Hands-Free to Winn-Dixie

Overfilling the Bucket

2011-07-24T14:15:00.000-07:00

Note: I mentioned these pictures a long time ago, but I never got around to posting them - sorry! Click here to check out some shots from my final month in Immokalee. Also - this post will be the final post of this blog - thank you all for caring enough to check it, for your emails, comments, and interest. I appreciate the encouragement that you've shown, and I hope that one day I can thank you properly.

Well... it's been a really hectic two months since I packed up and left Immokalee, sojourned up the coast, moved to Ann Arbor, and started grad school. I could fill this site with post-after-post on each of those topics, but I want to really focus on leaving Immokalee, and what this time period has meant in my life. If it scores me any points, I'd like to note that I actually already sat down and tried to write this once, but it just came out with the wrong tone, and I really don't want to leave things on a sour note. So, here comes take two.

Last month, while I was at home during my brief stay in Pennsylvania, my mom and I were making a long drive and listening to one of my favorite radio shows. A lot of things were going on in the program, but the information relevant to this post is that a big part of the story focused on a group of four young Iraqi men (all about my age) who held weekly phone conversations with a young American man.

The story was analyzing the friendship that these men shared despite their differences, and it compared and contrasted their similar interests through radically different surroundings. Towards the end of the piece, the young Iraqi that is closest with the American is put into a coma after he is a random victim of a public bombing. As they talk about what this means for all of them, they highlight that he will pass his 24th birthday in a coma, his pregnant wife unsure if their child will ever meet his or her father. They also mention that his birthday is May 29th - meaning that he and I were born on the exact same day.

Not that I didn't find this story interesting already, but in that moment that they mentioned the birthday, I found tears welling up in the corners of my eyes. The same revelation that sideswiped me in the car that day is the same reason that Immokalee has been so important to me. I'll do my best to describe what I mean by that, but forgive if my words come up short.

I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I know that I spend far too much of my time forgetting that there are people occupying these bodies that surround me. We're all the stars of our own movies, and even though you can pound it into my head that we're really all the same, that each person, despite the space they occupy, isn't really that different from me (or any other person), sometimes it takes a coincidental birthday to ring that bell for me.

Last night, I was in a crowded movie theater, and I had the same sensation. Sometimes, every thing in life just feels like a giant set, and all those people milling around are the bit-players. Man buying popcorn - played by: himself. Child throwing tantrum in bathroom: himself. Teenagers texting and nervously ignoring each other: themselves. High school football players fundraising with M&Ms: themselves. And these are the people I come into contact with! What about all of those other, unseen parts of my life?! South America, China, the entire West Coast, Europe, Australia, basically everywhere but here? Props. Nothing more than pictures on a website, words on the news. I have no connection that makes these places, or the people filling them, anything more than a blip on the credit-reel.

In one way, Immokalee changed that for me. I'll never be able to experience every culture, every language, every level of income on this planet - but it was huge, huge, huge to experience just one set other than my own. Within my first months of moving to Immokalee, I had one experience that will stay with me forever. I was biking home from work, passing a dog that was lying down and panting on the sidewalk, and for some reason, the big picture just clicked together in that instant. I realized that I came to Immokalee by a series of fortuitous, unusual, and somewhat difficult decisions, but that I had also just made the best choice of my life. I realized that I'd opened a door that could never be closed, and that no matter what happened to me, for the rest of my life, no one could ever take this away from me.

What was that? I guess it was the realization that there's more than just me. And I know I still forget it every day, and I forgot it every day when I lived there, too. But for the first time, I also knew it, and in some ways, I can never truly forget it again. I became polarized on a lot of topics that I was dispassionate about before, but that isn't really the point of this post. The truth is, I connected to a culture and way of life that was radically different than my own, and that experience has heavily adjusted the way that I see this continent and the entire world. In a way, that single connection outside of my "normal" was also a limitless, ever-multiplying connection to everything that's ever not been normal to me.

If you would have said the word "enlightenment" to me three years ago, I would have pictured this little wooden Buddha-figure that I own, and probably some candles or incense. Say it to me now, and I see an exhausted dog sprawled out on the pavement, tongue fully out, lifting his head just enough to decide whether or not I'm worth getting up for.

Mr. Greg Likes Zombies, I Like Sponge Bob

2011-05-26T10:31:00.000-07:00

Howdy, Hands-Free faithful!

This past weekend, I spent an hour or so getting all of my pictures organized and uploaded to the website, and all I have left to do is put some captions up and post them. Sadly, I fell short of that goal before the madness struck. It's the last week of my jobs here in Immokalee, Greg (my brother) and his novia, Liz, arrived in town a couple of days ago, and I'm already way behind on getting things ready for Ann Arbor. Consider this a formal excuse, but also a semi-promise that I'll be posting those pictures in a week or two with my final wrap-up post.

In the form of world's smallest update, I'll gift-wrap a little class-room update your way. Greg and Liz were a pretty big hit in my classroom between having more helping hands and Greg's drawing abilities. I knew the kids liked having them there, but I didn't realize just how much until Greg showed me the following note that one of my kids had given him:

Oh, and as long as we're talking about presents, one more thing. At every Christmas and End of the Year, I usually give my kids a few gifts that always include a couple of pictures of themselves with maybe a few other shots of the whole class. I decided that since I was going to be leaving Immokalee after this month, I ought to give them something to remember the two great teachers that they had this year, Mr. Dennis and Mr. Dennis Mustache:

Thanks for being such loyal readers, and look for my final wrap-up post (with pictures... real pictures!) within the next couple of weeks.

Kiddie Korner

2011-05-11T10:40:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I shared stories from my first-grade class, but they still come in by the bucket-load. Here are a few semi-gems from the past couple of weeks.

The Little Chicken

One day, when my kids were coming in to eat their snack in the cafeteria, I was sitting at their table starting to take attendance. When one boy, Bryan, sat next to me, I looked over and greeted him with a "Hey, little man!" - he hopped out his seat, pointed at me, and yelled "Hey little chicken!!" This spurred an insult war that lasted all day. For the most part, it involved me coming up with new and creative taunts, him laughing hysterically and then repeating the same insult back at me, only with my name inserted for his. By the end of the day, though, he was stringing together some pretty genuine insults.

Occasionally, other kids in our class would try to come up with some (lame) one-liners, but this thing was mostly between me and Bryan. He could barely do his homework he was enjoying it so much, and I was semi-pleased to have created such a diss-master by 5 o'clock.

At the end of the day, after our kids had loaded up to head home, I was walking past the buses when Bryan pulled down his window and yelled out "Hey! Mr. Dennis! Your underwear smells like a dirty diaper!" I shot back with "Hey Bryan! Your breath smells like a pet store!" This went on for a minute or two, but as I was preparing my third or fourth retort, I was interrupted by another "Hey, Mr. Dennis!" from a few windows down. Another boy in my class (also named Bryan) had opened his window. Bryan 2 hadn't joined in any insulting all day, so I figured he might have something important to say. "Yeah, Bryan?" He smirked and yelled "Mr. Dennis Mustache told me he thinks your new haircut looks ugly!"

I stood on the sidewalk, mouth agape. Before I could even speak, the bus roared and pulled away, leaving me amidst a cloud of shock, embarrassment, laughter (coming from anyone present), and a strong sense of pride for what a smart little insult comic had been stealthily lurking in my class all day.

Mr. Chennis and Chiana

Last week, while stopping in another classroom to rummage for a book to read to my kids, I came across one of my girls from last year, Diana. She was heading into the bathroom, right next to the stack of books I was looking through, and when she saw me she spurted out "Hey, Mr. Fennis!" I responded "Hey, Fiana!"

Next I was Mr. Bennis, and she was Biana- then we were Kennis and Kiana. This went on for a bit - Mr. Yennis & Yiana, Mr. Jennis & Jiana, Mr. Tennis & Tiana -- until a tutor from her class noticed her lingering at the bathroom. After a brief scolding, she said "Bye Mr. Dennis!" and disappeared into the bathroom - I responded her correct name (which just so happened to also start with D... how nicely these things work out sometimes), and went on perusing through the books.

A few minutes later, the door creaked open, and she peaked the top of her head out "... Hi Mr. Rennis." "Hi Riana." Hennis, Hiana, Wennis, Wiana, Sennis, Siana. Eventually, when I was Mr. Lennis, her tutor noticed again and hollered for her to get back to her desk just as I was calling her Liana. She eyes spread wide at the tutors voice and she whispered over to me "Okay! I guess I'll just be Liana forever now! Bye!" as she went running back to her seat.

The Fashion Lesson

And now for something a little different. Pretty commonly, our day winds down with about five or ten minutes of kids drawing on blank pieces of paper, and at this point in the year, it's well known that I'll join in the drawing fun if everyone's homework is done. Here's the illustrated version of an interaction I had with one of my girls last week (apologies if you have to squint to read it - you can click on the image to see a bigger version if you need to):

At first, I thought this was a pretty sweet thing for her to be asking - I must be some kind of romantic symbol to these first-grade girls... and who can blame them, right? I've also had a myriad of guises throughout this year (regardless of whether or not they were intentionally deceptive), and so I thought I ought to clarify which form of Mr. Dennis she'd like a picture of.

Huh. No big deal. I only had my long hair for about 6 months. And it has been my usual 'do for about the last 7 years. I'm not too insulted...

At this point in the year, I wear my glasses probably four out of five days due to allergies - I just so happened not to be wearing them that day. So maybe I'm not exactly a romantic symbol. Still, I'm actually two-for-two so far: short hair, no glasses. I might have poor style on most other days, but I appeared to be holding my own on that day.

Bad news, Maria. I think I might be ugly.

The Final Countdown

2011-05-03T10:23:00.001-07:00

Well holy crap, folks.

Welcome to May, my last full month in Immokalee (I'll be here at most a day or two in June). I don't even really know how to begin to express how that makes me feel, and for the most part, I haven't allowed myself to. I spent a good part of August and September feeling down about how quickly my time here was going, but since then, I've worked very hard to focus on living and being in the present. I know that I'll eventually need to address the issues that will come with my separation from this place and lifestyle, but I also don't want to bog down my final month with that kind of stuff.

I guess all of this is to warn you that, sometime in the near future, you can expect a pretty lengthy post heavily laden with memories and life lessons. BUT NOT TODAY!

Instead, you should check out the pictures that I've spent the last few days compiling for you all.

First off, click here to take a gander at the garden -- I know it's been a long time since I've updated this album, but that doesn't mean I haven't still been working in there every day. The new pictures begin towards the bottom of the album, at photo number 90, with the caption APRIL 2011 UPDATE.

Next, click here to check out my general update from the month of April. It's mostly pictures from Easter, but I sprinkled in a few other goodies from after-school and random birthday parties. I somehow failed to include a shot of the Easter bread I made in that album, so I'll lazily post it right here instead of doing the work it takes to put it in the album:

I'm definitely no Mary Jo, but these loaves turned out better than I expected. We also got a giant Easter Bread French Toast meal out of the second loaf, so no complaints here.

And finally, some links from Boston. I didn't mention it much on the blog, but I spent about ten days of April travelling - back home to PA for a couple of days, to our volunteer mid-year retreat for a few more days, and then up to Boston to watch my brother Greg run the Boston marathon on the 18th. Everyone else in my family was photo-happy, so I took and break and will instead direct you to their pictures if you haven't seen them yet.

Click here to check out Pat's photos OR here to check out my mom's photos.

Okay, folks - I've already got a head-start on those May pictures, so you can expect a few more photo-bombs and maybe one or two full-length posts before (perhaps?) Hands-Free to Winn Dixie's L A S T P O S T E V E R. Or not. Who knows, right?

The Return of Mr. Dennis Mustache

2011-04-17T06:54:00.000-07:00

As some of you may recall from earlier this year, my twin brother "Mr. Dennis Mustache" visited my first grade class for a week back in January. The real Mr. Dennis was "staying home sick" in Pennsylvania while Mr. Dennis Mustache came down to watch after the kids for a week. He was allegedly more strict with the rules, but really not that much different from Mr. Dennis. After just one short week, he went back to his ambiguous (yet demanding) job in Pennsylvania, while I came back to resume my role as primary deceiver of the innocents.

Well, since that time, the existence of Mr. Dennis Mustache has been a highly controversial event. Several children have asked about him, some of the kids get mad at the other ones for even mentioning his existence, some fervently believe in him and as me to tell him things for them, and at least two of my kids have launched "Mr. Dennis Mustache does not exist" campaigns. One of my girls, Gricelda, points out my stubble whenever I go more than a few days without shaving -- "Look! He's growing a mustache!He's Mr. Dennis and Mr. Dennis Mustache -- they're the same person!" There have been many requests for his return, preferably with both of us in the same room at once.

Well, in mid-March, our grade school had a one week Spring Break, and upon returning to the class-room, the kids found themselves face-to-face with Mr. Dennis Mustache once again. This round, Mr. Dennis Mustache came prepared. Sick of accusations that he and I were the same person, he made sure to wear different shoes than Mr. Dennis, dress slightly classier than his twin, and even had his own name tag, all of which were points of contention in January.

Upon arriving in the cafeteria to find this much maligned maestro, chaos broke out. Believers were ecstatic to have him back while many of the lukewarm masses were instantly polarized. Former non-believers converted based on the popular "name-tag hypothesis," while Gricelda stood on top of her chair and began chanting "MISS-TER DEN-NIS! MISS-TER DEN-NIS! YOU'RE MISTER DENNIS! MISS-TER DEN-NIS..."

The chant began to spread across the tables, and Mr. Dennis Mustache feared the loss of his identity forever. Sooner than he thought he would need to, the shaggy-haired instructor reached into his bag for his silver bullet -- the photo of Mr. Dennis "currently" vacationing in Guatemala with, the kicker - short hair.

A gasp rippled across the tables as even Gricelda fell silent. One girl held the picture and just stared at it, mouth open, as she pointed back and forth between the Mr. Dennis in the picture and his twin staring her in the face. Within minutes, kids were correcting each other -- when one would say "Mr. Dennis," another would finish it with "..mustache. It's Mr. Dennis Mustache, remember?"

Mr. Dennis Mustache's second stay was as long as his first, one week, and the students took the transition pretty well. They showed him to the classroom we switched to last month and filled him in on any rule changes since January. On the second day, one girl pointed to his shoes and yelled in Spanish "Look! Different shoes! He IS the brother!!" Unfortunately, Mr. Dennis Mustache doesn't speak much Spanish, so he didn't quite understand that. He also didn't understand it when that same delighted girl ran around all week yelling "He doesn't speak Spanish! He doesn't speak Spanish! This little boy can't even speak Spanish!"

As the week pressed on, some of the students began to lose their faith. Pedro and Gricelda continued to campaign against the twin theory in the face of first-grade logic, and they even managed to defect a few others. On Wednesday, a pivotal day on the campaign trail, Mr. Dennis Mustache had his existence further validated by a letter from his brother:

This pretty much sealed it. The doubters were silenced from Wednesday until Friday, with the exception of Pedro. On Friday, as we sat around practicing math flash cards, he referred to me as "Mr. Dennis" -- two girls immediately finished with "... Mustache." When Pedro complained that he still wasn't a believer, Mr. Dennis Mustache pressed him, saying "Pedro, it hurts my feelings that you don't consider me to be a real person." Pedro squinted his eyes, lowered his voice, and whispered "Man... you're just going to get a hair cut." Mr. Dennis Mustache was shocked and disheartened, though Pedro's comments fortunately didn't seem to strike any chords with the other students at the table.

The following Monday, the real Mr. Dennis came back to class. Some students ran up and hugged me, others were just as confused as when Mr. Dennis Mustache had shown up the week before. Many of them were shocked at my hair cut, but their attention spans for the previous week were already gone. "You just got a hair cut! It was you all along! There is no twin!" When I responded with "Man.... I really wish Mr. Dennis Mustache would have shown you all the pictures and letter I sent..." most of the class fell silent again.

There have been some unexpected troubles in the aftermath of my brother's visit. While I was planning on requests for both of us to be in the same room (which have come in abundance), or at least conference calls with my brother, or photographic evidence of us both being in the same place at once, some of the students have been confused beyond what could be expected. On Thursday of the week of my return, one girl was studying my "Mr. Dennis" name tag, and excitedly shouted out "It's him! It's him! It's Mr. Dennis!" As confusion and accusations permeated through the crowd, I had to explain "yes, it's me -- it's been me for four days, right?" Oh. Yeah. Another girl saw my stubble and ran up to my face to feel it -- she turned to the others and announced "Look! He's growing a mustache -- it's still Mr. Dennis Mustache!!" as if Mr. Dennis Mustache were the real teacher, and he only occasionally shaved and pretended to be his twin, Mr. Dennis.

Because this post has been particularly image-fueled, I'll leave you with a note (and picture) that one of my students gave me to give to Mr. Dennis Mustache. I came home from school and almost felt guilty about reading it, but I managed to crack it over after confusing myself about the morality of the situation. I guess it could be seen as sort of a first-grade ransom note or vehement request, but I like to think of it as more of a Zen statement:

March Pictures

2011-04-05T15:33:00.001-07:00

Hey folks!

This will be my last care package before heading home for about ten days (starting this Friday). I'll be shooting up north to visit my parents for a couple of days, hopefully scope out Ann Arbor for some potential living quarters in the fall, participate in our volunteer program's mid-year retreat, and then go to Boston with the fam to watch my brother, Greg, run his juevos off. Look for some pictures along with mopey sentiment about how I only have one month left in Immokalee sometime after my return (on the 19th).

Never fear, though, I've left you with a smörgåsbord (a shout out to spell-check for those sweet symbols) of goodies.

Click here to check out my pictures from the month of March (mostly the Tampa protest and John Carroll visit).

If you didn't get your fill of the Coalition pictures or videos, click here for the media page for the event.

My camera was pretty inoperable while my parents and Liz were in town, but I'll refer you again to the link of my mom's pictures when she visited if you missed those last time. Click here and sort around through the recent albums -- I think she put up three albums while she was here.

I'll do my best to get at least a couple of updates in during my final weeks in Immokalee -- check back soon!

March Madness Revisited

2011-03-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

As Mr. Deramo might say, March was a month where blogging and real-life activity were inversely proportional for Dennis Lackey. Allow me to hit you with the laundry list of excuses as to why I left my thirsting audience unslaked for so long: since my last post, we participated in a 2-day protest along with 1,500 other activists, hosted 15 college students/young adults and acted as their hosts and tour-guides for 8 days, received a 6-day visit from my former housemate Liz, and a week-long visit from my parents, aunt and uncle, and brother (there was a bit of overlapping among those groups).

Instead of burying you in the thousands of words that each of these topics deserves, I'm going to break the reviews down into sections and make sure that I short-change each topic on an equal level. Prepare for thesis statements.

March 4th and 5th - "Do the Right Thing" Protest at Publix (in Tampa)

As previously mentioned here, this protest was named after a quote from the founder of Publix, who once said that "You should never let making a profit get in the way of doing the right thing." This from the same company that recently had a PR rep whose response to the modern-day slavery cases in Florida agriculture (some of those cases in companies that Publix supported during the time of the case) with the quote "If there are some atrocities going on, it's not our business." Oh, and also the same company that is one of the top 10 largest privately owned companies in the country, and is being asked to spend corporate chump-change to improve the living and working conditions of tens of thousands of human beings.

Over the course of the past 2 years, I've probably made it to a couple of dozen protests held by the CIW, and while each were unique, this one will certainly stand out in my mind. After spending Friday doing small-scale, 8-hour protests at four different Publix's in Tampa, Saturday began as a wide-spread action, but converged on a single point. Three different marches of different lengths (1.5, 4, and 6 miles) started at different Publix's and converged at one massive Publix shopping center, where the final tally of protesters was somewhere around 1,500. After marching and chanting for an hour or so, the crowd was corralled into a street that the city had agreed to close for the day (right next to the Publix), where musicians and speakers entertained the audience for an hour or so before the culmination of the day, a popular theater event.

The theater was a 45 minute presentation depicting the history of the CIW, complete with four massive double-sided "puppets," each with one side presenting a symbol of atrocity, while the opposite side held the corresponding symbol of hope (example - poverty/fair wages, sexual harassment/respect, etc.). I could fill a book about this day (and especially this theater), but it would be better to see it for yourself - if you can spare three minutes, click here to watch the summary video of the protest, along with a few shots of the theater art.

If your interest on the event (and the whole week-long "Do the Right Thing" tour from Boston to Tampa) is still peaked, you can click here to check on the CIW's event page for more information and summaries.

March 6th through 13th - John Carroll Students Visit on Spring Break

For those of you who may not remember these events from last year, my three housemates and I spend a couple of months prepping for visits from college students at least once a year. Immokalee is a popular destination spot for many schools alternative break trips (at least a dozen schools spent a week in Immokalee this March), though most schools are in charge of their own schedule for the duration of their week. Due to a long-standing partnership with John Carroll University and our volunteer program, JCU gets the royal treatment during their stay. We make their entire schedule for them, plotting out service sites and speakers for them every day, and are also in charge of their transportation, housing, and food. While they don't actually sleep in our house, we spend just about every minute and meal of the day with them from the time we wake up until we drop them off at their housing at 9 or 10 PM. It sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but the pay-off is pretty huge for us as well.

It's incredible to re-experience Immokalee for the first time, especially for someone like me, whose first time in Immokalee was an alternative break trip with John Carroll (in January '09). After a year and a half, you get to thinking that you really know all there is to know about a place, but some of the insights, questions, and reflections of the group help illuminate this place in a brand new light. On top of that, it's great to spend a week in such close proximity with so many people our age. Immokalee can be tough in that our friendship circle here isn't much larger than about a dozen people, so to surround ourselves with 15 energetic, enthusiastic, service-oriented young people is nothing to complain about. I was totally exhausted by the end of the week, but in another sense, completely rejuvenated as well.

March 17th through 23rd - Lizzy T comes to visit

For the second time this volunteer year, my former housemate Liz came to spend a few days (including her birthday!) in her former home-town. I was busy spending time with my family during the same week she was here, but we also got a few chances to really sit down and re-connect. I always appreciate seeing and talking to her because the two of us came to Immokalee at the same time, and that connection still strongly binds us though we've taken separate paths this year (she's in grad school at Ohio State). There were a few occasions during her visit where her, Margaret, and I found ourselves hanging out alone together, and it was strange how little has changed since the three of us lived together. During one of those occasions, it occurred to me that, with my departure looming in 2 short months, this may have been the last time we all sat together in the house we once called a home. As depressing as that is to dwell on, it was comforting to recognize that no matter where I am, a part of me will always have a home wherever these two women can be found (something that goes for all of my former and present housemates as well).

March 18th through 25th - Mis Padres, Mis Tios, y Mi Hermano

For the second straight year, my parents, Uncle Dan and Aunt Margaret, and older brother Pat came for a week of combination Dennis-visiting/Pittsburgh-Pirate-Spring-Training-Watching. This year, the visit lined up nicely with my Spring break from after-school, so I was able to spend at least every other day with my family. It's not like I'm going to post box scores or anything on here (go check out Pat's blog if that's what you're into!), but in summary, it was great.

I got to watch a Pirates victory (the only one out of seven games that my family has seen in Spring Training these past two years), go running with my dad, capitalize on mega-delicious breakfasts at the Embassy Suites, go bike riding on Sanibel, and spend a day with Pat at Pirates City (the Pirates minor league facility) as he transcending into a Blogger-Bodhisattva while interviewing the Pirates GM. The Lackey clan also spent an afternoon in Immokalee where they got their first glimpse of the CIW community center and had an encore performance of pizza and beer from Roma en Havana, the Italian/Cuban restaurant in town. More than anything, it was just nice to see and spend time with my family - and because I know the participants of that trip make up probably half of my blogging audience, allow me to read this statement: Dear family, you totally rock. I really do appreciate you all taking an interest in how I choose to spend my time, and I hope you know how refreshing it is to spend time with each of you. Thank you all for visiting (and also for all the free food, baseball games, beer, and bike rides).

Based on the knowledge that the length of my posts are inversely proportional to how interested you all will be in reading them, I think I'll stop here. Sadly, I don't have any pictures ready for you all, largely because my camera briefly stopped working during the JCU visit, and so I'll have to do a lot of sifting through other peoples photos before I can post some for you all. Still, check back in a week or so for those. Until then, perhaps you can bide your time with the photos my mom took while she was here, which you can see if you click here - the first three albums cover their visit.

Thanks for stopping by, and check back soon for pictures of the CIW protest and JCU group visit!

What Year is it Back on Earth?

2011-03-03T07:08:00.000-08:00

Greetings loyal readers and royal leaders!

I know that I said I would try to get a complete update up here before things got really crazy, but it's looking like I failed to do that. I'm actually just slapping this quick update together before my bag of goodies slides off the short side of Mount Krumpet, so forgive me if this feels hurried or incomplete.

The reason that blogging has hit the back burner is because it's March, and that will apparently always be a crazy month for me in Immokalee. The last month or so has been filled with protests leading up to the huge CIW protest in Tampa this weekend, all intertwined with a cross country tour (from Immokalee to Boston and back) that started last Friday. Now I did not get a chance to accompany the tour, but that doesn't mean I haven't been busy working logistics for the CIW for the past several weeks.

