literacy. It helps improve our economy, because if menstruators aren’t working for a week out of each month, that hits our economy. People don’t realize it’s a huge, cross-cutting issue.”

The post Moon Pads Provides Sustainable Period Products to Tibetan Nomads appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Yet her efforts never stopped. In 2003, Ahmed cofounded License to Freedom in El Cajon, an organization that helps immigrant survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault.

“I grew up in a system where women did not have the privilege they were supposed to have,” Ahmed says. “What led me [to this work] is the lack of opportunity where I grew up.” Ahmed now returns to Iraq at least once a year to collaborate with organizations on the ground helping those who have experienced domestic violence.

License to Freedom not only addresses the immediate concerns of women facing violence but tries to tackle systemic issues by providing other resources, like youth and economic development programs, mental health services, and treatment for offenders in multiple languages. Looking forward, Ahmed hopes License to Freedom can push for policy shifts in El Cajon to improve housing affordability and quality for immigrants in the city.

“We recognize that refugees come from the colonial system—that tells you how to talk, how to act,” she says. “Restoring of justice is always restoring of power.”

The post The Local Activist Caring for Immigrant Survivors of Domestic Violence appeared first on San Diego Magazine.