I wish you all could have been there with me. I know that I have seen a lot of you since I went to work in the fields but I do not think I have fully processed everything I saw and felt and experienced. I don't feel like I was able to fully explain to anyone I saw in Tampa everything I experienced.
What scares me the most is that it is hard to believe that it all happened. It is so difficult to believe that I stood out in the sun in southern Alabama for two whole days, rolling and tossing watermelons around a field for your freakin 4th of july BBQ this friday (FYI, I have never been a fan of that holiday).
You can't really care about anything until it's all up in your face.
When it's your back that hurts, when it's your legs giving up on you, when it's your arms that can barely stand to lift anything anymore, when it's your breathing that becomes funny because you have inhaled pesticides all day long, when it's your fingernails that have become covered with dirt, when it's your face that the flies are attacking, when it's your body that is dripping with sweat, when it's you that wakes up several times in the night because your body aches so bad and you can't get comfortable in bed....
...then it can finally kick you out of complacency and really mean something to you. Then it becomes personal.
You can't play it safe anymore when it smacks you in the face.
Very few of us in the world of wealth and privilege have an idea of where all our convenience comes from. For two days, I watched people work their bodies harder than any human being should ever have to for the sake of my convenience and for yours, too. So we could have our goods nice and cheap, just like we feel entitled to them. I watched the Latino immigrants, MY PEOPLE, who are constantly stereotyped, scorned, and bashed in the freakin United States of America work for people like you and me, often deemed "illegals" and "aliens", as if they were not people created in the image of God. So we could have our watermelon for our 4th of July BBQ's this year and never give one thought to where it came from or who's back it came off of.
I watched a strong group of Latino men from Mexico and Guatemala work for their families. I watched them persevere in the midst of 90 degree summer heat, I watched them sacrifice for the sake of their people having a more dignified life back in their motherlands. I watched them as they never once felt sorry for themselves but instead chose to be strong and work together. I watched them encourage each other and push each other to keep working, all day long, all freakin day long. Sun up to sun down. No joke, no exaggeration on that.
Melody and I drove up to work alongside a crew from Immokalee that sticks together when they migrate north during the summer to look for work. What I saw was not common within the agricultural world. I got to work alongside a cooperative, people who were committed to being democratic about everything and making sure that their pay was split evenly amongst all the workers. I met a group of men who had become like a family, in the midst of having to leave their own families.
I already feel so far removed from being in that world. I couldn't even really journal while I was there because my arms hurt so bad. It hurt to use my hands and it hurt to make my arms straight. All I cared about at the end of the day was taking a shower and not being hot anymore and then finally being able to fall into bed, only to wake up several times throughout the night because my back hurt so much, and then my shoulders did too, and so did my legs. The first night a few of us went to swim in a river afterwards and I remember trying to find some comfort for my body in the water. All I could think about was how I did not want to go back the next day. I did not freakin want to put myself through that kind of labor again. To be honest with you, I did not feel like I should have to. I am a woman! I don't believe women should have to do work like that. That is pretty huge for me to say, considering that I am a feminist in many ways and that I am all about empowering women. But my body could not handle that. OK, so you may think, well, Lauren, you're just not strong enough. The truth is that you are probably are not strong enough, either. This work is not just physical, it is also mental and emotional. You have to be strong in spirit to endure monotonous work like this everyday, for weeks and weeks.
There were so many moments when I wanted to stop. I wanted to freakin stop. The first few hours I was there I wanted to cry. I knew that I was slow, I couldn't keep up with the crew, my body was not strong enough. My privilege was slowly nudging me, reminding me of my college degree I recently earned, reminding me that I have choices. It reminded me that just 48 hours later I would be back in Immokalee in my comfortable home and then in Tampa, even more in my comfort zone. I struggled with feeling too good to be there. I struggled with my privilege. I struggled with wondering if anyone would care when I talked to them about this experience. I struggled because I wanted to be good enough to do this work and I was not.
I looked at my Latino hermanos, my brothers, and I thought about how many times I have put them down. How I have stereotyped, assumed, and been angry with Latino men, ones who are related to me, ones I have dated, ones I have been annoyed at for being too flirtacious and sexual. I saw my brothers in a new way those days I spent with them.
My hermanos are strong. They are sacrificial, they are committed, they are caring, they are hard workers, they take their work seriously. They don't stop working because they know there are children to feed, maybe their younger brothers and sisters back home or their sons and daughters. They have wives to take care of and parents, too. They endure this kind of work for the sake of others. They are forced out of their motherland and away from all they know because that's how important their family is to them.
I had to ask God for forgiveness and mercy for the times I have put my brothers down. Then as I rolled watermelons around the fields, I thought about all the people I have met who hate immigrants. People who are so quick to hate my people, people who deem them all as criminals and "illegal" (as if any human being could be "illegal". I'd like to watch someone try and argue God on that one). If you have ever bashed immigrants or Latinos, I urge you to beg God for mercy. Unless you come from this world, we have a very, very limited idea of their struggle.
We bash the people who work for our convenience, who bring us the things we feel entitled to.
It's not just about the watermelons being picked here in the US. It's about the bananas we eat that came from Ecuador, the T-shirt from a maquiladora in El Salvador, the sneakers from India, the cell phone from China.
We just have no idea who's back it came off of.
How can I urge others to care?
How can I urge others out of complacency?
It was not just a farm worker who picked your tomatoes this year (or your strawberries or watermelons).
It was Gerardo, Joaquin, Leonel, Cruz, Manuel,Edwin, "Rocky", and Cande. And for a couple of days, it was ME, too.
It was a human being, who dreams, laughs, cries, and wants to live life, just like you and me.
Do they not deserve a fair wage, just like you feel you do, too? Just like I feel that, too, for myself?
But....
On Thursday we drove away from the fields, back into the world that made a bit more sense to me. On the way back to Immokalee, Melody and I stopped to eat at Panera in Gainesville and I felt like the two previous days may as well have been a dream. If it had not been for my muscles that were still so sore or the dirt that was still stuck underneath my fingernails, I probably would have thought so.
The only way we can truly care is if we stop removing ourselves from the pain of the world.
Jesus never removed Himself from the pain of the world.
Until it becomes personal, it won't ever really matter.
Until you put ourselves into someone else's reality, then we will just remain people who say "Oh man...that sucks, that's so sad" and then we'll be distracted two minutes later by something else.
We desperately need to re-connect ourselves to the pain of this world, ESPECIALLY the people of God, the people who claim to be followers of Jesus. We should be the ones on the front lines if we claim to follow the most loving and radical man who ever walked this earth.
We cannot afford to be the people who just send a monthly check to World Vision and then spend tons of money on unnecessary things for our homes.
I am pretty sure that when Jesus told us that to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves were the two greatest commandments, that He meant it.
And we are not called to feel sorry for anyone. No one needs our pity.
Another thing that really smacked me in the face was how much the guys I worked with did not feel sorry for themselves. When we waited for the next bus or wagon to come from the farmer to fill up, we were able to take short breaks and hang out in the van we all drove over in (BTW, breaks like this are not common when picking other produce, it was just because we happened to be loading the watermelons, what I learned). The guys would blast music and sing, sometimes they would playfully dance, kicked a soccer ball around and sometimes they would close their eyes and rest for a few minutes. If it hadn't been for them and their high spirits, I think I would have been in a really bad mood because of the pain I was in, along with the heat and the insects who insisted on being around you no matter how much big spray you had put on already.
Agricultural is a scary business. Not only is there a big risk for injury and for eventually developing something like cancer thanks to all the toxic chemicals you constantly inhale, you never know if you are guaranteed work or how much. You never know how much you will earn at the end of the day. You don't know if the crew leader or the grower is going to screw you over with your pay. You are not guaranteed health benefits in case of injury, either.
My challenge to any of you is to step into someone else's reality. Step into the world of someone who is faceless to many yet is someone you depend on for so much. Step in and take their struggle with you.
And have a happy freakin 4th of July.....celebrate "freedom"...........
Freedom for who? Definitely not for all. Definitely not for all who contribute a lot to our country.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Monday, June 23, 2008
Sandias
Today I am off to a small town in the Florida panhandle called Mariana ( i think that's the name, it's like 20 minutes from the Alabama border or something). Melody and I are going to work in the watermelon fields. We're meeting up with a bunch of the workers from Immokalee that we know (well, I only know a few of them).
I ask that you would pray for me.....pray that I would be changed in the ways God wants me to be changed through this experience. Pray that I will find a part of Him in the fields and in the lives of farmworkers. Pray for me as I learn to stop stereotyping, as I learn to love better, to forgive, to judge less....against both the rich and the poor.
So we will be working Tuesday and Wednesday and then driving back to Immo on early Thursday morning. Then I have to drive back up to Tampa on Thursday night so that i can go get my 6 month bone marrow biopsy check up on Friday morning. So it's gonna be a long and interesting week............
But i cannot wait to see many of you this weekend! And I will think of a lot of you today when we drive through Tampa on I-75. :(
I ask that you would pray for me.....pray that I would be changed in the ways God wants me to be changed through this experience. Pray that I will find a part of Him in the fields and in the lives of farmworkers. Pray for me as I learn to stop stereotyping, as I learn to love better, to forgive, to judge less....against both the rich and the poor.
So we will be working Tuesday and Wednesday and then driving back to Immo on early Thursday morning. Then I have to drive back up to Tampa on Thursday night so that i can go get my 6 month bone marrow biopsy check up on Friday morning. So it's gonna be a long and interesting week............
But i cannot wait to see many of you this weekend! And I will think of a lot of you today when we drive through Tampa on I-75. :(
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Carnival
The title of this blog has nothing to do with anything. But it is the name of a song by Natalie Merchant that I have been listening to a lot in the past month or so. I am not sure why. You know when you just need a good song in the background and it's raining outside (like right now) and you're like, yes, this is nice.
Speaking of music, something interesting I have noticed about myself here in Immo is that every time I hear traditional music from Mexico or Guatemala, I get this huge smile on my face and something inside of my soul smiles even wider. I feel this contentment within that I have not felt in a long time. It reminds me of the contentment I felt last summer when I went to Manila and we spent a couple of the day in the slums, making new friends. I can't even really differentiate between Norteno or Duranguense or Marimba, yet I know something in me is drawn to this music, whether it's in the car with no AC in the middle of a humid Florida afternoon or coming from our yard while Lucas works outside. Something in me comes home when I hear it.
I realized that I did not write in here all week! I really wish I would have because this has been a different kind of week;I got out of the office a lot and did some other kinds of things. Then this morning I had a bunch of revelations that kind of tied the whole week together and I was like AAH!, this is so awesome and convicting and harsh and incredible all at the same time.
Hmmm, where do I start?
Well, God is faithful, once again. I was riding my bike to the office this past Tuesday and it hit me once again how Immo is full of single males who don't mind showing a cute young woman like me some attention (hahaha). I can't really ride my bike or walk around here without someone hitting on me at least once. It doesn't really bother me and I have never felt offended, because like I said, it happened all the time in Miami growing up. Yet it made me sad that this is another barrier to building relationships with people in the community. I can only talk so much to a single male my age because I don't want to give him the wrong idea and there are really not a lot of single women here, so yeah. So I was praying as I rode my bike and I asked God for the opportunity to build relationships with some of the women of the community. That day at the office was pretty quiet and slow and a lot of the other staff had to take off and do some other things. Eventually it ended up only being one of the CIW staff, Pancha (Francisca) and myself. She just turned 26 and does not speak much English. We have talked before and she is really cool but I am so afraid of not being able to fully understand her or her understand me. Something amazing happened that day and I credit it all to God. Pancha and I sat down and had some deep conversations, all in Spanish and I promise you that I understood at least 90% of what she was saying. It was not just like, oh yeah, do have any brothers and sisters. No, we were sharing our struggles with body image, talking about exercise, talking about men, talking about God. It was so wonderful. She did most of the talking and it was so great to hear her story. Pancha came from Oaxaca (in southern Mexico) to Immo when she was 17 to work in the fields. She came with her 13 year old sister. I think they had a couple of family members here already but man. That is scary. When I was 17, I had trouble convincing my mom that I should be allowed to drive at night. My biggest concerns when I was 17 were college applications, my friends, and whoever I was dating at the time and how I looked. Pancha was 17 and immigrating on her own to a place she had never been to with a little sister. I was working on my one-act plays for theater classes in school and she was picking the tomatoes for my sandwich at Subway and having to endure a lot of unfairness in the process of picking those freakin tomatoes. And she did this just so she could send money back home so that her younger brothers and sisters would be able to go to school.............
Then Pancha showed me something else that really felt like an answer to prayer as well. One thing I miss here a lot is being able to converse with other believers and pray with them and just find hope in God together. The phone has been good but there is something about those face to face conversations. While we were talking, she grabs this book off her desk called Prayers for the New Social Awakening and then proceeds to show me her prayer that was published in this book! Pancha is Catholic; her poem was printed in Spanish and then translated into English. I will type it up later on tonight so you all can see it, it is pretty powerful and it was so encouraging to read about her faith.
The poor and the oppressed always have the strongest faith. They have been through the worst yet they generally never seem to doubt that God is on their side and that He is with them. The closest I can relate to that is when I had cancer three years ago. In that moment everything was stripped away from me and all I had was my Heavenly Father. The marginalized of this world have such a deep understanding of that because God has always been all that they have had. The rich and privileged like myself have so much worldly things and we still doubt and question at times. Even in a world that has been so mean to them, the poor tend not to doubt the existence or power of God. Pancha and I talked about that and dude, it was so hard for me to express how much I believe in the power of God and how I believe with all my heart that He is the one who will bring real transformation. But I believe she got what I was trying to say.
I believe God is constantly just trying to remind me of His power here. That same day God spoke to me through a Mos Def song (yeah, I know I got this CD like a decade late but it's still amazing and I love it a lot). It's from the "Black on Both Sides" album. The first song on it, called "Fear Not of Man", really has struck me hard. I love real hip-hop. Here are some of the lyrics that truly to spoke to me and encouraged me:
"The world is overrun with the wealthy and the wicked,
but God is sufficient in disposin of affairs
Gunmen and stockholders try to merit your fear
But God is sufficient over plans they prepared".
GOD IS SUFFICIENT!
We cannot let go or doubt His power to bring transformation into this broken and painful world.
It was truly incredible because you probably know that I have been thinking a lot about wealth and TNC's and profit and all that kind of stuff. I just struggle with the idea of rich CEO's and rich people in general. So I was listening to that song while I was working on some stuff at the office (yes, I can listen to music on my headphones while I work, it's so great! I love being in a grassroots organization!). And God did not stop there with speaking to me through this song. I checked my email and a certain little panda bear that has come into my life recently forwarded me an article about Jesus and Zaccheus (the tax collector). Basically Zaccheus was a man who cheated people out of money for profit and he became rich that way. He abused the already corrupted system to gain his wealth. Hmm, yeah, it did not take me long to compare Zaccheus to someone like a modern day CEO of a big corporation.