The reason for the tour is that the CIW is expanding their "Campaign for Fair Food," and even though Publix is still a major target, they're expanding to three other major companies: Giant (owner of Giant and Stop & Shop), Trader Joe's, and Krogers. The tour (of about 75 - 100 farmworkers and allies) started with a massive rally in downtown Boston this past weekend (nearly 1,000 supporters came out in the freezing cold), and has worked it's way down the country (New York City, Baltimore, Atlanta), protesting the different aforementioned grocery chains on the way down. They will meet us (their very supportive Florida crowd) in downtown Tampa this weekend to march on Publix for the third time in a year and a half.

While the tour's been gone this week, I've had the honor of getting to work with two incredible artists from California, Mona and David, who have been painting beautiful images of the CIW's struggle and mass producing several hundreds of pieces of protest art for this weekend. I promise I'll bring my camera, but here's a sneak peak of some of Mona's work (she's painting images of some of the current and former atrocities in the fields, as well as more hopeful shots of what can come from these agreements. This is an atrocity shot.):

On top of all this CIW business, John Carroll is sending 14 students/faculty members down to us on Sunday. THIS Sunday. At 10 AM. Probably less than 12 hours after we get home from Tampa. As you know from last year, we act as hosts and tour guides for these groups, so we've also had our hands full preparing their entire 8-day schedule for the past month or two.

Shortly after that, we'll be getting a 6-day visit from my former house-mate Liz, as well as a week-long or so visit from my parents, brother, and aunt and uncle. Just like last year, I'm incredibly grateful and happy for the visitors, events, and groups, but you could see how my blogging has taken a back seat.

I'll try to get a detailed post up after the JCU group leaves and before my next set of visitors arrive, and you should buckle your seatbelts for hopefully hundreds of pictures. If you'd like to learn a little more about the CIW's tour so far, click here to review their Boston visit, or here to review their NYC visit, or here to review their visit Giant's headquarters in Maryland.

Of course, you can always follow our current progress this weekend at CIW's event page, which you can get to by clicking here.

Thanks for your interest and your patience, friends! See you on the other side of the worm hole!

Pictures! Finally!

2011-02-20T15:15:00.001-08:00

That's right true believer, you've finally made it to the top of my list! Kick back and enjoy the panoramic beauty about to unfold before your very eyes. I've posted a slew of general photos from the last month or two, as well as just a couple of updated shots of the garden.

Click here for the general pictures, or click here for the garden shots (only the last 3 in the album are new).

That's all I've got for now! The Yes Man Agenda is about to get really heavy in March, but I'll do my best to update before the Coalition's big protest in a couple of weeks.

As always, thanks for reading!

Yes Man!

2011-02-16T09:39:00.000-08:00

(Note: I've taken a bunch of pictures lately, but I don't have them up yet. Suffer through this wordy post today and I'll reward you with some photos by the end of the week.)

Whenever I stumble upon something that seems too good to be true, I make a point of trying to take advantage of that situation while the opportunity lasts. My relationship with the Immokalee Library could be described as one of those "too good to be true" type things, but "taking advantage" doesn't really justify what I do there. I practically exploit the place. Not only do they have a stellar DVD library, they're also linked to every other library in our county, so that pretty much any book or movie you're looking for can be delivered to your hands within a few days. This past fall, when I realized what a gem this place was, I started going twice a week. It's to the point that I routinely have 10 or more items checked out, probably average 4 or 5 items shipped in from other libraries per week, and the librarians know me by name. Pretty sweet, huh? And oh, yeah - IT'S FREE. Seriously, how do these magical places sustain themselves? When I get a fine, I'm practically leaping to pay it - Yes! Please! Take it all!

That being said, one of my requests last week was for the movie Yes Man. You may not all have heard of this 2008 comedy, so let me give the quick run-down: Jim Carrey plays a negative, closed-minded sour-puss who won't commit to doing anything until an acquaintance forces him to attend a "Yes, Man!" seminar. He commits to saying "Yes!" to every opportunity that comes his way, no matter how ridiculous or impractical it seems. Of course, he gets himself into all kinds of hare-brained antics, but he also becomes a happier, more fulfilled person in the process. He eventually makes some deep connections that balance out his life's lunacy, but I think it's copyright infringement if I give it all away, so go rent it yourselves, you lazy bums. It's funny, I promise.

What was that all about? Where's he going with this? Oh, yeah.

In the past, I got a little down on myself for being an occasional "No Man," and this movie was a nice reminder that when the only thing holding you back from what you want is fear or personal inhibition, it turns out that nothing's really holding you back at all. At the start of my time here in Immokalee, I really committed to being a Yes Man (without having even seen the movie back then, imagine that), and I'll agree that it's opened my life up to a lot of wonderful and satisfying things that I may never have involved myself with if not for the attitude adjustment. Still, being a Yes Man has it's valleys, too.

You may have noticed that I haven't posted on here in a while - that's because a Yes Man has a busy schedule, dammit! Hey, Dennis - do you want to spend three straight weekends driving 15-passenger vans to Tampa, Sarasota, and St. Petersburg? YES! Do you want to take your remaining weekend day and help out with the slavery museum up in Port Charlotte? YES! How about after that, on Monday, we drive an hour to the closest college to go see their annual production of The Vagina Monologues? YES! How about you and Lena drive out to Miami on Tuesday night, meet your friend Marie, and go to some random John Carroll Alumni event at a beach-side mansion? YES!

I think that, perhaps, this is something I come by genetically. It's pretty obvious that my mother is a Yes Woman, and her busy schedule reflects that. My dad requires an emptier calendar (something I prefer when possible), but the spaces of his life are no less filled with activity and the pursuit of Yes. Throw those genes in a blender and then hand them to a kid working with an organization ramping up to it's biggest event of the season (not to mention living with a few whimsically spirited women) and you get one busy guy. I guess I'm saying it's hard enough being a Lackey, but when you throw being a Yes Man on top of that, stuff gets crazy. (Side note: I spent a long time making that pun come to fruition, so somebody make sure Uncle Bob reads it. That one's for him)

It's possible at this point that I've confused the reader. This isn't really a debate between being a Yes Man and being an inert fart. True, being a Yes Man can be a little exhausting, it can take you crazy places, it can make you uncomfortable, make you feel stupid, it can even increase your carbon foot print (sorry, Greg). But in the end, it's far better than the alternative. I spent a long time being a No Man, or at best a Maybe Man, but any of you out there on the fence, let me tell you - I'm gone, and I'm not coming back.

I'm sure that some of you are already Yes Men and Women, and others of you are probably convinced that no matter what you are, you're already set well enough in your routine that it's too late to change that. But it's not. The next time you can't work up the nerve to talk to your crush, or read a flyer you might be interested in, or hear about a concert you might go to, get invited to play board games or go out with a group you don't totally know - when you feel those shoulders starting to shrug, and your mouth begins to form that "Ehh... mayyybe" - relax the shoulders, clear your throat, drop a Yes Bomb, and see what happens.

CNK Returns

2011-01-28T10:38:00.001-08:00

Hey, folks! Just a quick update today.

Some of you may remember my old college friend, Casey N. Kindle, who used to draw cartoons to our newspaper on campus. Well, being the friend that he is, he decided to draw a cartoon to help out the CIW's Campaign for Fair Food.

For those of you who may not be completely familiar with Florida grocery stores, here's a shot of Publix's famous logo:

And now, here's a shot of Casey's cartoon, morphing that logo into an ostrich with it's head buried in the sand. The quote coming from the ostrich is an actual quote from a Publix representative in response to their role in Florida agriculture.

If you're interested in reading the Fort Myers' News-Press Op/Ed that the cartoon ran with, click here to go to the CIW's update on the article.

That's all I've got for today - a big thanks to Casey for helping out!

Hide the Deuce

2011-01-25T15:47:00.000-08:00

Somehow, a year and half of really enjoying myself have flown by pretty quickly, and I'm already staring down my last five months in Immokalee. I'm starting to field a lot of questions about what's coming up for me in the summer and fall, but I'm going to keep my focus on life in Immokalee before that stops being an option.

Things in 2011 have already started up fast, and if last spring was any indicator, it's going to be May before I have a chance to blink. The CIW is gearing up for their big protest against Publix this March, which means a couple of months of frantic planning in addition to weekly protests all over southwest Florida. We spent last Saturday protesting in Tampa and Clearwater, and will be on the road at least one weekend day for most of the next month and a half. As exhausting as it is to leave Immokalee at 8 AM and not get home until 10 PM, this past weekend was a reminder about why and how I fell in love with the Coalition (when we were on the same type of schedule in the fall of '09). Nothing brings a group together quite like 35 groggy and crabby road-mates, unexpected weather, confusing directions, incorrectly delivered pizza, or a mega-phone that unexpected fires off a siren noise in your ear every 10 minutes. And I mean that completely without sarcasm - I love these road trips more than anything else about Immokalee.

On a side note, the Coalition made big news once again with an article that made the front page of the New York Times business section - click here to check it out.

On the Habitat front, it's been decided that I'm officially part of the roofing team, which means that, whenever it's an option, I'm to be laying plywood on the roofs of the houses going up. This is all right with me mainly because I love the roofs - they're like big-kid jungle gyms that hover a story off the ground. I've got decent enough balance that my jelly-legs usually go away within a few minutes of arrival, and there's nothing quite like working on a roof at 10 AM on a sunny morning in January. This switch also means that I get to constantly embarrass myself with my lack of finesse with the saw, my lack of upper-body strength and thus extreme struggle to carry full sheets of plywood, and my inability to put a nail down when the plywood is bouncing up and down and my coworker is breaking his legs trying to hold a the roof beams in the right location. I usually prefer to work on the projects that will directly translate into my future-homeowner skills (shingling, tiling, siding, etc.), but that probably defeats the point of volunteering, doesn't it?

And finally, your after-school update. In case you don't quite know the set up, in our after school program, each class is made up a composite of kids from 2 or 3 regular (day-time) classes. The programs classes are held in regular (day-time) classrooms, which means that the classroom we're in for after-school is almost always different than the ones our students use during the day. Also, many of the real teachers are still in their classrooms after hours, which means that they're at their desk working on paperwork or grading while you're trying to run your class. This can go many ways, but usually it's one of two: 1) the teacher in your classroom appears to love you, or 2) the teacher in your classroom appears to hate you. The first half of this year, I was in a classroom where I was lucky enough to have drawn the (1) card. In January every year, we switch classrooms - this time, I drew a (2).

In addition to the regular kinks that need to be worked out with the classroom transition (what we can and can't use, where the kids can sit, what tutors can borrow but kids can't, etc.), one of my boys decided to pee all over the bathroom. Our new host teacher didn't enjoy this much. I gave a big speech on Friday, we devised a system for figuring out who had been in the bathroom last, and we started randomly checking the bathroom after kids had used it. This must have made a big impression on my kids, because the next week, when our new host teacher went to use to rest room, she found something a little different. This time, what appeared to a collaborative effort result in urine on the toilet, wall, and paper-towel dispenser, and, impressively, someone had pooped on the floor. The result was a pretty horrifying (though well-deserved) rant from our new host-teacher, whose voice is so perfectly "grade school teacher" that I found myself avoiding eye contact and grumbling "Yes, ma'am..." with the rest of the class. Things have kind of picked up in the last week or two, and my kids now know what "feces" means, so at the very least it counts as an educational experience.

To close things out, here are a couple of Kids Say The Darndest Things moments from this month so far.

While talking with one of my boys who was explaining how he lost a shirt he liked:

"One night I went to bed and I was wearing it because I liked it so much and it was cold but then in the middle of the night I was REALLY COLD and I woke up and someone had stoled it off my chest but the guy was still in the room and so I PUNCHED HIM IN THE FACE and I was like BAMBAMBAM give me my shirt back and then he gave it back to me."

"Bryan, I thought this was the story about how you lost your shirt though?"

"Oh, yeah. Then I lost it later."

One day, in the cafeteria, one of my girls pulled all of my hair back to the top of my head and started giggling at my Lackey hairline. She then held her hands on top of my hair, giving me the appearance of complete baldness, and composed a pretty impressive rap song for the rest of the class:

Mr. Dennis is an old old man, he's a oooold man, he a old man, old man, old man,

he look like a papa, he a papa, he a papa papa papa,

he so old he look like my grrrannnddma,

but even my grandma don't cut up all that hair on the sides of her head,

which mean Mr. Dennis is a really old man,

he older than my grandma, he old old old, he older than my grandma,

Mr. Dennis you's a oooold man, ooold man, Mr. Dennis you's an old old man

This one's not quite a quote, just a story. For my first week back, I was still sporting my mustache from New Years, so I told my kids that I was "Mr. Dennis Mustache," Mr. Dennis's twin brother. I was in town for a little while when he was sick, and I had learned all of their names from pictures over the holiday. None of my kids really bought this, but I still got my kicks. I was planning on keeping the mustache for through the Steelers playoff run. Then, on Friday of that first week, I was working on homework with one of the nicest, sweetest girls in my class when she looked up, completely seriously, and said "Mr. Dennis Mustache - when's Mr. Dennis coming back?" He came back on the following Monday.

As mentioned, these next few weeks are going to start getting hectic, but I'll do my best to keep the posts and pictures coming. Thanks for reading!

Lackey New Years Pictures

2011-01-09T14:58:00.000-08:00

Howdy folks!

I've been settled back down in Immokalee for about a week now, but I don't have too much to update on as far as Florida goes. Fortunately for all you blood relatives out there, I do have a link to pictures from our Lackey New Year Bonanza Extravaganza! Click here to check out the pictures from Grammie and Papa's house.

I'll try to put a real post up within a week or two. Hope you all had as great a holiday season as I did!

Wrapped up? Yes, please.

2010-12-16T15:45:00.000-08:00

And just like that, I've finished my "third" semester of volunteering. Wait. Third "semester." That's better. For those of you who like to read the back of the book, here's what you can expect from this post: some real-life updates, some updates that turn into anecdotes, some anecdotes that turn into analogies, and some analogies that turn into generalizations. Read on, brave soul.

Just this past weekend, my old house-mate Liz (from last year) came to visit for the about five days. Overall, I think surreal might have been the best way to describe that experience. On Saturday morning, Liz, Margaret, and I sat on the porch of our house while eating breakfast and catching up. The topic eventually turned to whether or not we would be hosting a party at our house that night, and we reached a consensus of "hells yes." Liz then looked at me and said "Do you want to text everyone and let them know?" My response was that we should probably confer with the people who actually live in the house before doing that - Liz and Margaret looked at each other - Oh... Right...

In many ways, it was a time-warping-time-melding experience. Margaret has been in town for both of my years here, but to have Liz back in town with us, it felt so much like two worlds were overlapping. It seemed strange that she should be standing there, in what was our kitchen last year, but among Lena, Sara, and Vitina, in what is now our kitchen this year. It also reminded me of how much I've missed having Liz around - as much as I've enjoyed living with each of my 6 female house-mates over the last two years, Liz is the only person that moved in at the same time as me. Everyone else has either been a veteran or a rookie to me, but Liz and I experienced Immokalee as a team, and I realize now that our experience together created a bond that can't be replicated or replaced.

On a lighter note, her stay here included the Christmas carnival, a heck of a decent party, a Steelers v. Bengals game (she's a Cinci girl), and even a (very) brief trip to the beach. She was definitely sad to leave again, but she's also clearly settling into her new life, proving once again that there is life after Immokalee (I'm really getting some use out of those italics today).

How about I do some of those general updates to round out the year?

Spanish - this is the first one I'm updating because it's the one I'm most excited about it. I know it's gradual, and I still confuse and embarrass myself on the daily, but I kind of speak Spanish now, dammit. I realized recently that if I got kidnapped and thrown into a rucksack, and that rucksack fell off of a truck in a Spanish-speaking country, I could actually explain and express myself pretty decently to the natives of that land (well... I can't say rucksack, but you get the point). Of course, I've still only got a basic understanding of the language, but I think I can honestly say that I've gone beyond my initial aspirations (maybe even into the hopes/dreams category) for Spanish-learning in my time here, and I'll (hopefully) only improve in my last 6 months.

Work - I give the Coalition plenty of their own posts, so I'll cover some of my thoughts on Habitat here. This year, I've been on the work-site 3 mornings a week instead of just two like last year, and I'd say there's a definite difference. I don't know when it happened, but I think I'm actually learning life skills out there. I'm consciously appreciative of those life-skills that will help me as a future home-owner, but I'm also starting to realize that even some of the tasks I considered meaningless may have taught me something too. Somewhere out there among the odd-jobs, I learned how to use, reload, and occasionally repair things like air- and battery-powered nail-guns, hand saws, skills saws, table saws, how to set up different kinds of generators and compressors, and even how to drive a humongerous fork-lift. Coming from a guy who got advice on how to hold his hammer last fall, I'd say I've come a long way.

The Kids - No more talking... how about a story?

This year, for Christmas, I got my kids each a few pictures of themselves at the After-School program in a plastic frame, and I even spelled out their name in fun stickers on the front. Word got out early in the week that I had a present for the kids, so by the time I was ready to hand things out, these kids were electric. As I held up a picture at the front of the class and explained the gift, one girl yelled out "Seriously? Pictures? Really?" Another boy, one of my trouble-makers, had been excellent all week in anticipation of a present. He was really happy with his gift, and one of the few children I considered adequately grateful. When I told him to put his picture in his book-bag before we all go to the bus, he said "But, wait - you never gave us our present though?" A third girl told me on Thursday that she was excited to get her gift on Friday (mine had already been passed out) - I thought maybe her teacher was giving out gifts, so I asked who she was getting a gift from - "You! You said you got us presents!" - "I did... you got it yesterday, remember?" - "What? That's not a present! Oooooooh, if that was the present, I hate that present!" You're welcome, kids.

Christmas surprise -- MORE PICTURES (I'll straight up smack you in the mouth if you complain)!! If you click here, I added about 20 more after-school pictures from the last few weeks, including the day that my kids all got Gobble Wobble Wild Thing shirts my dad mailed down to me. Scroll to the end of the album for the new pictures.

Also - a major frost straight-up murdered my garden earlier this week. Click here for funeral pictures (they're the last 7 or so).

With that, I bid adieu to twenty-ten! I'll be taking a personal holiday from blogging while I'm home for the break, so check back in 2011 for new updates.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Years, and thanks for reading!

Picture Buffet

2010-12-09T07:01:00.000-08:00

Looks like I'll be keeping up with my recent hot-streak of picture taking, which means Christmas comes early for HFWD readers!

To check out some more updated garden pictures, click here. The new pictures start on photo number 39, for those of you interested in that sort of continuity.

For pictures from the afterschool program from the last two months, click here.

And, oh yeah - you remember back when I was trying to run everywhere in Immokalee? Turns out I'm still trying to do that, I just haven't been updating maps. Click here to check out how if I can realistically accomplish this by the end of my time here.

In real life, things have suddenly gotten cold here. I know that real-life-cold and Florida-cold and pretty different, but it's actually been cold enough to frost a couple of nights this week. Seeing as how most of November flirted with the high eighties, this is kind of shocking.

Here's a couple of quick-hits to whet your appetite for my next update: my old roomate, Liz, is coming to town for 5 days starting tomorrow night, and I've only got (holy schnikes) 9 days left before heading home for the holiday.

Enjoy the pictures, and check back before next weekend for a 2010 wrap-up post!

The Gravitron 2000

2010-12-01T10:10:00.001-08:00

Whoosh! There goes November! I don't really know how this kind of thing keeps happening, but here we are, and I've let almost another month without a real update go by. On one hand - I'm sorry. On the other hand, it was actually a really busy month. On a third hand that I borrowed from a friend, I took a mega-rear-end-load of pictures, so you at least have those to look forward to. Unless you don't really like leafing through all of my photos of people you don't know, in which case, you might as well leave now.

So what's been making things so busy, you ask? It's hard already to think back on this month, but fortunately I brought my pensieve along with me. Let's take a look, shall we?

Earlier this month, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers signed yet another HUGE agreement with Florida tomato growers. If you've been keeping tabs, this fall they've already signed agreements with Florida's biggest tomato farm and the nation's biggest tomato farm(6 L's and Pacific) to ensure that those growers will pass the extra penny to workers, and that they will also adhere to a strict code of conduct in the field, including a zero-tolerance policy for modern-day slavery. Well, shortly after those agreements, they signed an agreement with the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (FTGE), an organization that represents 90% of Florida's tomato growers. That's right - N I N E T Y.

Depending on how much you really love acronyms, you may remember that I've mentioned the FTGE before. Remember last year, when I said that many workers were not receiving the penny-per-pound-raise because a group of growers were fining each other if they passed that penny along? That group would be the FTGE.

This is really awesome news for the CIW, but also spells a ton of work for their staff. These new agreements basically ensure that they'll be on the road a few days a week for most of the next year or two as they travel to the fields of the farms that have signed agreements and host personal training sessions with the workers, educating them on their new rights, their new wages, and the new no-penalty/no-fear complaint system.

I hate to jump topics so quickly, but there's a lot of diverse things to cover from this month. Next up - the School of the Americas (SOA) Protest. I mentioned this last year, but I'll cover it again in a brief summary for those of you who would never click on the link that I would put here. The SOA is a military training camp at Fort Benning, Georgia. They train international military personnel in American military tactics, including interrogation techniques. These trainings are allegedly for the benefit of the home-countries of these soldiers. Unfortunately, many of these soldiers return to their countries and use their military training against their own people, often leading or aiding in genocides in their own countries. This has been a major problem in Latin and South America, with some of the most devastating results in countries like Guatemala and Chile.

Once a year, a group called "SOA Watch" puts on a protest outside the gates of Ft. Benning, and for the last two years I've traveled up with the CIW (in our traditional three 15-passenger van-loads of people). It's an important issue for anyone who's interested in where and how our tax dollars are being spent, but it's especially relevant to the folks in Immokalee. Many of the Guatemalans here were actively or passively involved (in the Guatemalan Civil War) as friends and families were murdered, raped, tortured, or forced to join the national army (lead by an SOA graduate) and commit those atrocities against their own countrymen. The protest this year was much smaller than usual (only about 5,000 people), but it was still an incredible experience.

This year's Thanksgiving was basically an encore from last year, but I wouldn't have it any other way. The day started as my housemates and headed to our local park, where we helped the director of the local soup kitchen set up for a massive buffet. Once a year, the park is converted into a festive feeding frenzy as a thank you for local farmworkers. This year, I think the turn-out reach almost 1,500, though we were really only around for the set-up and tear-down portions of the day.

Next, we squeezed in the second annual Immokalee Gobble Wobble 5k, which you can see pictures (and a brief summary) of in my last post. Later on, Vitina, Margaret, and I headed over to the house of a couple that works in the CIW but lives about 30 minutes from Immokalee. They live in a quiet town, in a house that the porch wraps half-way around, underneath giant, beautiful trees. It was awesome. It really stinks not to be able to be with my family for the real Gobble Wobble, but this is a close second. There was a pot-luck dinner, football games, pick-up basketball with a five-year-old, and an hour or so walk after dinner as the sun set.

The day after Thanksgiving marked the 50th anniversary of The Harvest of Shame, Edward R. Murrow's final documentary for CBS evening news, which focused on the exploits of migrant farmers. When it originally aired in 1960, the races of the migrants were different, but sadly the working conditions and (in some instances) wages have barely changed in the half-century since this shocking exposé. In honor of the anniversary, the CIW held a condensed screening of the original film, as well as an open-house at their community center for some of their committed donors. They also showed a news clip that aired last week on CBS called Harvest of Shame Revisited, which reviewed some of the hot topics from the original documentary, and then compared them to modern day working conditions, with a heavy focus on Immokalee and the CIW. Click here to check out that news clip from CBS if you haven't seen it yet!

The final update of the month was the annual church carnival. For those of you who have never been to a fair before, allow me to get out my mental paint brush: picture an area about the size of two or three football fields. Now cram that full of carnie-games, kiddie-rides, food vendors, and horrifying, death-defying adult rides, that no sane person should ever ride on. Now, imagine that all of the little alleyways between said games and booths are crammed with the entire population of Immokalee. Also, Spanish music is blaring so loud that your brain hurts. Welcome to the fair.

The beautiful thing about this fair is that it takes place in a dimension not only of sight, and of sound, but of mind. In 2010, everything about society is so measured, so protected, so politically correct- unless, of course, you attend a fair in the farthest corner of... The Twilight Zone! Imagine you are attending a fair where you only follow the regulations because you want to keep on living, not because someone tells you to. You get inside the Gravitron 2000 (the spinning spaceship), and ... is that guy?... yes, that's right- the carnie driving this nauseating, closed-door-death-trap is also chain-smoking as he centrifuges your eye balls into your medulla oblongata. Are there seat belts in here? HELL NO - the little kid next to you has literally used his recently-shifted center of gravity to sit on the ceiling, and you'd love to watch him, but for your heroic attempt to face forward and force down the vomit that would surely paint the face of every participant in the topsy-turvy torture nightmare. The ride stops and you spill out of the space-ship, hugging mother-earth so hard that she squeeks a little.

