FELLSMERE — Hundreds of needy families from Fellsmere, Sebastian and even South Brevard were able to look forward to a proper Thanksgiving feast this year courtesy of Jesse Zermeno’s Operation Hope.
The organization handed out more than 400 turkeys and chickens, plus countless canned and boxed goods on Saturday, items donated by a supportive community.
It’s tough to think what local families did without Operation Hope when nothing like it existed.
Fourteen years ago, Mexico-born Jesse Zermeno took a drive around the small city of Fellsmere, on a tour with a field worker who was hoping to find work with Zermeno’s carpet cleaning business.
The man showed Zermeno the parts of town most didn’t know or care to know existed – where the migrant workers and their families lived.
Zermeno saw trailer after trailer crammed with people “living like sardines,” he recalled.
At the time, Zermeno was consumed with trying to improve his own family’s circumstances, building up his carpet cleaning company in Melbourne.
“I never helped anyone before in my life,” Zermeno said, adding that he was just too busy.
But the images of those families living in such squalor – trailers with holes in them where rats scurried in and out – haunted Zermeno.
“I feel like something was born in my heart,” he said.
“This town was, wow, very depressing,” Zermeno said, recalling Fellsmere 14 years ago.
Something inside him said, “Jump in.”
“What can I do?” he wondered.
His church, he said, was like many others sending missionaries overseas to other countries to provide assistance.
“I saw the need half an hour from my house,” Zermeno said. “I never forgot what I saw.”
“It just crushed him,” said Jann Zermeno, Jesse’s wife of 36 years, recalling that he often wondered, “Where is somebody to care that this is going on in our own backyard? Where is the church? The government?”
Working in Melbourne, Zermeno was often called to wealthy families’ homes in communities such as Satellite Beach to clean their carpets.
On the way to one such customer, a thought rippled through Zermeno’s mind.
While he did not have the resources to help others, his customers did.
He went to one customer and told her about what he had seen in Fellsmere – a city he had been to only once before. He asked her if she had any items she no longer needed, that she planned to get rid of – clothing, furniture, kitchen ware.
She not only gave him the items, but she also spread the word to her neighbors.
Soon Zermeno was making regular trips to collect items.
“That was the beginning,” he said.
Even as their house began to fill up with donated goods that had not yet been distributed, she said she supported her husband’s efforts.
“He was doing something meaningful,” she said.
On Saturdays, he and his family would drive into Fellsmere, pulling into driveways, along sides of the road and into parks to give out what he had collected. It was the humble start of what would later become Operation Hope, Zermeno’s proudest accomplishment.
Born in Mexico City, Mexico, Zermeno graduated from college with a business administration degree and went to work for a telephone company.
The company, wanting him to learn English, sent him to school in Chicago to continue his education.
Zermeno quit his job with the telephone company, and because of his lack of English, took menial jobs in hotels and restaurants.
It was at one such restaurant that he met Jann, who spoke Spanish after having studied abroad in Spain while in college.
She became his wife and the mother of his children, Jesse Jr., Janette, and Jacqueline.
The family moved to the Melbourne area to be near Jann’s family.
Zermeno attained U.S. citizenship, bought a home and started Sandpiper Dry Carpet Cleaning. That’s where Zermeno was, pursuing his American dream, when he took that tour of Fellsmere.
After six months of making weekly distributions to the migrant community in Fellsmere, Florida Today did a story on Zermeno’s endeavors.
The publicity set Zermeno’s phone to constant ringing.
“I couldn’t keep up,” Zermeno said of all the people who wanted to help, to donate. “God works in mysterious ways.”
One man, an engineer, offered up a vacant home he owned for Zermeno to use as a warehouse for all the donated goods that had yet to be distributed. The “warehouse” helped alleviate the overcrowding that had occurred within his own home.
The then-Fellsmere Mayor, having heard about the Zermeno family’s efforts, offered up the former fire station on Broadway, which is now the Fellsmere Community Center, as a distribution site.
Time went on and three years later, Zermeno got a call from a man who lives in Windsor.
“I call him my angel,” Zermeno said, adding that the man wishes to remain anonymous.
The pair met face to face and at the end of the meeting, the angel told Zermeno he wanted him to do three things: hire two people to help with the endeavor, buy a delivery truck, and lease a proper warehouse.
“Yeah, right,” Zermeno said, knowing there was no way he could pay for all of that.
“I will pay for this,” Zermeno recalled the angel saying. The man then cut Zermeno a $100,000 check.
The angel did even more.
He sent his attorneys to help Zermeno with the paperwork to set up Operation Hope as a non-profit.
And later, he negotiated the purchase of the 17- acre site where Operation Hope currently sits on County Road 512. The angel then paid $3 million for it and deeded it to Zermeno.
Operation Hope opened at its current location in April 2004, just before Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne.
Zermeno said it was like a dream coming true. The angel knew that Zermeno wanted to do more than hand out food and clothing and the like. He also wanted to take on education, providing day care.
Today, Operation Hope offers voluntary pre-kindergarten and has approximately 30 students registered, though there is room for about 50.
Among those in the pre-kindergarten program is 4-year-old Daniel, who nodded shyly when asked if he likes his class.
His mother, Sandra Sanchez, said that having the program has been very beneficial for her family.
Daniel’s brother, Romero Jr., attends Fellsmere Elementary. They attended the annual Thanksgiving Giveaway last Saturday for help in putting enough food on the table for them, her husband, and their two older children.
“He’s a really nice guy,” Sanchez said of Zermeno, “and his wife, too.”
It’s a common refrain from those Operation Hope helps, as well as from those who help Operation Hope.
“He’s unbelievable,” volunteer Dianne Spagnolia said of Zermeno. “He’s so good of heart, so pure.”
Those who know about Operation Hope might be aware of only the annual giveaways the organization puts together – the Back to School Backpack Giveaway, the Thanksgiving Turkey Giveaway, and the Christmas Toy Giveaway.
But every day, Operation Hope helps those in need in the community through its food pantry and thrift shop.
Zermeno said the food pantry serves 14,000 people each year.
Fourteen years ago, he said the demographic of those he helped was 90 percent Hispanic, 7 percent African American, and 1 percent white.
Today, that’s shifted dramatically. He estimates that 60 percent of those now helped by the food pantry are white, 25 percent Hispanic and 15 percent African American.
Along with the food pantry and thrift shop, Operation Hope also helps to integrate non-English speakers into American society through its voluntary pre-kindergarten program.
To keep children active and out of trouble, there is a new youth soccer program Zermeno expects to attract 200 kids ages 6 to 13 next season.
And there is a senior center of sorts – a place where local seniors come to socialize, play cards, and even volunteer.
Going forward, there is really just one last goal Zermeno wants to tackle – open a full school, one grade level at a time.
Details are still sparse; Zermeno doesn’t know if he’d create a private school or a charter school.
“Those kids, they need some help,” Zermeno said of the children of migrant workers. Language is a barrier for them, which Zermeno wants to help them overcome.