What really smacked me in the face was the fact that Jesus reached out to this rich man. Zaccheus climbs in a tree to see and hear Jesus speak and as a result of their interactions, Jesus invited himself over to his house for dinner. Out of the gracious love Jesus shows Zaccheus, who is so despised in his society, Zaccheus ends up giving away half of his wealth. He repents for the ways he has cheated others and for the ways he has abused the system.
How can Jesus, a man who came to the world and stood amongst the poor and the least of these, also choose to love this rich man and show him grace and love?
Now that, my friends, is radical love.
I was just sitting there reading this article and I wanted to scream because something in me clicked. The rich desperately need Jesus, too, and His will is also to be reconciled to them as well.
His will is for me to love those whom seem like enemies. The ones I cannot stand, the ones controlling all the wealth in this world and creating unjust trade policies, the ones who oppress, the ones who are racist, the ones who gentrify low income neighborhoods, the ones who hate immigrants, He calls us to love them and share His good news with them, too.
Trust me, it's a bit hard for me to swallow, too. But this is truth. I cannot deny that this is truth.
This morning I realized that probably since the beginning of time there has been a war going on between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots. This past week it hit me that this struggle, this fight is not just about farm workers fighting for their fair wages and safe working conditions. The working class is fighting against the system everywhere. On Thursday I went with Melody (my roommate/co-worker) and Brigitte (another co-worker) to a Collier County School Board meeting that was set to be pretty controversial. Basically, the county has decided that they are going to fire a few hundred janitors because they want to outsource them to work for a private company. That means all the janitors (who are mostly Latino and Black) will lose their jobs; if they want to, they can reapply for a job with this new private company but of course they will lose a lot of benefits and will be making less money. The three of us decided to go to stand in solidarity with other day laborers. That is what I truly love about the CIW. Much of their philosophy is not all about the farm workers; the fight is against any kind of oppression anywhere and we will show our support to others when and where we can.
I had a lot of mixed feelings at the school board meeting all the way in Naples. Going to Naples just feels strange in itself because it feels like one just went to another planet. It is so wealthy, so extravagant, so pristine. All in the same county- one of the richest towns in the US and then one of the poorest. Anyhow, there was a few hundred people who showed up to this meeting in order to fight for their jobs. Part of me felt hopeful because at least there was a time during the meeting for some of the janitors and their supporters (i.e. teachers) who were there to speak to the school board members about this. Some people spoke so powerfully and they really put the school board in their place. Some were audacious enough to challenge them and ask why there have been so administrative raises yet the school board claims they need to privatize in order to stay within their budget cuts. I loved watching their faces at certain comments, hahahaha....
There was one really beautiful lady who got up; she was from Haiti and even after her three minute time limit was over and the buzzer went off indicating that she needed to stop talking, she just looked at school board, pointed at the paper she was reading off of and said, "I'm sorry but I need to keep going, I need to read this until the end" and everyone in the audience just laughed and cheered and she finished! She said her piece and it was wonderful and they needed to hear about how she has worked as a janitor for ten years in Collier County; how dare they freakin just take away her job like that.
Then on Friday several of us drove over to Miami for a protest and march that took place downtown. It was put on by an alliance of people called Right to the City; there were groups based out of New Orleans, New York, L.A., etc, who all decided that it would be a good time to protest at the National Conference of the Mayors this weekend. It is a time when a lot of the mayors in the US get together to talk with developers, etc. But what about listening to the people of the community? What about talking with constituents about where their tax money is going, about how we want to improve our schools, about how we don't want our neighborhoods gentrified and yuppie'fied. So this protest and march around downtown was to get the mayors attention about these kinds of issues. Again, we went as the CIW to support other grassroots and community organizations who support us and have come to our events in the past.
It was so interesting. This march started in Overtown, which is an inner-city mostly African-American neighborhood in Miami right next to downtown and as I walked through there, I saw a lot of beauty and charm. I wondered why I was taught growing up to be scared of this neighborhood and to be separated from the people of that community. I was taught to avoid those exits on the interstate. It has gone through a lot of gentrification, though and you better believe a lot of the community was there to march and fight against it that day.
The protest got really rained out, though, typical Florida! But we marched anyhow and stood outside of the hotel that the mayors were in, people with their megaphones and their signs and everyone chanting their chants. I was just standing there in the pouring rain in my orange skirt and my bare feet (because it was too hard to walk in wet sandals and I am not a big fan of shoes anyway), looking up at this fancy building in the downtown of the city I grew up in and I wondered if the mayors even cared. I wondered how effective we are. I wondered if they would take into consideration any concerns of the citizens. I wondered if they cared that people are pushed out of the communities they have lived in their whole lives. I wondered if they cared that teachers are underpaid or that students are not often receiving the best possible education.
I wondered if the school board cared about the janitors who got up and spoke about how they were concerned they might not have enough money in the near future to feed their families if their jobs were outsourced. I wondered if they cared about the struggle of the immigrants who clean Collier County public schools.
God is sufficient.
So we ended up staying in Miami the whole weekend and it was a lot of fun. I unexpectedly ran into a ton of people I went to high school with and hadn't seen since I graduated. I also got to see my old college roommate/one of my best friends since the 6th grade this weekend too and it made me so happy. I missed her so much. She came out to dinner with my family and I love how she just feels like a family member even after not seeing her for a while. It was also great to share with people about Immokalee and to tell them about this amazing community I have entered into. I got to go to the beach, too!
So Melody and I ended up staying at my mom's place and for some reason, as much wealth my family has now because of my mom's re-marraige to my step-dad, there is no internet access in that house. Melody really needed to work on translating on this document for some of the CIW staff and get online so we decided to crash for four hours after coming home really late and then wake up at like 7:30 am to go take advantage of free w-fi at Panera Bread since she was on a time constraint. I felt like dying when I woke up because I was so exhausted but wow. I am so glad we woke up and I ended up sitting in Panera with her for a couple of hours because I had this powerful experience with the Lord.
I decided to just sit there and write and journal and read. I wonder if some people were just really praying for me this morning because the whole week tied together for me in a powerful way. I am not even sure that my words will do justice to what I felt and heard from God.
Reconciliation.
My life seems to run in themes sometimes. Reconciliation has been the big theme for me so far in 2008, it has seemed.
I don't know if you are familiar with the story of Jonah or not. In case not, it's a short book in the Old Testament; he is the dude who gets swallowed by the big fish for three days and three nights. Jonah, a Hebrew, was called by God to preach to the Ninevites to repent for their sins. The real interesting thing is the Ninevites were very oppressive towards Jonah and his people. Yet God was calling Jonah of all people to go and love the very people who oppressed him? Who hurt him, who probably stripped him of his dignity in some ways, and his people, too?
God has been bringing me back to the story of Jonah for three years now. I have gotten different things out of it at various times in my life the past three years. Today the Lord lead me back to Jonah and all I could hear was God's desire for reconciliation. His desire for peace, for truth, for restoration.
God calls for an end to this war between the rich and the poor. He calls for an end to oppression and He calls us to end it with love. We are called to the love the oppressors (and in some ways, I am part of being the oppressor but I take it personally as that I am called to love the CEO's I despise).
God loves those who hurt us, too. He wants better for them, too.
It's exactly what Jesus preached about -loving our enemies.
God is kind to the ungrateful and wicked, He is merciful (Luke 6:27-36).
I thought about how so much this semester the Lord has urged me to be merciful to so many who have deeply hurt me in the past and also recently. He has urged me to choose His love. Reconciliation is the ministry of Jesus, that is what He did for us. He reconciled us to our Father, He gave us a restored relationship.
Is it possible? Could we be willing to fight for that? For reconciliation between the rich and the poor? Could we be willing to reach out to those who oppress, to those who hate us for no reason, who try and control us and the rest of the world?
I wrote this in my journal this morning as God spoke all this to me and I was trying to take it all in. I saw Him come alive once again in the Scriptures. I saw His desire for us, for His children, His jealously to be first in our lives, above anything else....
"Mercy on an abusive father....
mercy on a man who lies to you and disrespects you and uses you...
mercy on the rich CEO's who profit off of sweatshops...
mercy on me, the prideful girl who often deceives herself".
God is merciful and gracious and loving. He gives us a call to be of this kind of character as well. We have to choose this if we ever want to see real transformation, real reconciliation in this world...............
(PS~I just want to put it out there that Melody personally knows Zack de la Rocha and Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine because they heavily support the CIW! She has Zack de la Rocha's cell phone number in her own cell phone! OK, I just thought that was really cool because I have been a Rage fan since I was like 12). :)
Speaking of music, something interesting I have noticed about myself here in Immo is that every time I hear traditional music from Mexico or Guatemala, I get this huge smile on my face and something inside of my soul smiles even wider. I feel this contentment within that I have not felt in a long time. It reminds me of the contentment I felt last summer when I went to Manila and we spent a couple of the day in the slums, making new friends. I can't even really differentiate between Norteno or Duranguense or Marimba, yet I know something in me is drawn to this music, whether it's in the car with no AC in the middle of a humid Florida afternoon or coming from our yard while Lucas works outside. Something in me comes home when I hear it.
I realized that I did not write in here all week! I really wish I would have because this has been a different kind of week;I got out of the office a lot and did some other kinds of things. Then this morning I had a bunch of revelations that kind of tied the whole week together and I was like AAH!, this is so awesome and convicting and harsh and incredible all at the same time.
Hmmm, where do I start?
Well, God is faithful, once again. I was riding my bike to the office this past Tuesday and it hit me once again how Immo is full of single males who don't mind showing a cute young woman like me some attention (hahaha). I can't really ride my bike or walk around here without someone hitting on me at least once. It doesn't really bother me and I have never felt offended, because like I said, it happened all the time in Miami growing up. Yet it made me sad that this is another barrier to building relationships with people in the community. I can only talk so much to a single male my age because I don't want to give him the wrong idea and there are really not a lot of single women here, so yeah. So I was praying as I rode my bike and I asked God for the opportunity to build relationships with some of the women of the community. That day at the office was pretty quiet and slow and a lot of the other staff had to take off and do some other things. Eventually it ended up only being one of the CIW staff, Pancha (Francisca) and myself. She just turned 26 and does not speak much English. We have talked before and she is really cool but I am so afraid of not being able to fully understand her or her understand me. Something amazing happened that day and I credit it all to God. Pancha and I sat down and had some deep conversations, all in Spanish and I promise you that I understood at least 90% of what she was saying. It was not just like, oh yeah, do have any brothers and sisters. No, we were sharing our struggles with body image, talking about exercise, talking about men, talking about God. It was so wonderful. She did most of the talking and it was so great to hear her story. Pancha came from Oaxaca (in southern Mexico) to Immo when she was 17 to work in the fields. She came with her 13 year old sister. I think they had a couple of family members here already but man. That is scary. When I was 17, I had trouble convincing my mom that I should be allowed to drive at night. My biggest concerns when I was 17 were college applications, my friends, and whoever I was dating at the time and how I looked. Pancha was 17 and immigrating on her own to a place she had never been to with a little sister. I was working on my one-act plays for theater classes in school and she was picking the tomatoes for my sandwich at Subway and having to endure a lot of unfairness in the process of picking those freakin tomatoes. And she did this just so she could send money back home so that her younger brothers and sisters would be able to go to school.............
Then Pancha showed me something else that really felt like an answer to prayer as well. One thing I miss here a lot is being able to converse with other believers and pray with them and just find hope in God together. The phone has been good but there is something about those face to face conversations. While we were talking, she grabs this book off her desk called Prayers for the New Social Awakening and then proceeds to show me her prayer that was published in this book! Pancha is Catholic; her poem was printed in Spanish and then translated into English. I will type it up later on tonight so you all can see it, it is pretty powerful and it was so encouraging to read about her faith.
The poor and the oppressed always have the strongest faith. They have been through the worst yet they generally never seem to doubt that God is on their side and that He is with them. The closest I can relate to that is when I had cancer three years ago. In that moment everything was stripped away from me and all I had was my Heavenly Father. The marginalized of this world have such a deep understanding of that because God has always been all that they have had. The rich and privileged like myself have so much worldly things and we still doubt and question at times. Even in a world that has been so mean to them, the poor tend not to doubt the existence or power of God. Pancha and I talked about that and dude, it was so hard for me to express how much I believe in the power of God and how I believe with all my heart that He is the one who will bring real transformation. But I believe she got what I was trying to say.
I believe God is constantly just trying to remind me of His power here. That same day God spoke to me through a Mos Def song (yeah, I know I got this CD like a decade late but it's still amazing and I love it a lot). It's from the "Black on Both Sides" album. The first song on it, called "Fear Not of Man", really has struck me hard. I love real hip-hop. Here are some of the lyrics that truly to spoke to me and encouraged me:
"The world is overrun with the wealthy and the wicked,
but God is sufficient in disposin of affairs
Gunmen and stockholders try to merit your fear
But God is sufficient over plans they prepared".
GOD IS SUFFICIENT!
We cannot let go or doubt His power to bring transformation into this broken and painful world.
It was truly incredible because you probably know that I have been thinking a lot about wealth and TNC's and profit and all that kind of stuff. I just struggle with the idea of rich CEO's and rich people in general. So I was listening to that song while I was working on some stuff at the office (yes, I can listen to music on my headphones while I work, it's so great! I love being in a grassroots organization!). And God did not stop there with speaking to me through this song. I checked my email and a certain little panda bear that has come into my life recently forwarded me an article about Jesus and Zaccheus (the tax collector). Basically Zaccheus was a man who cheated people out of money for profit and he became rich that way. He abused the already corrupted system to gain his wealth. Hmm, yeah, it did not take me long to compare Zaccheus to someone like a modern day CEO of a big corporation.
What really smacked me in the face was the fact that Jesus reached out to this rich man. Zaccheus climbs in a tree to see and hear Jesus speak and as a result of their interactions, Jesus invited himself over to his house for dinner. Out of the gracious love Jesus shows Zaccheus, who is so despised in his society, Zaccheus ends up giving away half of his wealth. He repents for the ways he has cheated others and for the ways he has abused the system.
How can Jesus, a man who came to the world and stood amongst the poor and the least of these, also choose to love this rich man and show him grace and love?
Now that, my friends, is radical love.
I was just sitting there reading this article and I wanted to scream because something in me clicked. The rich desperately need Jesus, too, and His will is also to be reconciled to them as well.