You sit on the grass in between the Ferris Wheel and Dunk Booth. The Ferris Wheel has an alleged height requirement, but it might as well be a kindergarten birthday party. The clown in the Dunk Booth has just offered passer-byers green cards if they can dunk him, and says if they pay an extra dollar, he won't tell the INS where to find them. He is also handing out hair-cut and fashion advice to most passing males, though it rarely extends beyond how your current status reflects your sexual orientation. Looking back at the Ferris Wheel, the contraption is now stuck, leaving baskets full of bored children and adolescents stranded a hundred and fifty feet in the air. Three carnies converge and debate for a few minutes as they smoke relentlessly and fiddle with the control panel. Finally our hero arrives - a fat, goatee'd, shaved-head-yet-still-pony-tailed man in jean shorts and a beater. He advises them to "just push the f@$&ing thing," and so they do, manually churning the giant wheel to slowly release the young participants from their suspended state. You meander around the fair the rest of the night, your brain still slushing in it's cage from the Gravitron, and eventually return soundly to your bed. It may not have been a typical evening, but you're just happy to have made it back alive from the farthest reaches... of the Twilight Zone.

I think that just about wraps it up for November. Sorry if this was scatter-brained, but it's too late for me to go back and add cohesive remarks now! Also, as a bonus-reward for sticking with me - click here to check out my pictures from basically everything I mentioned above! Be warned - there's 150-some of them, so make sure you've got a few minutes before diving into this next adventure.

Thanks for reading, and check back for another post before I head home for the holiday season!

25:08

2010-11-25T09:21:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving, folks - this year was our second annual Immokalee-branch Gobble Wobble 5k! We bumped our competitors from 3 up to 5 this year, meaning that in about 526 years, we could have as many runners as the actual Gobble Wobble. From left to right, you're looking at my housemate Lena, our friend (and another local volunteer) Kristina (crouching), my housemate Vitina, Margaret (one of last year's housemates), and myself.

Things have been pretty hectic so far this November, but I've made good on my promise of a butt-ton on pictures, so make sure you check back for updates and more photos soon.

Happy Turkey Day!

Fall Picture Update

2010-11-11T12:20:00.001-08:00

After some serious begging, I managed to round up some of my housemates' pictures from this fall, and I've combined them with some of my own from the last month. Click here to check out how Florida does October.

Also - I've added about a dozen new pictures at the end of my garden album, so you can click here if you want to see SOME ACTUAL VEGGIES!

After going through these, I'm recognizing that I've been pretty weak on my picture taking so far this far. In response, expect me to take a sock-rocking amount of photos this November. Consider yourselves warned.

Basically Everything That's Happened This Fall (and then some)

2010-11-04T11:21:00.000-07:00

Well, after several weeks of promising, here it is -- a real life update. The first thing I have to point out is that, despite those pretty substantial CIW updates and some flashy shots of my garden, I somehow lost the interest of my long-time friends, the Chinese commenters. I think we should start this post with a moment of silence in rememberance of the international hay-day of HFWD.

(Feel free to say a prayer or give alms here.)

ALLLL RIGHT - ON TO THE GOSSIP (not really... my boss, my grandparents, and at least one nun make up probably the majority of my audience, so this is really just going to be personal information with maybe a borderline cuss word or two)! I don't even really know how to dive into what's been going on here in Immokalee, because as usual, so much and so little seems to happen all at once.

I was going over some journal entries and blog posts from this time last year, and I was shocked to realize that the start of November basically signifies that I'm closer to going home for Christmas than I am to the end of August (when I moved here). Last year, this was a huge deal. This year, it's more like "So what? It was two months." I still feel like this year has barely gotten underway, and then I look back at last year and realize that at this point, I was using metaphors for descending down the easy side of a mountainous trek. What gives?

As much as this fall just feels like a continuation of last year, I’m starting to realize that it's a really different experience when I put my two year's side-by-side so far. By this point last year, I had spent 5 or 6 straight weekends crammed in the back (or behind the wheel of) a 15-passenger van doing CIW protests – in that context, it’s easy to see why I felt like I had made some mountainous achievements by early November. This fall, the CIW hasn’t had the same protest schedule (they didn’t give up or anything, it’s just something that fluctuates depending on the campaign), and so we’ve had a lot more free time and opportunities to ease into the year.

Another big thing that I didn't realize at the time was that the string of events and circumstances last fall lead to an immediate, involuntary cohesion of my housemates and I. Not only were we skimming around the metropolitan areas of Florida in a fleet of white vans, but we were also all working at the same school every day (as opposed to being splint into two schools, like this year). That meant that we had the same daily work schedule, had all the same co-workers, knew all the kids in each others’ classes, and spent about 50 straight hours together every weekend. We didn't really have much of a choice other than to act as a family unit, and so by early November, I felt like I'd been living with Margaret, Liz, and Alison for years.

This fall, things have progressed at what is probably a much more normal (and sane) rate. We’ve had a lot of time to settle into our own routines, and get used to living with new people. I would say that especially over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed this year’s house really start to settle into a true community, as opposed to just four people living with each other. Looking at it as a whole, two months is still making pretty good time for that type of thing – I guess normal just feels slow when you get used to the extreme.

Still, that’s not to say that nothing has been going on in the absence of CIW protests this fall. A couple of weekends ago, my mom made her second visit to Immokalee after having to travel to Orlando for business. She got to spend some time with my first-graders, stay at the luxurious Immokalee Inn for an evening, and even work on her tan at Fort Myers beach. That same weekend, the rest of my housemates whisked over to Miami for a couple of days to visit Adam and Nicole, the volunteers from our program that are stationed there.

Last weekend, I went with Margaret up to Orlando to help her baby-sit her niece and nephew while her sister and brother-in-law where in town for a wedding, and I even got my first trip to Disney-World out of it (sadly, that day involved her niece tripping and needing stitches, so Margaret and I wandered around Disney’s Hollywood Studios for about 5 hours with her one-and-a-half-year-old nephew). An added bonus on that trip was that my brother Pat was in Tampa that weekend for a wedding - he drove over on Saturday so that we could do all the things normal brothers do, like hang out in a hotel room that belongs to no one you’re related to, wander around an outlet mall, and each dinner with toddlers. That whole weekend pretty much gets filed into the rarely used "unconventional but totally awesome" bag.

But that’s not all! As we speak, my former housemate Alison is in town for the weekend, and she’s entertaining us all with stories of grad school life and cold weather in Boston (this weekend has been our coldest of the fall so far, but she’s just happy not to be wearing long-sleeves instead of gloves). Up ahead, the next month promises a trip to Fort Benning for the School of the America’s Protest, a visit from our program director (Ellen), and a visit from my other former-housemate, Liz. The latter is in town on the same weekend that her Bengals play the Steelers in December, so we’ll probably spend the whole weekend trash-talking and then (half of us) weeping – just like old times.

All right, before this gets too long, I'll throw in some general updates for old-times sake:

Morning jobs - this year I only work mornings at either Habitat or the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. The "snow-bird" volunteers have just started coming back out in full force at Habitat, so the worksite is finally bustling again. I spent every Monday this past month learning how to roof from Lou and Martha, who are 80 and 70 respectively, and both far more nimble and knowledgeable on the roof than I am. Martha's also taking a few weeks off to train for her upcoming full Ironman (you know, a race where you swim 4.5 miles, bike 112, then run a full marathon). As humbling as it constantly is, it's awesome to really learn a trade that I could one-day use on my own house.

The CIW has been an incredible place to be this fall. Despite the lack of a protest tour, there's been some pretty huge news (check my last few posts if you haven't read them) this year. It's amazing to be around an organization when a decade and a half of hard work begins to pay off, and so I'm sure this year will only get more interesting as the new agreements develop.

After-school - This year has been a lot different, but I think that's in a good way. First graders are capable of way more thank Kindergartners (academically speaking), but there's also less of a grace period. In Kinder, there was a month or two where the kids were practically so terrified of a new environment that half of them barely spoke, and I kind of had time to get my game together. With First, we hit the ground running and never looked back. So far, the class still seems to be mostly in control, and I have way less days where I come home completely over-whelmed than last year. Some highlights of this year so far include:

-The girl who pees her pants AFTER she's already inside the bathroom

-The boy who thought the bathroom was sound-proof and decided it would be a good idea to go inside and scream at the top of his lungs for no reason

-The boy who decided to "play monster" and bit right into the arm of another girl, breaking skin and all

-The day that the children find out I had a mother, and then proceeded to ask me if she had any babies. When I told her that, yes, I was her baby, one boy responded "You was a baby when you were little?? .... COOL! ME TOO!"

Spanish - No matter what difficulties I come across, it's safe to say that I've learned a lot in the past year. I can mostly understand my first graders when they try to talk smack behind my back in Spanish, I can finally answer the phone and respond to conversations that I haven't initiated, and I can basically get across any major point I need to. That being said, there's a ton of work left to do. As I mentioned after Guatemala, one of the things that most shocked me from being there was how much of what I picked up came from just daily studying, a habit I still need to bring into my every day life. At this point it's a matter of not being happy with everything I've learned so far, but instead taking advantage of what time I have left in such a good learning environment.

And with that, most of you have probably clicked over to Facebook by now. My mom has done an excellent job of reminding me that I've really been slacking on pictures so far this fall, so check back within a week or so for a compilation of my most recent pictures (and some that I'm stealing from my housemates). As always, thanks for reading, for your emails, and for your comments!

The Garden of (E)Den

2010-10-28T08:10:00.000-07:00

Hey folks -

Sorry for another teaser post, but I wanted to put this up to keep you coming back for more. It turns out I haven't told you everything, and on the sly, I started working on a garden back in April, and have been meticulously chronicling my progress for six months. Up until now though, I haven't posted any pictures because I wasn't sure you all could cope if it ended in abysmal failure. But, hey, good news! There are green things growing in my designated square of dirt, so you can now all relish in the riveting images of nature.

Again, check back soon for actual information about my life, but until then, click here to enjoy the garden!

More Great News!

2010-10-21T11:10:00.000-07:00

If you haven't already checked out the post below, this update may not make much sense - I'll pause while you read that one.

Ready? The CIW announced today that Six L's growers have agreed to the same conditions laid out in the Pacific agreement. Remember when I said Pacific was one of the two largest farms in Florida? Six L's is the other one. Obviously, this is another major step towards putting dignity and equality back into the Florida agricultural system.

For more information, check out the CIW's website:

http://www.ciw-online.org/

The Pacific Agreement

2010-10-18T10:32:00.001-07:00

As important as it is for me to keep this site updated with personal stuff, I thought I'd dedicate this post to some big news for the Coalition. I know that I've spent a few posts in the past talking about how Florida's agriculture system works, and the CIW's Campaign for Fair Food, so I'll spare you all a repetition of the tedious details while still glossing over the important stuff.

Some very basic vocab before I start - when I say a "grower," I am referring to a company that plants and harvests tomatoes in Florida. I am speaking about the organization as a whole, not a specific individual. These growers sell their product to companies such as restaurants, food service companies, and grocery stores. The CIW's Campaign for Fair Food has focused more on those companies that purchase the tomatoes, but growers have played a large role as well. For many years, despite the purchasing companies that had signed agreements with the CIW paying more for their tomatoes, a trade union of all the major growers in Florida (the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange or FTGE) refused to pass that penny down to the workers. That changed last year when the 3rd largest grower in Florida (East Coast) broke away from the FTGE in order to pass the penny. Shortly after that, the FTGE repealed their ban on passing the penny, though their cooperation with the CIW standards was still unverified as they had no formal agreements. If you want a more detailed version of these relationships, click here for my post from last year that really breaks it down.

This past week, Pacific growers signed an agreement with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers that said they would 1) agree to pass the one extra penny per pound of tomatoes picked to field workers (when they are harvesting in fields where the tomatoes will go to a company that has signed an agreement with the CIW: McDonald's, Burger King, Whole Foods, etc... still not Publix), 2) not only agree to a code of conduct in the fields, but also allow and encourage on-site training (by the CIW) for field-workers that will help them to recognize and anonymously report any kind of abuse or mistreatment from crew leaders or owners, and 3) keep an open and honest flow of communication with the CIW and current field-workers about the labor conditions in their fields.

This is massive news for many reasons, but here are just a few; no grower has ever put forward this kind of commitment towards making a change in their fields; one of the most recent slavery cases was committed by people employed by this particular grower; and Pacific not only happens to be a large farm, it is arguably the largest grower in Florida (if not, the second).

There's still a lot of work to be done, but hopefully, this agreement is a major step towards thousands of fieldworkers receiving a fair pay (remember, that penny-per-pound will practically double their annual income) and encourage other large growers to recognize the importance of human rights in their fields. On the flip side of things, the CIW has still yet to convince the entire grocery world (sans Whole Foods) that they ought to be paying that extra penny in the first place, so this is hardly a finish line. Still - it's an agreement that's been fifteen years in the making, and if you can't celebrate those small victories along the way, what's the point of pressing on?

If this totally rocks your brain and you're looking for more information on the agreement, check out these links:

The CIW Website

The Fort Myers News-Press

The Wall Street Journal (Yeah, that's right, it's actually big news.)

Also, for a little fun, you can check out my former-housemate Margaret in the CIW's new supermarket video here. You'll probably recognize a few others faces from my pictures as well.

I'm probably lucky if you're still reading at this point, so this feels like a good place to stop. Sorry I've been a little lacking on the pictures so far this year - my new housemates carry cameras just about everywhere, so I don't feel the need to take as many pictures. Still, I'll have to snag some of their photos so you guys don't get bored of just my thoughts all the time. Check back for a personal update and new pictures soon!

Picture Review

2010-10-04T15:49:00.001-07:00

Hey folks -

No major update this time, just posting some pictures that I've been neglecting for way too long. I was a little sporadic in my photography these past few months, so this folder covers everything from the end of the summer program, to one of my 3 road trips, to the current school year, and basically skips everything in the middle.

You can click here to check out the Summer Catch-Up folder.

Check back soon for more updates!

Dirty D and the Immokalee Three

2010-09-26T08:36:00.000-07:00

Well, as much as some things are changing this year, some things are certainly staying the same - I'm back in Immokalee, and time is flying by once again. I've been wanting to put a new post on here but keep feeling like nothing really substantial has happened - still, I don't want to go on too long between posts for fear of losing my Chinese fan-base.

Before settling into the logistics of our annual schedules, I thought I'd bring up maybe the most exciting non-house-related event from the last month, the SFA Strategy Retreat. Student/Farmworker Alliance (the Coalition Ally I worked with last year) held their annual gathering of maybe 50 or so college students and Fair Food committee members in Immokalee last weekend, and it was one of my favorite events I've gotten to be a part of. Not only did I get to see a lot of the organizers that I met and became friends with through the protests and marches last year, but it was also incredible to see such a pool of talented, inspired young people unite and strategize for a common goal (supporting the Coalition's super-market campaign - read more about it here in my post from last year if you need a refresher). As much as I feel at home among microscopes and petri dishes, events like this one make me realize that I want to plant life-long routes in the realm of community organizing as well.

As for volunteer life, my housemates and I have finally started to settle into something that almost resembles a normal schedule, or at least enough of one to report on where we'll be divvying up our days. Sara (from boston) and Lena (from John Carroll) are going to be taking a note out of my playbook from last year and splicing their mornings up with the blender set on high. Sara is working two days a week at the soup kitchen/clothing room, two days with PACE (an alternative high-school for girls, where they can work through the grades at their own speed) and the Guadalupe family center (a day care for children between the ages of 6 weeks and 4 years). Lena is going to be spending 2-3 days a week at Habitat, 2 days with PACE, and an occasional day with the Friendship House (Immokalee's homeless shelter). Vitina (from Dayton) is already in love with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and so she spends 4 mornings a week working with Interfaith Action (a CIW ally-group), and one morning at the Guadalupe family center.

As much as I loved my "a little bit of everything" schedule from last year, I decided to boil this year down to the work sites that I both enjoyed working at and felt rewarded by the work I was doing. I'm splitting my mornings between Habitat for Humanity and Student/Farmworker Alliance (the same CIW ally I worked with last year), and I'm on-call to lend a hand as an extra case-worker at the Social Services office.

As for the afternoons, we've officially completed our first week of the After-School Program. This year they decided to split our group up into two different grade schools so that they don't lose a third of their teachers if we all have to miss on the same day. Sara and Lena are teaching Kinder and Second (respectively) at Highlands (the school I worked at last summer), and Vitina and I are both First Grade teachers at Pinecrest (the same school I worked at during the school-year last year). Since I'm not at the same school as them, it's hard for me to comment on Lena and Sara's experience, though they both have said it's started well, so I'll take their words for it.

Vitina and I have classrooms right next to each other, so I've got a constant reminder of how mortifying it is to be put in front of a classroom is 6 or 7 year-olds, with no formal training, and be expected to control them. As rocky as her first week seemed to be, it's also been a reminder that some things just come with time, and I can already see her start to reign in control over her class, a trend that will hopefully continue.

Admittedly, I was almost disappointed when I heard I wouldn't be working with Kindergarten again, but the start of this year (coupled with seeing the shy little Kindergartners who can't even write their name walking around) has me glad to be where I am. I really like picking up where I left off with Kinder last year, and I'm lucky enough to have almost all new kids (only two who I had last year in Kindergarten). As much as I loved my kids last year, I thought it would be good to have a fresh start this fall. So far, things have been almost shockingly good - the first week went off without any major problems, and the kids actually seem to respect the rules, each others, and the tutors and I. It's only been a week, but things could definitely be going worse. Unfortunately, I haven't snagged any pictures yet, but I'll be putting some up within the next couple weeks.

That about does it for September in Immokalee - as we've really started to get into the swing of things, I'm sure I'll have plenty more to write about (though probably less time to do it) - but check back soon! As always, thanks for reading.

Getting Ready for Round 2

2010-09-03T07:50:00.000-07:00

And just like that, August is gone. I know that I mentioned in my last post that I would be spending a lot of time in the car on my month "off," but I don't think I had any idea just how long that would be. By the end of the month I had spent about 13 full days in the car, and let me tell you, it feels nice to be in one place and know that I'm not going anywhere for a few months. That's not to say I didn't have a lot of fun bonding time with my old housemate/brother/new housemates (depending on the trip), but I won't miss the seat-belt dress-code I so strictly adhered to this summer.

I did spend a few days this past month not hurtling across the country in a tin can, and while most of them were unproductive, I guess there were some high-lights in there as well. The week between my first and second trips was spent at orientation/training for the coming volunteer year. Our program grew from 9 volunteers up to 14, and there were (gasp!) even other dudes in the program -- 3 of them! It was a little weird to get used to sharing the Mens Room at the retreat house dormitory, but it was nice to get the occasional whiff of testosterone that's been mostly lacking this past year. Overall, it was a great week, and our group bonded incredibly quickly. It was also a good reminder of what a strong support system we have in our program, financially and otherwise, and really an excellent way to spend a relaxing week. This year we've got volunteers in Immokalee, Miami, Youngstown/Boardman, Cleveland, and Chile. If you know (or are) a recent or soon-to-be college grad, this is my official hawk for my own program - check out our website at: http://www.hmvolunteers.org/ (the website also has pictures of everyone in our program, including me and my 3 new housemates, right on the main page).

After my second road trip and then a week of relaxation (and canning tomatoes), I packed up the car one final time and headed south with 2 of my future housemates, Vitina and Lena. Vitina graduated from the University of Dayton (the same school as Liz, my housemate from last year), and Lena is a JCU grad who's been a friend of mine since about her first week of college (and a long-time friend of Margaret as well). We spent 2 nights on the road with two of my former college roomates who are perfectly dispersed down the East Coast, and then picked up Sara (our final roommate, a graduate of Stonehill College in Massachusetts) at the airport on our way into Immokalee. We arrived here August 30th, one year to the day after my flight landed in 2009 - and what a difference a year makes!

It's been really strange to get used to being the veteran in the house. I guess it's kind of a little nice too (you know, in an ego-centric way), but it also really makes me appreciate all the help Alison and Margaret gave Liz and I last year. So far, the 4 of us get along great, but I still can't wrap my head around the fact that these are my new housemates - I acted as chauffeur and tour-guide for so many different little groups last year, and now it just kind of feels that same way, like I'm expecting them all to get back on a plane this weekend and go back to school. Margaret's still working in town, so she's a constant, but when I look around the house, I still expect to see Alison or Liz pull up in the driveway or walk out of the laundry room. I'm sure I'll get used to it over time, but it's kind of surreal right now.

September in Immokalee certainly has it's benefits, too. The after-school program doesn't start until the 20th, so we've got a nice period of time to settle into our morning routines (and get used to the sweltering heat). It's also nice to be back in town with all of my old friends around -- the summer is a pretty boring place in these parts, but the fall feels like Homecoming. I've been surprised (and happy) to find that, despite hardly speaking any Spanish since Guatemala, most of what I learned there stuck. I can really understand my friends far better than I ever could before, and am way more confident speaking. It's also an interesting role reversal, because my housemates are all new to Spanish, and so my Spanish-speaking-role has gone from quiet and shy and in-the-corner to designated translator for the group. I wouldn't have believed it if you told me I'd be here a year ago, but I've definitely picked up a lot in 12 months (with much much more still to go).

This feels like a good stopping point for now - there's a lot that goes on during these first few weeks, so I'll try to toss out another update within a week or two. Until next time, thanks for reading!

Una Pausa

2010-07-27T05:23:00.001-07:00

I can hardly believe I'm already typing this up, but here we are - the final post of my first year in Immokalee. I've got only a few more days of summer school left, and then I'll be getting into a car to start my "Destroy the Ozone '10" tour around the country (more on that later).

I've been trying pretty hard to think about a good way to summarize this year, but I'm not sure I can really put it into words (...other than the thousands of words I've already put it into over the course of this year). I'll probably go through and try to update some individual categories for old times sake, but first, I'd just like to say a word or two about how much I appreciate this experience.

I've spent a lot of this past week catching up on emails with old friends, professors, and advisors from college (mostly people I haven't spoken to in a while), and so I've been having to sum up my experiences in a few sentences or less. Basically, the theme that keeps coming out is gratitude, gratitude, gratitude. For the number of things that had to line up for me to come here this year (visiting Immokalee in the first place, convincing myself to apply, getting accepted, Michigan allowing me to defer), I sometimes look back and get the chills thinking that under any number of reasonable different circumstances, I wouldn't have had the chance to do this. I'm not saying that another path would have been better or worse, but I know for a fact that I'm happy with this one.

I'm going to bring back Mrs. Lebrun (the teacher I'm working with this summer - check the last post if you need a reference) for another example. After she told me all of those incredible stories about her life, I was kind of blown away. Here she is, this woman raised in a dirt-floor hut, who described not-starving as "living like a princess," who never used an indoor toilet for the first 2 decades of her life, who speaks 4 languages; and here I am, with experiences no where near that, yet the two of us are, right now, passing our days and lives in almost the same manner. We wake up, work with kids (and each other) for about 9 hours, go home, maybe exercise somewhere in Immokalee, watch some TV or get some housework done, and then do it again the next day. To look at our routines, you could almost get us confused - yet in reality, she's this incredible vessel of knowledge, experience, hardship, and passion. Not that this experience has quite elevated me to her level, but it's an important component of the vessel that I will carry for the rest of my life. No matter how ordinary my routine becomes, Immokalee has made me feel as though I can never be ordinary again, because I will always carry these experiences with me.

And now, because the Chinese commenters demanded it - categories!

My Spanish - Well, I done worked fo' a year, but I sho' ain't no fluent. That's all right, though, I've learned a lot. This past year was incredible for many reasons, but trying to learn another language has been one of my favorite (and most humbling) activities. It's been a lot of fun because I was so bad when I came here that rapid improvement was just about my only option. I've plateaued in some senses, but the more I learn, the more I realize I have yet to learn. As a friend recently put it, "learning a language is a life-long thing. We're in our twenties and still hear and learn new words in English all the time." Amen to that. Immokalee has been very good to me in the sense that I've been given the opportunity to keep improving, but any stalls or back-slips are my own fault. The other night, our friend Oscar came over to our house, and when I was really trying, I could understand somewhere in the neighborhood of 75% of what he said - considering where I started, I'm pretty happy with this resting point.

The Kids - It would be hard to convince me that there are better people in the world than 5 and 6 year olds. They know exactly what they want, and what they don't want, and they always tell you. As an adult(ish), it's kind of refreshing when you don't have to pull out your Little Orphan Annie Decoder Ring just to figure what somebody is saying to you. Plus, the stuff they like is awesome - running as fast as you can, falling down in the grass, tackling people, jumping from the swings, sliding, Spider-Man, and dancing to math-based-raps. In Mrs. Lebrun's classroom, when she takes out the dominoes at the end of the day, I practically throw kids out of the way to get a seat at that table. Of course I've learned a ton about classroom management and being an educator (blah, blah, blah), but I think I was the primary receiver of education in almost all of my interactions with children this year. That's not to say that there weren't days when my Google search history showed things like "Vasectomy, Flights to Pennsylvania, How to make kids shut the hell up," but those days were by far the minority. It hasn't yet been decided what age group I'll be working with next year, but you can bet I'm pulling for Kinder.

