Lifelong Camarillo resident Kim Price-Marczuk has deep roots in her community. It was these local bonds that led her to become a volunteer with the Red Cross. “My former high school advisor was [volunteering] and posting pictures (on Facebook), so I messaged him and asked ‘How do I get involved in the Red Cross?’” Two days later Kim was working in her first Red Cross shelter for the evacuees of the Hill-Woolsey Fires in Camarillo and Thousand Oaks. That was six years ago.
When typhoon Mawar hit Guam in May of 2023, Kim took three weeks of vacation from work to travel there and serve in the shelter. “Mawar came through and devastated half the island,” she recalls. “A lot of people in Guam live in ‘island style’ homes they call them. It’s not a brick-and-mortar home like you and I are used to here. They’re just maybe wood, maybe tarps on the ceiling, metal roofs, something like that. Their kitchens are all outside, maybe under an awning. A typhoon just wiped it – gone; flattened everything. So, all the families, they needed help.
“There was one young mother. She had a young child, probably a year old or two. She was coming to the states to have a medical procedure done at USC but she didn’t know anyone here.”
Kim took the initiative and used her personal connections to help this young family. She called acquaintances who teach at USC with the hope of getting specific support, and it worked. “I said I have a situation, and I’m hoping maybe you have some information for me.” With that, she was able to secure housing and transportation through USC so that the family from Guam could get the medical procedure.
“The children were severely burned and had to receive treatment at specialized burn centers”
Volunteers don’t often get to see the long-term impact of their efforts, but Kim got the reward of experiencing a full circle moment after a particularly tragic fire in Oxnard. A few years ago, on Christmas day, there was an early morning fire which resulted in a fatality. It was in a makeshift rental unit with unsafe electrical outlets and cords. A family lived in those conditions, and the father perished in the fire. The mother and children were severely burned and had to receive treatment at specialized burn centers for many months. The next Christmas, the family was invited to a fire department toy drive. There, Kim got reacquainted with the family and learned that the children were healing from the burns, and from the trauma.
More recently, Kim again volunteered at an evacuation shelter for the Mountain Fire. “This fire was different because this was my backyard. I know a lot of the houses and a lot of the people in the neighborhoods, so it’s very personal for me. It was the fact that my best friend and her siblings lost all their childhood memories in their mom’s house.”
Two other friends’ homes were also destroyed in the fire and her own mother had to evacuate. With the fire rapidly approaching, Kim’s mother evacuated her home so quickly that she had to leave her horse in the paddock. Someone with a horse trailer rescued the horse but Kim’s mom couldn’t find it for three days. Kim had a hard time keeping her mom out the fire area because she wanted to search for the horse. Luckily, it was finally located at a nearby ranch just out of the fire zone.
In the days that followed the Mountain Fire, Kim worked as the Local Assistance Center supervisor. Her team helped 120 families in the community who were affected by the fire. For Kim, meeting with and helping her neighbors was another very personal experience.
“When one of my friends came into the assistance center, it was the first time I had seen her since the fire. We cried and she just hugged me for at least fifteen minutes.”
by Anna Kumor, Red Cross Communications Volunteer
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