SEATTLE -- With baseball on hold, Manny Acta is home with his family in Florida during April for the first time in 34 years. But for the veteran Mariners coach, family extends far beyond his own house.

Acta, 51, has always maintained close contact with his roots in the Dominican Republic, where he grew up in San Pedro de Macoris. Even now, while working as Seattle’s third-base coach during the Major League season, he spends his offseasons as the vice president and general manager of the Estrellas Orientales in the Dominican Winter League.

So while Acta devotes part of each day to contacting various Mariners players and coaches to make sure they’re doing OK during the COVID-19 shutdown, he also worries about the people back in his homeland as they deal with obtaining the necessary ventilators, masks and equipment to deal with the pandemic.

Acta has tried to help educate about the importance of social distancing and adhering to the national curfew in the Dominican Republic, where citizens are asked to stay home after 6 p.m.

“There are way too many people just not respecting it,” Acta said Monday on a conference call with Mariners reporters. “We live in a country [in the Dominican Republic] where a lot of people have to come out today just to get their bread for tomorrow.

“It is easy for me to stay here [in Madeira Beach, Fla.] and hunker up with my family, buy groceries and not go out for 15 days. But you can’t ask people who live in poverty to close yourself in a house with six kids, not getting a paycheck and not having any food to eat. So they are having some issues, especially with the social distancing.”

Acta was manager of the Indians and Nationals prior to joining Scott Servais’ coaching staff with the Mariners in 2016, and he has seen baseball from all sides. But he’s never witnessed anything quite like what is going on now around the world, so he’s tried to use his social media and status in the Dominican Republic to get the word out to those who might not understand the need to stay home, including a message in Spanish on his Instagram account.

“I’m afraid what could happen there the next couple weeks, because a lot of people there don’t understand what 'asymptomatic' means,” Acta said. “You don’t feel [physically] bad, but you’re still carrying it and spreading it. They’ve worked so hard to try to educate people on this back home, but right now, this is what we’re fighting.

“It’s just hard. I have empathy for a lot of those people because I grew up there and saw the poverty in some families. It’s not easy to be in a little tiny house with two or three bedrooms, including the living room, to be there locked up with six kids and not have internet and three different TVs and all that. So I have empathy for that.

“But in the same token, we’re all going to have to make sacrifices in order to stop it. That’s the issue we’re battling back home. The people who are in a level of poverty where they just can’t afford to stay home and watch cable TV and have food for two weeks.”

On the plus side in his own life, Acta says he’s been able to communicate with some players on a more personal level than normal as they talk about life and dealing with the shutdown. And he’s found time to read books again, currently working through 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' by Gabriel García Márquez.

“It’s an old book, a best-seller from the '60s,” Acta said. “The original was in Spanish, but I got it in English from my sister. A lot of stuff I read is history from the D.R., back when we had the dictatorship and all that kind of stuff. I’ll probably go back and do again 'The Alchemist' and 'The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari' and all those books that used to keep me sane when I was doing rebuildings in Cleveland and Washington, D.C. All those self-help type of things.”

In other words, when Acta isn't helping others, he'll try to help himself. And stay ready to return to baseball as soon as possible.