His will is for me to love those whom seem like enemies. The ones I cannot stand, the ones controlling all the wealth in this world and creating unjust trade policies, the ones who oppress, the ones who are racist, the ones who gentrify low income neighborhoods, the ones who hate immigrants, He calls us to love them and share His good news with them, too.
Trust me, it's a bit hard for me to swallow, too. But this is truth. I cannot deny that this is truth.
This morning I realized that probably since the beginning of time there has been a war going on between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots. This past week it hit me that this struggle, this fight is not just about farm workers fighting for their fair wages and safe working conditions. The working class is fighting against the system everywhere. On Thursday I went with Melody (my roommate/co-worker) and Brigitte (another co-worker) to a Collier County School Board meeting that was set to be pretty controversial. Basically, the county has decided that they are going to fire a few hundred janitors because they want to outsource them to work for a private company. That means all the janitors (who are mostly Latino and Black) will lose their jobs; if they want to, they can reapply for a job with this new private company but of course they will lose a lot of benefits and will be making less money. The three of us decided to go to stand in solidarity with other day laborers. That is what I truly love about the CIW. Much of their philosophy is not all about the farm workers; the fight is against any kind of oppression anywhere and we will show our support to others when and where we can.
I had a lot of mixed feelings at the school board meeting all the way in Naples. Going to Naples just feels strange in itself because it feels like one just went to another planet. It is so wealthy, so extravagant, so pristine. All in the same county- one of the richest towns in the US and then one of the poorest. Anyhow, there was a few hundred people who showed up to this meeting in order to fight for their jobs. Part of me felt hopeful because at least there was a time during the meeting for some of the janitors and their supporters (i.e. teachers) who were there to speak to the school board members about this. Some people spoke so powerfully and they really put the school board in their place. Some were audacious enough to challenge them and ask why there have been so administrative raises yet the school board claims they need to privatize in order to stay within their budget cuts. I loved watching their faces at certain comments, hahahaha....
There was one really beautiful lady who got up; she was from Haiti and even after her three minute time limit was over and the buzzer went off indicating that she needed to stop talking, she just looked at school board, pointed at the paper she was reading off of and said, "I'm sorry but I need to keep going, I need to read this until the end" and everyone in the audience just laughed and cheered and she finished! She said her piece and it was wonderful and they needed to hear about how she has worked as a janitor for ten years in Collier County; how dare they freakin just take away her job like that.
Then on Friday several of us drove over to Miami for a protest and march that took place downtown. It was put on by an alliance of people called Right to the City; there were groups based out of New Orleans, New York, L.A., etc, who all decided that it would be a good time to protest at the National Conference of the Mayors this weekend. It is a time when a lot of the mayors in the US get together to talk with developers, etc. But what about listening to the people of the community? What about talking with constituents about where their tax money is going, about how we want to improve our schools, about how we don't want our neighborhoods gentrified and yuppie'fied. So this protest and march around downtown was to get the mayors attention about these kinds of issues. Again, we went as the CIW to support other grassroots and community organizations who support us and have come to our events in the past.
It was so interesting. This march started in Overtown, which is an inner-city mostly African-American neighborhood in Miami right next to downtown and as I walked through there, I saw a lot of beauty and charm. I wondered why I was taught growing up to be scared of this neighborhood and to be separated from the people of that community. I was taught to avoid those exits on the interstate. It has gone through a lot of gentrification, though and you better believe a lot of the community was there to march and fight against it that day.
The protest got really rained out, though, typical Florida! But we marched anyhow and stood outside of the hotel that the mayors were in, people with their megaphones and their signs and everyone chanting their chants. I was just standing there in the pouring rain in my orange skirt and my bare feet (because it was too hard to walk in wet sandals and I am not a big fan of shoes anyway), looking up at this fancy building in the downtown of the city I grew up in and I wondered if the mayors even cared. I wondered how effective we are. I wondered if they would take into consideration any concerns of the citizens. I wondered if they cared that people are pushed out of the communities they have lived in their whole lives. I wondered if they cared that teachers are underpaid or that students are not often receiving the best possible education.
I wondered if the school board cared about the janitors who got up and spoke about how they were concerned they might not have enough money in the near future to feed their families if their jobs were outsourced. I wondered if they cared about the struggle of the immigrants who clean Collier County public schools.
God is sufficient.
So we ended up staying in Miami the whole weekend and it was a lot of fun. I unexpectedly ran into a ton of people I went to high school with and hadn't seen since I graduated. I also got to see my old college roommate/one of my best friends since the 6th grade this weekend too and it made me so happy. I missed her so much. She came out to dinner with my family and I love how she just feels like a family member even after not seeing her for a while. It was also great to share with people about Immokalee and to tell them about this amazing community I have entered into. I got to go to the beach, too!
So Melody and I ended up staying at my mom's place and for some reason, as much wealth my family has now because of my mom's re-marraige to my step-dad, there is no internet access in that house. Melody really needed to work on translating on this document for some of the CIW staff and get online so we decided to crash for four hours after coming home really late and then wake up at like 7:30 am to go take advantage of free w-fi at Panera Bread since she was on a time constraint. I felt like dying when I woke up because I was so exhausted but wow. I am so glad we woke up and I ended up sitting in Panera with her for a couple of hours because I had this powerful experience with the Lord.
I decided to just sit there and write and journal and read. I wonder if some people were just really praying for me this morning because the whole week tied together for me in a powerful way. I am not even sure that my words will do justice to what I felt and heard from God.
Reconciliation.
My life seems to run in themes sometimes. Reconciliation has been the big theme for me so far in 2008, it has seemed.
I don't know if you are familiar with the story of Jonah or not. In case not, it's a short book in the Old Testament; he is the dude who gets swallowed by the big fish for three days and three nights. Jonah, a Hebrew, was called by God to preach to the Ninevites to repent for their sins. The real interesting thing is the Ninevites were very oppressive towards Jonah and his people. Yet God was calling Jonah of all people to go and love the very people who oppressed him? Who hurt him, who probably stripped him of his dignity in some ways, and his people, too?
God has been bringing me back to the story of Jonah for three years now. I have gotten different things out of it at various times in my life the past three years. Today the Lord lead me back to Jonah and all I could hear was God's desire for reconciliation. His desire for peace, for truth, for restoration.
God calls for an end to this war between the rich and the poor. He calls for an end to oppression and He calls us to end it with love. We are called to the love the oppressors (and in some ways, I am part of being the oppressor but I take it personally as that I am called to love the CEO's I despise).
God loves those who hurt us, too. He wants better for them, too.
It's exactly what Jesus preached about -loving our enemies.
God is kind to the ungrateful and wicked, He is merciful (Luke 6:27-36).
I thought about how so much this semester the Lord has urged me to be merciful to so many who have deeply hurt me in the past and also recently. He has urged me to choose His love. Reconciliation is the ministry of Jesus, that is what He did for us. He reconciled us to our Father, He gave us a restored relationship.
Is it possible? Could we be willing to fight for that? For reconciliation between the rich and the poor? Could we be willing to reach out to those who oppress, to those who hate us for no reason, who try and control us and the rest of the world?
I wrote this in my journal this morning as God spoke all this to me and I was trying to take it all in. I saw Him come alive once again in the Scriptures. I saw His desire for us, for His children, His jealously to be first in our lives, above anything else....
"Mercy on an abusive father....
mercy on a man who lies to you and disrespects you and uses you...
mercy on the rich CEO's who profit off of sweatshops...
mercy on me, the prideful girl who often deceives herself".
God is merciful and gracious and loving. He gives us a call to be of this kind of character as well. We have to choose this if we ever want to see real transformation, real reconciliation in this world...............
(PS~I just want to put it out there that Melody personally knows Zack de la Rocha and Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine because they heavily support the CIW! She has Zack de la Rocha's cell phone number in her own cell phone! OK, I just thought that was really cool because I have been a Rage fan since I was like 12). :)
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Aguacates
So apparently more people read this thing than I thought! Seriously, I am flattered because I have had several people contact me this week and tell me that they enjoy reading my entries. I have always felt that being a writer has been part of my identity and this year I feel like it's come back more than ever. I remember when I was a little girl, my mom used to have to take my sister and me with her to the restaurant she worked at with her on the weekends sometimes. It was a small place, so it was OK. My mom was the best looking waitress, as well the hardest working. :) I used to sit in a corner at a table and write stories most of the day. I even made covers for them and chapters and then drew pictures on the cover. I'd really like to go back and read those so I can see how truly whacked out I was as a kid. I bet I would make more sense to myself now. I am pretty sure I wrote some really funny things, like stealing golf carts and driving to Canada or something. jajajajajajajajajajajajaja...........................
OK, that was a random tangent that has nothing to do with Immokalee!
Immokalee. I've been here for two weeks but it has felt like forever. Rahiel has left and I miss her a lot. Now I really feel like I am on my own for real in a spiritual sense. And that's hard because I have been asking myself a lot of hard questions.
One thing that has been really frustrating is my lack of Spanish in some cases. There is absolutely no way that I can express how I feel about a lot of things in Spanish the way I can in English. And this affects a lot of things, I am realizing. It really puts up a lot of barriers to building relationships with people in the community. I hate to constantly ask people to translate, too. All day I watch people come into the office and then I cannot fully communicate with them. I cannot support them or hear their stories fully. Sometimes its people who are coming in because they have not received wages for work, things like that.
So then this is where I have to ask God to continue to help me to forgive my Dad, who is the reason I don't speak Spanish fluently; because he was so freakin adamant about English being my first language so my mom stopped speaking it to my sister and me when we were very young. And then all I picked up most of my life were random phrases and words until I went to college and took 3 semesters of Spanish. That helped a lot but it's still not the same. I see no solution but to move to Latin America for a while and totally immerse myself into learning it fully. If Latinos can come to the US and learn English well and learn to express themselves deeply in another language, then so can I. So much of me is ready to pick up and leave this year but part of me is being an adult (sigh) and being practical about things like finances. So it might have to wait for a while.
I am not writing this to offend anyone but I just need to be honest, too. It is so hard that all the White people who have moved here to Immokalee to work with the community all speak Spanish better than me. It's difficult because none of them have to know Spanish. That is not their culture, that is not their roots. I should know it. The most important and influential person in my life is my mami, a pura ecuatoriana and I can't even fluently speak her native language that she wanted to teach me so badly.
I want so badly to reconcile these two worlds I live in. I keep thinking about how a few years ago God began to affirm me in my ethnic identity as a bi-racial person. I always heard Him tell me He was going to use me a bridge builder. I kind of can see how that may possibly come alive. I live in a world of White privilege because of how I look and because I am half White. But I am also a Latina and that is the culture I was raised in. And now somehow God is gonna use this for His glory as He uses me to love the Latino community. I can't fully explain it but I feel like I can see it.
So mostly I have been working on small things around the office, like making packets, copying articles, going to meetings, meeting and talking with people who come to visit. I know it does not seem so glamorous and exciting. But at the same time I feel motivated and inspired because I realize this is how you change a system. You educate, you network, you build relationships. You mobilize. We had a meeting this week to talk about the upcoming Subway campaign in the fall, so that they too can join in with ensuring farm workers get paid fair wages and have safe working conditions. It was amazing to sit there and listen the staff name off all these different groups and individuals they have guaranteed support from around the country. Basically this is what they do and this is what they did for the Taco Bell, McDonalds and BK campaigns. During the fall and spring they will go to the location of the company's headquarters and just work off whatever connections they already have there and then build new ones. They spend several months, the allies and the farm workers, in that specific city visiting churches, synagogues, universities, high schools, non-profits and community organizations explaining to them the situations of Immokalee. They then just build ally after ally and it leads up to a huge protest eventually at the company's HQ. Due to these strategies, the CIW, I believe is one of the most dynamic and effective grassroots movements in the US today. I feel so privileged to be a part of this. They are truly a group of people who persevere through the worst and it is amazing to hear their stories.
Their first campaign started back in 2001 against Yum! Brands,which is the parent company of Taco Bell, KFC, A&W, Pizza Hut, and another fast food place, I forget. Not only did they do a protest and ally building in Louisville, KY for several months at the Yum! Brands HQ, they also did a Taco Bell Truth Tour. A large group of farm workers and their allies got on a bus and drove cross country to Irvine, CA to do a hunger strike at the Taco Bell HQ. Along the way they visited numerous universities, churches and community organizations to build relationships and to educate people about what was going on. They then sat outside the Taco Bell HQ and did a hunger strike. It was like a 100 of them, I think, I am not sure how many. But that is courage, that is determination, that is perseverance. And Taco Bell and Yum finally did agree to their demands to pay a penny more per pound of tomatoes they picked. They worked on that first campaign for FOUR years.
And they are changing a system, slowly...............
I watched a couple of documentaries this week that made me sick to my stomach. One of them was The Corporation and the other was This is what Democracy Looks Like. (The latter is about the WTO protests that went down in 99 in Seattle). We live in such a sick world. We live in a world that is controlled by a bunch of big corporations who are money hungry, greedy and they don't care who they step on in the process of getting more profit. We live in a world where many people outside the US see this country as imperialistic. We live in a world where transnational corporations have more power than our governments do and they own everything. Soon they will come into our homes while we sleep and patent our genes without our permission and then they'll be on sale at a freakin Wal-Mart the next week.
OK, that might be an exaggeration but if a TNC feels they have the right to go into any country they want and patent a rare plant THAT DOES NOT BELONG TO THEM and then make it into some expensive drug that only rich people can afford, how is that fair? How is that fair? How is that fair???????????
I am writing about this because I see the affects of globalization and neoliberalism in Immokalee. I see how it has forced people to leave their mother countries and their families.
I meet men who are lonely and who are looking for a woman to love them. I realize that they are not many single women in Immokalee. But there are a lot of single men who were forced to leave their wives and children to find work because their countries are getting screwed over by TNC's and US foreign policy and by their own governments. It is such a freakin devastating situation and many times this week I have had to wrestle with things like this within and I feel hopeless. Now I also see gentrification going on here, too, and I am like damn, they can't get a break in life??? Now some rich people are going to try and shove them out of their community because they think traditional agriculture won't even exist in the future. Are they really going to try and import everything cheaply from Latin America?
I HATE free trade. With a passion.
Last night I thought a lot about power. Then today I got a surprise phone call (I actually got two and they both made me very happy). But the first one was with a good and old friend from Tampa, Heather Plazak. We were talking about some different things and I shared with her something that I got myself into a couple of days ago. I am not going to explain the whole situation here because it's too complicated but basically something happened that was my fault and it really caught me off guard. Then she told me with a lot of love that I was relying too much on my power, on my own strength, on myself. I was not trusting God completely. It was definitely true because I heard God tell me the same thing, more or less, yesterday.
We NEED the power of God.