Life in General - Why even bother make a category with this title? Isn't that the point of a blog anyways? What I think I mean here is "Practical Stuff." And honestly, I've learned a lot. My construction knowledge was poorer than my Spanish when I got here, and now it's basically to a level that would linguistically equate to the ability to say "Hay, ma name es Dennis, and Ima heet this wud wit this hanner." But it's improvement! I also learned a pretty good deal about living in community (especially with women), organizing, basic home (and even some car and bicycle) maintenance, and time management. In one way or another, I'll always carry and appreciate all of my experiences here, but they'll be particularly useful one day down the road when I need to fix a door, or change my oil, or put a new chain on a bike -- I feel like this year has afforded me the opportunity to learn a lot of those things that if I were born in the '20's, I'd already know by a right-of-passage. At this rate, I could potentially be a justifiably ornery old man if I work hard enough.

What's Next? - Well, this weekend starts my month "off," which includes a road trip from Florida to Pennsylvania with my housemate Margaret, a week of orientation/training for my second year, a road trip from New Mexico to PA with my brother Greg, a week or so at home, and then a road trip from PA back to FL with 2 of my new housemates for next year. Take that, environment!

Once I get back down here at around the end of August, I'll have a couple of weeks to decide how exactly I'll spend my mornings next year, a little bit of a break before after-school starts back up, and an adjustment period to settle in with 3 new female housemates (Welcome to the house, girls! Have some chocolate chip cookies. Why don't you just sit down and let me turn on "So You Think You Can Dance" for you?). I'm sure I'll put up some new thoughts and pictures of my travels at around the start of September, but I'm not planning on posting during the month of August, so I guess you'll just have to go read WHYGAVS if you get bored.

All that being said - thank you for reading, for commenting, for emailing, and for your general interest. I started this blog because I didn't want to have to repeat the same facts and stories in every email and at every family party, but it turned out to have been one of the most cathartic things I've done this year. I look forward to seeing many of you during August, but if not, check back for new posts in September!

The Best Lebrun in Florida

2010-07-14T16:35:00.000-07:00

There are two reasons that I haven't paid much attention to the fact that "King James" is coming to Miami next year. 1) I don't really care that much about the NBA, and 2) I'm pretty sure I've already found the best entertainer in Florida, and she goes by Lebrun, not Lebron.

As I mentioned before, the June-July portion of our program has us working full-time days in a summer-school program, so I've been spending 8 hours a day with Kindergartners for the last two and a half weeks. Because I had to miss some time at the start of the program (from being in Guatemala), and also because the program had lower enrollment this year, I was chosen to be partnered with a full-time teacher instead of "lead teaching" my own classroom, as I did during the school year. I was paired with Mrs. Lebrun, a Haitian woman in her mid-forties who has lived in Immokalee for about 25 years. From the my first moments in the classroom, it was pretty clear that I would more be filling the role of extra tutor (in addition to the 2 high school tutors already in the class) than co-teacher. Some might be upset about the "demotion." I think I could better be described as ecstatic.

It's awesome enough to not have to worry about lesson planning or full-responsibility of the class, but working with Mrs. Lebrun (whose first name I've never heard) is a reward in itself. I've been trying to pick a good word to describe her, but I keep coming up short... if I had to go with a single word, I'd probably say crazyhystericalincrediblefascinatinginterestingentertaininginspiring. But don't hold me to that.

Please, feel free to go get stoop kid and snap your fingers as I lay out this magnificent beat: She was born in Haiti, where she lived "like a princess" for the first 8 years of her life. Later, when she told me about how only royalty in Haiti had indoor plumbing, I asked if she had it during those early years - she laughed - "What?! No! Of course not - we didn't have water, or electricity, or even an out-house." "But I thought you lived like a princess?" "I did! I wasn't starving! I ate every single day!" Aaaanddd humbled again. At 8 or 9, her grandfather passed away, and a prostitute (that her father was seeing on the side) convinced her grandmother that Lebrun's mother had murdered him. After her parents' divorce-ish-thing, Lebrun lived with her sisters, mother, and step-father from ages 9 until 21, in what she called "sometimes, a living hell." She talked about living in her dirt-floor hut, what it's like to walk through grass taller than your head and hope their are no animals in there with you, about the time she fell into a sinkhole in a cemetery during a storm (as coffins and corpses floated in the mud around her), not using a toilet until she was a teenager (and even then, indoor toilets were basically indoor out-houses where the stench made the tall grass seem like a pleasant alternative), and her 45 minute walk (through 3 rivers) to and from school, a trek she made 4 times each day.

During those years, her mother practiced voodoo, but she had converted to Christianity. Still, she watched her family and her neighbors practice voodoo everyday, and if she got sick, was immediately taken to the witch doctor. She watched rituals where people danced, worshiped, and sacrificed sun-to-sun for 3 months; watched as infants were tossed back-and-forth over raging fires to cleanse their spirits. She underwent the local medical treatments that would sometimes include bathing in feces or washing your hair with urine (though she claims that one's "legitimate" for a head-cold).

At 21, she left Haiti and came to Immokalee. She spent the first year working in the fields, and now she sounds like a testimony for the CIW. "It was awful - they treated us like dogs, and me worse, because I am a woman. I worked all day, breaking my back, for 8 or 9 dollars a day. They sprayed pesticide while we worked, they never gave us breaks, and when they did, they'd give us water from the ditch." She left the fields for the packing houses (tomato packaging plants), where she met her husband. I asked how they got together, and she said "Oh, he worked in the fields and brought the tomatoes to the plant. He liked me a lot, but I wasn't interested. Then, you know, we got married." Okay then.

She moved on to working in hotels, but her life-long allergic reactions to cleaning chemicals made that difficult too. After repeatedly struggling with health issues, she left the hotels. Although she had graduated high school in Haiti, the education system here gave her a hard time about accepting her transcript, so she took and passed her GED, then landed a job at a local school tutoring for the next 10 years. During that time, she went to night school and got her degree in education, and has been teaching kindergarten for the last 13 years.

Oh, and her husband. He came here at 16, without hardly any education. He eventually got a steady job in the orange fields where he was able to attend classes to get his GED and later a college degree, and has been working his way through medical school for the past 8 years. Their two children are both in college in Gainesville, and the couple owns two houses right now, one in Immokalee and another in Georgia (where her husband is finishing medical school). Did I mention she speaks 4 languages? She does - Creole, English, French, and Spanish.

Also - she's exercise crazy. Seriously. Look at her during any free second, and you'll find her doing lunges, jumping jacks, running in place, doing random arm exercises, breathing exercises, or power walking - if she's not doing any of those things, she's probably thinking about them. When the class acts up, she'll tell them it's time to "shake out their sillies" and challenge them to a jumping-jack or running in place competition where she does whichever drill until all of the kids quit. She also makes sure to chastise the quitters one-by-one "Ha! You are a young chick and you can't keep up with me?! I am an old woman! Come on, who can go longer!?").

At this point, I hope you'r getting the picture. Yeah, I met a lot of interesting people during my stint abroad, but it's not like I was coming back to Pleasantville or anything. Immokalee has been a great place to live over this past year, and interactions with people like Mrs. Lebrun make me look forward to another year here even more. If you want to check out some of the pictures I've taken since being back (including a few in the classroom, and even one or two of the soon-to-be-famous Mrs. Lebrun), click here.

It's crazy to think that I only have about two weeks left here before ending my first year here (I'll be up north-ish for the month of August), but I'm thinking I'll get up one more post by the end of the month. Expect long-winded ramblings about what this year has meant to me, and probably something about poverty, justice, inequality, or crazy-inspiring Haitian ladies. As always, thanks for reading, for your emails, and for your comments (especially you, Chinese people!).

Mr. Ryan Goes to Guatemala - Part II

2010-07-01T18:20:00.000-07:00

If you didn't already read the post that summarized the first half of my travels in Guatemala, scroll down to my last post or click here to read that first. (Picture link after the post)

Part III - PLQ's Mountain School -Colomba (June 20th - 24th)

When I originally signed up for 3 weeks with my school (PLQ), they told me that their Xela location was booked for the third week, and wanted to know if I would mind relocating to their "Mountain School" location for that week. I agreed, thinking "why not?" but later read and heard more about it, and got really excited for this leg of my journey.

The mountain school is about a 2 hour ride by "chicken-bus" (a word: chicken-buses are old American school buses that have been hand-me-down-the-continent-ed to Guatemala. They usually ride one set route, but you can get on or off at any point on the route. Also, there are no limits as to how many people they will let on one of these things at a time. The jam-packed-est one I was one had 3 adults per seat, plus the aisles so full of people that nobody could move. They have a 2-man operating crew - a driver and an ayudante (helper) whose job description includes climbing metal ladders out the back door of the bus to the top to strap an unstrap luggage, often at speeds 40 mph and above). Transportation (and everything else) in the country are pretty cheap, so it only cost me about $1.25 to relocate.

I met up in Xela with a few other students who were going out there the same weekend I was, and after the bus-ride and small walk down a cobble-stone rode, we arrived at the school. A single building with 4 or 5 dormitory style rooms, a few bathrooms, and about an acre to roam around on. At the school, part of the experience is supposed to be bringing students closer to rural Guatemalan life, but the families in these areas are too poor to host students, so we were housed at the school. Each student did, however, share three meals a day with a designated local family each week. My new host mom was Irma, and her two children, Francisco and Lendi, were around for most meals as well. During the day, we were encouraged not to stray too far from the school (lots of coffee plantations with armed guards and whatnot...), though we were able to see the local town and much of the local villages as well. This was actually a pretty exciting part of the journey, as most of my Guatemalan friends in Immokalee come from rural towns and not the city, so I was able to understand their history a little bit more.

Everything about this final week of classes had relaxation written all over it. The classes were held in thatched-roof bamboo huts, and they're 4 hours a day instead of 5. The teachers were a super-tight-knit group that were incredibly fun and easy to talk to. I spent most of my afternoons studying for a bit, and then reading in a hammock for hours at a time with a cat (the school has 2 cats and 3 dogs) sleeping in my lap. Instead of feeling tempted by city life just a few blocks away, I was perfectly content to pass the rainy afternoons embracing my inner-old-man (that doesn't really read as I had planned -- "What did you do in Guatemala?" "Oh, you know, embraced an old man in a hammock").

My teacher was great, too. Her name was Maria Jose, which I kind of thought was funny, having a man's name for a middle name, until she asked me my mother's name - "Well, it doesn't really translate I don't think. In English, it's 'Mary Jo,' but I guess in Spanish that would be ... Maria... Jose..." (maybe I did land my mental airplane just a little too early that final week). Classes with MJ (or Emmay Hota as I never called her) were very laid back, as well. After 2 weeks of rigorous grammar, it was nice to just sit back and have mostly conversations with someone. We just talked for probably half of each lesson, which could seem like a waste, but I'm there to learn how to speak Spanish anyways, so what better way than to speak it?

After just four days of lessons with MJ, I packed my bags and headed out a day early so that I could get back and spend and extra-afternoon with Alex and Otzoy's on my way back to the U.S. Leaving the school, I took a micro-bus (an old VW bus that operates on basically the same system as the Chicken Buses) to Xela, which turned out to be way faster and even cheaper. I got back to the city, went out to dinner with Jeff Villanueva and my PLQ-Xela friends from the weeks before, then holed up in a hostel in Xela ($2.75 for the night for my own locking room, locking wardrobe, and an available hot shower), preparing for the Odyssey back to Comalopa.

Part IV - Comalopa, Again (June 25th/26th)

Getting to Comalopa was a bit of journey. All I really knew was that I needed to take a bus from Xela to Chimaltenango, and then a second to Comalopa. My friends at PLQ had told me that I had to try a first-class bus (retired Greyhounds) rather than chicken bus for my longer (3ish hour) journey, and the woman at my hostel seemed sure that she knew a first-class bus line with seats to Chimaltenango. I woke up on Friday, took a taxi to the described station, and began my adventure.

At the ticket counter, I asked (please remember that all of the following conversations take place in Spanish, with me playing the role of Cave-Man level speaker in each of them) if there was a bus to Chimaltenango- the man told me, Yes, of course, at 10:15 AM, though the board behind told me that bus was going to Guatemala City. (To be clear, Chimaltenango sits perfectly in between Xela and Guatemala city - if you need to get to one from the other, you have to pass through Chimaltenango). Seeing as how the major perk of the nice buses is that they don't stop, I was worried I wouldn't be able to get off at my location. The man assured me everything would be okay. As I offered the ayudante my bag to be loaded into the bottom of the bus, I made clear that I would need to exit at Chimaltenango -- No problema, vos. After two hours on the (admittedly comfortable) bus, we stopped at a gas station, where I asked the driver himself -- "How close are we to Chimaltenango? Can I get off there?" He laughed and said we were a half-hour away, "But YOU want to go to Antigua" (Guatemala's largest tourist attraction). "No. I need to go to Chimaltenango. Please tell me when we get there."

About a half-hour later traffic slowed down pretty heavily as we got to the biggest town so far. After the bus picked back up, my Spider-Sense went off, and I decided to approach the dastardly duo up front to see if I was maybe missing my mark - I asked the ayudante where we were (the bus now rolling along), and the response came "Chimaltenango" -- "I need to get off! Now!" "No, no - YOU want to go ANT-I-GUA." "NO. NO. I WANT TO GO TO CHI-MAL-TEN-AN-GO." The bus door opened and I hopped out, trotting along next to the bus and pointing underneath to my luggage. When the ayudante realized what was going on, he hopped out too, and, cursing at me in Spanish, retrieving my luggage from underneath as we both ran next to the bus.

Fortunately, I was exactly where I needed to be. I got my second bus, and within the hour, was back at the Otzoy house. I got to spend another 24 hours or so with the Otzoys, watching the World Cup, eating food, and even playing a just-for-fun scrimmage on a mountain soccer field. Ashley, Alex's girlfriend, and a friend of mine from Immokalee (she was the intern for Student-Farmworker Alliance the year before I moved here - we'd met several times before the weekend) was visiting at the same time. On Friday night, Alex, Ashley, and I rode a "tuk-tuk" (basically a 3-wheeled golf-cart-taxi) to Comalapa's annual fair, which was essentially a 4 square block solid mass of humanity. Though I was able to see over the entire crowd whenever I pleased, the 3 of us rode the Ferris Wheel to get the full experience. Soaring over the mountain town of Comalapa with two friends, looming over a crowd of thousands as a Latin-dance band blared on stage, it was one of those moments that left me with a Is this really my life? feeling.

On Saturday, Efrain gave me a ride back to Guatemala City's airport. I hopped on the plane in Guatemala, got off in sweaty Miami, and that's where our fable comes full circle. You can click here to check out my pictures, which will hopefully help you color-in some of the mental outlines I've given you so far.

I'd love to fill you with lengthy impressions of the country and whatnot, but I think I've already said a lot. If you have any specific (or general) questions, though, I'd be more than willing to talk more about my experiences if you want to give me an email or call sometime. I supply what the people demand, dammit!

A quick update to bring you to the very present: I've spent my last week in Immokalee working with the summer-school program from about 8-5 every day. I'm at a different grade school than I was during the school year, but I'm still with Kindergartners. There are only 12 kids in my class, plus I'm kind of the assistant teacher to a real teacher -- all-in-all, much less stressful than the regular school year. More updates on that later though. As always, thanks for reading!

Mr. Ryan Goes to Guatemala - Part I

2010-06-28T16:07:00.000-07:00

I'm back! After three weeks romping around G-town, I landed safely back in Miami on Saturday, the 26th, where my three housemates greeted me for a 2.5-hour ride home full of stories about a chronic IBS-er going abroad. The trip was certainly one of those experiences that will be hard to put into words, but I'll do my best. I'm going to break it up into two sections, so this post will cover the first(ish) half of my journey.

Part I- The Otzoy's - Comalapa (June 5th/6th)

You may remember hearing this name tossed around a few times, as Alex and Oscar Otzoy are some of the nicest guys I've met in Immokalee. Alex was my friend that I used to go for runs with at the start of this year (though was deported in January -- check out this post if you don't remember my summary of the situation), while Oscar is a current CIW staff member that I hang out with usually a few times a week. There's only one major airport in Gaute, which is in Guatemala City, and my destination was about 4 hours West of that in Quetzaltenango. Fortunately for me, the Otzoy's live in Comalapa, pretty much smack-dab in the middle of those two cities.

I arrived on Saturday morning, and didn't need to be at my school until Sunday night, so I spent my first 24 hours or so with Alex and his family. It was a pretty surreal experience - Alex and I really only spent most of our time together during my first month and a half here, when my Spanish was an embarrassment to embarrassment. We've talked off and on since then, but this was really the first time I got to hang out with him since mid-October or so. I had to wake up at 5 AM U.S. time for my flight which meant I'd been up since 3 AM Guatemalan time by the time I met Alex and his other brother at the airport (around noon). I spent the majority of the day entertaining his niece and nephew, Marlon and Maritza, but also got to catch up with Alex (plus ride with him on his motorcycle through their mountain town ). More than that, it was incredible to get to see the child-hood home of two of my closest friends here, plus meet the extended family members that they talk about all the time.

I definitely embarrassed myself with some pitiful Spanish, but it was a great warm-up for the weeks to come.

Part II - PLQ - Quetzaltenango/Xela (June 6th - 20th)

Thanks again to the Otzoy's hospitality, I got a ride from Alex's brother (Efrain) all the way to Quetzaltenango (the indigenous name is "Xela," meaning "surrounded by 10 mountains." Ten was an under-estimation). I showed up at my school (Proyecto Linguistico Quetzalteco - PLQ) mid-day on Sunday, and was quickly picked up by my host family. My host "mother" (Rosa) was really a host "grand-mother," who lived with her husband, her two sons (in their 30s), her daughter-in-law, and her grandchild. The grandchild was a 2 and half year old who still didn't speak other than to make the noise "uh!" really loudly as he thundered his plastic playthings into my bedroom door while squealing gleefully. The host family was a pretty comfortable, if somewhat awkward, experience -- after about 2 days I became furniture to everyone but Rosa, but the privacy wasn't too terrible most of the time.

PLQ itself was a pretty great experience - walking in reminded me a lot of the CIW offices, the walls plastered with social-justice and anti-capitalism posters. It was founded in the early '90s in the memory of two Xela University student-leaders who were murdered for anti-government protesting. The school held daily activities, including local trips and plenty of movies and conferences focusing around Guatemala's long and bloody civil war (which officially ended in 1996). They have two 5-hour class sessions that students choose from, either from 8AM -1PM, or 2PM - 7PM. During the first week, I was placed into the afternoon session, which left my mornings free.

Most mornings, I romped around the city (to parks, markets, stores, weaving co-ops, etc.), and on my first Wednesday I went (with 5 other students and a guide) to "Los Vahos," a sauna-room fueled by natural volcanic vapors. Those 5 students and I become pretty close, so it was nice make some quick friends in a distant city -- though one of my college-roommates, Jeff Villanueva, was also in Xela (at a different school) for about 10 days of overlap with me, which was a really nice situation.

My afternoons (in week 1) and mornings (in week 2) in class were spent with Rocael and Miguel, respectively. Both of them were pretty great to work with, and we mostly fluctuated between grammar lessons/exercises and conversation. All of the teachers at the school did a fantastic job of speaking right at or above my level, so that I was completely capable of having hours of conversation with them every day, while still learning a lot. The conversation topics were often my choice, so we got to discuss immigration, the civil war, and current/past political relations between Guatemala and the U.S. It was pretty freaking sweet.

Moving on to things that were not sweet - my bowels. Somewhere around Thursday of my first week, I ate some Kryptonite, and was basically comatose for about 6 days. I'll spare you all the details (since I know my grandparents and a few nuns are reading), but let's just say it wasn't pretty. From about Friday to the following Thursday, I was really only capable of making the ten-minute walk to school and back without extreme fear of jangling some kind of monster loose from my intestines (and even then.. I kept a change of pants in my book bag, just in case). My teacher eventually convinced me to get an "examen de fecales" done at the local lab -- that was another highly entertaining and unsanitary story in itself, though it did have the positive side-affect of finding out that I didn't have any parasites or amoebas.

Whatever issue I had eventually ran it's course, and I felt fully recovered by about Thursday, the 17th. I then attempted to jam all the fun I had missed into my final two days in Xela. Within my last couple days there, Jeff & I visited the city's largest market (9 square blocks), climbed a mountain outside of (and overlooking) Xela, traveled to natural volcanic hot baths, and rode through the mountains in the back of a pick-up truck (buses were stopped, and we had to get home somehow).

With that, I think I've mostly summarized my first couple of weeks in Guatemala. I'll try to put up another post within a few days that includes my adventures in PLQ's Mountain School plus my pictures. Stay tuned!

Hell and High Water

2010-05-31T10:30:00.000-07:00

Howdy folks! I know that I said I wouldn't be posting for a while, but I thought I'd put something up in case any of you were curious about my international status after hearing about the natural disasters going on in Guatemala. To summarize, my original flight was cancelled due a volcanic eruption that coated most of Guatemala City in ash, and subsequent volcanoes (in Ecuador) and tropical storms (in Western Guatemala) have delayed me even further. As of now, my Central American adventure is slated for June 5th through 26th -- I'll update again if things change substantially from that.

On the bright side of things, the delay did allow me to go the final day of after-school on Friday, and I was rewarded with one of the best "kids say the darndest things" stories of my year. To set the stage - I was supposed to be missing Friday, and so I had told my kids all week "Thursday is my last day," over and over - we had a party on Thursday, a group-hug good-bye, all that good stuff. Also, as you may have noticed from my pictures, my hair has gotten a bit long in the time since I moved here, because I haven't exactly cut it since last May.

So, when my flight got cancelled and I had Friday morning free, I went over to the vocational school salon and got my mane buzzed off - I had been meaning to do it before Guatemala, but just ran out of time. That meant that when I showed up on Friday, it was a double surprise - I wasn't supposed to be there, plus I was missing my sandy blonde halo.

During snack (the way we start each day at after-school), the kids ran in and mostly made fun of me. "You look so silly!!" "What happened to your head?" and then my favorite response "You're not Mr. Dennis!" -- the girl who said it was joking, and I responded back, "Nope! I'm his twin brother, Mr. Ryan!"

About fifteen minutes later, after I finished leading the line of kindergartners to our play space for the day, I put down my book bag and grabbed a drink from my water bottle. As I was in mid-gulp, Edi, one of the boys in my class ran up and said "Whoa! Mr. Ryan! Mr. Dennis has that exact same water bottle!!"

That's about all that's new from here for now -- I'm going to spending most of the week enjoying being somewhere I'm not supposed to (cough*having no responsibilities*cough), but I'll put up more updates if things get delayed or cancelled further. If not, look for a post at the end of June. Thanks for reading!

Fish-Eating Creek

2010-05-22T07:38:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago, my housemate Margaret and I stumbled onto what I've considered to the best-kept secret in Florida: Fish-Eating Creek. It's a small park about 45 minutes from Immokalee where it only costs about $20 to rent a 2-person canoe for four hours, and then you're free to navigate some seriously untouched Florida habitat. When we went last time, we saw about a dozen gators, some at least 10 feet long - some sunbathing, some swimming within 50 feet of us. Of course there are plenty of other natural wonders to see (most of them from the plant realm), but I failed to capture anything on film because I was afraid to get my camera wet.

Lucky for you all, the two of us ventured back there yesterday with another housemate, Liz, and I decided to risk my camera for sake of capturing some of the scenery. Unfortunately, we didn't see quite as many gators sunbathing, and most of the ones in the water submerge once you get within 30 or 40 feet, so I don't have any good gator pics for you (...yet). For all you worried moms and sisters (that's you Sr. Katie) out there, don't sweat it - the gators are just afraid of us as we are of them. Plus, somebody taught us a good "gator-face-swatting" technique with our oars in case we should ever have to use it.

Anyways, to check out some pictures from our adventure, click here.

In real life news, there's not much else going on. This coming week is the final week the routine we've had for almost nine months now, and will also be the last time I go to any of my morning jobs until at least the fall (or maybe ever, depending on where I decide to work in the fall).

We're also in the middle of a couple of weeks of 2 extra housemates right now, as Tom (a former Immokalee volunteer) is in town doing research for his Public Health Master's project, and Marie (a current Cleveland volunteer) is in town checking out some Florida schools for her own graduate career.

I leave for Guatemala in less than a week, so I imagine that this will probably be my last post before that adventure. I won't be back in the states until June 20th, so you'll have to keep your HF-to-WD habit in check for a month or so. If you'd like to contact me for any reason, I should have periodic email access while I'm there until about the 14th, and then I'll be out of touch for the final week.

Thanks for reading!

Significant Life Events I've Been Tiptoeing Around, General Updates, and Pictures

2010-05-11T10:28:00.000-07:00

My last few posts have mostly dealt with the bigger events going on here in Immokalee, but I think it's been a little while since I shared some of the news from my personal life. There are a couple of pretty big updates about the coming month/year, and then I'll do my best to update some of my general information as well.

Specific Life Events!

Next Year: Momma Jo has probably fed this through the grape vine to most of you, but for those of you beyond the influence of the Kelly girls, I will be staying a second year here in Immokalee! This was admittedly something I had kind of hoped for from the start, but didn't put into motion until after I moved here. After officially recognizing how much I enjoyed being here, I started a long chain of actions that would eventually result in my groveling to a couple of head-haunchos up in Michigan to let me defer for a second year (which they agreed to). I decided to do this for many reasons, but mostly so that my brother and uncle would have a good enough excuse to drag my parents back to Pirates Spring Training games next year (you're welcome, guys).

