Saturday, July 18, 2009

Independence Day?


This is an entry I wrote a while ago and, due to limited internet access, am just now uploading it to the blog...

July 4th - El Dia de la Independencia - was a solemn one for me. The night before, I went camping down in Kiptopeke Park with a Honduran family. I learned a new card game which was sort of like slaps in that their only similarity is that you suffer severe bodily harm by the end of the game. I also heard a lot of "vos," which is Central American Spanish for the "tu" normally thought to mean "you" in English.

On Saturday, July 4, I drove up to Silver Springs, MD, for a quinceanera for a daughter from a family from Guerrero, Mexico. On the drive up from the bottom of the Eastern Shore (where Kiptopeke is) toward the peninsula's point of contact with the mainland, there was the normal July 4 traffic with people rushing to get to their cookouts and pools before too much of the day was gone. Can't miss the fireworks! Cars with license plates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Virginia littered US-13, apparently one of the deadliest highways in the US.

Amidst the vacationers and travelers, however, I saw a different type of traffic. Practically rundown school buses, some white, others painted bright green, others with small Mexican flags on the side, showed a different side of our nation's Independence Day. Those buses were full of migrant farmworkers, going to work to pick tomatoes while we enjoyed the fights of our ancestors for our freedom to drink beer, get sunburnt while playing on the beach, and shoot fireworks. It makes me wonder how really independent we are. We are dependent on a group of people who have no choice but to break their backs and their families to come to a country they don't know, to work in one of the most dangerous jobs, and sacrifice the chance for a life even half as comfortable as ours, for us to be able to put tomatoes on our hamburgers. We have certainly based our freedoms and independence on making others dependent on us. We have raped them of their ability to provide for themselves and we say that we are their saviors because we offer them work. The work that no one else would want to do. The work that we are too "good" for.

I am one of the guilty ones, too, though. I wish I would've stopped by car at one of the fields and asked if I could work in the fields. I'm sure I would've been the weakest worker out there, but maybe showing a bit of solidarity would have been one step forward to a new type of Independence Day for our nation, where we stop the exploitation and the outright negligence of the people who help to bring us our most basic necessity: food.

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

La Cosecha


I have a few minutes before work today, so I stopped by a quaint restaurant in 'downtown' Parksley called the Club Car because they have wireless and because I was in desperate need of caffeine. Yep, I drank coffee. I hope I don't have the anxiety attacks I used to have or that I don't start feeling that itchy feeling under my skin.

Anyway, this is finally the week where we are doing the pesticide trainings with the large grower for their new workers. We were expecting last week to be the busy week - i.e., when all of the workers came in - but after spending two days sitting around in the deserted packing house, we were told that THIS was the week. And man were they right. Sunday night, bus loads of crews came in from Florida. Monday morning, that old packing house once deserted was filled with a new air, with men and women ready to work, ready to settle in to another home that they'll only have for 5 months, ready (or at least hoping) to make $200 for spending 60 hours a week picking tomatoes.

The foodbank, consequentially, is also busy. There, I get to talk to the farmworkers a bit more. They tell me that they're lucky if they get that $200, but that's only one or two weeks during the harvest. They've also gotten checks for $27. For one week of work. To feed themselves, maybe a child, pay rent, gas, electricity. Wow. And they still find some way to be friendly, open and outgoing.

Well, it's time to head to work. I saw my first combine in action the other day. The picture here is one of the dozens of wheat fields around here and in the past week all of them have been harvested. Hence, the title of this entry: La Cosecha means The Harvest. The summer is finally started aaaaand we'll see what kind of fruit she bears.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Wrestling with the higher powers?

As part of the internship, I have to write "guided journal entries" throughout the summer. The following is from my first assignment, which was written in response to a book called The Human Cost of Food.

I’m not sure if it’s just because I am only in the first week at my placement but I feel that there is a suffocating amount of limitations placed on the work we can do with the campesinos under the auspices of the agency. On my first day of work at the office, I met the man with whom I would be doing a handful of pesticide trainings and together we went to meet a grower that wanted to go through our agency to provide the training for his workers. As we waited in the grower’s small, wood-paneled office which revived olfactory memories of my grandpa’s dining room I was upset because I felt like my co-workers were letting the grower walk all over them and that the health education training I received at internship orientation would be thrown to the curb. My two, middle-aged co-workers expressed their excitement to me that the grower had decided to give us a second chance to conduct the pesticide trainings for his workers. Apparently the year before, a pesticide health educator new to the agency and the grower, came in and spent an hour and a half on the EPA's Worker Protection Standards (WPS) pesticide safety training.

I asked, “What’s wrong with that? You can hardly cover everything in less than that amount of time, if you’re doing it right.”

The grower only wanted her to spend 20 minutes to cover the mandatory 11 points of the training with more than 50 new workers at a time. I was shocked and decided I would try to watch what I said from then on, even in front of people I thought were advocates on behalf of the campesinos.