And I know various kinds of people read this and you all do not follow the same spiritual beliefs that I do. But I need to express here that in some ways I have forgotten how powerful God is. That is so wrong. And this is all somehow related. This one personal thing that happened to me helped me to see how dangerous it is to rely on our own strength and our own wisdom.
I think about "power to the people" and all this kind of hype that goes on in activist worlds. If the power were really in the people, wouldn't things be a lot better by now? I believe that God can empower us, He wants to empower us, to move, to act, to do something. He doesn't want us to be complacent. But God is the ultimate one with the power. And once we fully grasp that, that we serve a God of the impossible, then maybe we will begin to move mountains.
Why are we not crying out to God more for change? Why don't we pray together for things to be more just? Why don't we pray in Jesus name for maquiladoras to shut down, for the WTO to demolish and that more fair institutions would be implemented instead? Why don't we pray that the people of God would move, especially the people of God with privilege and degrees and that we would use those resources to change systems, to move mountains, to create something to His glory?? Why don't we pray together against greed, that CEO's of these TNC's would be changed in spirit? Why don't we stop being complacent and do more?
Why is the majority of the activist and grassroots world devoid of Jesus and prayer?
I have been questioning myself a lot lately. I wonder if I really am who I say am. I wonder if I am really about what I say I am about. I feel like this summer is a test.
I went running tonight (early evening and the sun was not beating down on me, so I did not feel like I was going to die, it was great!). I was able to actually go about 4 miles, yay! Anyhow, I thought a lot about this I ran. It's easy to be a certain kind of person when everyone is watching. I don't want to stop running when there are cars on the road and people might be watching. Then people might not think I am able to run, that I am not capable. I want them to have a certain image of me, I don't want them to think I can't handle it, so I force myself to keep going even though there is a huge cramp in my right oblique and also in my right shoulder.
But then I got to a more isolated road. I could have walked it if I wanted to. No one was watching. I could have gotten away with it. And then I could have kept running when I got back to a busier road again, when people would see me.
If I really want to be good at running, if I say I want to get better at this, I want to be healthier and stronger, then I am going to run whether anyone is watching or not. It's something I choose to be committed to.
If I say I am going to follow Jesus, then I am going to do it whether other Christians are watching or not. I have no other Christians here to watch me. It's not like college, where Melyssa and Jeremy always challenged us to go deeper, to do more. This is where the real test comes. Am I committed or not?
If I say I am committed to seeking justice, then I am going to do it, whether others are watching or not.
I want to be who I say I am. And I need to be OK with the fact that I am going to fall from time to time.
But I can't stop running this race. God is all I have, He is all we have. We can't change things without Him.
Because if it was possible to change things without Him.........
then someone explain to me why all these movements that exist in the world, all these ideologies have not been able to fix things yet.
We need Jesus and we need each other.
One last thing...sorry, I know this was really long. I need to ask for some prayer for my family. One of aunts, my Tia Odalys, may be passing away soon. She is the wife of my Tio (uncle) Javier, one of my mom's younger brothers. She is diabetic and has not been doing well for the past couple of years. Recently she went blind and had two massive heart attacks. I am not close to her so it has not really hit me yet. I am concerned, though, for my three cousins and my uncle she is going to leave behind. My cousins are only 15, 20, and 22. All still so young.............and they just have so many other crazy things going on along with this. I only usually see them about once a year. We were all super close when we were kids but you know how things get when you get older. So just pray that God does something beautiful in my family even in the midst of a hard time. Maybe this will all bring us closer together. I think it already is. My mom and my Tio Javier have had a lot of conflict over the past few years. The other night I was talking to her on the phone and she was on her way to take them out to eat and get them out from the hospital and I just had this surge of hope and I got a little teary eyed. God is hope and He does the impossible. So I just pray things get better and that we are all brought closer together to each other and to Him as a result of all this.
OK, that was a random tangent that has nothing to do with Immokalee!
Immokalee. I've been here for two weeks but it has felt like forever. Rahiel has left and I miss her a lot. Now I really feel like I am on my own for real in a spiritual sense. And that's hard because I have been asking myself a lot of hard questions.
One thing that has been really frustrating is my lack of Spanish in some cases. There is absolutely no way that I can express how I feel about a lot of things in Spanish the way I can in English. And this affects a lot of things, I am realizing. It really puts up a lot of barriers to building relationships with people in the community. I hate to constantly ask people to translate, too. All day I watch people come into the office and then I cannot fully communicate with them. I cannot support them or hear their stories fully. Sometimes its people who are coming in because they have not received wages for work, things like that.
So then this is where I have to ask God to continue to help me to forgive my Dad, who is the reason I don't speak Spanish fluently; because he was so freakin adamant about English being my first language so my mom stopped speaking it to my sister and me when we were very young. And then all I picked up most of my life were random phrases and words until I went to college and took 3 semesters of Spanish. That helped a lot but it's still not the same. I see no solution but to move to Latin America for a while and totally immerse myself into learning it fully. If Latinos can come to the US and learn English well and learn to express themselves deeply in another language, then so can I. So much of me is ready to pick up and leave this year but part of me is being an adult (sigh) and being practical about things like finances. So it might have to wait for a while.
I am not writing this to offend anyone but I just need to be honest, too. It is so hard that all the White people who have moved here to Immokalee to work with the community all speak Spanish better than me. It's difficult because none of them have to know Spanish. That is not their culture, that is not their roots. I should know it. The most important and influential person in my life is my mami, a pura ecuatoriana and I can't even fluently speak her native language that she wanted to teach me so badly.
I want so badly to reconcile these two worlds I live in. I keep thinking about how a few years ago God began to affirm me in my ethnic identity as a bi-racial person. I always heard Him tell me He was going to use me a bridge builder. I kind of can see how that may possibly come alive. I live in a world of White privilege because of how I look and because I am half White. But I am also a Latina and that is the culture I was raised in. And now somehow God is gonna use this for His glory as He uses me to love the Latino community. I can't fully explain it but I feel like I can see it.
So mostly I have been working on small things around the office, like making packets, copying articles, going to meetings, meeting and talking with people who come to visit. I know it does not seem so glamorous and exciting. But at the same time I feel motivated and inspired because I realize this is how you change a system. You educate, you network, you build relationships. You mobilize. We had a meeting this week to talk about the upcoming Subway campaign in the fall, so that they too can join in with ensuring farm workers get paid fair wages and have safe working conditions. It was amazing to sit there and listen the staff name off all these different groups and individuals they have guaranteed support from around the country. Basically this is what they do and this is what they did for the Taco Bell, McDonalds and BK campaigns. During the fall and spring they will go to the location of the company's headquarters and just work off whatever connections they already have there and then build new ones. They spend several months, the allies and the farm workers, in that specific city visiting churches, synagogues, universities, high schools, non-profits and community organizations explaining to them the situations of Immokalee. They then just build ally after ally and it leads up to a huge protest eventually at the company's HQ. Due to these strategies, the CIW, I believe is one of the most dynamic and effective grassroots movements in the US today. I feel so privileged to be a part of this. They are truly a group of people who persevere through the worst and it is amazing to hear their stories.
Their first campaign started back in 2001 against Yum! Brands,which is the parent company of Taco Bell, KFC, A&W, Pizza Hut, and another fast food place, I forget. Not only did they do a protest and ally building in Louisville, KY for several months at the Yum! Brands HQ, they also did a Taco Bell Truth Tour. A large group of farm workers and their allies got on a bus and drove cross country to Irvine, CA to do a hunger strike at the Taco Bell HQ. Along the way they visited numerous universities, churches and community organizations to build relationships and to educate people about what was going on. They then sat outside the Taco Bell HQ and did a hunger strike. It was like a 100 of them, I think, I am not sure how many. But that is courage, that is determination, that is perseverance. And Taco Bell and Yum finally did agree to their demands to pay a penny more per pound of tomatoes they picked. They worked on that first campaign for FOUR years.
And they are changing a system, slowly...............
I watched a couple of documentaries this week that made me sick to my stomach. One of them was The Corporation and the other was This is what Democracy Looks Like. (The latter is about the WTO protests that went down in 99 in Seattle). We live in such a sick world. We live in a world that is controlled by a bunch of big corporations who are money hungry, greedy and they don't care who they step on in the process of getting more profit. We live in a world where many people outside the US see this country as imperialistic. We live in a world where transnational corporations have more power than our governments do and they own everything. Soon they will come into our homes while we sleep and patent our genes without our permission and then they'll be on sale at a freakin Wal-Mart the next week.
OK, that might be an exaggeration but if a TNC feels they have the right to go into any country they want and patent a rare plant THAT DOES NOT BELONG TO THEM and then make it into some expensive drug that only rich people can afford, how is that fair? How is that fair? How is that fair???????????
I am writing about this because I see the affects of globalization and neoliberalism in Immokalee. I see how it has forced people to leave their mother countries and their families.
I meet men who are lonely and who are looking for a woman to love them. I realize that they are not many single women in Immokalee. But there are a lot of single men who were forced to leave their wives and children to find work because their countries are getting screwed over by TNC's and US foreign policy and by their own governments. It is such a freakin devastating situation and many times this week I have had to wrestle with things like this within and I feel hopeless. Now I also see gentrification going on here, too, and I am like damn, they can't get a break in life??? Now some rich people are going to try and shove them out of their community because they think traditional agriculture won't even exist in the future. Are they really going to try and import everything cheaply from Latin America?
I HATE free trade. With a passion.
Last night I thought a lot about power. Then today I got a surprise phone call (I actually got two and they both made me very happy). But the first one was with a good and old friend from Tampa, Heather Plazak. We were talking about some different things and I shared with her something that I got myself into a couple of days ago. I am not going to explain the whole situation here because it's too complicated but basically something happened that was my fault and it really caught me off guard. Then she told me with a lot of love that I was relying too much on my power, on my own strength, on myself. I was not trusting God completely. It was definitely true because I heard God tell me the same thing, more or less, yesterday.
We NEED the power of God.
And I know various kinds of people read this and you all do not follow the same spiritual beliefs that I do. But I need to express here that in some ways I have forgotten how powerful God is. That is so wrong. And this is all somehow related. This one personal thing that happened to me helped me to see how dangerous it is to rely on our own strength and our own wisdom.
I think about "power to the people" and all this kind of hype that goes on in activist worlds. If the power were really in the people, wouldn't things be a lot better by now? I believe that God can empower us, He wants to empower us, to move, to act, to do something. He doesn't want us to be complacent. But God is the ultimate one with the power. And once we fully grasp that, that we serve a God of the impossible, then maybe we will begin to move mountains.
Why are we not crying out to God more for change? Why don't we pray together for things to be more just? Why don't we pray in Jesus name for maquiladoras to shut down, for the WTO to demolish and that more fair institutions would be implemented instead? Why don't we pray that the people of God would move, especially the people of God with privilege and degrees and that we would use those resources to change systems, to move mountains, to create something to His glory?? Why don't we pray together against greed, that CEO's of these TNC's would be changed in spirit? Why don't we stop being complacent and do more?
Why is the majority of the activist and grassroots world devoid of Jesus and prayer?
I have been questioning myself a lot lately. I wonder if I really am who I say am. I wonder if I am really about what I say I am about. I feel like this summer is a test.
I went running tonight (early evening and the sun was not beating down on me, so I did not feel like I was going to die, it was great!). I was able to actually go about 4 miles, yay! Anyhow, I thought a lot about this I ran. It's easy to be a certain kind of person when everyone is watching. I don't want to stop running when there are cars on the road and people might be watching. Then people might not think I am able to run, that I am not capable. I want them to have a certain image of me, I don't want them to think I can't handle it, so I force myself to keep going even though there is a huge cramp in my right oblique and also in my right shoulder.
But then I got to a more isolated road. I could have walked it if I wanted to. No one was watching. I could have gotten away with it. And then I could have kept running when I got back to a busier road again, when people would see me.
If I really want to be good at running, if I say I want to get better at this, I want to be healthier and stronger, then I am going to run whether anyone is watching or not. It's something I choose to be committed to.
If I say I am going to follow Jesus, then I am going to do it whether other Christians are watching or not. I have no other Christians here to watch me. It's not like college, where Melyssa and Jeremy always challenged us to go deeper, to do more. This is where the real test comes. Am I committed or not?
If I say I am committed to seeking justice, then I am going to do it, whether others are watching or not.
I want to be who I say I am. And I need to be OK with the fact that I am going to fall from time to time.
But I can't stop running this race. God is all I have, He is all we have. We can't change things without Him.
Because if it was possible to change things without Him.........
then someone explain to me why all these movements that exist in the world, all these ideologies have not been able to fix things yet.
We need Jesus and we need each other.
One last thing...sorry, I know this was really long. I need to ask for some prayer for my family. One of aunts, my Tia Odalys, may be passing away soon. She is the wife of my Tio (uncle) Javier, one of my mom's younger brothers. She is diabetic and has not been doing well for the past couple of years. Recently she went blind and had two massive heart attacks. I am not close to her so it has not really hit me yet. I am concerned, though, for my three cousins and my uncle she is going to leave behind. My cousins are only 15, 20, and 22. All still so young.............and they just have so many other crazy things going on along with this. I only usually see them about once a year. We were all super close when we were kids but you know how things get when you get older. So just pray that God does something beautiful in my family even in the midst of a hard time. Maybe this will all bring us closer together. I think it already is. My mom and my Tio Javier have had a lot of conflict over the past few years. The other night I was talking to her on the phone and she was on her way to take them out to eat and get them out from the hospital and I just had this surge of hope and I got a little teary eyed. God is hope and He does the impossible. So I just pray things get better and that we are all brought closer together to each other and to Him as a result of all this.
Monday, June 9, 2008
The Latino American Dream?
OK, just wanted to post this poem I wrote back in April. It was inspired by the LaFe/Wimauma immersion trip I went to this past March. Right after being in Wimauma for a weekend and then going home to Miami made me think about a lot of things. Here are some of my thoughts in a spoken word:
First there were some of us that came on the plane,
Some of us had to walk through deserts, our bodies dehydrated and drained.
Another handful of us jumped onto a boat in the
Either way we got here, it was all the same kind of pain.
Giving up the motherland for the American dream,
Some sort of magical life that was promised to us,
At least that’s how it first seemed.
Does the “us”, the “nosotros” even exist anymore today?
It’s become more like me, myself, and I and I just want it all my way.
A
The magical promised life she has found and it’s just oh so supreme.
Watching her hermanos y hermanas sip away their Starbucks in their designer jeans,
Never realizing our exploited people are the ones who picked those coffee beans!
A
Wondering if anyone will ever see,
That she’s been sold into modern day slavery.
Picks tomatoes and strawberries and never sees a dime,
On and on for years, because no one seems to ever have the time,
No one has the time to be her voice,
No one seems to care that she doesn’t have a choice.