I was talking about this with one of older volunteers at Habitat, and he asked me "What the hell, kid? What are you, afraid of school now?" That's not it - I'm still really excited about going to Michigan, it's just not time for that yet. Once I start that education process, it's something I'm going to be invested in for a long time - and when I come out the other side, I won't have the same opportunities that I have now. I'm here, I'm invested, and my program is willing to keep me sponsored - I don't need much more convincing than that. Also, as I reassured Michigan (and every other concerned adult in my life), my volunteer program only allows 2 year periods of service, so I can't try to pull this again next year.

This means that I'll be in Florida until the end of July working with our summer-school program, and then be home for the month of August. I'll be moving back down around September and be living with 3 new housemates. My current housemates are either pursuing grad school next year (Liz and Alison) or have already completed their 2-years with the program (Margaret). Margaret is thinking about sticking around Immokalee, but as far as my house goes, it will be all new people (I'll have to make sure to steal all the good furniture for my room before they move in).

This month - now that I won't be moving to Michigan this summer, I do have a little more free time to play with. So, I decided to do the one thing that apparently frightens mothers more than getting lost at the beach or hiding in the clothes racks at JC Penney's- travel to Central America.

My flight leaves for Guatemala on May 28th, and I won't be back in the states until June 19th. I'll get to catch up with our friend Alex, who moved back to Guatemala in January, but I'll be spending the bulk of my time at a language school in the western highlands. I've actually had a couple of friends go to (and recommend) the same school that I'm going to, and another friend of mine will be in the same city as I am while I'm there (only he'll be studying at another school).

After finding out for certain that I would be here next year, I decided it was time to really invest myself with the Spanish language. I've talked multiple times about my need to push myself to speak Spanish, so I'm hoping that a few weeks in a place where I have no option will help me overcome some of my shyness. The language school includes one-on-one lessons for five hours a day, and home stays with Spanish-only speaking families... I'm either going to get a lot better, or cry myself to sleep every night.

Also, for the comfort of all adults, I've included this heart-felt and spontaneous disclaimer: I understand that international travel can be unsafe, and I will never let my guard down. I pledge to sleep with one eye open, drink beer instead of water, tuck my cash where no one would dare steal it, not put my face over any active volcanoes, and try not to act so damn white all the time.

General Things in General (... Things!)

Kindergarten: Believe it or not, I only have TWO WEEKS left with the little goons. I still remember talking with one of the tutors during the second week of school (back in September), and saying "How can this possibly only be the seventh day of after-school?," and immediately thinking How am I going to do this for an entire year? While that thought recurred more than once over the past nine months, for the most part, time has flown.

I was just telling my housemates that I can't believe how much I've learned from the kids. To be honest, before this year, I hadn't spent much time among the 5-to-6-year-old crowd since I was counted among them. I know that what follows is going to reveal me as a giant idiot, but really, the thing that blew me away the most was the extent to which kindergartners are really just little people.

For the most part, they're fully formed and capable (on some level) of just about anything you or I are capable of. I don't know if I was expecting some kind of flock of play-dough-minded drones, but they came to me fully capable of a wide range of impressive (occasionally depressing) social skills. They don't really tolerate anything other than an obvious effort on my part to keep learning fun, entertaining, and challenging, and it's almost pathetic how little I can slip past them. Speaking in Immokalee specific terms, their bilingualism (23 of the 24 kids I had this year) was also mind-blowing (and definitely depressing - when my hispanic kids speak to each other in Spanish, it is still too fast for me. After all the improvements I've made this year, it would be stretch to say I could speak Spanish at a Kindergarten level - there' s a real confidence booster.).

In addition to gaining appreciation for the kids, I far more appreciate the people who work with them. I can only do this every day because I know it's temporary - if this were my career... I'd be re-evaluating things. I can't imagine what it would be like to work with this age group year-after-year, or what it would be like to have a child that age (they would be in your home?? That's horrible - how could you ever rest?). So make this a special thanks to my parents, my elementary school teachers, and anyone who willingly chooses to spend their lives with children - you are far stronger people than I am.

My Non-School Jobs - I've only got two more weeks of these left as well. Once I get back from Guatemala, we're going to be working at summer school full-time until the end of July, so I've only got a couple more go-arounds of the hodge-podge work-week I constructed for myself. For the most part, all four morning jobs (Habitat, Soup Kitchen, Social Services, The Coalition) have mostly followed the same pattern - ssssslloowwweedd ddddoooowwwnnnnn.

Almost all of the snow-birds have gone back north, and so Habitat volunteers have dropped from 30 or 40 a day to 1 or 2. It's usually just me and the full-time crew now, so we spend a lot more time on little projects that aren't quite the same pace as when you frame a whole house before lunch. The soup kitchen has gone from serving almost 450 people a day to barely serving 45. Social services has been so slow that they've let me take the last month off because they don't even need the help. The Coalition always has work to be done, but things have slowed way down since the march. Overall, I'm starting to really feel some of that slow-paced-summer-feel that the house veterans promised would come our way.

I'm going to wrap this thing up before I venture too far into "Another Long-Ass Post that Started Out As a Short One" territory. I'll do my best to put up at least a little something before I leave for Guatemala, but if you don't see any updates by May 28th, you can leave that Refresh button alone until the end of June. For now, feel free to enjoy some new pictures (mostly of the Kindergartners) I posted -- click here to check out the April and May folder. Thanks again for reading!

The Farmworker Freedom March

2010-04-23T09:30:00.000-07:00

Note: If you still don't fully understand the purpose of the Coalition's campaign against Publix, please take the time to scroll down and read my post from earlier this week, or just click here to go directly to it. It's a long explanation, but worth it if you're looking for clarity.

I know that I've kind of been building up to talking about this for a couple of weeks now, but after the long post earlier this week, I'm going to try to keep this summary pretty short. I'll do my best to explain what it was like to be a part of a movement this large, and why it was so powerful, but I'll probably let most of the images speak for themselves.

The event itself was a 3 day march from Tampa to Lakeland - about a 22 mile trek. It started with a rally in downtown Tampa, and ended with a rally in downtown Lakeland. On Friday and Saturday, we marched about 10 miles each day, and Sunday was a 2 or so mile march through Lakeland. We passed a couple of Publix's along the route, and there was a picket/protest on each day - including a vigil outside of Publix's corporate headquarters. When we started on Friday morning, there were maybe a couple hundred people at the opening rally. As time wore on, more and more of our allies joined in - some were long-time allies that flew in from out of town, others were informed locals who joined for their local portion of the journey. Regardless, things grew and grew to the point that, by Sunday, we had approximately 1,500 people marching (and that was in the rain - I think a few hundred more would have been expected in nice weather).

As amazing as it was to take part in the activities of the weekend, it was even more incredible to get to be somewhat behind the curtains for the whole ordeal. Basically, this entire event was organized by a core group of probably 10 or so people - all of them current or former CIW, Interfaith Action, or Student Farmworker-Alliance staff members or interns. Obviously, there are scores of volunteers (myself included among those ranks) who try to just take orders and help to make things run smoothly over the weekend, but the logistics fell really to that core team. With our advantage of living and working in Immokalee, my housemates and I have the privilege of sharing friendships with just about all those who were the brains behind the march - which also made us prime candidates for any and every task at hand.

And so, we got to spend a few days in the lives of organizers. We helped with some pretty big pre-march activity (pre-registration, ordering the flat-bed truck to lead the march, lining up port-a-potties, etc.), as well as some hefty on-site work (new arrival registration at every meal, helping to organize transportation), and of course all of the little things (helping with water team, snack team, t-shirt distribution/selling, helping to transport people who couldn't walk for the march, serving food at the meals, set-up and tear-down at our stops and meals, etc.).

To be sure, it was an exhausting weekend. But more than that, it was also one of the most powerful events I've taken part in up to this point in my life. During the opportunities I had to participate in the march, it was incredible to walk alongside the people who have become some of my closest friends, and watched as they organized, marched, protested, chanted, and made a difference in their own lives. Opportunities to be a part of a movement this large, this powerful, and this effective are truly rare, and I am grateful to be able to say that I have been a part of it.

I did take some pictures on my camera when I had time, but I definitely was not able to capture most of the weekend's activities. You can check my pictures our here, but as I mentioned, they kind of jump around depending on when I had enough time to take pictures.

For a complete picture of the weekend, if you've got the time, please check out the two videos I am posting below. Neither is much longer than 5 minutes, and they'll both give you a better snapshot of the weekend than I can provide.

The first is a montage from one of the photographers over the weekend - he captured some of the most important people in the movement from start-to-finish through the weekend, and also got some great shots to show how huge the crowd was.

Click here to view the weekend summary video - this video is not yet on YouTube, so I am linking to the photographer's home page. You will need to scroll down the first video you can play on the webpage - it has a still-shot of an "end the Poverty" stencil.

This second video is a montage of women and children who are CIW community members. I think this is a great reminder that this movement isn't about greed - these aren't people who are doing well enough already and looking for that extra penny. This fight is literally a fight for the right to earn almost enough money to be right below the poverty line. And this fight isn't only for the workers - it is for their families, and their collective futures.

Click here to view the women and children of the CIW video.

If you've managed to slog through all that, plus the stuff I posted earlier this week, I think you'll have a pretty good idea of what it's like to be a part of this movement. If anything remains unclear, though, please email me and I'll see if I can clarify it for you.

I haven't really posted about some pretty big events going on in my life recently, so I'll do my best to get another post up before too much time passes. Thanks again for reading, commenting, and emailing!

Florida Agriculture and the Campaign for Fair Food

2010-04-20T10:33:00.000-07:00

As promised, I'm going to do my best to put a summary of the Farmworker Freedom March sometime soon. However, this weekend, I fielded a lot questions about what exactly the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) wants from Publix, and why. It's something I've been around for long enough now that it feels like common knowledge, but this past weekend was a good reminder that when you step back from the situation, it's really very complicated. So before I talk about the power of this movement, I want to make sure I've given a good explanation of what exactly is going on. This post is very long, but if you've got the time to plug through it, I'm sure it will help explain some questions you might have.

Basically, Florida agriculture breaks down into 4 main groups.

1) The Workers (aka farmworkers/pickers/laborers, etc.) - the people who actually harvest the food we eat. I've talked pretty extensively about their living conditions and demographic make-up in this post (click here to read), but in their job summary reads something like this: stagnant wages for over 30 years; earn 40-45 cents per 32 pound bucket of tomatoes picked; pick two tons (125 buckets) of tomatoes in a single day (per person) in order to earn $50; earn $10,000 - $12,000 per year.

2) The Growers - the agricultural companies that hire the workers to plant and harvest their fields. Florida agriculture is a huge business, vastly different from the family-owned farms of the north. A single "grower" could have hundreds or thousands of fields. They employ crew leaders, individuals who oversee work in the fields and typically distribute pay at the end of the week. Growers often employ workers on a daily or weekly basis, and thus have little connection to any individual workers. They are the ones directly paying workers.

3) The Companies - the restaurants, food providers, or grocery stores that purchase tomatoes from the growers. They choose which growers to buy their food from, and they are the ones directly paying the growers.

4) The Consumers - you and me. The people who sit down at McDonald's, walk into Publix (or Kroger, or Giant Eagle, or Jewel, etc.), or eat in a cafeteria (or ball park, or stadium, or catered event, etc.). We choose where to eat, and so we choose which companies to pay.

Notice that the government is not a part of this equation. Labor laws (many of them written shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation) intentionally exclude field laborers from the rights or pay you would find in almost any other line of work in this country. The low wages and child labor (ages 12 and up) found in Florida fields are perfectly legal. Additionally, many politicians in Florida also happen to be Presidents/VPs/CEOs, or other high-ranking members of huge agricultural operations in Florida, so they're not exactly people who are looking to radically change the system they've been exploiting for decades.

Now, let's look at the history of the interaction between the CIW and Florida Agriculture.

In the early 1990s, some of the farmworkers began meeting regularly to discuss how terrible their working conditions were, and if anything could be done to change that. This was the basis for the CIW. They started with less than ten people, and they met in a room lent to them from the local church. They eventually moved into a small office in town, and began pressuring growers to raise their wages.

During this period, there was a beating in one of the fields - a 17-year old boy had stopped picking to drink water, and was met with the response "you come here to work, not to drink water!" before being brutally beaten by his crew leader. The boy walked to the CIW office, still in his bloody shirt (an artifact now framed in the CIW office) where Coalition members rallied 500 workers, marched to the crew leaders house waving the boy's shirt as their flag and announcing that "an injury against one of us is an injury against all of us." The CIW went on to stage a labor strike against that crew leader.

Around this same time, they continued to pressure growers to raise the wages in the fields, going so far as to organize massive labor strikes in protest of the low wages. When one grower was asked why he wouldn't meet with the Coalition to discuss wages, his response was "the tractor doesn't tell a farmer how to run his field," confirming that pickers were seen as little more than machinery, to be used and abused however the grower pleased.

Despite heavy pressure from the CIW, growers refused to yield. The Coalition eventually decided they were barking up the wrong tree. The growers were receiving too much pressure from above; if any grower raised what they paid workers, the price of their product would go up, and the companies would stop buying from them. So, the CIW switched focus to the companies - international corporations with more flexible budgets. And who do the companies listen to? Consumers.

Thus started the Campaign for Fair Food in 2001. This campaign urges consumers to stand up and demand fair food from the companies they buy from. The first company targeted was Taco bell, and the CIW approached them with 3 demands (the same ones that they still demand today from Publix, or any company). When we say that a company has "signed an agreement" with the Coalition, that means that they have agreed to each of these demands.

1 - Pay one penny per pound more for tomatoes picked. This penny would be paid to the grower, who would then pass it on to the worker. This raises a worker's earnings to 70-75 cents per bucket picked, and could raise their annual earnings to around $17,000 per year (right below the poverty line).

2 - Agree to a (3rd-party monitored) code of conduct for the growers they employ, including a zero-tolerance policy for slavery. This means that if a grower has cases of wage abuse, physical abuse, or modern-day slavery found in their fields, the companies will stop employing those growers.

3 - Worker participation. This means that the company keeps in close contact with the CIW, who are able to keep the companies updated on the relationship between the workers and the growers. This way, if a grower does not pass the penny to the workers, or exerts some other kind of abuse, this can be reported directly to the company, who can act appropriately in their relationship with the grower (whether it be pressuring them to change or cutting ties with that grower).

After four years of protests, marches, hunger-strikes, and boycotts, Yum! Brands (the owner of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC) agreed to an agreement with the Coalition. In the years since that first agreement, the CIW has signed agreements with: McDonalds, Burger King, Subway, Whole Foods, and the food service provers Compass, Bon Appetit, & Aramark. Right now, the Campaign's main targets are Publix and Sodexo (the last major food provider yet to sign), and their peripheral agenda includes Ahold (owner of Giant, Stop'n'Shop, and many other stores) and Kroger. The Coalition now has a dozen staff members, over 500 community members (all of them farm workers), and two ally organizations (Interfaith Action and Student Farmworker Alliance - the group I volunteer for) which are individually staffed and work expressly for the interest of the CIW.

Since the launch of the Campaign, their have been many speed bumps. Almost every company has been stubborn, but all of them eventually caved. For many years, the growers refused to pass the penny to the workers, but now one major grower (the 3rd largest in Florida) passes the penny (which ensures them the business of all 8 companies that have signed agreements with the CIW, as that grower is the only one paying workers a fair wage). Companies have even placed spies into the CIW organization (seriously - check out this New York Times article about how Burger King attempted to infiltrate the CIW ranks).

But none of that matters now. What matters is this - if a company signs an agreement with the Coalition, it will mean better wages for the workers who pick the tomatoes for that company. This past weekend, I saw the heart of this movement, and I can this with certainty - there is no stopping the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. The CIW always says that "it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when," and I believe that now more than ever. I know that it would be easy to classify this movement as hopelessly idealistic, but being a part of it has made one thing clear to me- the CIW will not stop until Florida agriculture has undergone a radical change (and I doubt they'll even stop then).

Hopefully, this answers some of the questions that still might be out there for readers. I'm going to let that information digest for a few days, and then maybe this weekend I'll put up a summary of the march, which I hope will have more significance after this explanation. As always, thanks for reading!

"Why We March"

2010-04-15T07:54:00.000-07:00

Tonight, we'll be heading out from Immokalee for Tampa, where we'll start our 3-day march towards Lakeland (home of Publix's headquarters) tomorrow morning. The CIW's website posted the flyer that they will be handing out along the route, and I thought it was pretty insightful, so I'm going to repost it here, in case any readers are still unsure of the purpose of the march:

"We are Florida farmworkers marching 22 miles over 3 days from Tampa to Publix headquarters in Lakeland.

We march to call on Publix to work with us to end the human rights crisis in Florida's tomato fields.

We march to see in our lifetime the day where we who toil at one of the most difficult and important jobs in society -- harvesting the food enjoyed on America's tables -- will finally be treated with the respect we deserve.

We march because tomato pickers still earn 45 cents per 32-lb bucket of tomatoes, a rate stagnant for three decades, signifying that each worker must harvest over two and a half tons of tomatoes each day just to earn minimum wage. Our backbreaking labor has helped make Publix the richest privately-held company in Florida.

We march for freedom from forced labor, poverty and abuse. There have been seven federally-prosecuted slavery operations in Florida agriculture since 1997 involving a total of well over 1,000 workers held against their will and forced to work through threats and violence.

We march because slavery should not exist in America in the 21st century, and if we are to eliminate the poverty and powerlessness at the root of modern slavery, Publix, a major purchaser of tomatoes, must be part of the solution.

We march because we are on the road to creating a more humane agricultural industry. Our Campaign for Fair Food has resulted in eight major food companies -- among them McDonald's and Whole Foods -- agreeing to work with us and with growers to bring change to Florida's fields. Yet Publix has refused to do the same.

We march because our dreams and hopes are bigger than Publix's excuses to not do the right thing. We believe the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

Today we march because we love our families and want a better tomorrow for our children and for our children's children, one based in respect for human rights.

We are Publix customers, too; people like you who refuse to accept that our food must be harvested in degrading conditions and who call on Publix to live up to its own words and act as 'a responsible citizen in our communities'."

We'll be getting back to Immokalee pretty late on Sunday night, but I'll try to put up a post with some pictures before next weekend. If you'd like to read more about the Coalition or their campaign against Publix, click here to check out their website.

Newton's Third Law

2010-04-09T10:25:00.000-07:00

Ever since we returned to Immokalee after Christmas, things have been pretty crazy here - not only have we been hosting a gamut of students, friends, and family, but the town itself has been pretty draining. As I've mentioned in a post or two before, when we came back here at the start of 2010, we saw a storm of crises in Immokalee - within a week, the earthquake rocked the Haitian population in town, and the tomato freeze left almost the entire migrant population jobless. Our social services sites in town ballooned to serving 4, 5, or 6 times as many people as we were used to in the fall, and the general feel about town was one of depression.

After ten days back in Pennsylvania, I returned to Immokalee this past Monday completely refreshed. I was ready to head back into the storm and weather whatever Immokalee wanted to send my way. Instead, I saw the equal, yet opposite, reaction of the January crises.

I walked into work at the soup kitchen on Tuesday morning and thought they must have been closed for some reason. Before I went home for Easter, the lines were routinely at least a hundred people long in the morning, and we were serving about 450 people a day. When I showed up on Tuesday, there was one guy sitting outside the window, and four or five other guys lounging within twenty feet of the door.

Next door, at Social Services, they had been limiting themselves to 120 clients a morning. This week, they have less than 20 clients a day. It used to be that when you rode your bike to work in the morning, the sidewalks were blotted with people all around town - mostly guys out of work with nothing better to do than wander from one place to the other during the day. The park was packed at all hours of every day, every bench in town had at least one guy sitting on it, and you could find a pick-up soccer game happening on every other block. Now, riding around town, I'm lucky to come across a handful of people in a two mile bike ride.

So what happened? Well, in the words of Eva (the cook at the soup kitchen): "It's over. They all went back to work." Between orange season picking up, the second crop of tomatoes finally coming in, and people starting to head north for the summer, Immokalee is a different town. It's hard to believe it's even the same place that we left two weeks ago, but there's no denying reality. Margaret and Alison have told Liz and I before that Immokalee is a much more quiet, slow-paced town during the summer, and I guess we're starting to get our early glimpses of that lifestyle.

Not to worry, though - whatever free time we're gaining from our other job sites, we can just as easily pour those back into working with the Coalition. Next weekend is the Farmworker Freedom March, a 3-day, 22-mile march against Publix, starting in Tampa and ending with a rally in Lakeland (home of Publix's headquarters). The tag-line is that it is a march for "freedom from forced labor, poverty, and abuse."(If you need a refresher as to why the CIW is protesting Publix, please check out this post starting in the 2nd paragraph or so.)

You may have noticed that this spring has involved much less week-to-week protesting than the fall did, but that's mainly because the Coalition and their ally organizations have been busy planning this event for the past several months. There have been staff members from all three organizations building support in Tampa and Lakeland since January, and they've also been busy with the traveling Florida Modern-Day Slavery Museum.

When I was telling my dad about the museum, his response was "Modern-day slaves? In America? As in, recently?" Try over 1,000. In the last ten years. In Florida agriculture alone. The museum is composed of several displays that document the history of slavery in Florida (dating back to the 1800s), and the centerpiece is a box-truck that houses information on 6 of the most recent federally prosecuted slavery cases in Florida (since 1997). The truck is a mock-up of a truck used in the most recent case, where workers were locked in the truck every night, sometimes with their hands and feet chained as well. One corner of the truck was used as their restroom. Because the entire museum fits nicely into the truck, they've been all over Florida for the past two months spreading awareness about the issue, and also garnering attention to the companies that still support growers who have had recent slavery cases in their fields (like Publix).

Although it has been a good method of garnering support for this weekend's march, the museum wasn't composed as any kind of direct attack on Publix or any other organization. From my understanding, the museum really has a few purposes - not only to point out the unspeakable things that happen right in our country (to both undocumented immigrants and, yes, many "legal," American-born citizens) and the companies that condone this type of behavior, but also to point just how easy it is to let these happen when you're working in a system that's already so broken. Nobody is saying that Publix (or any other company that hasn't signed with the CIW) is endorsing slavery, but they are perpetuating a system which keeps people so poor and desperate for work that they're willing to risk their freedom in exchange for the promise of a day's work. If you're not quite interested enough to check out the link that I posted above, you could also just click here and watch a video that shows a little about the museum and some reactions to it.

To end things on an upbeat note, Aramark, one of the nation's largest food service providers, signed an agreement with the Coalition last week. That leaves only Sodexo left before the CIW has tackled the majority of the food service world, in addition to their major successes on the fast food front. While the campaign against Publix has certainly lasted longer than most people expected, the Coalition's ever-growing line of victories affirms that fairer foods in grocery stores is a question of when, not if.

I'll do my best to get a description (and pictures) of the march up sometime shortly after next weekend, as well as some of the more exciting updates on my life in general. Thanks for reading, commenting, and emailing!

March Madness

2010-03-21T08:14:00.000-07:00

Well, it's over.

In my last entry, I promised that I would have a few busy weeks ahead of me, and I definitely made good on that promise. I also promised that I'd try to get a post up somewhere during the time that I had my slew of visitors, but I didn't quite follow through on that. My final trip to the airport was yesterday morning, so this morning has been my first chance to breathe in about three weeks. Looking back over this hectic month, I was having trouble how to best summarize every thing that went on - I've decided I'm just going to break things up into the groups that visited, and then give a few quick high lights from each group. (Of course, if you'd rather just skip all those words and go straight to the pictures, you can just click here. Also - at my mom's request, I've updated my Immokalee run map, which you can check out here)

John Carroll (JCU) Spring Break Group (2/28-3/7)

This second time around was a hugely different experience from the group that came in January. The January group was almost all juniors and seniors, and they were a pretty mature group that was prepared for their week in Immokalee. That week with them was physically taxing, but otherwise pretty normal.

The spring break group was an entirely different experience. Not only were the participants mostly first or second year students, but JCU had switched over it's pre-trip planning policy. Every spring break, JCU sends students to probably 5 or 6 national and international locations. It used to be that each group of students going to a particular destination (i.e. Immokalee) would meet with each other 4 or 5 times before leaving for that trip, and prepare for their specific destination. This spring, they switched to having all of the students going on any trip meeting together in preparation, and changed the theme from specific locations to broader scale ideas (social justice, cultural barriers, etc.).

I'm sure there were benefits, but we saw a lot of the down-sides on our trip. Many of the students were very unprepared to be in Immokalee - half-way through the week, one student apparently commented that she hadn't expected to be working so much with undocumented workers, and if she'd known that it would be this way before she left, she didn't know if she would have come. She was among multiple students who were clearly taken aback at many points through out the week. In some senses, this was a positive thing - many students told us that by the end of the week, they had a change of heart about some of their long-standing opinions on immigration and poverty, and it was only the unexpected aspect of this journey that allowed them to receive the information without their guards up. Still, this made the week a much more emotionally draining adventure (on top of physical exhaustion). A couple of hours before the group got dropped off at the airport, I stopped and picked up my younger brother Greg.