In two weeks, we will be standing in front of a long day of rotations of 50 campesinos recently arrived from Florida to show two videos for a total of 40 minutes about pesticide handling and pesticide safety. Apparently this is exciting news but I am dreading that day. Maybe I am biased because of how a health education specialist who conducted our training at orientation talked about how ineffective and even painful it is that growers will just pop in a video to “train” the exhausted campesinos as soon as they’ve arrived from a 20-hour car drive. It could also be due to my prior experience in developing culturally sensitive and plausibly effective health education materials and approaches, which has given me a basic understanding of some of the theories of health education. Either way, I feel torn, because the word around town is that the grower is a nice man, that he is more understanding toward the campesinos, and that he actually was fired from a previous place because of his generosity toward the campesinos.

I ask myself then, “What purpose do we even serve at the site? To click the ‘play’ button on the remote? To be able to sign the green cards to certify that the campesinos received the 'training?'”

It feels like we are getting thrown alongside the campesinos and even the growers, governed by some outside entity – the market? the corporations? – to cut back our time and do the bare minimum required to be compliant with the law. In other words, we are to be as machine-like as possible. As one of the co-workers put it, “Thirty minutes times 500 workers is 250 hours of work that the grower is missing out on because of the pesticide training.”

Nonetheless, I sit in my office and prepare activities for more entertaining pesticide training education sessions directed toward a group of people about whom I know very little in regards to their previous training, educational background, and personal history, with hopes of facilitating their discovery of the dangerousness of pesticides and actions they can take to reduce their potential to suffer from the chemicals’ harmful effects. I am trying to do all of this while still complying with the WPS training requirements.

I know that, supposedly, WPS, our agency, and even the grower are on 'our side' in providing this pesticide safety training, but I think I’m starting to be able to differentiate between different types of service and advocacy. At the internship orientation, we discussed 'service' and how many of us look at service as someone with an 'expertise' and goodwill going to another person and saying, "You need this and I am going to give it to you," without ever giving the choice to the other person. This has stripped people of their own power to make decisions and choices, and so I'm hoping that, even through something as perhaps mundane as pesticide safety education, the campesinos with whom I work will have the power to let their own voices be heard, instead of having to suffer through a mundane video produced in the 1980s (just imagine those videos you had to watch in middle school health class).

I'm not much for prayer anymore, but I'm praying that the theatre group works out. I have a meeting tomorrow with some of the women in the camp and they seem excited to be a part of something novel where they can share their experiences with other community members to help improve the working and living conditions of their vecinos (neighbors).

Friday, June 12, 2009

Thought of the morning

Woke up this morning to a nice thunderstorm, grabbed a Coke Zero as I rushed out the door (was almost late again!), and drove the daily 26 minutes (according to Mapquest, it is supposed to take 34) to the office. The fields have a surreal magesty to them under overcast skies. So, sitting in the office, I began to work on the pesticide training again, and I started thinking about how painfully ironic it is that these campesinos, people who work long days with the food that will eventually find its way to our tables, have to humble themselves to come into an office and ask for cans of green peas, sweet corn, and diced tomatoes as a way of sustaining themselves and their families. How can such a basic necessity, like food, be subject to such an inbalance of power and distribution? Is it human nature? Is it animal nature? This won't just be the thought of the morning, I think this is going to be something to wrestle with for the rest of the summer and the rest of my life...

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Settling in...


Well, four days on the Eastern Shore of VA and I find myself with mixed feelings. I spend the days working at Telamon distributing food to farm workers who come by the office while also making contacts to start a theatre group with some of the interested community members and creating an entertaining pesticide safety training workshop. I spend the nights trying to remember how to cook (at least, how to cook enough not to starve) and meeting the array of our roommate's small-town friends. Spending time as a child in what we affectionately called 'The Country', or our small plot of land out in Gaston, SC, certainly wasn't enough preparation for life in this rural peninsula in the Chesapeake Bay. The other Student Action with Farmworkers intern, Rachel, and I found a cute bar with wifi in "'downtown' Parksley. So, with a jukebox soundtrack of Guns N Roses, Allman Bros., and whoever sings that song, "Cornbread and Chicken," and locals playing pool and darts, we work on writing assignments and check the beloved facebook.

So now to the interesting stuff: in the office, I've gotten to work with a few campesinos (farm workers) who come in for food assistance. Our outreach so far has consisted of going to an English as a Second Language class, and we were greeted with such warmth! We are planning an art exhibit on the civil war in El Salvador and I am going to be interpreter for the introductions. In two weeks, we also are hosting a Latino festival and I have hopes that the theatre group will be ready for its first presentation; we'll see. We have many other pesticide safety trainings planned with some of the major growers in the area as well as with the people who come into the Virginia Employment Commission office. The farm workers are arriving here in the next week or two from either Florida or Beaufort, SC. Many of them who are already here say that the work is limited. Driving by the fields, you can see that harvesting time is still a few weeks away.

So far, in terms of 'cultural experiences,' I've stopped by a vegetable stand on the highway and 'The Oaxaquena' tienda. This weekend, Rachel and I are planning on hitting up all of the thrift stores. Blue crabs are a huge thing on the peninsula....and I can't wait to get to eat some. All I'll have to do is stop at the local roadside stand.

There are certainly beauties of the open fields and long highways. But, a change of scenery brings with it many challenges. I have had more conversations in which racist comments are tossed around within the first five minutes than ever before. I have also been greeted by people as if they had known me their entire life. This summer promises to present many questions about my past, my present, and my future, as well as questions about the history of farm working, the current situation, and plans for cultural understanding and agricultural work reform.