A
Because of her
A life full of fancy clothes straight from the maquiladoras, the sweatshops, of
The exact same kind of places and reason her parents ran away over here for.
A
Having never no clue that just an hour and a half away is a world of her own gente, her people, just completely unseen and unknown.
One day the suburbanized
Away from all that she knew, but in so many ways it was like coming home.
She began to hear the voiceless and their silent screams,
The Latino American dream is not all that great as it had seemed.
Not only coming home to her gente, but also coming home to the Lord,
She felt her Heavenly Father urging her that this abundant life He offered was not to be ignored.
The
Ones of justice, love, redemption, instead those were now the themes.
A
Felt her heart begin to break, a heart that was once so mean.
Now she has finally woken up, her eyes are ready to see,
Her hands ready to help reconcile, to create new things for His glory,
The way it was always meant to be.
A new dream of freedom, of dignity, and love,
A new kind of Latino American dream for our people,
Can only come from our Heavenly Father above.
Trying to figure out what i feel
I've come to the conclusion that pretty much the majority of these entries are gonna be long. I know that I talk a lot and I've become really self-conscious about that recently more than ever. So I feel self-conscious about writing too much in here as well. But at the same time, shoot, this is my blog and I have a lot I need to process. I'll try and organize this one as much as I can but I'm a pretty scatterbrained mujer so this is gonna be interesting....
I think there are several things mostly on my mind. So I'll try& divide it up like that.....
Community. I think about this idea of community often throughout the day. I think about what it really means and if I have it or if I have ever had it. I think about how this is what every human being desperately longs for within, whether they want to admit it or not. Right now my definition of community means people you share life and passions with, that you naturally connect with and enjoy being around. I think community comes a lot more naturally and can be more fruitful in certain situations.
One thing I have noticed here in Immokalee is that the community is not as isolated like in big cities. I have only been here a week and I feel part of this town. I believe it has a lot to do with the culture, the hospitality, the way people have pursued me and loved me and welcomed me. Every night I have been out doing something with someone. Last Wednesday night I went to have dinner with Rahiel (the other intern from Yale Divinity) and one of our co-workers Brigiette at a lady named Christina's house. Christina is an older lady originally from Mexico and she had never ever even met Rahiel or me and she just welcomed us in as though we were familia. She cooked authentic comida Mexicana and then a one of the priests from the catholic church in town came over, too. It was like being at home or something with old friends and family. I just love this idea of welcoming strangers into one's home. Christina had one of the best decorated homes I have ever been in, too; orange walls and such. So simple and so beautiful. Nothing extravagant just simple and beautiful. And we all did not even know each other that well and we were all coming from such different worlds and backgrounds but we asked each other questions and shared life and found common ground. It was just simple and beautiful, like the house we broke bread in was.
Other nights have been spent watching some amazing documentaries that I am going to make some of you sit down and watch with me at some point, so get ready. Rahiel ,our other co-worker Jordan and I have been having a lot of movie nights together and they are so much fun.
Community. We eat together, we come home from the office together, some of us, and cook our lunch and it's not rushed. Nothing is rushed here. People value relationships and laughter and eating well. People eat together. The majority of time in college I ate meals in my car while driving and rushing somewhere or somewhere by myself on campus or something. Eating with someone or with several people was a special event. Here in Immokalee is natural and normal and I love it. My family did not often eat dinner together growing up because my parents fought so much and then they got divorced when I was a still kid and it never felt whole. You don't realize until you're older how those things really affect you. It became normal to me at a young age to just learn to take care of myself and be by myself a lot because that's what I had to do while my mom was working all the time.
There's something truly incredible about community, commitment, and stability. It's something my soul longs for, something I don't think I have ever had completely. I become more aware of that here everyday. There is something amazing about valuing relationships over tasks. So much of the US has lost that. Perhaps because Immokalee is a small town and the majority here are recent immigrants, they have not completely forgotten that yet. Being here reminds me of times in Ecuador, Mexico, and the Philippines. People over work. Yes, work is important but people are more important. It's okay to take time in the day to just be. We do not have to be busy all the time and we do not have to be so isolated.
It makes me think of how many people I have blown off because for some reason work took priority over them a lot of the time. Somewhere down the road I got brainwashed to believe that if I wasn't making all A's and B's in my college then I was less of a person. I know I did make time for people but man. I spent so much time being busy in life. We all have. Or how it would take me days to get around to calling people back because "man, I've been busy".
The community I have found here is beautiful and I already feel at home here in Immokalee. It feels natural and good to be here. I feel like a lot of the pressures of the world have left me. The one thing that gets to me is not having a spiritual community. The only person I have met here that follows Jesus wholeheartedly is leaving on Wednesday. That's a hard place to be as a Jesus follower...
...which brings me to another thing I have been thinking about quite a bit. I really don't like to do this but sometimes I believe it's necessary to put things out there in hopes that it will stir up some thinking in people. I'm not mad but I am hurt that I haven't really heard from certain friends while I have been here so far. There are a couple who have been checking in on me but I think a lot of the ones who I thought would at least shot me an email or even taken a few seconds to text me to ask me how the first week I was going...well, they haven't. And the big question that keeps coming to my mind is that they must be too busy. Too busy. We're all too freakin busy in this culture.
So much of me wants to be sympathetic to be people who are busy. But I think it's something we have got to break in us. Seriously.
But why? What are we trying to prove? Who are we trying to impress when we can say we graduated college with a 4.0 in 3 years while being involved with half of the organizations on campus?
Who did I hurt along the way when I decided it was more important to write a paper rather than to take just 30 minutes and listen to someone who was having a bad day and pray for them? Who I was trying to impress when I took 5 or 6 upper level classes in one semester and that left me with no time to get to know the people around me? What did I miss out on when I decided that it was more important to study and save money rather than go on a spiritual retreat with some good friends?
It's easy for me to feel a little hurt right now but also I need to realize where I have gone wrong with this, too.
And I don't want to act like I never had any good times in college or something. Trust me, there were a lot of times I did blow things off to be with friends and I believe I did find community in a lot of ways. I made a lot of incredible friends that I would not trade for the world.
I just think it would not hurt to rethink many of our priorities, our pace of life, and our pursuit of people. Especially pursuing those who have been forgotten, as Jesus would.
I wonder if I also give off the vibe that I am like this really busy person who has no time to talk to people. I am so sorry if I do. I believe that so much of me thrives off of being around people and conversing with them. I am one of the most extroverted people I have ever met. That's why I don't get why I have spent so much time isolated in life at times in the past.
I am so glad God brought me to Immokalee. Slowness is good.
It's possible to be content without so many of the things we believe we need. We are deceived so much everyday by this world. We are lied to and told we need to spend money on eating out all time, that we need to buy things we don't really need, that we need a lot of money, we need a lot of pretty stuff to decorate our homes with.
Those are all freakin lies.
This past Saturday I drove out to Miami with Rahiel since she has never been there and probably won't have a chance to go there for a while again. It was so funny to see someone who, as we drove through the Everglades to get there, was so amazed by the beauty she saw in all of it. I have driven through there so many times I cannot even see it sometimes or appreciate it as much. .............
Going to Miami made me feel like I left to another world. Right before we left, we went to one of the CIW staff's birthday parties, a lady named Pancha. I remember driving over to the trailer she lived in and looking around her neighborhood and it looked so much like the poverty stricken communities Mexico or Ecuador I have visited. Just Latinos who are hard working and looking for a better life. Then I drive to the other side of the coast into the upper middle class neighborhood my family lives in now. And there are Latinos, hard working and who were looking for a better life. But how did one side get so fortunate and the other did not? It's something I cannot stop wrestling with. I am realizing so much of it has to do with US foreign policy and our various relationships with different Latin American countries.
I am really, really grateful for my education. I see everyday here how a lot of what I learned in college is helping me here in Immokalee and to understand things a bit more. At the same time, though, I struggle with that tension of school being like a god....how much is too much? Where do we find our balance?
Oh yeah! I finally got to meet Lucas Benitez last night. He is one of the co-founders of the CIW and is just as amazing as the rest of this community. He is the main one, though, that has been talking with the UN about human rights violations in the fields of the United States.
It was somewhat discouraging, though, what he shared with us. He pretty much explained that the folks in Geneva have a hard time believing that such a thing like modern day slavery could actually exist here in the US. Yes, because this country is that flawless, right? Slavery is only supposed to be acceptable in the developing world? No, it's not freakin acceptable anywhere but sadly, yes, it does go on in Florida and other parts of the US. I think he felt that they just did not take this work that the CIW is doing too seriously. That is so sad.
I am so inspired being here. I love that I am doing work that is helping to slowly change a system. I think its important to meet immediate needs of people but I think that we have a higher call than charity work.
I believe that God wants us to move mountains and to change systems. Our Father in Heaven is a God of the impossible. Sometimes I look at these systems and I wonder how we will ever get over this mountain. Then I remember who my Father is. That's who we have. That's who we have to empower us to do more.
And we need to do it TOGETHER. In community, in Him, in love.
I think there are several things mostly on my mind. So I'll try& divide it up like that.....
Community. I think about this idea of community often throughout the day. I think about what it really means and if I have it or if I have ever had it. I think about how this is what every human being desperately longs for within, whether they want to admit it or not. Right now my definition of community means people you share life and passions with, that you naturally connect with and enjoy being around. I think community comes a lot more naturally and can be more fruitful in certain situations.
One thing I have noticed here in Immokalee is that the community is not as isolated like in big cities. I have only been here a week and I feel part of this town. I believe it has a lot to do with the culture, the hospitality, the way people have pursued me and loved me and welcomed me. Every night I have been out doing something with someone. Last Wednesday night I went to have dinner with Rahiel (the other intern from Yale Divinity) and one of our co-workers Brigiette at a lady named Christina's house. Christina is an older lady originally from Mexico and she had never ever even met Rahiel or me and she just welcomed us in as though we were familia. She cooked authentic comida Mexicana and then a one of the priests from the catholic church in town came over, too. It was like being at home or something with old friends and family. I just love this idea of welcoming strangers into one's home. Christina had one of the best decorated homes I have ever been in, too; orange walls and such. So simple and so beautiful. Nothing extravagant just simple and beautiful. And we all did not even know each other that well and we were all coming from such different worlds and backgrounds but we asked each other questions and shared life and found common ground. It was just simple and beautiful, like the house we broke bread in was.
Other nights have been spent watching some amazing documentaries that I am going to make some of you sit down and watch with me at some point, so get ready. Rahiel ,our other co-worker Jordan and I have been having a lot of movie nights together and they are so much fun.
Community. We eat together, we come home from the office together, some of us, and cook our lunch and it's not rushed. Nothing is rushed here. People value relationships and laughter and eating well. People eat together. The majority of time in college I ate meals in my car while driving and rushing somewhere or somewhere by myself on campus or something. Eating with someone or with several people was a special event. Here in Immokalee is natural and normal and I love it. My family did not often eat dinner together growing up because my parents fought so much and then they got divorced when I was a still kid and it never felt whole. You don't realize until you're older how those things really affect you. It became normal to me at a young age to just learn to take care of myself and be by myself a lot because that's what I had to do while my mom was working all the time.
There's something truly incredible about community, commitment, and stability. It's something my soul longs for, something I don't think I have ever had completely. I become more aware of that here everyday. There is something amazing about valuing relationships over tasks. So much of the US has lost that. Perhaps because Immokalee is a small town and the majority here are recent immigrants, they have not completely forgotten that yet. Being here reminds me of times in Ecuador, Mexico, and the Philippines. People over work. Yes, work is important but people are more important. It's okay to take time in the day to just be. We do not have to be busy all the time and we do not have to be so isolated.
It makes me think of how many people I have blown off because for some reason work took priority over them a lot of the time. Somewhere down the road I got brainwashed to believe that if I wasn't making all A's and B's in my college then I was less of a person. I know I did make time for people but man. I spent so much time being busy in life. We all have. Or how it would take me days to get around to calling people back because "man, I've been busy".
The community I have found here is beautiful and I already feel at home here in Immokalee. It feels natural and good to be here. I feel like a lot of the pressures of the world have left me. The one thing that gets to me is not having a spiritual community. The only person I have met here that follows Jesus wholeheartedly is leaving on Wednesday. That's a hard place to be as a Jesus follower...
...which brings me to another thing I have been thinking about quite a bit. I really don't like to do this but sometimes I believe it's necessary to put things out there in hopes that it will stir up some thinking in people. I'm not mad but I am hurt that I haven't really heard from certain friends while I have been here so far. There are a couple who have been checking in on me but I think a lot of the ones who I thought would at least shot me an email or even taken a few seconds to text me to ask me how the first week I was going...well, they haven't. And the big question that keeps coming to my mind is that they must be too busy. Too busy. We're all too freakin busy in this culture.
So much of me wants to be sympathetic to be people who are busy. But I think it's something we have got to break in us. Seriously.
But why? What are we trying to prove? Who are we trying to impress when we can say we graduated college with a 4.0 in 3 years while being involved with half of the organizations on campus?
Who did I hurt along the way when I decided it was more important to write a paper rather than to take just 30 minutes and listen to someone who was having a bad day and pray for them? Who I was trying to impress when I took 5 or 6 upper level classes in one semester and that left me with no time to get to know the people around me? What did I miss out on when I decided that it was more important to study and save money rather than go on a spiritual retreat with some good friends?
It's easy for me to feel a little hurt right now but also I need to realize where I have gone wrong with this, too.
And I don't want to act like I never had any good times in college or something. Trust me, there were a lot of times I did blow things off to be with friends and I believe I did find community in a lot of ways. I made a lot of incredible friends that I would not trade for the world.
I just think it would not hurt to rethink many of our priorities, our pace of life, and our pursuit of people. Especially pursuing those who have been forgotten, as Jesus would.
I wonder if I also give off the vibe that I am like this really busy person who has no time to talk to people. I am so sorry if I do. I believe that so much of me thrives off of being around people and conversing with them. I am one of the most extroverted people I have ever met. That's why I don't get why I have spent so much time isolated in life at times in the past.
I am so glad God brought me to Immokalee. Slowness is good.
It's possible to be content without so many of the things we believe we need. We are deceived so much everyday by this world. We are lied to and told we need to spend money on eating out all time, that we need to buy things we don't really need, that we need a lot of money, we need a lot of pretty stuff to decorate our homes with.
Those are all freakin lies.
This past Saturday I drove out to Miami with Rahiel since she has never been there and probably won't have a chance to go there for a while again. It was so funny to see someone who, as we drove through the Everglades to get there, was so amazed by the beauty she saw in all of it. I have driven through there so many times I cannot even see it sometimes or appreciate it as much. .............