Greg Lackey (3/7 - 3/14)

My housemates later commented that Greg was the perfect guest. Aside from leaving an insulting amount of yogurt left in the tub before returning it to the fridge, I'd have to agree with them (Greg, if you take that comment seriously, you need your head checked). After a week with the JCU crew, it was nice to have just one guest (opposed to 12) who's only goal was to be a sponge for life in Immokalee. Greg accompanied me to most of my morning jobs, and worked alongside me without hesitation or complaint. When we'd get a break in the after-noon or evening, we'd usually sit around and talk about the different aspects of each part of the community that each job focuses on, and I'd try my best to round out his knowledge on each location. He was also lucky enough to be in town when a lot of other Spring Break groups from other schools were around, so we were able to piggy-back into different presentation all week that might not normally be an option (we went to a Publix protest, visited the CIW's traveling Modern-Day Florida-Agriculture Slavery Museum, and even went on a 5 AM walking tour of Immokalee to watch as tomato pickers tried to secure work for the day).

He also came with me to after-school all week. By Friday, the marathon-man was asking me "How do you do this every day? This is exhausting."

For me, it was particularly nice to have Greg around, mainly because we see the world very similarly. As much as the JCU groups are a nice reminder of what it's like to experience Immokalee for the first time, being with Greg for that same journey was practically like re-living the experience. Throughout the week, as he would comment on and react to different things here, I remembered feeling the exact same way just six months ago. The day before Greg flew out, we headed to the air port and met up with my Mom, Dad, older brother Pat, Uncle Dan, and Aunt Margaret.

The Lackey Clan (3/13 - 3/19)

After years of waiting, my location finally gave Uncle Dan the push he needed to convince my dad to fly down to Florida to watch some Pittsburgh Pirates Spring Training baseball. The Pirates home stadium is only about 2 hours from Immokalee (in Bradenton), and my uncle scheduled a week where the Pirates were playing half of their games in Fort Myers, about an hour from Immokalee. It wasn't too difficult to talk the wives into a week in Florida in the middle of March, and Pat (wildly successful author of Where Have You Gone, Andy Van Slyke?) wouldn't miss it for the world.

And so, Gary Lackey got on a plane for the first time in his life, and just like that, the Hann Hill Lackeys were reunited in South West Florida. We managed to all go to one game together before Greg took off on Sunday morning, and the rest of my family got a nice mix of poverty and the Pirates for the rest of their stay. They had two off-days during their visit, and they all spent Sunday afternoon on a quick tour of Immokalee. They didn't quite get the full job-site/co-worker/day-to-day experience that Greg got, but they definitely got a feel for the town I live in. I took Wednesday off and went to Bradenton with the family (check out Pat's site for details of our crazy adventures there), and then we all met up for dinner in Immokalee on Thursday night (after my mom and aunt came to after-school with me for the day).

You might be thinking that this on-and-off week with the parents was nice break from the constant house guests, which it was... except that one of my college roommates was also in Immokalee that whole week, starting on Monday.

Jeff Villanueva (3/15 - 3/20)

Jeff was one of my first friends at JCU, and during our last semester at school, he moved into the house I shared with 3 other guys. Jeff is currently a med student at University of Massachusetts (in Wooster), and UMass is looking into improving their health programs for migrant farmworkers who work in Massachusetts during the summer months. "Say, Jeff, doesn't one of your best friends live in one the country's biggest migrant worker hubs?"

And so, Jeff came and lived with us for the last week as well. Unlike the JCU groups and Greg, Jeff and I had pretty different schedules for most of the week. He had lined up a lot of interviews and visits with the different clinics in town, so we mostly only spent our lunches and evenings together. He did come with me to after-school on Monday and then again on Thursday, and even though he was going to have Friday afternoon free, as we walked out the school on Thursday, he looked at me, exhausted, and said "Dude... I'm not coming tomorrow. I can't do this two days in a row." I dropped Jeff off at the airport last night, then came home and slept for approximately 4,000 hours.

And thus ended the madness. To clarify, though - I've been incredibly grateful to have all of our visitors and guests. It has definitely been a little exhausting over the past month, but I'm also happy to host anyone who wants to learn more about life in Immokalee. It was a pretty huge gesture to have my entire family come to Southwest Florida, as well as one of my best friends, and so I want to say thank you to all of those visitors. I'd be happy to have them all back, any time, as well as anyone else who would like to come visit.

Looking Forward

This post is already incredibly long, so I'm going to keep it short. This coming Wednesday, I'm flying home for about 10 days. We have a 4-5 day Mid-year retreat (in PA) for our volunteer program, and then I'll be home for about a week until Easter. When we get back down here, we'll be revving up for the CIW's big Spring action against Publix (a 35-mile march on April 16-18), but that will all merit it's own post when the time comes.

Thanks for reading, for your emails & comments, and for your patience while I've been slacking on these posts. Hope to hear from you soon!

Green, Green, Yellow, Green

2010-02-25T17:09:00.000-08:00

To start, apologies for the lack of posts this month. The other day, my mom left me a voicemail accusing me of "never putting anything up on the website anymore" -- I thought she was being kind of hasty and mom-like until I checked the blog and realized it's been over two weeks since I got anything up here. To make things formal, my official plan is to try to post something every two weeks or so - that's probably about half as often as I posted in the fall, but as things have started to become more routine here, you don't really need to hear about what color my boogers are.

Now, immediately after telling you that I've become a boring southern man, let me hit you with how jam-packed my life is. Last weekend, we hosted 3 of our fellow volunteers from our volunteer program (HMVS). The two girls stationed in Cleveland, Marie and Robin, flew down from Thursday through Monday, and our Miami volunteer, Susannah, drove over for Saturday. It was a pretty laid back visit, but it still requires a little extra-energy to host people for a few days in a row. Click here to check out a few pictures from their visit (plus new pictures from after-school!).

Coming up this Sunday, the second John Carroll group comes through (click here for details if you missed it last time). The day they leave, my little brother Greg is coming into town to spend a week with me on his spring break. Before he leaves, my older brother, parents, and aunt & uncle will be coming down for a week to spend some time with me and watch Pittsburgh Pirates spring training games. The same week they're down here, one of my best friends from college is visiting to get information on a project he's doing for medical school about migrant workers and health care. Three days after he leaves, I go back home for our mid-year retreat with the volunteer program. So, yeah, forgive me in advance if I slack on my blogging, but I guess not all of us can be in the running for Pittsburgh Sports Bloggers of the Year (vote now for WHYGAVS if you haven't and the poll is still open!).

With all that out of the way, I thought I'd post on a few things that I haven't really commented on in some months. Spanish, Kindergarten, and my 4 other jobs are still a pretty big part (in fact, the majority) of my life, but it's been a while since I really gave many details about any of them. Let's remedy that.

My Spanish has gotten better, but I still have a long way to go. Today was actually a really validating day at Social Services (the only job that I am required to speak Spanish at for the whole morning). Multiple people, after I spoke a few introductory sentences to them, replied with a surprised "You speak Spanish?" This may have seemed like a normal question, but most often, I don't get that response. More often, after my opening few sentences, it is plainly obvious that No, I don't speak Spanish, good luck if you have a complicated request this morning. Even though most of my conversations at the office are canned and heavily rehearsed (I have approximately the same conversation with 20-30 clients a week), to have people surprised that I speak somewhat-intelligibly in Spanish was a nice change.

As always, I need to do a better job of being less self-conscious of myself and just dive in - I sometimes surprise myself with how much I can speak and understand when I'm one-on-one with a Spanish-only speaker, but put me in the presence of any bilingual person (which is a very common person in Immokalee) and my brain starts to sweat a little. My dad once described the absorption of any knowledge as a brick that starts out sitting on top of your head - with time, patience, and practice, that brick eventually sinks down into your brain. I don't know how far my Spanish Brick has sunk in at this point, but I like to think that if I shook my head really hard, it wouldn't fall off.

My Kindergarten class has been pretty wonderful since coming back after Christmas. There are still days that I would beat children with hickory sticks if this were the '50s, but mostly, they've been great. I like to think that this has something to do with me. I feel like the first few months were extremely experimental (horrifyingly so... let's be honest, folks - I had no idea what I was doing), but I'm finally starting to understand my role. I've got a better idea of what types of activities do and don't work, what types of punishments and rewards do and don't work, and what's worth getting upset over versus what's worth letting go (after all... they are 6 year-olds). To reference a previous post, I'm finally starting to feel like Atticus Finch.

My other jobs -- well, there are four of them (Habitat, Soup Kitchen, Social Services, and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers), and I'm not really planning on giving each of them a huge summary. I'll do my best to give you a patch-work summary of each of them (I already kind of covered social services in the Spanish section).

Overall, I actually really do still enjoy each of them. I leave every job wishing that I could spend more time in my week working there, but that would of course eliminate time for one of the other jobs that I'm also really enjoying. I'm not only learning a lot at each of them, but I'm also becoming closer with many of the people I work with. The old guys at Habitat are becoming friendlier towards me ("You taking another half-day today, princess?"), I've started running with my Haitian friend, Frantz, from the soup kitchen, and I'm cementing more and more of my friendships with my CIW friends (both white and hispanic). On a side-note that deserves it's own sentence, I learned to drive the fork-lift at Habitat. This isn't one of those wussy little fork-lifts either - it's one of those awesome, bad-ass, could lift your car up and put in a dumpster fork-lifts. Want a visual? Here - this is the exact model we have on site. The morning I learned to drive it, I'm pretty sure I drove around the development with an un-wipe-offable-grin on my face for four hours. This grin will probably leave my face when I inevitably swipe the forks through a house, car, or pedestrian. Until then... I'M THE KING OF THE ROAD, BABY!

In summary, things are still great in Immokalee. Admittedly, they do feel more routine than they once did, but it's not exactly a normal routine is it? Maybe this is how circus performers must feel - I'm doing things that are generally unusual, often unpredictable, I suppose potentially dangerous at times; and yet I've been doing them so regularly that they are starting to feel... regular.

Well, that's all I've got for now. I'll do my best to get a post up somewhere in our hectic month of house guests, but forgive me if I fall behind. Thanks for reading, and your emails and comments are appreciated as always!

A Tale of Two Immokalees

2010-02-07T10:20:00.000-08:00

I was looking over my last couple of posts, and I realized that I've gotten into a routine of a few sort of downer posts in a row. I'm planning on focusing part of this post on more up-beat aspects of life, but before I do, I wanted to share one more piece of pretty lousy information.

Arabella, one of my closest friends here during the fall, recently moved back home to Mississippi. This past week, while parked on the side of the road (because she was making a phone call), a police officer pulled up behind her and approached her car on the passenger side. He then began to harass her fiancé, Javier (in the passenger seat), referring to him as a "fucking illegal." In Mississippi (as in Florida), police are not able to ask passengers of a car for identification, which Arabella informed the officer of. When she asked for his name and badge number, he arrested her for having an expired sticker on her license plate. He brought her and her fiance in, him on the fact that he didn't have identification - also not a crime. When four officers surrounded Javier and continually harassed him about his legal status, Arabella told him that he didn't need to say a word, and that he shouldn't say a word until they had a lawyer present. When the officer told her to "shut up" but she continued to remind her fiance of his rights, he charged both of them with disorderly conduct. Javier is now in jail, but will be transferred to a detention center soon, and deported shortly thereafter.

Last week, there were several meetings around Immokalee held about the recent implementation of the 287 (g) Agreement, which allows certain state and local law enforcement agencies to engage in federal immigration enforcement activities. The officer who spoke indicated that people get the wrong impression of this law, and that if you think about it, you need to be arrested before this law can really even take affect, right? So all this law is really doing is scooping up all of your felons, your drug dealers, your sex offenders, rapists, abusers, and deporting them. Who really wants them in our country anyways?

Since I've moved back here (barely one month ago), this is now two people that I either personally know or are very closely connected to that are being deported. Neither of them are criminals. Alex was one of the kindest people I knew in Immokalee, and his crime was public transportation. Javier has been busy splitting rent with his fiance, paying medical bills for his parents (Leukemia and kidney problems), and putting money away for his future home if possible. His crime was private transportation.

I’ve already re-written what I wanted to say next about five times, but I don’t think I really need to say anything else. I don’t really care anymore about how anyone else feels about race, privilege, immigration, or law enforcement. There are some things that will never sit right with me no matter how you attempt to justify them. When you sit down and ask yourself – is this right? Just listen. Don’t think.

COMPLETELY UNEXPLAINED TRANSITION TO SUNSHINE AND RAINBOW LAND!

Welcome to the chipper half of the blog post, folks! This is the side of things where I take a couple of breaths and remind you all that yes, I am actually having fun here. The following tid-bits are little morsels of joy that have made my life enjoyable over the past month.

Hans, the German roofer from Habitat, has been coming back pretty regularly over the past couple of months. One day during break, he told me that he’s a vintage car collector, and then told me the story of his favorite car he ever owned. One night in the '70s, on a business deal in Russia, he got super-drunk with a bunch of associates and wandered into a barn in the middle of nowhere. In the middle of the barn was a 1934 Russian convertible (apparently the same car that Schindler drives in Schindler’s List). The poor old farmer then wanders in and explains that in 1939, a Russian officer drove through his farm in the convertible, which broke down right outside of his door. He traded the farmer his tractor for the convertible, so that he could continue driving away from the Germans who were pursuing him. Knowing that Germans would be passing through soon, he buried the convertible in his field to cover any sign of Russian-Army compliance. The car stayed buried there for 17 years, until the farmer felt comfortable enough to unearth it, fix it up, and drive it around. Obviously appreciating that all good stories involve Hotrods and Nazis, Hans offered the farmer more money than he had ever heard of for the car. Hans drove it until last year, when it became too much of a hassle to continually repair. Also – the farmer’s daughter was allegedly a total babe – just sayin’.

During the Saturday of the JCU visit, we all (my housemates and the students) went to Habitat for the morning. Jerry, one of my favorite people at Habitat (he’s a future home-owner who was putting in his hours), gave Margaret and Liz a long talking to about love and relationships. Liz had mentioned that she was excited that her boyfriend of over two years was coming to visit the next week, and Jerry asked “Do you love him?” When Liz answered in the affirmative, Jerry laughed at her (and would later call her “foolish girl!”). He went on to explain in his thick Haitian accent that you can’t truly know love until you’re married – “Until you sleepin’ in the same bed. Until you realize –OhMyGod this man has changed- he is no longer trying to impress me. Until you having the baby you didn’t expect. Until then, you just hope – you pick a person, and you hope you can love them one day.” He fully expects each of us to call him one day and say “JERRY! OH MY GOD! YOU WERE RIGHT!” I’ll make sure to save his number.

I’m running in a 10.5. mile race (let’s just call it a “fun run”) with Margaret and Liz next Sunday. I’ve barely run at all since moving back here, so my current goal is to run 10.5 miles in less time than it took Greg to run 26.2.

Though my chin was never manly enough for facial hair, it is apparently manly enough for ringworm (thank you, kindergartners). People keep trying to make this better by reminding me “well, it’s not actually a virus or a worm, it’s just fungus.” Right. Fungus. On my face.

For somewhere around the 12th straight year, I was able to watch Groundhog’s Day on or at least moderately close to the actual holiday. As much as I usually hate to re-watch movies that I love, I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving Bill Murray saying “I don’t even have to floss,” right before he slowly wedges and entire piece of cake into his mouth. More than anything, I associate scenes like that with my dad laughing so hard that he’s crying, memories that never really get old either.

That’s about all that’s new from Florida. Instead of several feet of snow we’ve got some moderately harsh winds, which makes things just about even. Within the next 6 weeks, I’ll be paid visits from a JCU Staff member; our program’s two Cleveland Volunteers; another JCU Spring Break group; Greg for a week; Pat, my parents, and my aunt and uncle for another week; and a friend from college wedged within that same week. SO – things might get crazy here, but I’m going to try to put out a general update before things get rolling too fast.

As always, thanks for reading!

Freshmen, Frosts, Fault Lines, and Photos

2010-01-20T17:27:00.000-08:00

After a pretty hectic week or two, things are finally starting to cool back down (as the temperature starts to pick back up) in Immokalee. The John Carroll (JCU) kids were here from last Monday until this past Sunday, and as much as I loved having them around, it's been nice for life to quiet back down.

Before I go on, I'm realizing that I should probably explain this experience a little bit more. To summarize, we basically hosted 14 people for 10-12 hours a day. We split them into 4 small groups of 3-5 every day, and then each person I would live with would pick up a small group (from the center they all stayed at) and take them to whatever job we were doing that day. We would then bring them back to our house for lunch and an hour or so break, and then bring them to after-school with us, where they acted as additional tutors in our classrooms (which was incredibly helpful). After that, we brought them back to our house again, and they took turns making dinner throughout the week (another nice component of the week for us). After dinner, we had a presentation scheduled for them every evening, most of them hosted at our house. We had a local immigration lawyer come speak, a couple of people from the Coalition, one of our neighbors who was originally from Mexico, the woman who runs the after-school program, and a few others. Then, there was usually another hour or two of hang-out time at our house until we eventually dropped them back off at the center around 9:30 or 10.

The whole experience was somewhat surreal for me -- the schedule that we had them on was very similar to the one that I had while visiting last January, so I kept having flashbacks to a year ago. There was one point when a woman was giving a talk to the group, which was really the same talk she gave my group, and she said "I think you all ought to really examine your life and think about what it is that you're living for. If you're not living for other people, what else is there really?" I hadn't even remembered her saying that before, but as soon as she did, I recalled that her speech was one of the big motivators that made me think about applying for a year here.

Overall it was great - it was nice to see the few kids I already knew before they came down, and also nice to make a handful of new friends. More than anything, I was glad to sit in on the presentations and be refreshed on all of the Immokalee basics. After being here for almost five months, I guess I already was forgetting some of the things that make this town tick. If you want to check out pictures I took during their visit, you can click here to go directly to that folder.

Things in Immokalee have otherwise been pretty rough. The first couple of weeks of January brought a freeze that really ruined a big part of the tomato crop, and it's easy to see the difference around town. The soup kitchen that I work at usually holds 4 or 5 seatings (of 44 people) a day. Now, they're holding 8 or 9 seatings. The Social Services office usually sees about 50 people a day, but they've doubled that number in the last week or two. On top of all of that is, of course, the earthquake in Haiti.

As I mentioned earlier this year, Haitians make up around 10-15% of the population in Immokalee. That may not seem like a lot, but it certainly makes for more Haitian acquaintances than I had in Hermitage, PA or University Heights, OH. The days after the quake were the worst, when a few or my friends and co-workers were waiting on edge to hear from their families. I hadn't really realized until then that not only were their extended family back in Haiti, but most of them had at least one parent still in Haiti. Fortunately, I've heard good things from my friends about their nuclear families, but I do have friends with injured and deceased cousins.

Through these tough times, though, there are still positives to focus on. The Coalition posted a powerful article called Love Among the Ruins (click here to read it), which details the outpouring of generosity for donations to Haiti, even in a community that is struggling worse than ever to make their own ends meet. At the bottom of the article, they share a link that you can use to make a donation to Partners in Health, an organization that has been made famous for providing a preferential health-care option for the poor in Haiti. My mom suggested that I share that link with you all, so click here if you'd be interested in helping them recover and rebuild.

On one final note, Alex, my Guatemalan friend that was recently detained (described in the previous post), has made it safely home to Guatemala. Thank you to those of you who sent me reactionary emails to the post - I always appreciate knowing when something that I've written has stirred you, and I'll do my best to send you a personal email when things get a little less hectic.

We've got (what seem to be) a few slower paced weeks before life picks back up, so I'll do my best to keep posts regular while I can. Thanks for reading!

My Anniversary

2010-01-09T13:50:00.000-08:00

At this time one year ago, I was making my way to Immokalee for the first time. I signed up for an Immersion Trip to Immokalee during the Winter Break of my Senior Year because I wanted to have one last service experience under my belt while I still had the chance. At that time, I had no intention of doing anything but going to graduate school in the fall, did not know where I wanted to go to graduate school, and I hadn't thought seriously about taking time off to volunteer in probably two years.

I'm not really crazy about using proverbs or religious cliches, but I can't deny how much this makes me think of the saying "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans." Looking back over the past year, I can hardly believe how lucky I was to have been able to make the decisions that I did. I feel like I usually would have talked myself out making a spontaneous, life-changing decision like that one it took to get me here, but I'm incredibly grateful that I trusted my instincts. Since I got here, I've tried my best to continue to continue in that vein, trying to evaluate my decisions more on what's better for me as a person than what's more comfortable in that moment. I've probably failed just as often as I've succeeded, but just knowing that I'm trying makes a difference.

The one-year anniversary of coming to Immokalee is of course going to be celebrated with this-year's rendition of the JCU group coming to town for a week. I knew that it was a ton of work for the volunteers when I came last year, but I have a whole new appreciation for the planning that goes on now that I'm on the other side of the table. To be fair, the bulk of the work has been taken care of by Margaret and (especially) Alison, our veterans who have been through this a couple of times before. I'm sure that by the end of the week we'll be ready to have our regular lives back, but I'm also excited for the change of pace. The group was actually supposed to come in on Sunday (today), but due to some power-outages in Cleveland, they won't be here until tomorrow.

The other big (but pretty awful) news from Immokalee regards my friend Alex. You may have remembered me mentioning Alex earlier on in the year - he was a friend of mine that we went for runs with and was one of the few people in town I felt comfortable speaking Spanish with, but he moved to Oklahoma in seek of work in October. Well - after working some pretty terrible jobs out-of-state (where he was making less than half of minimum wage for 72 hour work-weeks), he managed to line up two job options in Immokalee, and was set to return here this past Wednesday.

Unfortunately, when he transferred from one Greyhound bus to another in Orlando, Immigration Officials came on the bus and asked for the I.D. of every individual on board. Alex is now in a detention center in Orlando, and will probably be deported back to Guatemala as early as the end of this week. Regardless of how you feel about immigration or undocumented workers in the United States, it's hard not to feel compassion for someone in this situation - this is especially true for me, now that it's happened to a person I know and care about.

Thanks to the United States and NAFTA, Alex and thousands of other young men are no longer able to stay in their home countries and make a living, but instead must illegally enter into the same country that is driving their poverty because it is their only reasonably hope of supporting their family. They work the jobs that no Americans would ever work, for wages less than half of what any American could legally accept, receive no government or other benefits, and must instead hide from that government. Despite all of this, Alex had found some happiness in his life here. He had a town full of friends in Immokalee, a steady (though demanding) job that he could use to help support his brother's schooling in Guatemala, and a serious girlfriend. Now, he is being sent back to the country that has been made poor by his prosecutors, and will spend 20 years in jail if he ever tries to come back and dwell in poverty in reward for doing the most thankless jobs in the nation.

I know that most of the people reading this made up their minds a long time ago about how they feel about illegal immigration, and one more sob story about some poor Guatemalan is not going to change that. But as we sit in the glow of our laptops, perhaps comfortable that the government has done the right things despite the hardships it may cause, comfortable in knowing that we will never, ever have to experience this kind of pain -- I hope that if nothing else, we can look at a situation like this and ask ourselves - what have we done to deserve this comfort?

New Years Pictures

2010-01-07T19:17:00.000-08:00

Howdy followers!

I got safely back to Immokalee on Monday evening, and I've been taking it nice and easy readjusting to life here. I plan on getting up a longer post with actual life details sometime this weekend, but for now, I wanted to post my pictures from New Years - I figured that most of my readers are family (who don't all have access to Faceboook), so it might be nice for you all to see some of the pictures I took at the annual Lackey festival.

If you're interested, you can click here and check out the New Years folder.

Homecoming (and pictures!)

2009-12-14T10:32:00.000-08:00

Pictures Note: At the risk of you just clicking over to the pictures and not reading the rest of this post at all, I've put up my last set of pictures from 2009. Once again, I think the album order got mixed up, but you'll be looking for the November to December album. Click here to go straight to the album.

I think it's safe to assume that this will be my last post before returning home (this coming Saturday, the 19th!). As I've indicated over the past few posts, it's really hard for me to believe that Christmas time is already here (part of that may be due to the 85 degree weather, but probably not all of it).

I remember that when I was at John Carroll, I never even really had an interest in studying abroad - I couldn't imagine really being away from my normal life for what I thought was such a long amount of time, and felt like I would be missing so much at school and at home. Even when friends of mine were gone for a semester, it would seem like they were gone forever, but they would always come back saying that the time had flown, and they wished they could have stayed longer. I guess I never really appreciated that experience until now - I've been completely away from my "normal" life and family for the equivalent of a semester, and it's hard to believe it's been more than a month. I've become so invested in my friends, co-workers, jobs, hobbies, and habits here that I would feel pretty devastated if I weren't coming back in January.

