Essential worker
Cathie Escalante has applied downtime to making 1,700 masks
EL CENTRO — El Centro Elementary School District senior secretary Cathie Escalante has been using her newfound free time generously.
Escalante and her colleagues have remained at home, per district orders, since all public school sites in Imperial County closed March 17 in precaution to COVID-19.
She’s been largely spending her downtime at her sewing machine making face masks. As of Friday, she had made approximately 1,700 handmade face masks. She’s donated about 500 of them and has sold the rest for $2 each.
Escalante hasn’t kept any of that money for herself, however.
She’s used most of the money to purchase elastic and fabric to make more masks, and has donated the rest to the Imperial Valley Food Bank.
Escalante said she has chosen to do this as a way to fully dedicate her effort to the betterment of the community.
“I saw the need for it, and I just thought it could put my skills to use right now,” Escalante, who is still receiving a paycheck from the district at this time, said.
Escalante said she makes about 60 masks a day. She estimated that one mask takes her about 10 minutes to make.
“It’s not that difficult,” she said.
Escalante recalled that when the county first required the use of face masks in public on April 10, she was averaging about 100 masks a day, as more residents were in need of masks.
“At one point, I was getting up at 4 a.m. and staying up until midnight making masks,” she said.
Although she’s been occasionally sewing since she was a teenager, Escalante had never made a face mask before the pandemic hit.
After realizing the need for masks, she searched for a how-to video on YouTube and practiced with some scrap material.
Her initial mask came out decent, and she figured she should make a few more. However, after seeing that face masks were selling for about $10 each, she realized she could be of service to the community by selling them for less money.
“I just thought, ‘I don’t want to profit from a pandemic,’” Escalante said of her $2 masks.
She posted her masks on Facebook, and they turned out to be a hit. Her friends of friends began reaching out to her, and soon after hundreds of other people began inquiring.
Escalante, who is in her 21st year with ECESD, said she wouldn’t be able to make so many masks without the help of several of her coworkers and ECESD parents.
She gave credit to
Araceli Topete, Sylvia Hernandez, Gloria Figueroa, Esther Banda, Patsy Jernigan, Patsy Robinson, Elsa Montano and Brenda Sheffield for their donations of materials.
The 500 masks Escalante has donated have gone to ECESD staff, local nurses and other essential workers.
Along with two local doctor’s offices, Escalante has donated masks to some assisted living facilities in San Diego and Riverside counties, as she has some friends who have daughters who are nurses there.Escalante also came to know of a facility in
San Diego that was running low on surgical caps — staff there were using T-shirts as a substitute.
So, she took to YouTube, looked up a how-to video on how to make surgical caps and made some for the facility.
After donating masks to the IV Food Bank, Escalante came to learn that it was having some difficulty in keeping enough food on its shelves to meet the current need of the community.
As she didn’t want to keep any of the profits from her face masks, Escalante believed the Food Bank was a good organization to give the profits to. She’s donated $200 there so far.
Some time ago, Escalante’s husband bought her a shirt that reads, “I became a mask maker because your life is worth my time.”
“That’s how I feel,” Escalante said. “If
I’m just sitting here at home and there’s something that I can do, I mean, why not? I can’t just stay sitting here doing nothing. I want to do something to help.”