Going to Miami made me feel like I left to another world. Right before we left, we went to one of the CIW staff's birthday parties, a lady named Pancha. I remember driving over to the trailer she lived in and looking around her neighborhood and it looked so much like the poverty stricken communities Mexico or Ecuador I have visited. Just Latinos who are hard working and looking for a better life. Then I drive to the other side of the coast into the upper middle class neighborhood my family lives in now. And there are Latinos, hard working and who were looking for a better life. But how did one side get so fortunate and the other did not? It's something I cannot stop wrestling with. I am realizing so much of it has to do with US foreign policy and our various relationships with different Latin American countries.
I am really, really grateful for my education. I see everyday here how a lot of what I learned in college is helping me here in Immokalee and to understand things a bit more. At the same time, though, I struggle with that tension of school being like a god....how much is too much? Where do we find our balance?
Oh yeah! I finally got to meet Lucas Benitez last night. He is one of the co-founders of the CIW and is just as amazing as the rest of this community. He is the main one, though, that has been talking with the UN about human rights violations in the fields of the United States.
It was somewhat discouraging, though, what he shared with us. He pretty much explained that the folks in Geneva have a hard time believing that such a thing like modern day slavery could actually exist here in the US. Yes, because this country is that flawless, right? Slavery is only supposed to be acceptable in the developing world? No, it's not freakin acceptable anywhere but sadly, yes, it does go on in Florida and other parts of the US. I think he felt that they just did not take this work that the CIW is doing too seriously. That is so sad.
I am so inspired being here. I love that I am doing work that is helping to slowly change a system. I think its important to meet immediate needs of people but I think that we have a higher call than charity work.
I believe that God wants us to move mountains and to change systems. Our Father in Heaven is a God of the impossible. Sometimes I look at these systems and I wonder how we will ever get over this mountain. Then I remember who my Father is. That's who we have. That's who we have to empower us to do more.
And we need to do it TOGETHER. In community, in Him, in love.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Orange walls and such
I am so sleepy right now. It never ceases to amaze me how year after year my sleeping schedule never becomes consistent. Somehow I slept 4 hours last night but I don't understand how and those 4 hours were split up into intervals. Today I felt absolutely wretched because I didn't sleep much the night before either, so i drank a bunch of coffee at the office and now I'm home and it is impossible to take a nap. Reading makes me sleepy, too.
The work I do here is so random and in so many ways I just love that. For example, this morning I took one of the staff to the airport and somehow I ended up back at my house by 6 am. It was pretty watching the sun begin to rise from the east. I also saw a stop sign in Spanish! I have never seen that in the US, not even in Hialeah or Little Havana or any neighborhood in Miami. It said ALTO right underneath the one in English. Then somehow a couple of hours I was awake for some reason and I didn't understand why I was awake because I was so sleepy. Somehow I ended up in my car with one of the hugest dogs ever in the backseat and his name was Bear. I drove twenty miles north to a town called LaBelle, which also has a large Latino population and most of them work in the fields. LaBelle is a bit bigger than Immokalee but it's definitely rural. I went to a lady named Laura's house because for some reason her dog Bear was hanging out at the convent I live in. I don't know why he was there in the first place and why he was not home with her because her house is awesome, small with a front porch and a hammock and a million beautiful plants. But I left Bear with her and I drove back by myself. He was a nice dog. Anyhow, Laura also works with the CIW, I am not really sure what her position is. The funny thing is here is that there is no boss. No one is over anyone. I mean, there are others who have been here longer but yeah, there is no hierarchy at all. Everyone is just "staff" and somehow everything always gets done.
Laura did talk to me a lot, though, about how LaBelle has been one of the big spots for where many of the slavery rings have gone on. I am supposed to go back there next week and she is going to take me out to some of the labor camps around there that the workers live in. I do remember reading the name LaBelle in many of the articles I have read regarding this issue, so we will see what that will be like...
I feel like I have been here for ages and I have been here for less than a week. One thing I have been grateful for is how the staff are all pretty close in age to me, there is only one lady in her 30's. The ally staff (SFA and IA) are all in their 20's, like me. The CIW staff (all farm workers) vary in age. There is one other intern here right now, too. I can't believe I haven't mentioned her yet because it really is an answer to prayer in a lot of ways. Rahiel is a student from Yale Divinity School (I know, WOW), and she is such a great person. It's wonderful to have another Jesus follower here with me and to be able to openly talk about certain things with her. She is originally from Eritrea (east Africa) and grew up in DC. (Dana, I think you would get along with her really well. She's all about Busboys & Poets on U Street, too!). So coming to Immokalee for a week and a half was part of her internship she's required to do for the program she's in at the divinity school.
The rest of the staff has really grown on me. It's so different to be in a work environment where everyone is extremely socially conscious and it's just natural to brew only Fair Trade coffee in the morning. No one really dresses up but everyone is modest. Everyone respects one another and listens to each other and jokes around. We have amazing conversations with each other about God, trade, slavery, Spanish, immigration, who our Bible crushes are (yes, I started that one, I admitted my one about the apostle Paul...)
OK, I have to run right now, actually. I'll write more later. Les extrano mucho! (I miss you all a lot).
The work I do here is so random and in so many ways I just love that. For example, this morning I took one of the staff to the airport and somehow I ended up back at my house by 6 am. It was pretty watching the sun begin to rise from the east. I also saw a stop sign in Spanish! I have never seen that in the US, not even in Hialeah or Little Havana or any neighborhood in Miami. It said ALTO right underneath the one in English. Then somehow a couple of hours I was awake for some reason and I didn't understand why I was awake because I was so sleepy. Somehow I ended up in my car with one of the hugest dogs ever in the backseat and his name was Bear. I drove twenty miles north to a town called LaBelle, which also has a large Latino population and most of them work in the fields. LaBelle is a bit bigger than Immokalee but it's definitely rural. I went to a lady named Laura's house because for some reason her dog Bear was hanging out at the convent I live in. I don't know why he was there in the first place and why he was not home with her because her house is awesome, small with a front porch and a hammock and a million beautiful plants. But I left Bear with her and I drove back by myself. He was a nice dog. Anyhow, Laura also works with the CIW, I am not really sure what her position is. The funny thing is here is that there is no boss. No one is over anyone. I mean, there are others who have been here longer but yeah, there is no hierarchy at all. Everyone is just "staff" and somehow everything always gets done.
Laura did talk to me a lot, though, about how LaBelle has been one of the big spots for where many of the slavery rings have gone on. I am supposed to go back there next week and she is going to take me out to some of the labor camps around there that the workers live in. I do remember reading the name LaBelle in many of the articles I have read regarding this issue, so we will see what that will be like...
I feel like I have been here for ages and I have been here for less than a week. One thing I have been grateful for is how the staff are all pretty close in age to me, there is only one lady in her 30's. The ally staff (SFA and IA) are all in their 20's, like me. The CIW staff (all farm workers) vary in age. There is one other intern here right now, too. I can't believe I haven't mentioned her yet because it really is an answer to prayer in a lot of ways. Rahiel is a student from Yale Divinity School (I know, WOW), and she is such a great person. It's wonderful to have another Jesus follower here with me and to be able to openly talk about certain things with her. She is originally from Eritrea (east Africa) and grew up in DC. (Dana, I think you would get along with her really well. She's all about Busboys & Poets on U Street, too!). So coming to Immokalee for a week and a half was part of her internship she's required to do for the program she's in at the divinity school.
The rest of the staff has really grown on me. It's so different to be in a work environment where everyone is extremely socially conscious and it's just natural to brew only Fair Trade coffee in the morning. No one really dresses up but everyone is modest. Everyone respects one another and listens to each other and jokes around. We have amazing conversations with each other about God, trade, slavery, Spanish, immigration, who our Bible crushes are (yes, I started that one, I admitted my one about the apostle Paul...)
OK, I have to run right now, actually. I'll write more later. Les extrano mucho! (I miss you all a lot).
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
The mustard seed
Days here are so long and the heat is no joke. This morning I went running with Melody and I could barely finish two miles and it was simply because I felt so freakin overheated and like I was going to die. I even started to feel a bit stomach sick. I guess it must be because we're so inland-there is just such little breeze going on here!
On a more interesting note and one that convicts me (hopefully it will continue to convict me even more deeply and I think it's definitely something I need to repent for), running in Immokalee was not what I expected it to be.
(Why do I seem to always be the person who just always puts themselves out there? But then I have to remind myself that I am not the only one who struggles with assumptions, stereotypes, and prejudices....)
I was surprised that I could even go running around Immokalee and that Melody does run on a consistent basis here just fine by herself. I was also caught off guard by how middle class many of the homes and parts of the town are. I don't feel unsafe, I don't feel threatened. I felt as though many people (and sadly some of them were family members) really bashed Immokalee and discouraged me from coming here because of a safety concern. Many also said I should be very cautious with all the men that will be here hitting on me constantly, because, yeah, that's all older Latino men do, right? They have nothing better to do than hit on younger women?? WRONG!
No one needs to tell me that Latino men can be flirtacious. Trust me, I know. I am from Miami, enough said. (And all I have ever dated has been Hispanic guys, if that says anything, too). But I have always found many Latino men to be very respectful of women in a lot of ways. Here in Immokalee I feel respected so far. Sure, I have caught a couple looking at me here and there but can you blame them?? hahahaha :) Yeah, there is some truth in some of the stereotype but it's also very unfair to assume that all Latino men are going to yell out to you as you walk down the street about how beautiful you are and how they are in love with you.
The point is that generalizations have got to be killed. We cannot just form our opinions about a whole people group based on one or two interactions. That's just so stupid.
So I've mostly been doing some office work, which at first (and still kind of is) hard for me to do such menial tasks (or what feels like menial tasks). I am trying hard not to have that kind of attitude because those tasks need to get done and they do have a purpose, even if it just adding like hundreds of names and emails to the SFA list serve. I do get to attend all staff meetings and it's cool to hear about things that are coming up for the fall that need to be planned now. Mostly we are now planning for the annual Encuentro (means "gathering" in Spanish), which is a small conference with workshops on how to bring the CIW campaigns to college campuses. That was the first time I came to Immokalee, actually, for the Encuentro in 06. It's pretty intense and it's fun because it's just all these hippie college students who want to love farm workers and bring justice into the world.
We're also planning for the next national campaigns for fair food. Taco Bell, McDonald's, Burger King...got them to agree to work with the CIW on fair wages, so who's next? You may have seen stuff already on the CIW website if youre someone who keeps up with it, but the next targets are going to be Subway, Chipotle, and Whole Foods. They've already been talking with these corps about the tomatoes they purchase from Immokalee so it will be interesting to see where these campaigns go, especially if any these CEO's follow what just happened with the whole BK thing.
God is so faithful, you guys. I feel Him so near to me and I see Him evident in such small ways. I have so many thoughts that go through my mind throughout the day. Too bad I do not have a way to implant a laptop in my brain and then type everything as it happens.
I have been thinking a lot about Christian community and how much I value having that. Yesterday morning I kept feeling this weird emptiness. Parts of me were irritated and then parts of me were really sad. I think I just really wish I had someone from Tampa with me here to process and debrief everything I see, think, and feel.
I have this issue of a divided heart sometimes. I think its definitely this battle between the flesh and the spirit. My flesh says that prosperity and wealth and comfort sound nice but then my soul can see that there is no life in those things and my soul is thirsty and it longs to stay alive.
I realized once again last night how nothing I ever do makes sense to the world. When I hear the Lord tell me, yes, mi hija, go! I feel empowered and it makes sense while I pray and when I listen to my Father. But then I present this idea to the world and many of them do not get it. They think I'm gullible, a communist, immature, that I am too idealistic and that it does not matter what I do, change will never come (these are things people have told me in the past several years, whether I was going to do TUP, the Mexico City Project, moving into Ybor Heights, moving back on campus, and now in Immokalee). Many people tell me I might get sick, I might get physically hurt or attacked by someone, I might get robbed. They tell me I don't really know anything or what I am talking about.
Then I hear my Father speak to me and it's usually through others who have an intimate relationship with Him and they affirm me. They encourage me and remind me that I am following Jesus and that is who I live for.
Something else to admit. Being in Immokalee is really hard because I just graduated from college. Again, it does not line up with what the world has always told me to do after I get my degree. The world has always told me to go and get something so I can make as much money as possible and then I can also find a husband to take care of me so we can pop out a bunch of kids together. Then I can have my nice house and spend my Saturdays buying new sheets at Linen 'n'Things and that will be the highlight of my week. And it will be all about me, me, me........
NO! That's NOT me. I don't want to spend all my time and money decorating a house that could be broken into or burnt down in a matter of seconds. Why does everything have to be about how much you have? I hate stuff. I hate even more that I find such a comfort zone in it, though.
Really, it doesn't make sense to come to a place like Immokalee immediately following graduation. But for some reason when I hear from the Lord, it makes all the sense it needs to make to me.
I have been wondering about what drives the rest of the staff to stay here and be committed to this movement and to this community. I felt so encouraged by the Lord this morning because I found out that my roommate Melody is Catholic and that her faith has driven her to lead a life fighting for justice. We also talked about liberation theology for a while and she told me about she got to hear Gustavo Gutierrez's sermons a few times while she was attending Notre Dame (which of course made me a bit jealous!). She also felt a lot her drive came out of the liberation theology she was taught and just realizing how God is definitely on the side of the poor. I also got to share a lot more with her about my relationship with Jesus and really what He means to me and how He is the reason I am here now. It was just a good conversation and once again God really showering me with His faithfulness, especially because of somethings I was praying about last night.
The more I think about who God has created me to be and what He has empowered me to do, the more drawn and ready I feel to love and serve the Latino community, particularly migrant farm workers. I know that one thing that scares me but that I have been praying about a lot is a community of believers who are ready to commit themselves with me to love and serve. Who else will come?
The kingdom of God...like a mustard seed. It starts out small.
Yet when a seed falls to the ground and dies, it can spread its seed and multiply.
Dying to ourselves, our conveniences, our comforts, to pleasing our families, to our own plans and desires. All for the sake of the kingdom of God and the love He has shown us.
I pray one day a community of people will come with me and we can challenge each other in deep ways to die to ourselves. That we can be like those mustard seeds. Or like the yeast worked into the flour and dough.
Today I dropped off a couple of staff at the Ft Myers airport who were leaving to a conference. I cannot explain to you how weird it was to be in this rich behind area and then to stumble upon this crazy shopping center that had all kinds of stores and restaurants that looked so familiar and comfortable and that just felt natural. I really wanted to go into the Super Target, actually, because I wanted to buy a couple of things that I wasn't able to find in Winn Dixie in Immokalee. I also wanted to buy more fruit because I knew it would be higher quality.