I worked at Habitat this morning, and I feel like it was a nice microcosm of my time here so far. When I arrived, I was told to join Lou, Bruce, and Martha on the roof doing shingles (on a side note, these 3 are like the Dream Team to me - the two men are at least 85, and Martha is in her 70s and still running triathlons. They spend every Monday on the roof, in the sun, lugging around shingles and laying them out on their hands and knees. They freaking rock.). Now, for the 3 months I've spent with HFH, this is honestly just about the first time that I've been assigned to do something that I've actually done before (with Hans, as you may recall). That meant that for the first time, I was able to hop right into it, know how to use all the tools, have a rough idea of what needed to be done, and actually be a help instead of a burden for the first two hours. As I was pumping nails into long lines of shingles, I felt the satisfied feeling of accomplishment that I've been hoping for from HFH for a long time.

At 10, we all hopped off the roof (not literally... though the Dream Team probably could have) and headed to the picnic tables for break. By now, I know a handful of the Monday volunteers (there are 15 or so of them) pretty well, and I know the HFH staff very well, and so I usually find myself having a pretty pleasant conversation at some point during break, which was the case today with Martha and Gloria (an HFH staffer). As I was walking back to the roof, I ran into Lorenzo (another HFH staffer), who is a Spanish-only speaker. He asked me something very basic about the work on the roof, and I was entirely unable to understand him. With my inflating ego properly restored to its original hiding place under a rock, I returned to the roof for a couple of hours before heading home.

When I say that this morning was a microcosm of my time here so far, I guess I mean that in three ways:

1 - In some regards, it's obvious that I've learned a lot. I can see evidence of this in my every day life, not only in the physical skills I may have learned (which are really not many), but especially in my mental practices. While I'm not always fully aware of it, Immokalee has challenged the way that I see the world, and that effects how I see every person I meet, every conversation I have, every motivation that drives me, and every routine that I'd allowed myself to become used to before moving here.

2 - I have grown very comfortable here. Not only have I adjusted to (and really enjoy) living with my housemates, but I've also become comfortable in many other ways. I've reached a status of understanding at most of my jobs that I now feel like I'm contributing rather than being trained, and I've also become friends with many of the people I work with. It's nice to get past that period of awkwardness and uselessness that accompanies new responsibilities, especially when I went through 5 sets of new responsibilities and work environments all at once. And while it's more demanding of my free time, it's a great feeling to have all of your weekends once again filled by social events with your friends. If you need more evidence of how comfortable I feel, just check back to my last post and my feelings on Thanksgiving in Immokalee.

3 - I've got a lot of learning left to do. Not only in the very obvious "white-boy-can't-speak-Spanish" way, but really in all regards. I've learned a huge amount about myself by seeing the world through the eyes of others, but it was only easy to learn so much because I knew so little. When I sit down and think about the level of education that is available to me right now, and how little time I have to absorb it all, it can be pretty overwhelming.

Though there are a lot of other things that have been going on in my life since my last post (many of them are touched upon in the pictures), but I feel like this is a good stopping point. I hope my opening paragraph didn't mislead anyone - I'm incredibly excited to get home and see my family (and most of my readers here, I'm sure), but I'm also excited that I'll be coming back to my new home in January. This has certainly been one of the most formative chunks of time I've experienced, and I can't wait to see what lies ahead.

Thank you all for reading, emailing, and commenting. Merry Christmas, Happy New Years, and check back in 2010!

Little Hand on the Eleven

2009-12-04T09:57:00.000-08:00

Notice: If you've checked out the Picasa web page lately, you may have noticed a folder with random pictures of classrooms. Those are for the John Carroll group that's coming in January, and really not related to anything I'm doing here.

Wasn't I just writing a post about how I was about half-way through my first stint in Immokalee? How is it already 2 weeks from Christmas break? Life here continues to amaze me with how fast it moves, but I guess part of the explanation could lie in how great and busy my last two weeks have been.

In my last substantial post, I mentioned that I was hopefully approaching a big stretch of free time, and that turned out to be entirely accurate. Last week, Thursday (Thanksgiving) through Sunday, were four of the most relaxed days I've probably ever had, and definitely in Immokalee. Thanksgiving morning was pretty hectic because we were volunteering at a community meal in the local park, but the busy work kept my mind off of the fact that I was missing the Gobble Wobble, so I appreciated that. Both Thursday and Friday night we attended or hosted a pretty large gathering of friends and co-workers, and I have to say that those were two of my favorite memories of Immokalee so far. I was surprised by how comfortable and happy I felt with the people around me, almost in the same way I would feel with my own family. Recognizing that I knew none of these people 3 months ago, but now consider them my closest friends gave me a deep sense of satisfaction and contentment.

We also went to the church carnival a couple of times, which had some surprisingly large (and probably life-threatening) rides. The whole fair was nostalgic of high school for me, but again, it was an eye-opening moment where I recognized how close I've become with the people in my life. The weekend also included plenty of sleeping in, reading, eating breakfast on the porch, watching movies with the housemates, and even a little bit of lounging in book stores.

The one downer from the weekend was that my friend, Arabella, went home on Friday. She has been interning for Student/Farmworker Alliance (the group at the CIW that I volunteer with) for the past semester, but her internship was up this past week, and so she's on to the next stage of her life. While it was a pretty sad moment to lose one of my better friends since moving to Immokalee, it was also a good learning experience. I've heard mentioned a few times before how difficult it can be for the friends we make at the CIW (those who permanently live here) to really get close to interns or ally staff members or volunteers like us, because in reality, we're just another stage in a continuous carousel of people moving in and out of Immokalee. So while it might have been tough for me to lose a friend like her, I'm really only beginning to recognize what many of my new friends have to go through multiple times a year, every year.

The other thing that's really speeding things along is that this Sunday is the biggest Publix protest of the year. The past two months of protests have been building up to this weekend, when we will head to Lakeland, FL, home of Publix's headquarters. We won't actually be at their heavily-gaurded/unreachable Fortress of Solitude, but will instead be protesting at Publix in town, then marching 2.5 miles to a local park, where we will be holding a rally. As far as I understand it, this weekend is expected to be by far the largest action of the year. The CIW this week has a really electric feel, and there's tons of work to be done to prepare and organize for the weekend, so the days are slipping away without much notice. Once again, if you're not sure what the basis of the whole Publix protest is, you can refresh yourself by clicking here, and review starting in about the second paragraph.

In other news, our house has a few visitors this week, who are also helping pass the time rather quickly. Margaret's parents came down on Wednesday and have entertained us with their company and home-cooked meals for the last few evenings, in addition to one of Alison's friends from college (who I also knew at JCU) staying with us this week. I think everyone is heading out at around the same time this weekend, and while it'll be nice to have things quiet down, a change in company is always appreciated as well.

Before I wrap up, I will say that my kindergartners have been far better this week. I think that's mostly the result of me putting in a substantial amount of more effort in my lesson and activity planning. I hadn't realized what a regular routine I'd gotten myself into with the kids, and am once again recognizing the importance of keeping things fresh with them. Hopefully I can keep up at this pace for a while (or at least until break).

That's all for now -- send me your thoughts if you have any, and I'll be seeing most of you before we know it!

24:48

2009-11-26T11:49:00.000-08:00

As mentioned, Liz and Margaret ran the First Annual Immokalee Gobble Wobble 5k with me this morning. It was strange to run on Thanksgiving in shorts and a tee-shirt, but I really appreciated them keeping up the tradition with me.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Late November Pictures

2009-11-25T15:00:00.001-08:00

I just put up some pictures from the last 2 weeks of protests and after-school. The date somehow got saved at October 30th, but the name of the folder with new pictures should be Late November.

You can click here to check them out. Enjoy!

The First Annual Immokalee Gobble Wobble

2009-11-25T10:54:00.000-08:00

After a month and a half of non-stop action, this week has finally yielded some of the long stretches of free time that I've been dreaming of. We don't have after-school at all this week, plus my Monday and Friday jobs have the day off, so I've really got myself a pretty legitimate holiday. Of course, to getting there took some doing.

This past weekend, I was in Georgia for the School of the Americas (SOA) protest. The SOA is located on the grounds of Fort Benning, and is an academy which trains international military personal. Over the past few decades, hundreds of graduates of the academy have returned to their home countries (mostly in Latin America) and committed heinous war crimes against their own people, using the military tactics they learned at the SOA. I've had many friends go to the SOA protest over the years (especially during my time at John Carroll), but had never attended before this year. Seeing as how I now live and work with a primarily Latin American community, this type of thing has a newfound significance for me, so I decided to tag along with the Coalition.

The weekend was nuts - it took about 10 hours to drive there (9 PM Friday to 7 AM Saturday), and 12 hours to get home on Sunday, but it was very worth it. The vigil protest at Fort Benning on Sunday was moving beyond description, but the best part (as almost always) was the quality time shared among my friends and co-workers. The CIW also held a Publix protest on Saturday night (there was a Publix close to the Fort, so they figured 'why not?'), which escalated rapidly. Before now, the most people I've seen at a protest was maybe 200 - the Saturday night protest had probably 400 people by the time the police shut it down, and quickly became a "let's leave before we get arrested" scenario.

I was completely zonked by the time the weekend was over, butI actually ended up driving for another 8 hours yesterday (a friend of mine got stuck in Orlando and needed a ride home). Fortunately, I've finally hit the Free Time Home Stretch I've been waiting for.

While I'm very grateful to have this time to myself, this is also really the first time that I've been really melancholy about not being in PA. For those who might not know, Thanksgiving in my house always means "The Gobble Wobble 5k," a Thanksgiving-day race that my dad has been the director of for the past decade or so. The last Gobble Wobble I missed, I think I was about 7 years old, and Greg and I stayed home to sled instead of go watch the race - even then I remember regretted missing it.

Race day is always such a hectic affair, but since I started college, I recognized that it was easily my favorite day of the year. It's heart-wrenching to think that half-way up the country, my family is folding shirts, entering names, lugging juice, carrying the pop-corn machine, stuffing bags, worrying about race chips, picking up bagels, and getting ready for race-day without me. And while Christmas morning is great, nothing compares to getting up early, finding out the route is mis-marked, wondering where the race timer is, not knowing whether or not to plow, going through the hurricane of race day registration downstairs (and later hearing about the equal magnitude of chaos of pre-registration upstairs), getting to the starting line 5 minutes before the horn blows, wondering how the hell Jake Dodd is still that much faster than you, smelling pop-corn and chugging Orange Drinks, sitting with Greg and watching my dad hand out Turkey Medals and whiff on handshakes, and then loading everything up while Mickey talks about Alice's Restaurant. It's safe to say that I'm pretty down about it.

On the upside, Liz and Margaret have promised to run 3.2 miles with me tomorrow in solidarity. I don't think we'll be able to make it right at 9 AM because we have other volunteer commitments, but it'll still be nice to get a run in on Turkey Day. It also makes it easier that Thanksgiving in Immokalee means the church carnival, which is allegedly one of the best weeks of the year. I don't plan on making it my new tradition, but it's certainly better than sitting around missing home.

I think that's about all that's new for me. I'm going to try to get some of my most recent pictures up within a day or two, so keep an eye out for those. And while this might have been one of my sadder posts, try not to feel too bad for me - remember, I am going to be spending most of the next 4 days lying around reading, eating, watching movies, and talking with friends.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Dance to the Time Warp Again

2009-11-20T06:27:00.001-08:00

As the Three Month mark rapidly approaches, life in Immokalee continues to move in a pretty strange pattern for me. On one hand, I'm completely exhausted. The biggest reason for this is probably the traveling; over the last four weekends, I've been at protests in Naples, Port Charlotte, Sarasota, Venice, Fort Myers, Gainesville, Tampa, Orlando, Lakeland, Miami, Bradenton, and St. Petersburg. I've been to a few of the locations twice, and stayed less than 18 hours at most of them. On the upside, things are beginning to wind down there - we leave for Georgia tonight, but we have next weekend off and then only one more weekend of protests before Christmas. Of course, if Publix doesn't cave, that means we'll be repeating this all in the spring, but I guess we'll wait to see what happens.

Another factor in my exhaustion is definitely the kindergartners. I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but the last 10 days or so have been a nightmare. I walked out of my classroom on Monday thinking "this was definitely the worst day of the year with them," and sadly, each day has only gotten worse. The general trajectory of my year has been something like this: the first month was great, they started to get out of hand, I cracked down, for another month they were great, they got out of hand again, I cracked down again, and then they staged a revolution against me and overthrew the castle.

Basically, they seem to have lost all respect for me, for each other, for the tutors, for the rules, for the director, and for punishments. I know there are many contributing factors, but I also know that the responsibility is primarily mine. I'm not sure what I need to do next, but I'm just grateful that we have all of next week off from after-school. I'm planning on coming back with the necessary authority when the program resumes, but right now, all I want to do is get through today.

The language aspect is continuing to exhaust me as well. I'm constantly reminded of how tiny my structural base in the language is, and recognize my need to really put an effort into independent study before I can expect to see large improvements. I actually see immediate improvements when I put in even a little extra effort, but it can be tough to motivate myself to spend my free time studying.

On the other side of all this is the fact that I still completely love living here, and time continues to fly unlike any other period in my life. I realized this morning that today was November 20th - I don't think I even fully knew it was November, much less that the month was over half gone already. I think back to what I usually feel like at this point in the school year - tired of that semester's classes, exhausted by looming finals, ready for a break - and realize that I really don't feel that way at all about being here. As mentioned, I'm certainly tired by being here, but definitely not tired of being here. If anything, I'm depressed that the first half of my year is slipping away from me so quickly.

As much as it may sound like I'm looking at this year and analyzing all of the ways that I could or should be doing things differently, I feel that I should really emphasize that I wouldn't change a thing about this year so far. I still feel like every day is an accumulation of more and more knowledge about myself and the world around me, and knowing that no one can ever take this experience away from me is more rewarding than just about anything else I've accomplished to this point in my life.

Next week should be a much slower week, so I'll probably put up a post around Thanksgiving, as well as try to keep my pictures updated. Thank you again for reading and for your emails.

Christmas Comes Early

2009-11-14T12:57:00.000-08:00

After having last Saturday off, I wasn't really too sure how I would handle going back to dedicating all of my free time to protesting again. Technically, we have a weekend off two weeks from now, but still, it was hard to get myself mentally back into that "no-stopping" mind frame. I think it's akin to going for a really long run - as long as you keep running, you don't really notice how much ground you're covering or how fast you're moving, but once you take a break to walk, running again somehow feels like some kind of punishment. That's about how I was feeling with these weekend protests.

Last night, though, I was sitting in our kitchen starting to toy with the idea of taking today off as well. Nobody except for me was really expecting or demanding me to go for both days, but I've basically assumed all week that I would. Just about that time, when it started to dawn on me that I could take today off if I wanted to (I would just need to make myself not feel guilty about it), I got a call from a staff member asking if I could leave on Sunday instead of Saturday so that I could drive on Sunday. HALLE-FREAKING-LUJAH!

So here I am, enjoying my second straight work-free Saturday, and never before have I appreciated weekends in this way. These past few months have taught me to really cherish my free time, so I'm doing my best to make sure I feel like I accomplish at least something, even on my off-days. This morning, I hoofed out probably my longest run since moving to Immokalee, and now I get to bask around all day in the glow of satisfied, complete exhaustion.

Running regularly has been especially tough for me over the last month. Not only have I lost my weekends and generally maintain much lower energy-levels, but the early darkness and inadequate lighting around town make it tough to fit in a run. Some days, I leave straight from school and trek around town until I get home, but even on those days it's almost pitch black by the time I make it back to our yellow castle. Admittedly, the one nice thing about only running a day or two a week is that I always have fresh legs - a run like the one that I did this morning would have really worn me down if I were going 5 days a week, but instead, I felt great and loose the whole way.

The other positive side of my running over the last month is that I have been doing a great job of covering new ground. If you recall, I'm doing my best to hit every road in Immokalee on foot, and you can check out my updated progress in that endeavor here. Constantly running somewhere new (even if I've seen in a car before) has really turned running back into an adventure for me, which helps on days when I need that extra motivation.

Fortunately, despite lowered running-levels, I don't exactly feel like a sloth. I still bike to work 3 or 4 times a week and usually play in the park at least once a week, so I definitely still feel active. A part of me wishes I could keep up with the running pace I established this past summer, but a different part of me thinks I might also die if I tried that right now.

As far as an update for living in the Land of Women, things are still going pretty well. Admittedly, the last 3 movies that I watched were either chick-flicks or heavily female-oriented (When Harry Met Sally, Love Actually, and Mean Girls), and I occasionally find myself doing things like singing along to Jason Mraz songs when I'm in the car by myself, but I think those are fair concessions to make in this situation. Tuesday nights usually entail 6 or 7 women sitting in my living room watching 2 hours of So You Think You Can Dance -- because I have to draw the line somewhere, those nights become an excellent opportunity to catch up on some quality me-time.

I think that's about all that's new for me as of lately. I'll be in St. Petersburg tomorrow, and then one more weekend of protests next week, followed by a week off, followed by our biggest protests on December 5 & 6 (in Lakeland, home to Publix's head-quarters). I'll probably spend the rest of the evening studying Spanish or maybe doing something really manly like baking brownies or cleaning the kitchen.

Until next time, thanks for reading!

Protests and After-school Pictures

2009-11-11T10:45:00.001-08:00

It's been a few weeks since I put up any new pictures, but I've definitely still been taking them. I have pictures from the last 3 weekends of protests (Gainesville, Orlando, and Miami), as well as a few pictures from after-school spliced in between them.

In case you've forgotten what all these protests are about in the first place, you can go back and read up on the campaign against Publix here (the explanation starts in the second or so paragraph). If you'd rather just scoot right over to the pictures, you can click here and check out the Early November folder.

Hope you're all enjoying, and thanks for the emails!

In the Novembers, but feels like Julys

2009-11-06T14:22:00.000-08:00

As the title indicates, things in Immokalee have really only barely cooled down since I got here. Most people in town are talking about how unusual it is to have this kind of weather this late into the year, so I'm doing my best to enjoy it while it lasts. I think the oddest thing (regarding the weather) for me since being here is that it still gets light and dark at about the same time as home, but the weather feels more like mid-summer than mid-fall. My inner-Pennyslvanian keeps expecting it to be light until 8 or 9 because of the temperature, but then the sun is basically set by 6. We've got a few of the alleged "cool days" that people told me to expect this time of year, but it's more like perfect weather/nature's air conditioning on those days than anything else.

As far as my personal life, today (Saturday) marks my first real day off in about a month. I decided to take a break from the road-tripping and protesting for a day (I'll probably still go to Miami tomorrow), which I can tell I really need at this point. As I mentioned, the actions/protests/pickets have been one of the best parts about living in Immokalee, but it also makes things difficult when you're used to a schedule with at least a little bit of free time.

I'm not sure if it's the result of the actions or just general osmosis, but I've lately been realizing that my Spanish is definitely getting better. I still feel completely inept when I'm surrounded by it, but I do definitely understand much more of what's being said. In a way though, that almost makes things harder. When I could hardly understand anything, it was easy to not be involved in conversations, but now, even though I understand more of what's being said, I still feel like my own word-formation and talking-skills would be way too slow for most conversations. Still, I'm grateful to be able recognize at least some headway. The frustration remains, and there are days when I just really want the results without putting in the hard work, but I can certainly see a difference over the past two months.

Other than that, nothing has been too crazy in Immokalee. I feel like I've gotten myself into a good routine with the kindergartners, and I think my tutors and I are beginning to function well as a team. Even with better-established control and a smoother class-room system, I can hardly believe that anyone could spend their whole life doing this (particularly for more than just a couple of hours an afternoon). It's really made me look back on my early elementary school teachers and think about which ones I liked, which ones I thought were mean, and ultimately, which were better teachers. I can't say that the groups fit nicely into one category or another, but I can certainly understand the importance of a strong authority figure more now than I could then.

I didn't meet any crazy Germans or drug-lords this week, but I still learned a lot. One thing that Immokalee constantly reminds me is that no matter what you're doing, you have the opportunity to learn from where you are, who you're with, and who you are in that moment. As long as I keep myself open to those ideas, I have a hard time believing I'll ever stop learning from Immokalee.

Hans the Roofer

2009-10-30T10:43:00.001-07:00

One of the best part about working at so many different locations is getting to meet such a variety of people. It's nice to meet the clientele that come to most of the locations, but often, my fellow employees are colorful enough to make things interesting. Lots of times I forget that many of the people in Immokalee who are doing any kind of service work are doing community service hours for crimes they've committed, and then I find out that the nice man who just taught me how to tile is a notorious drug-trafficker. It's also hard to remember that just about anyone who's over 18 has at least one kid, and that most of them are shocked to find out I don't have any. Anyways, this is the story of one of my favorite new acquantences.

This past Wednesday at Habitat, I was assigned to put shingles on a roof with a few other guys. These last couple weeks have seen a nice shift from painting every day towards actually learning new skills like cutting base-boards, laying tile, putting up siding, and roofing. Anyways, I was working with one other Hispanic guy when I turned around and almost walked right into an older white gentlemen. The majority of the Habitat volunteer corpse is made of retired "snow-birds" (folks who move south for the winter), so it's not too unusual to see an older white guy. What was unusual however was that he introduced himself in a thick German accent, saying "Good marning, mah name is Hans," and proceeded to crush my fingers with the marble-hewn mitts he calls hands.

Hans has a history of roofing, so he and I spent the whole morning working together, him showing me the basics. Turns out he still lives in Germany 6 months out of the year, but he and his Finnish wife also live in Naples from about November through May. He didn't really know any Spanish, so I was translating for him (very basic things) to our other friend, but he seemed interested in learning. For whatever reason, I decided to ask him how many languages he knew. His response: "Vell, obveeously German and Finnish. And also Russian, French, and ... some English." Some English. We talked for four hours, and the only word in English he didn't know how to say was "scaffolding." Out of his 5 languages, this the one he knows the least. Who is this guy? The pope?

He then went on to tell me that he learned about roofing while in University in Germany, where he repaired steep 6th and 7th story rooves that had stone and marble tile for shingles. Most companies were very expensive because they needed to put up scaffolding around the buildings, but he just tied a rope to himself and did it for half the cost. "I made very, very good munney. It vas dangerous, but, ah, you know, I bought a fast car, lots of money for beer. It vas good."

When Armando (a perennial Habitat employee) joined us for a bit on the roof, the two of them started talking beer. The conversation (of course) turned to the German Purity Law of 1573, which states that beer can be made of 4 (and only 4) components. Hans explained that most countries (including America) make corn-based bear (instead of truly-wheat based), which is why "I'm sorry, but, ve call American beer 'German Rain-Vater.'" He also lamented the "tiny sizes" of American beer bottles. "If I vant to get drunk, ah!, I spend half ze night opening bottles. Why so tiny?" Hans' last name was even something like Hoppner - could one possibly be any manlier?

At the end of the day, he slapped my back (nearly severing my spinal cord) and said that he would see me next week. Some days, Immokalee is hard place to live. Other days, I can't really imagine being any where else.

Coasting Downhill

2009-10-26T12:44:00.001-07:00

About a week or so ago, everyone in my house sat down and we all bought our tickets for flights home at Christmas. I believe the day that I'm heading home is something like December 19th, and if I got here on August 30th, and the Math Sector of my brain still functions mildly correctly, I think that means I've just about passed the half-way point of my first "semester" in Immokalee. This fact seems ludicrous to me.

Admittedly, I am starting to feel more like I've been here for a while. My weeks have developed a natural rhythm to them that give my life more of the structural feeling that I'm used to, but I'm not sure whether or not I really like that. When I wrote my 1 Month Review, I mentioned that I felt like I had a "I can't believe this is my life/I'm so grateful to be here" moment every day. I still feel that way, but lately, especially over the past couple of weeks, I'm lucky if life slows down long enough for me to notice anything. I've settled in enough that my social and work schedules seem to have expanded into those open hours that really abounded during my first few weeks, and while I'm constantly reminding myself that I'll only have these chances once, I know that I need to do a better job of taking time for myself.

The after-school program is starting to feel more normal as well. Last week was kind of my "crack-down" week with the kids, and it was actually a pretty big success. Over the first month and a half, they gradually (and without me really noticing) got louder and more unruly until it got to the point that a day-time teacher who passed my classroom stopped in to scream at my class. While I felt like she was over-reacting a bit, I did recognize that I could be doing a better job of keeping them in order. Sometimes it's just hard for me to draw the line between Fair Disciplinarian and Just Plain Mean, but I think I do a good job. I recently re-read To Kill a Mockingbird, and though it's fiction, I was again inspired by the calm/assertive power of Atticus Finch. Whenever I start to over-react, I just think to myself Remember Atticus... Remember Atticus... As I mentioned, the kids really cleaned up their act this week, so I'll have to see how long I can play Atticus for.

This past weekend was another big protest for the CIW. We went Gainesville (to the University of Florida) to protest Aramark (the food service provider on campus) and Publix (which has stores right around campus). Despite UF being pretty dead during the mid-afternoon of a non-football weekend, the level of student support was great. Also, Dan Schneck, one of the guys I lived with for the last two years at John Carroll, goes to grad school at UF now, so he came out to the protest and I got to hang out with him for a couple of hours. It was really nice to see him, but also kind of strange -- he's the first person I've really seen from my life before Immokalee, and having the two realities blend like that kind of messed with my head.

