Associated Press

Moises Ochoa lives here with his wife, Patricia, and three children - ages 7, 10 and 13 - in a battered trailer behind a work shed that also serves as part of the family home. Trash litters the ground. A hose fills a tub for bathing. Flies are everywhere.

Injured on the job as a farm laborer several years ago, Ochoa doesn't work. His wife just started picking grapes in the nearby fields this year.

"How do we live? Who knows," Ochoa says in Spanish, a muddy tear dripping down his cheek. "Only God knows. This is not what I want for my children."

His is a story all too typical in Tulare County, parts of which look more like Third World shantytowns than the Golden State. It's the No. 2 county in the nation for agricultural production, behind Fresno, but also is home to some of the state's hungriest and poorest people.

Twenty percent of California's children were living in poverty in 1999 - the latest figures available. That's 3 percentage points above the national average, according to the 2003 Kids Count Data Book, a project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The study, released Wednesday, put California 39th in the nation for the percent of children in poverty, tied with Kentucky, Montana and Oklahoma.

Nationally, children's lives improved overall during the 1990's, according to the Kids Count study, but its authors warn that the data came from years when the economy was strong, and that pockets of poverty persist.

In Alpaugh, Earlimart, Plainview, Woodville and other small mostly Hispanic outposts in the south San Joaquin Valley, some families live in lean-tos, trailers and wood shacks with no indoor plumbing or electricity, like open sores among acres of oranges, grapes and peaches.

"We learn to drive down the right roads so we don't see it," says Robert Shipman, director of the Tulare ministry group Love In the Name of Christ.

The hunger is so bad that Feed the Children is preparing to begin massive food deliveries to the area. The Oklahoma-based Christian nonprofit group, known for its fund-raising commercials that dramatically depict hunger in the Third World, will begin filming in Tulare County in July, says spokeswoman Sherri Fisher. The group has filmed similar commercials in Kentucky, West Virginia and Arkansas.

Many poor families here are illegal immigrants who make a living only part of the year, working in fields with fake social security numbers.

They are reluctant to seek government assistance for fear it will keep them from eventually gaining legal status.

At the elementary school in Woodville, all 600 kids receive free meals. Ninety-five percent of their parents are farm laborers.

"We're in another world here," says school secretary Augustina Costa, walking along a nearby dirt side street, lined with ramshackle wooden huts where stray dogs dig in the trash and children run barefoot.

"It's places like this where kids fall through the cracks," Costa says. "But (parents) really can't say much because they're illegals and they're afraid they'll get sent back to Mexico. ... At least here there is an opportunity for their children to learn, to speak English and to be something more than what their parents are."

Janice Rice walks the streets of Plainview like a missionary in a Mexican village, waving to kids and stopping in yards to offer kind words and biblical praise. She's the pastor of a town church and runs El Granito Foundation, a Tulare County aid group.

Rice stops to talk to a family sitting under a shade tree. A few feet away, a little girl bathes in a red plastic Coca Cola bucket on the doorstep of the family home.

"Around here, if you've got a fence and a halfway decent roof, you're uptown," Rice says. "Everybody deserves a place to go to the bathroom, a place to shower and something to eat."

Copyright 2003 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.