It was just this tension again. This entitlement and at the same time this feeling of why I am not more disturbed by certain things? How can I be disturbed by something that is all I have ever known? That feels so natural to me?
I can't get that one thing Jesus said that time out of my head.... "Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions".
There is so much more to life than me and my needs, my clothes, how I look..........
yet I can't seem to get away from those things.
I have so much more I could write but I'll have to save it until tomorrow. It's late and I need to sleep.
On a more interesting note and one that convicts me (hopefully it will continue to convict me even more deeply and I think it's definitely something I need to repent for), running in Immokalee was not what I expected it to be.
(Why do I seem to always be the person who just always puts themselves out there? But then I have to remind myself that I am not the only one who struggles with assumptions, stereotypes, and prejudices....)
I was surprised that I could even go running around Immokalee and that Melody does run on a consistent basis here just fine by herself. I was also caught off guard by how middle class many of the homes and parts of the town are. I don't feel unsafe, I don't feel threatened. I felt as though many people (and sadly some of them were family members) really bashed Immokalee and discouraged me from coming here because of a safety concern. Many also said I should be very cautious with all the men that will be here hitting on me constantly, because, yeah, that's all older Latino men do, right? They have nothing better to do than hit on younger women?? WRONG!
No one needs to tell me that Latino men can be flirtacious. Trust me, I know. I am from Miami, enough said. (And all I have ever dated has been Hispanic guys, if that says anything, too). But I have always found many Latino men to be very respectful of women in a lot of ways. Here in Immokalee I feel respected so far. Sure, I have caught a couple looking at me here and there but can you blame them?? hahahaha :) Yeah, there is some truth in some of the stereotype but it's also very unfair to assume that all Latino men are going to yell out to you as you walk down the street about how beautiful you are and how they are in love with you.
The point is that generalizations have got to be killed. We cannot just form our opinions about a whole people group based on one or two interactions. That's just so stupid.
So I've mostly been doing some office work, which at first (and still kind of is) hard for me to do such menial tasks (or what feels like menial tasks). I am trying hard not to have that kind of attitude because those tasks need to get done and they do have a purpose, even if it just adding like hundreds of names and emails to the SFA list serve. I do get to attend all staff meetings and it's cool to hear about things that are coming up for the fall that need to be planned now. Mostly we are now planning for the annual Encuentro (means "gathering" in Spanish), which is a small conference with workshops on how to bring the CIW campaigns to college campuses. That was the first time I came to Immokalee, actually, for the Encuentro in 06. It's pretty intense and it's fun because it's just all these hippie college students who want to love farm workers and bring justice into the world.
We're also planning for the next national campaigns for fair food. Taco Bell, McDonald's, Burger King...got them to agree to work with the CIW on fair wages, so who's next? You may have seen stuff already on the CIW website if youre someone who keeps up with it, but the next targets are going to be Subway, Chipotle, and Whole Foods. They've already been talking with these corps about the tomatoes they purchase from Immokalee so it will be interesting to see where these campaigns go, especially if any these CEO's follow what just happened with the whole BK thing.
God is so faithful, you guys. I feel Him so near to me and I see Him evident in such small ways. I have so many thoughts that go through my mind throughout the day. Too bad I do not have a way to implant a laptop in my brain and then type everything as it happens.
I have been thinking a lot about Christian community and how much I value having that. Yesterday morning I kept feeling this weird emptiness. Parts of me were irritated and then parts of me were really sad. I think I just really wish I had someone from Tampa with me here to process and debrief everything I see, think, and feel.
I have this issue of a divided heart sometimes. I think its definitely this battle between the flesh and the spirit. My flesh says that prosperity and wealth and comfort sound nice but then my soul can see that there is no life in those things and my soul is thirsty and it longs to stay alive.
I realized once again last night how nothing I ever do makes sense to the world. When I hear the Lord tell me, yes, mi hija, go! I feel empowered and it makes sense while I pray and when I listen to my Father. But then I present this idea to the world and many of them do not get it. They think I'm gullible, a communist, immature, that I am too idealistic and that it does not matter what I do, change will never come (these are things people have told me in the past several years, whether I was going to do TUP, the Mexico City Project, moving into Ybor Heights, moving back on campus, and now in Immokalee). Many people tell me I might get sick, I might get physically hurt or attacked by someone, I might get robbed. They tell me I don't really know anything or what I am talking about.
Then I hear my Father speak to me and it's usually through others who have an intimate relationship with Him and they affirm me. They encourage me and remind me that I am following Jesus and that is who I live for.
Something else to admit. Being in Immokalee is really hard because I just graduated from college. Again, it does not line up with what the world has always told me to do after I get my degree. The world has always told me to go and get something so I can make as much money as possible and then I can also find a husband to take care of me so we can pop out a bunch of kids together. Then I can have my nice house and spend my Saturdays buying new sheets at Linen 'n'Things and that will be the highlight of my week. And it will be all about me, me, me........
NO! That's NOT me. I don't want to spend all my time and money decorating a house that could be broken into or burnt down in a matter of seconds. Why does everything have to be about how much you have? I hate stuff. I hate even more that I find such a comfort zone in it, though.
Really, it doesn't make sense to come to a place like Immokalee immediately following graduation. But for some reason when I hear from the Lord, it makes all the sense it needs to make to me.
I have been wondering about what drives the rest of the staff to stay here and be committed to this movement and to this community. I felt so encouraged by the Lord this morning because I found out that my roommate Melody is Catholic and that her faith has driven her to lead a life fighting for justice. We also talked about liberation theology for a while and she told me about she got to hear Gustavo Gutierrez's sermons a few times while she was attending Notre Dame (which of course made me a bit jealous!). She also felt a lot her drive came out of the liberation theology she was taught and just realizing how God is definitely on the side of the poor. I also got to share a lot more with her about my relationship with Jesus and really what He means to me and how He is the reason I am here now. It was just a good conversation and once again God really showering me with His faithfulness, especially because of somethings I was praying about last night.
The more I think about who God has created me to be and what He has empowered me to do, the more drawn and ready I feel to love and serve the Latino community, particularly migrant farm workers. I know that one thing that scares me but that I have been praying about a lot is a community of believers who are ready to commit themselves with me to love and serve. Who else will come?
The kingdom of God...like a mustard seed. It starts out small.
Yet when a seed falls to the ground and dies, it can spread its seed and multiply.
Dying to ourselves, our conveniences, our comforts, to pleasing our families, to our own plans and desires. All for the sake of the kingdom of God and the love He has shown us.
I pray one day a community of people will come with me and we can challenge each other in deep ways to die to ourselves. That we can be like those mustard seeds. Or like the yeast worked into the flour and dough.
Today I dropped off a couple of staff at the Ft Myers airport who were leaving to a conference. I cannot explain to you how weird it was to be in this rich behind area and then to stumble upon this crazy shopping center that had all kinds of stores and restaurants that looked so familiar and comfortable and that just felt natural. I really wanted to go into the Super Target, actually, because I wanted to buy a couple of things that I wasn't able to find in Winn Dixie in Immokalee. I also wanted to buy more fruit because I knew it would be higher quality.
It was just this tension again. This entitlement and at the same time this feeling of why I am not more disturbed by certain things? How can I be disturbed by something that is all I have ever known? That feels so natural to me?
I can't get that one thing Jesus said that time out of my head.... "Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions".
There is so much more to life than me and my needs, my clothes, how I look..........
yet I can't seem to get away from those things.
I have so much more I could write but I'll have to save it until tomorrow. It's late and I need to sleep.
Monday, June 2, 2008
8th Continent Soy Milk!! (warning: this entry is loooong)
I wish I could somehow describe to you all that I feel within right now.
I mean, I know I'm a volatile person (haha, i hope that's the word I mean??) but man. I have had so many different emotions running through me today on my first full day living in Immokalee.
Here's what I honestly feel:
I feel scared, uncomfortable, like saying AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH and then making all my strange noises I make when I don't know what else to do, I feel angry, I feel compelled to create change, I feel hopeful because of God's justice and love, I feel fearful at the same time that I won't ever see real transformation, I feel ignorant, I feel glad that I am not in a 9-5 job that I hate, I feel grateful and privileged to be here, I feel scared that I am going to miss something I need to learn or see, I feel entitled, I feel sad because I miss Tampa and my friends, I miss Miami and my mom, I miss my friends in DC, I miss my cousin in Oregon (ok, so, I just miss people).
When I was driving down here yesterday and then got off the exit from I-75, I almost wanted to get back on and keep driving south to go home to Miami. I kept asking myself what I was doing, and then I laughed at myself. I wasn't just getting off an exit to get gas. No, I was getting off an unfamiliar exit to come live somewhere, in a place like I have never been before.
In spite of all my fears, I am glad I listened to God and I am glad I came.
I don't understand how I can really live life if all I do is stay safe. One thought that has been constantly running through my mind is that when a person really decides to follow Jesus in a radical way, you are no longer playing it safe. There should always be that tension. Anywhere that Jesus could call me would never be safe or all cupcakes and meadows. I have felt a lot of tension in life the past several years because of my decision to follow Jesus. This is not an easy call. But more than anything, I have felt His love, His faithfulness, His grace and there is a great joy in following Jesus. I cannot even begin to describe it. There is a great joy in living radically for God. There is a love you find like none other in the whole freakin universe.
So, Immokalee....I am living in a house that used to be a convent (guess all those jokes about going to be a nun in Chile finally caught up with me! haha). It's really pretty on the inside. I'm sharing a room with an SFA (one of the organizations I'm working for) staff named Melody Gonzalez. I've met her twice before and she is incredible. She moved to Immokalee after she graduated from Notre Dame three years ago. Our room is covered with her posters about the downfalls of free trade, Diego Rivera art, and posters advertising past marches and rallies of the CIW (the Coalition of Immokalee Workers). In this house/convent, also live one of the co-founders of the CIW, Lucas Benitez, his wife Veronica, and their son, Itzael (I may have misspelled that). He is about a year and a half old and he definitely may be one of the cutest kids ever. I like kids enough and I've never lived with one long term so this should interesting. I think I just bored easily because they can't talk much back to me at that age. I like good conversations. :)
I haven't met Lucas yet because, well, he's in freakin Geneva! He actually flew out there yesterday to meet with the good ol' folks of the United Nations to discuss human rights violations in the United States. In case you don't know this, the CIW has played a large role in busting several slavery rings in Florida the past decade. These were slavery rings made of undocumented immigrants from Latin America who basically were sold into indentured servitude. I feel privileged to be able to spend time around people like Lucas who have had such a big hand in work like this. It really amazes me that someone from a small, mostly unknown town like Immokalee is in Geneva with the UN, such a powerful institution in the world. That really did something to me to learn about that.
So it seems like my work days will be mostly like 10 am-7 pm, but this place is seriously laid backed. But everyone here is very serious and passionate about their work. And everyone speaks Spanish and some are also fluent in Portuguese and Haitian Creole. It's incredible. I am so happy because I understand so much more Spanish than ever before and I know that I can speak better than ever before. I'm going to try and practice as much as I can. It was so great to sit around in the office and hear everyone go back and forth with Spanish and English (really, it's just like being home again). I got to sit in the office with the staff and read through an Oxfam report about migrant farm workers and talk with Melody more about things I didn't know about, like more about the slavery rings, etc. Then a journalist from Orlando came into town and I went out on a walking tour of Immokalee with two of the CIW staff.
The walking tours never cease to boggle my mind. Just being in Immokalee makes you wonder how such poverty can exist in the supposed land of opportunity and freedom. All I could think about was how Naples is only 40 minutes away from us, in the same county and it is one of richest towns in the whole United States. We also border Broward County (where Ft Lauderdale is). My family lives only a few miles from the Broward county line so I am familiar with the area. How the heck does that kind of wealth and world exist so closely to this one? How the heck did I grow up only an hour and a half from Immokalee and I never knew it existed until around two and a half years ago? How did I grow up so close to modern slavery never knowing it was going on? How did one side of the coast find their supposed Latino American dream of wealth and prosperity and the other just kind of got screwed over and forgotten?
We stopped at the up and coming new offices of the CIW (just barely a block away from the current ones) to show the journalist around. There is now a new community radio station there, too. Well, the station, Radio Conciencia- La Tuya, has existed for some time now and has really served the Immokalee community. We sat down to talk for a while with one of the DJ's, Norberto. I just sat on the couch and listened to him to talk for I don't know how long and you have no idea how this conversation just freakin destroyed me in so many ways inside.
In a lot of ways, it just destroyed me.
It was like everything I learned and read in college came to life right in front of me at the moment. Not that something similar like this hasn't happened to me before but wow. When it happens, it happens. Norberto is originally from Oaxaca (southern Mexico). (Sidenote: many of the residents of Immokalee come from indigenous communities of southern Mexico and Guatemala, where small farms are highly valued). When he was back home, he had a coffee farm and that was his livelihood- he was a coffee farmer and he also farmed beans and corn. Norberto was never rich but he always had enough to feed his family.
Then 1994 rolled around and NAFTA came into effect.....(the North American Free Trade Agreement, in case you're not familiar with it).
Norberto explained how NAFTA pretty much put him out of business., as it did to many small farmers in southern Mexico over time. Corn imports from the US were much cheaper and he couldn't make a livelihood because all the prices of corn and coffee got jacked up. It was the same story I had read about for presentations I made in class while in college and here was a statistic right in front of me.
Except that Norberto is not a statistic. He is a human being, someone created purposely by God, a man, a person like you and me. As he sat there and told us about how he had to leave his wife and 5 children behind and how he hasn't seen them in 3 and a half years, the reality of all this hit me hard. I wanted to grab the pillow off the couch I was sitting on and scream into it.
It just made me so angry because so many people miss things like this. So many people are so quick to bash immigrants, to degrade them, to accuse them of "invading our land" and "stealing our jobs", when it's US, the people of the United States, who elect certain people into power and then allow them to create unfair trade policies that destroy other peoples communities.
Who the heck really wants to leave their wife and their family that they love so much? Especially from Latin America, a place where family is HIGHLY valued. Norberto told us, though, that even though he misses his family like crazy, he is happy that his children are able to attend school now because of the money he sends back home. His family has food to eat.
Shoot, but at what cost??? At what freakin cost???
He told us his youngest daughter is now 8 years old. That means he hasn't seen her since she was 5. So because of something as poorly planned as NAFTA and because of greed and because of the love of money and the lust over it and because of complacent citizens and consumers like ourselves, someone like Norberto was forced to leave his homeland and miss out on his daughter's childhood.
I could not even imagine not being able to see my mom and my sister for three years.
And this is WHY i get frustrated when US citizens don't exercise their right to vote. Then you will hear so many people complain about issues they do not even take the time to really understand. There are layers to every issue and we need to take the time to educate ourselves and see what lies underneath.
