DESCANSO – On a recent chilly Thursday morning, men and women bundled in layers were awaiting Willie Mills as he pulled his truck into the parking lot of tiny Descanso Town Hall.

Soon, the crowd was feverishly setting up tables and unloading the boxes of food that Mills brought.

Buried amid the hills and Indian reservations of east San Diego County is this mountain community of 1,423 residents as well as other small towns and villages. This is San Diego's remote border backcountry, home to some of the poorest communities in California.

A mobile food pantry truck, run by a San Diego nonprofit, has started distributing free food to families in these isolated areas, many deep in the mountains or along the Mexican border. They come from far and wide, several finding themselves on the brink of homelessness during the recession.

Jennifer Bevill-Dobbs, 55, was among those unloading and distributing the boxes of carrots, cantaloupe, canned white chicken and peanut butter. She recently lost her job as a restaurant manager in Descanso and traveled from her home in Campo to volunteer and pick up food for her family, including her husband and three sons.

"I'm 30 miles from the grocery store where I live," she said. "Without (this), we wouldn't be able to survive. There's no way because we're so far away from the grocery stores."

Mills said that coming to the backcountry has been eye-opening. "There are some sites where we have like 300 to 400 people to come get food," he said.

In San Diego County, the number of residents living below the poverty line has jumped to 446,060 people – 14.8 percent of the population, up from 12.6 percent in 2009, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2010 American Community Survey.

People in remote rural areas like this one have been especially vulnerable to the long-term effects of the recession, said Rich Easter, program manager with Feeding America San Diego.

Since Feeding America launched its mobile pantry in January, its monthly tally of clients along the border had more than doubled to 1,625 by the end of August.

"The lines are getting longer. More and more people are coming out and looking for that emergency food assistance for a lot of reasons," Easter said. "It hits especially hard on those rural areas."

The region served by the mobile pantry includes Descanso and such towns as Boulevard, Campo, Jacumba and Potrero. Although many people who receive food volunteer in the program, there is no requirement to do so, and there is no means test, Easter said.

Feeding America San Diego gets no government funding, Easter said. Its programs are supported by individuals, private donors and corporations, including Kraft Foods, Ralphs and the Kresge Foundation. If someone shows up, they get food – 20 and 25 pounds of it, including fresh produce, canned goods and beverages.

Clients include retirees on fixed incomes that don't stretch as far as they used to or people who have lost their jobs or seen pay cuts. Rural remote areas have limited access not only to soup kitchens but to supermarkets, with stores as far as 30 or 40 miles away, Easter said.

In fact, the county's rural border communities are relatively poor and isolated, said Charles Pope, assistant director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego. "There's not a lot of industry or commerce or infrastructure," he said.

Four times a month, Deborah Kile, 60, and partner David Klaus, 55, leave their trailer park in Guatay, where living is cheaper than in the city, and load up their 1998 Ford Windstar van with friends to pitch in at the pantry and receive groceries.

"If it wasn't for these guys, we wouldn't eat at all," said Kile, who lives on $150 a month in Social Security. Klaus receives a disability check.

High unemployment, a lack of jobs paying good wages and the San Diego area's cost of living contribute to the region's rising poverty rate, said Corinne Wilson, who oversees research and policy at the Center on Policy Initiatives in San Diego.

"It's dramatic in that what we're seeing is a steady increase in poverty," Wilson said. "People are unemployed or if they are employed, they've seen their hours cut or their wages cut or both."

Gas prices are also a challenge, said Sandra Wilson, volunteer coordinator in Descanso, and safety net services are more concentrated in heavily populated areas.

"That's a big issue up here: To get around, you have to have gas," she said. "I have people getting food for six to eight people in their family, and they're the only one here."

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Marisa Agha is a journalist based in Southern California.

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