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).

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