I'm so tired of exploitation, of oppression. I refuse to sit back and just let things go on. Jesus did not ever just sit back, He was not complacent!
I feel so privileged to be here. Pray that I stay open to learning. Pray that I often have encounters like I did today that turn my thought processes upside down.
Also, just to put this out there, I really struggle with wanting to separate myself from the "rest of the US" at times. But I am just as guilty in so many ways, I have spent years being a socially unconscious person. My clothes still come from maquiladoras, my produce still comes from a sweatshop in the fields.....
but how are going to create something new?
Maquiladoras were not part of God's plan for human beings!
OK, I know this was super long. I'm just trying to process everything I have seen and felt in just one day. Mad props to you if you got this far.
On a happier note, I had an amazing experience in Winn Dixie today. (There is no Publix in Immokalee, it feels really strange, honestly). I found my favorite kind of milk!!!!! Dude, I have been looking for this milk in Tampa for months and for some reason, it just doesn't exist there anymore. I am serious, I went out of my way several times to different grocery stores to find it...NADA. And where do I finally find my 8th Continent Lite Soy Milk?? In Immokalee, of all places!
Oh yeah....there's no Wal-Mart here, either (like in the Philippines). Yay! I despise Wal-Mart. :)
I mean, I know I'm a volatile person (haha, i hope that's the word I mean??) but man. I have had so many different emotions running through me today on my first full day living in Immokalee.
Here's what I honestly feel:
I feel scared, uncomfortable, like saying AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH and then making all my strange noises I make when I don't know what else to do, I feel angry, I feel compelled to create change, I feel hopeful because of God's justice and love, I feel fearful at the same time that I won't ever see real transformation, I feel ignorant, I feel glad that I am not in a 9-5 job that I hate, I feel grateful and privileged to be here, I feel scared that I am going to miss something I need to learn or see, I feel entitled, I feel sad because I miss Tampa and my friends, I miss Miami and my mom, I miss my friends in DC, I miss my cousin in Oregon (ok, so, I just miss people).
When I was driving down here yesterday and then got off the exit from I-75, I almost wanted to get back on and keep driving south to go home to Miami. I kept asking myself what I was doing, and then I laughed at myself. I wasn't just getting off an exit to get gas. No, I was getting off an unfamiliar exit to come live somewhere, in a place like I have never been before.
In spite of all my fears, I am glad I listened to God and I am glad I came.
I don't understand how I can really live life if all I do is stay safe. One thought that has been constantly running through my mind is that when a person really decides to follow Jesus in a radical way, you are no longer playing it safe. There should always be that tension. Anywhere that Jesus could call me would never be safe or all cupcakes and meadows. I have felt a lot of tension in life the past several years because of my decision to follow Jesus. This is not an easy call. But more than anything, I have felt His love, His faithfulness, His grace and there is a great joy in following Jesus. I cannot even begin to describe it. There is a great joy in living radically for God. There is a love you find like none other in the whole freakin universe.
So, Immokalee....I am living in a house that used to be a convent (guess all those jokes about going to be a nun in Chile finally caught up with me! haha). It's really pretty on the inside. I'm sharing a room with an SFA (one of the organizations I'm working for) staff named Melody Gonzalez. I've met her twice before and she is incredible. She moved to Immokalee after she graduated from Notre Dame three years ago. Our room is covered with her posters about the downfalls of free trade, Diego Rivera art, and posters advertising past marches and rallies of the CIW (the Coalition of Immokalee Workers). In this house/convent, also live one of the co-founders of the CIW, Lucas Benitez, his wife Veronica, and their son, Itzael (I may have misspelled that). He is about a year and a half old and he definitely may be one of the cutest kids ever. I like kids enough and I've never lived with one long term so this should interesting. I think I just bored easily because they can't talk much back to me at that age. I like good conversations. :)
I haven't met Lucas yet because, well, he's in freakin Geneva! He actually flew out there yesterday to meet with the good ol' folks of the United Nations to discuss human rights violations in the United States. In case you don't know this, the CIW has played a large role in busting several slavery rings in Florida the past decade. These were slavery rings made of undocumented immigrants from Latin America who basically were sold into indentured servitude. I feel privileged to be able to spend time around people like Lucas who have had such a big hand in work like this. It really amazes me that someone from a small, mostly unknown town like Immokalee is in Geneva with the UN, such a powerful institution in the world. That really did something to me to learn about that.
So it seems like my work days will be mostly like 10 am-7 pm, but this place is seriously laid backed. But everyone here is very serious and passionate about their work. And everyone speaks Spanish and some are also fluent in Portuguese and Haitian Creole. It's incredible. I am so happy because I understand so much more Spanish than ever before and I know that I can speak better than ever before. I'm going to try and practice as much as I can. It was so great to sit around in the office and hear everyone go back and forth with Spanish and English (really, it's just like being home again). I got to sit in the office with the staff and read through an Oxfam report about migrant farm workers and talk with Melody more about things I didn't know about, like more about the slavery rings, etc. Then a journalist from Orlando came into town and I went out on a walking tour of Immokalee with two of the CIW staff.
The walking tours never cease to boggle my mind. Just being in Immokalee makes you wonder how such poverty can exist in the supposed land of opportunity and freedom. All I could think about was how Naples is only 40 minutes away from us, in the same county and it is one of richest towns in the whole United States. We also border Broward County (where Ft Lauderdale is). My family lives only a few miles from the Broward county line so I am familiar with the area. How the heck does that kind of wealth and world exist so closely to this one? How the heck did I grow up only an hour and a half from Immokalee and I never knew it existed until around two and a half years ago? How did I grow up so close to modern slavery never knowing it was going on? How did one side of the coast find their supposed Latino American dream of wealth and prosperity and the other just kind of got screwed over and forgotten?
We stopped at the up and coming new offices of the CIW (just barely a block away from the current ones) to show the journalist around. There is now a new community radio station there, too. Well, the station, Radio Conciencia- La Tuya, has existed for some time now and has really served the Immokalee community. We sat down to talk for a while with one of the DJ's, Norberto. I just sat on the couch and listened to him to talk for I don't know how long and you have no idea how this conversation just freakin destroyed me in so many ways inside.
In a lot of ways, it just destroyed me.
It was like everything I learned and read in college came to life right in front of me at the moment. Not that something similar like this hasn't happened to me before but wow. When it happens, it happens. Norberto is originally from Oaxaca (southern Mexico). (Sidenote: many of the residents of Immokalee come from indigenous communities of southern Mexico and Guatemala, where small farms are highly valued). When he was back home, he had a coffee farm and that was his livelihood- he was a coffee farmer and he also farmed beans and corn. Norberto was never rich but he always had enough to feed his family.
Then 1994 rolled around and NAFTA came into effect.....(the North American Free Trade Agreement, in case you're not familiar with it).
Norberto explained how NAFTA pretty much put him out of business., as it did to many small farmers in southern Mexico over time. Corn imports from the US were much cheaper and he couldn't make a livelihood because all the prices of corn and coffee got jacked up. It was the same story I had read about for presentations I made in class while in college and here was a statistic right in front of me.
Except that Norberto is not a statistic. He is a human being, someone created purposely by God, a man, a person like you and me. As he sat there and told us about how he had to leave his wife and 5 children behind and how he hasn't seen them in 3 and a half years, the reality of all this hit me hard. I wanted to grab the pillow off the couch I was sitting on and scream into it.
It just made me so angry because so many people miss things like this. So many people are so quick to bash immigrants, to degrade them, to accuse them of "invading our land" and "stealing our jobs", when it's US, the people of the United States, who elect certain people into power and then allow them to create unfair trade policies that destroy other peoples communities.
Who the heck really wants to leave their wife and their family that they love so much? Especially from Latin America, a place where family is HIGHLY valued. Norberto told us, though, that even though he misses his family like crazy, he is happy that his children are able to attend school now because of the money he sends back home. His family has food to eat.
Shoot, but at what cost??? At what freakin cost???
He told us his youngest daughter is now 8 years old. That means he hasn't seen her since she was 5. So because of something as poorly planned as NAFTA and because of greed and because of the love of money and the lust over it and because of complacent citizens and consumers like ourselves, someone like Norberto was forced to leave his homeland and miss out on his daughter's childhood.
I could not even imagine not being able to see my mom and my sister for three years.
And this is WHY i get frustrated when US citizens don't exercise their right to vote. Then you will hear so many people complain about issues they do not even take the time to really understand. There are layers to every issue and we need to take the time to educate ourselves and see what lies underneath.
I'm so tired of exploitation, of oppression. I refuse to sit back and just let things go on. Jesus did not ever just sit back, He was not complacent!
I feel so privileged to be here. Pray that I stay open to learning. Pray that I often have encounters like I did today that turn my thought processes upside down.
Also, just to put this out there, I really struggle with wanting to separate myself from the "rest of the US" at times. But I am just as guilty in so many ways, I have spent years being a socially unconscious person. My clothes still come from maquiladoras, my produce still comes from a sweatshop in the fields.....
but how are going to create something new?
Maquiladoras were not part of God's plan for human beings!
OK, I know this was super long. I'm just trying to process everything I have seen and felt in just one day. Mad props to you if you got this far.
On a happier note, I had an amazing experience in Winn Dixie today. (There is no Publix in Immokalee, it feels really strange, honestly). I found my favorite kind of milk!!!!! Dude, I have been looking for this milk in Tampa for months and for some reason, it just doesn't exist there anymore. I am serious, I went out of my way several times to different grocery stores to find it...NADA. And where do I finally find my 8th Continent Lite Soy Milk?? In Immokalee, of all places!
Oh yeah....there's no Wal-Mart here, either (like in the Philippines). Yay! I despise Wal-Mart. :)
Sunday, June 1, 2008
The last place I'd thought I'd ever be....
You know when you're a teenager and you make up all these great plans for yourself because you really have no idea how the world works yet? I used to think I was going to move to northern California and be an English teacher and a freelance writer and burn a lot of incense in between. I thought I'd end up going to college in some other state because I hated Florida and couldn't wait to get out of Miami (which I used to believe was the most wretched city ever).
For some reason, none of that happened. And where I have ended up, there has been no other place where I would have rather been these past several years. (well, most of the time....i still struggle with envying the "real" big cities who have amazing public transportation systems).
Tampa didn't always make sense to me. Now I know for sure that this was a big part of God's pursuit for me because that's how bad He wanted me. I left this afternoon after shedding some tears surrounded by a few handful of friends who showed me more love than I have ever deserved. It was so hard to leave them. I think of the community of people I have been surrounded with in Tampa and I'm like man, this is exactly what I have always been searching for. God knows the desires of my hearts and He blesses that.
I guess the point of all this is I am wondering how the heck why and how I have ended up in a very small town called Immokalee right now.
The only possible explanation is because of what has happened to me as a person in Tampa the past several years. If it wasn't for this pursuing God had done after me, I highly doubt I would have ever cared about the plight of farm workers in Immokalee.
God is amazing.
This is the last place I thought I would ever be and even though I have so many fears and I feel waaaaaaaay out of my comfort zone right now, I praise God that He introduced me to this community. I am grateful for how He has caused me to care for my people from Latin America and that somehow He is going to teach me through the years to live for someone besides myself.
Immokalee is not an easy place to be. Especially for a big city girl like me. I think I have started to believe that usually the place we may be the most scared of going to would be the best place for us to end up in, at least for a while. Small, rural areas have always scared me. I like noise, I like tall buildings, buses and trains, highways.....yeah, the nearest highway is about 40 minutes from me right now!
I just have so many thoughts going through my head right now. I'm also really sleepy because I think between the past 3 nights I have slept a total of 15 hours. THATS NOT GOOD! But it has been worth it because I got to spend a lot of time with people I love a lot before I left.
If you're someone who prays, I ask that you would please pray for me to be open to whatever God would want to teach me this summer in Immokalee. Pray that I'm open to change, that I adjust well, that I'll be real about my fears and that I'd be willing to work through them and give them to God. I'm not even sure what I am scared of....I think that all of us are always scared of the unfamiliar, whether we want to admit that or not.
To be honest with you...I am scared of leaving comfort. I am so freakin attached to the comforts of this world and I HATE THAT! But there is something comfortable about things like Target, like Panera Bread, like being around people that all look and think like me, that talk like me.
OK, I'll write more tomorrow. I'm too sleepy now and I'm just going to keep rambling, haha.
I miss YOU! :)
For some reason, none of that happened. And where I have ended up, there has been no other place where I would have rather been these past several years. (well, most of the time....i still struggle with envying the "real" big cities who have amazing public transportation systems).
Tampa didn't always make sense to me. Now I know for sure that this was a big part of God's pursuit for me because that's how bad He wanted me. I left this afternoon after shedding some tears surrounded by a few handful of friends who showed me more love than I have ever deserved. It was so hard to leave them. I think of the community of people I have been surrounded with in Tampa and I'm like man, this is exactly what I have always been searching for. God knows the desires of my hearts and He blesses that.
I guess the point of all this is I am wondering how the heck why and how I have ended up in a very small town called Immokalee right now.
The only possible explanation is because of what has happened to me as a person in Tampa the past several years. If it wasn't for this pursuing God had done after me, I highly doubt I would have ever cared about the plight of farm workers in Immokalee.
God is amazing.
This is the last place I thought I would ever be and even though I have so many fears and I feel waaaaaaaay out of my comfort zone right now, I praise God that He introduced me to this community. I am grateful for how He has caused me to care for my people from Latin America and that somehow He is going to teach me through the years to live for someone besides myself.
Immokalee is not an easy place to be. Especially for a big city girl like me. I think I have started to believe that usually the place we may be the most scared of going to would be the best place for us to end up in, at least for a while. Small, rural areas have always scared me. I like noise, I like tall buildings, buses and trains, highways.....yeah, the nearest highway is about 40 minutes from me right now!
I just have so many thoughts going through my head right now. I'm also really sleepy because I think between the past 3 nights I have slept a total of 15 hours. THATS NOT GOOD! But it has been worth it because I got to spend a lot of time with people I love a lot before I left.
If you're someone who prays, I ask that you would please pray for me to be open to whatever God would want to teach me this summer in Immokalee. Pray that I'm open to change, that I adjust well, that I'll be real about my fears and that I'd be willing to work through them and give them to God. I'm not even sure what I am scared of....I think that all of us are always scared of the unfamiliar, whether we want to admit that or not.
To be honest with you...I am scared of leaving comfort. I am so freakin attached to the comforts of this world and I HATE THAT! But there is something comfortable about things like Target, like Panera Bread, like being around people that all look and think like me, that talk like me.
OK, I'll write more tomorrow. I'm too sleepy now and I'm just going to keep rambling, haha.
I miss YOU! :)
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