Saturday night, our group (of 40 or so) had to stay at a few different locations because we couldn't all fit at one spot. A few of the higher-ups asked if I (and 4 farmworkers) would mind staying with a student who offered his apartment. I said I didn't mind, but kind of hesitated when they said I'd need to do any translating. I was about to back-out when someone who had stayed there before said "No, don't sweat it, the one guy who lives there is fluent." Well, turns out that guy wasn't home.

This lead to a mildly comical situation where I was translating between 4 farmworkers and 4 students - I was fine converting English into Spanish, but I only understand maybe a quarter of the responses being said in Spanish. So, basically, I just made some stuff up that used a lot of the same words as the farmworkers had said... it was the exact kind of moment I'd hoped this year would bring -- really uncomfortable, totally embarassing, but a complete learning experience.

The next morning at breakfast, 3 of the guys who I'd stayed with the night before called me over to their table to sit with them. We didn't really talk about anything, and I'm still not sure why any of these guys seem to like me, but I am definitely grateful that I've been somewhat embraced by the community.

I think that's about all that's new in Immokalee. I'm planning on doing maybe one more weekend protest (this weekend is Orlando), and then probably taking next weekend off. I think that there are 7 weekends in a row of protests, so it'll probably be a nice point in the middle to take a break.

If you've got the time, I'd love to hear how things are going in your lives. Thanks for reading!

Pictures!

2009-10-20T19:33:00.000-07:00

Hey team,

As promised, I put up a nearly suffocating amount of pictures earlier today. I think there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 110 of them, so make sure you've got a few free minutes before leafing through them. They cover the following occasions: Alex's Going Away party, the kitten that lives on our porch, more after-school shots, pictures I took during the protests, and pictures other people took of me during the protests. You can find them here under the title "October, Part 2."

Enjoy!

A "Mary Jo Lackey" Week

2009-10-19T10:43:00.000-07:00

If last Monday was a Greg Lackey Monday, it was only the beginning of what evolved into a very "Mary Jo Lackey" week. My dad and I have long marveled at how Momma Jo is able to go go go all the time, and I've always figured that if I had to live like her, I would be exhausted all the time. Well, yep, turns out that's the case.

After a pretty jam-packed Monday, I spent the rest of the week gearing up for this past weekend. This weekend marked the kick-off of the Coalition's campaign against Publix, the Florida grocery store. As I mentioned in previous posts, the Coalition (CIW) is trying to get Publix to sign similar agreements as all of the fast food companies have now signed. Such an agreement would say that Publix would: 1) sign a code of ethics that they would cut ties with any growers found to use unethical procedures in their fields (such as the grower they currently employ that was convicted of forced-slavery, in Immokalee, only last year), 2) pay one penny-per-pound more for tomatoes picked to farmworkers, and 3) have a 3-way meeting between Publix, the CIW, and growers.

The CIW and its supporters have been mailing letters and post-cards to Publix managers and their headquarters for several months, with their only response being that they "don't get involved in disputes between growers and their employers." This was the same response that the fast food companies gave before meeting with the CIW, and is empty because this isn't about any specific dispute, it's about a choice that Publix has to make.

After such a failure to respond, the CIW moves to it's next stage, which is going on what they call "actions," which was what I spent this past weekend doing. In reality, these are protests (or "educational pickets") that they hold for an hour or two outside of different Publix stores all over Florida. For example, this weekend, we had 3 actions on Saturday (one each in Naples, Port Charlotte, and Venice), followed by 2 on Sunday (Sarasota and Fort Myers), with Church presentations at 3 churches in Sarasota on Sunday morning. We spent both days driving from one location to the next, stopping to eat at various churches or other ally organizations that had offered to support us during the trip. The Fort Myers protest was preceded by a candle-light vigil at the federal courthouse, in honor of the 1 year anniversary of the discovery of the most recent slavery case (which was prosecuted at that location).

There were about 30 people from the CIW that went on the full weekend trip, and we were joined by about 20 more CIWers on Sunday, in addition to the 10-50 people that joined us at each different location. We mostly held signs, chanted, and passed out flyers to cars and people passing by. At each location, there was some kind of news coverage, including 3 camera crews at the vigil/final protest - you can check out some of the Naples News Coverage (and pictures!) here. It was a great time, and great way to get closer to a lot of my friends, but also totally exhausting. I had also spent most of my free time last week either making calls to CIW supporters to let them know about the time and location of the pickets nearest to them, or drawing and painting the signs for the pickets, so I feel pretty zonked right about now.

Also looming on the horizon is the fact that this will happen every weekend from now until the middle of December (assuming Publix doesn't sign by then). I'm pretty sure I won't be road-tripping every weekend, but I'll probably go again this weekend as the destination is Gainesville, where one of my former roommates now goes to school at University of Florida.

One relaxing aspect of the present is that we have today off from after-school. Thank God. I had to get up early for Habitat today, but it's so nice to have a free afternoon ahead of me. It's also finally cooled down in Florida - after spending all of last week in the nineties, we dropped in the fifties over the weekend. That was mostly nice except for me not bothering to pack anything long-sleeved, and then getting rained on for the first couple of hours of picketing. Still, it feels nice to have weather cooler than my body temperature.

Of course, after all that, when I talked to my mom earlier this weekend, she told me she "had been on a business trip to Canada and Michigan all week, was home for 18 hours, and then was heading out for Chicago in the morning." I'm still no Mary Jo.

I've taken a ton of pictures over the last couple of weeks (including some from this weekend), so I'll try to get those up either later tonight or tomorrow. Hope all is well in your homeland!

A "Greg Lackey" Monday

2009-10-12T19:46:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I got a call from (my younger brother) Greg, who told me that he had "beasted" a half-marathon. He woke up at 5:30 A.M. to drive home from PSU, and stopped in Punxsutawney to run the half. He was hoping to run it at a 6 minute 50 second (per mile) pace, and ended up running it at a 6:45 pace, which he was really happy with. Now, I should clarify right now that the farthest I've ever run is 6.5 miles, so already he's got my personal best doubled, at a pace well under a minute quicker than my usual. Still, this half was part of his marathon training, so I was inclined to ask him "At the end of it, did any part of you say 'Holy Crap, can I really run that fast for twice as long?' "(for when he runs the full marathon in November). His response: "Well, no, not really - I ran an extra seven miles, six before and one after, at about the same pace, so I felt pretty good about it." It's times like these that I think one of us was traded at the hospital.

Every once in a while, though, I have a day that is worthy of being called a Greg Lackey Day. Today was one of those. I woke up and went to Habitat, where I (for really the first time) did actual labor in the sun for four hours. There were hammers and saws involved, and I even felt kind of like a man. Then I came home, got changed, and went to the after-school program. From there, I ran 4 or 5 miles around Immokalee and ended up back at my house. I wolfed down some chicken and veggies that Margaret had whipped up, then we went to the park and played soccer for about an hour before the lights went out. I had trouble falling asleep last night - if the problem persists tonight, I might actually be a zombie.

Still, days like today are what I love about Immokalee. I love that I can spend my free time however I want, and I even got a nice solitary event (my run) mixed in with a social event (soccer). I'm exhausted at the end of the day, but there's also a huge feeling of accomplishment. No wonder time seems to be going so quickly here.

One other note - I've decided that I'm going to go all Forrest Gump on Immokalee. The town is small enough that I can basically run anywhere, so I intend to run everywhere. Over the first month or so, I've mostly repeated a few of the same loops, but I got inspired last week when I went a new route and saw a whole bunch of things I'd never seen less than a mile from my house. So, over the course of the next year, I'm planning on seeing everything there is to see in Immokalee, on foot. I put up a map of Immokalee on my Picasa page with everywhere I've run high-lighted in red (you may have to click on it more than once to get the full-screen image) - I figure if I clue you all in on this as well, it will make me more likely to go through with it. For reference, the distance from my house to Pinecrest (the elementary school I work at, and where my runs often start) is only about 2 miles if you take the shortest route. I'll try to keep this map updated every month or so.

This upcoming week promises to be pretty busy due to the kick-off of the CIW's campaign against Publix, but I'll try to keep you all updated. Thanks for reading!

Cha-Cha threw a can of green beans at Chicka-weewee

2009-10-10T17:18:00.000-07:00

Instead of the regular life update this weekend, I thought I'd share a little piece of Immokalee folk lore.

Every child in Immokalee knows about Chicka-weewee. If you're outside playing when it's getting close to dark, your mother will call "You better get inside unless you want Chicka-weewee to get you!" When you get off the bus after school, your parents tell you "Make sure you come right home and lock the door behind you, otherwise Chicka-weewee will follow you into the house." The volunteers who lived in my house last told me that they always heard their kids at school talking about Chicka-weewee; where they had seen her, what she had done, which bus stops she hung out at. They had assumed that Chicka-weewee was akin to "La llorona" (the crying woman), a Latin American folk legend who wanders the banks of the Rio Grande crying and searching for her lost/drowned children. Turns out, Chicka-weewee is a real person.

Katie, who used to be an HM volunteer but now works a different job in Immokalee, turned me on to Chicka-weewee. One day last month, she told a bunch of us a story about this strange, ape-like woman with ridiculous layers of very pale make-up who is incomprehensible in two languages that came into her office. The woman's name was Linda, and she got lost trying to find her way out of the building (which only has 2 doors in - the bathroom and the exit). The next day, Katie was playing with some local kids, and when she brought them inside the building, she looked out the window and saw Linda walking by. Simultaneously, all the kids screamed "Chicka-weewee!!" She was stunned to realize that she was actually a real person, but suddenly, all of her kids stories made sense.

A couple days later, I was helping Katie with a community garden she does for her job. As we were leaving, Katie pointed to a strange woman that walked by and mouthed "That's Chicka-weewee!" with her eyes bulging (her initial description was dead on). Since then, I see Chicka-weewee probably almost every day. She wanders around basically any part of Immokalee - I pass her on the sidewalk during runs, see her at the Winn-Dixie, and have driven by her a handful of times as well (she's identifiable from maybe a quarter mile away). Apparently the real story with Chicka-weewee is that she just loves kids, but her love isn't very well received by the general public. Most people speculate that she's maybe not entirely right in the head, which could be part of it. Earlier today, I got to witness her affection first-hand. I was helping at the garden where about 7 or 8 little kids were helping us, and I watched as mother's apprehensively eyed Chicka-weewee trying to hold hands and walk off with any child who would let her. She has also apparently wandered into strangers houses and asked to use the restroom, so the motherly warnings I posted above no longer seem so ridiculous.

Well, to pull things full circle, Margaret is friends with a woman named Cha-Cha. At some point, Margaret was working with Cha-Cha and other local mothers, and the conversations turned to "times Chicka-weewee has tried to steal my child." Apparently, one time, Cha-Cha was in the Winn-Dixie when Chica-weewee walked up to her son, grabbed his hand, and started wandering off. Not knowing what else to do, Cha-Cha hurled the can of green beans she had in her hand off of Chica-weewee and retrieved her son. Now, I admit, sometimes Immokalee isn't really that different from home. But anytime you can hear or say the sentence "Cha-Cha threw a can of green beans at Chica-weewee" with any sense of normalcy, it's probably a good indicator that you're not in Kansas anymore.

More After-School Pictures

2009-10-07T17:56:00.000-07:00

Even though I think I got at least one picture of all of my kids up last week, I've been doing my best to take a few shots every day. Monday is our day on the playground, so I got a lot of great pictures there, plus, one of my tutors took hold of the camera today, so there are a actually a few of me with the kids. Click here for the latest.

I've been compiling a decent amount of pictures in my normal life as well, but I think I'll wait a few more days before I put those up. Until then, enjoy!

One month down

2009-10-06T10:56:00.000-07:00

Well, it's official - I've been a Floridian for over a month. I can hardly believe that much time has passed already, but also, it kind of feels like I've lived here forever. I keep waiting for some of the shine to wear off of things, but really, I just feel grateful every day to be here. The other night, Margaret was telling me about how when she was biking home that night, she turned down a road that looked out over a massive field, and on the other side of it, the full moon was glowing an orange-red just above the horizon. She said she stopped her bike, and just stood there thinking "I can't believe this is my life." I feel like I have a moment like that every day.

Probably the hardest thing for me to do is to make sure I'm taking some down time, especially since school started. It seems like every night there's something else to do, and if I'm not careful, Thursday or Friday rolls around and I'm totally drained. Still, I want to take every opportunity to make new friends, practice Spanish, enjoy nature, or educate myself, so it's difficult to draw a line somewhere.

As far as the Spanish goes, things have been getting better. I'm aware that I'm barely inching along, and I have had to admit that it would take much longer than a year to reach the level that many of my white friends speak at, but still, I can feel some improvement. I'm slightly less timid to speak it in public, and I think that's probably one of the most important things for me to get used to. My housemates and a couple of other friends are really excited to help anyone who wants to learn, so I've got a huge advantage there.

As I mentioned in some picture captions, our friend Alex (the one I went on runs with) left this past weekend. Alex is a 22-year-old Guatemalan, and he's lived in Immokalee for the last three and a half years. He got fired from a job in a tortilla bakery/store that he worked 12-16 hours a day for, every day (and I mean every. day.) for the last three years. A couple of weeks ago, he missed his fourth day in three years, and he got fired because one of the women who works there started a nasty rumor about why he missed. Rather than try to work in the fields, he headed to Oklahoma, where a friend said he might be able to get a job in a restaurant. As much as Immokalee has taught me that people are not always as they appear (many of the people who work at the same volunteer sites I do are convicts doing community service), you don't need to speak to the same language to know when someone is a genuinely kind person. I'm very grateful to Alex for teaching me that, as well as for his patience in my learning Spanish.

One other thing - both of my parents commented on how nice the elementary school looks (in the pictures with the kids). That's because while Immokalee is one of the poorest towns in the South, it's located in one of the richest counties (Collier), which borders or contains parts of Naples and Ft. Myers. Because of that, many of the public buildings (including schools) in Immokalee are great facilities, but some of them are literally hundreds of feet from 2-room trailors that house 15 people. I guess it's an interesting contrast.

That's about all I've got for now. I took some great pictures of the kids on the playground yesterday, so I'll try to get some more through out this week and update the Picasa page by the weekend. Thanks for reading!

Kindergarten Pictures

2009-10-02T09:54:00.000-07:00

As promised, I managed to take a few pictures of the kindergartners this week. I think I have a picture of just about everyone in my class, so you'll be getting a pretty good idea of who I spend every afternoon with.

I'll try my best to periodically add more shots of the kids over the year, but for now, you can click here to check out this week's photos.

The Big News

2009-09-30T15:10:00.000-07:00

As I've mentioned a few times over the past week, the Coalition (CIW) recently scored what is widely being considered it's biggest victory to date. About two weeks ago, East Coast Growers and Packers announced that they would be dropping out of the Florida Tomato Grower Exchange (FTGE) in order to pass the extra penny per pound to fieldworkers. As detailed in a previous post, the FTGE has been slamming fines on anyone who agreed to pay the extra cent per pound to fieldworkers, and East Coast is the first major grower to leave the FTGE in order to make sure that they are paying a fair wage. While some smaller organic growers have already dropped from the FTGE, East Coast is the number 3 grower of tomatoes in Florida, so their decision to drop out of the FTGE is really a huge victory for the CIW.

At almost the exact same time, Compass, the world's largest food service company, agreed to sign a contract with the CIW guaranteeing that they would: ethically pay their workers (end wage abuse), keep workers empowered and informed of their rights, form a worker-controlled health and safety committee, and allow themselves to be monitored by a third party. This agreement was similar to the ones that the CIW has already made with Taco Bell, Burger King, McDonalds, and Whole Foods. The CIW, Compass, and East Coast all met in D.C. to sign agreements this past weekend, where they were accompanied by U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis.

So what does this mean? It means that fieldworkers who are employed by East Coast will be paid one penny more per pound of tomatoes picked - raising the payment per bucket from under 50 cents to around 80 cents. Over the course of a year, that would raise a fieldworker's annual income from around $10,000 to $16,000-$17,000 per year. This also means that all companies who have signed contracts with the CIW must purchase their tomatoes from East Coast (or any other growers who choose to drop out of the FTGE), because these are the only companies paying their workers a fair wage.

This also topples one of the biggest arguments that companies have used in order to prevent signing agreements with the CIW. For the past 5 years, the companies that had signed contracts were paying the extra penny into an escrow account, but the money was not reaching the fieldworkers. Reticent companies often refused to sign agreements on the grounds that it made no difference anyways, because the extra money would never make it to the fieldworkers - that argument is dead now.

How does this affect you, the purchaser? Right now, it mostly doesn't. There's still no system in place to guarantee that the tomatoes you buy are "fair-trade" or slave-labor free. The CIW is working with some companies (including Whole Foods) in an attempt to start that type of classification, but it really hasn't been possible until this agreement to guarantee that fieldworkers of any given company were treated fairly. Hopefully, the agreement will allow some kind of fair-trade-type standards to be put into place. If you'd like to support the cause, the CIW's recommendation is to join the Campaign for Fair Food (once the Campaign reaches far enough north that you can actually do something about it, I'll let you know).

What's next? The CIW is still attempting to get more companies to sign agreements with the Campaign for Fair Food. They've mostly toppled the fast-food world, and are moving on to food service companies and super-markets. They've had a major victory with Compass, but they're still targeting companies like Aramark and Sudexo (one of those three probably provides dining hall food for you or your children). The major supermarket under fire right now is Publix, the biggest grocer in the southeast. While they've been resisting negotiations for several months, they may change their stance after the recent agreement with East Coast. Once Publix signs on, I'll let you know what you can do help the CIW win over chains that you would be more likely to see in the north (Krogers, Giant, Giant Eagle, etc.).

While I've still got a lot more information on all of this, I think it would be better to give you just the basic details. If you've got other questions about anything I just mentioned, feel free to email them to me. If I don't know the answer, I'm sure I know someone who does.

That's all for now - you may have noticed that I added a "Common Abbreviations and Friends" spot on the sidebar. I thought it would make things easier in case I ever fail to explain an abbreviation, or you forget which friends I live or work with. I've been taking pictures of the kids at school this week, so I ought to have some more photos up by maybe this weekend. Check back soon!

New Pictures!

2009-09-28T19:52:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a slightly better job of toting my camera around over the last week, so I put up 50 or so new photos on the Picasa Site (under "September, Part Two"). There's nothing too exciting, but I documented some of the adventures we took over the past couple of days, and there are many more (non-blurry even!) pictures of my housemates, so you can all get some kind of idea of who I'm living with.

As the captions indicate, we went out to the beach in Naples tonight to celebrate the CIWs big victory. Part of me is jealous when I hear my family talk about how it's "sweatshirt weather" back in PA, but then I go to two different beaches on consecutive nights, and I decide I'm doing okay for myself in Florida.

As I mentioned yesterday, I'll try to put up a post about the Coalition's recent victory within a couple of days. Until then, enjoy the pictures!

Week Two Looms

2009-09-27T19:03:00.001-07:00

Well, I've officially completed one week with my kindergartners. As optimistic as I was on Wednesday, I was completely worn out by the end of the day on Friday. Thursday was really the first day that the kids constantly tested us, and I was totally wiped by the time it was over.Friday was actually a little bit better on the whole, but it also contained an incident where one little girl threw a boy to the ground and he bit his lip open. By the end of the week, my tutors and I had good reason to be visibly exhausted.

Still, I feel like I've learned a lot in a week. I've learned what types of things I can do to keep their attention (keep them moving, play learning games), and what types of things are really a miserable idea (staying in the seats for too long, trying to carry activities from one day to the next). I still need to get myself completely settled into a daily routine with them, but I do think that the first week went well, all things considered. As I write this (on Sunday night), another week feels a little daunting, and the prospect of a full school-year seems down-right ludicrous, but I'm doing my best not to underestimate myself.

Fortunately, the weekend was both relaxing and exciting enough that I feel energized for a new week. I spent a decent part of the weekend catching up on all of my favorite TV shows online, but also managed to be social. There was another long volleyball session at the park, followed by a small gathering at Katie's (a former HM volunteer) house last night. As much as I feel like my Spanish has improved, Oscar (a Guatemalan friend) was talking to me in Spanish last night, and I was just too tired to even interpret him. One of my housemates translated off-and-on for me, and I was almost embarrassed by the simplicity of the conversation that I was having trouble understanding. Still, I'm sure I've come a long way in a month.

Today, I spent the full day with Liz and Margaret (two of my housemates) in Fort Myers. We went out to the Unitarian Universalist church that Allison (who works with Margaret through Interfaith Action and the Coalition) is the pastor at. It was interesting to go to a church with a female minister and listen to a sermon that focused more on humanity than any kind of divinity. I'm not really saying that I preferred it or disliked it compared to Catholicism, but I certainly appreciate the variation.

Afterwards, the three of us hit up the Ft. Myers beach for a few hours, then set off for a sports bar. Margaret and I are both Steelers fans, and Liz is from Cincinnati, so today was a big day for the house. As we cut through a parking lot to a cryptic tiki bar that we were given directions to, I heard a couple of yinzers (who must have seen our jerseys) shout from behind "Ay, Eric, I'm goin' where these kids are goin'!" Between Pam and Eric (a middle-aged couple from the South Hills) and the oddly massive conglomerate of Bengals fans at the bar, the three of us basically ate and drank for free the entire afternoon. Despite a pretty lack-luster effort from the Steelers, the afternoon was still a success on the whole. Liz doesn't seem to be rubbing our faces in it too bad, so hopefully we can return the "good-winners" favor later this year.

That's about it as far as personal updates go, but there was also some big news for the CIW this week. The Coalition met with East Coast Packers and Growers (who recently agreed to pass the penny to farmworkers) in D.C., and were joined by the Secretary of Labor and members of other social justice groups. I'll do my best to get something more extensive up within a few days, but as far as the CIW goes, this has been their biggest victory to date.

All right, I'm burnt out enough for an early turn-in, so thanks for reading, and check back for more updates later this week!

"Uncle Dan" Your Kindergartners

2009-09-23T17:26:00.000-07:00

For those of you unfamiliar with the verb, to "Uncle Dan" something is to calmly have total control over it. The Hann Hill Lackey's have long marveled at how calm the McIntyre Lackey's dogs always seem to be, but then when we watch Uncle Dan assertively issue "Aleric. Down. Now." with that "Uncle Dan" look in his eyes, we realize that we'd probably do whatever he told us to as well. Thus, the verb was created one afternoon when Zoe was going bonkers in our own home, and Greg informed my dad that he really needed to "Uncle Dan his dog." An additional important tid-bit of information is that my dad has taken a liking to watching "the dog whisperer" over the past few years, a show in which Cesar Millan proves the virtue of being calmly assertive (or "Uncle Dan-esque") with your dogs.

Well, last week, during training for the after-school program (which started Monday), we were informed that the best method with little kids was to be "calm and assertive." While it made me laugh to think that we were being told to treat our kids like misbehaving puppies, I also made a mental note to "Uncle Dan" my kindergartners. Let me tell you - that's some of the best advice I've gotten.

It's only 3 days into the program, but so far, that approach has really helped me. I'm sure the kids will test the limits much more as time wears on, but I'm glad to be setting such a good precedent in the first week. I do have a disciplinary system in place, but I haven't really needed to use it, or even raise my voice much, which is great (and kind of makes me wonder if Zoe would be a calmer pooch if I'd known to treat her like a kindergartner) . The other massive thing I've got going for me is Elizabeth, one of the high school tutors in my class. She's great with the kids, plus she can pull of that Latina Woman sass that I'm not really capable of. Again, it's not yelling, but more like "Artemio, don't you LET me see you outta that seat without permission again? You hear me? I said you HEAR me? Good. Sit yo' little hiney down." I think what I'm trying to say is that Latin Women make the best Uncle Dans.

The other great advice I got was from Aunt Margaret - she emailed me about the blog, so I wrote back asking for advice with little kids. In her response, she mentioned that I really can't plan on doing anything for more than 10-15 minutes, or they'll lose interest. Part of me thought she must have been exaggerating... that part of me was wrong. I have them for an hour and half in the class room (2 hours 15 minutes overall, but snack and recess take up 45 minutes), so I basically need at least 5 activities for every day. Today I set a personal record by keeping them entertained for almost 30 minutes with a single activity. It can be exhausting, but so far we've done a great job. I don't think I'd be doing half as well without Elizabeth and Tania (my other tutor), though.

The kids are all from Central America or Haiti, with the majority (maybe 2/3) being central america. Most of them speak English, but some are still just learning it, so having one tutor who can speak Spanish (Elizabeth) and one that can speak Creole (Tania) is really a life-saver at times. Elizabeth's going to miss tomorrow, so we'll see how Tania and I handle the class on our own - I'll have to include an update over the weekend.

Other than that, life's been great. My house inherited a racing bike from a friend who moved away last week, and I think I'm in love with it. Greg always calls his bike his "teleportation device," and now I see why. The other bike I'd been riding ("Free Spirit") was nice, but this thing basically cuts my travel time in half. I'm still getting used to the feel of a road bike, and the struggle for communal harmony led me to name the bike "Cirrus," after the Dinotopian Skybax (please don't worry if you don't catch the reference, that just means you're not a nerd).

As far as picking up Spanish, I went to the park the last two nights to play basketball and volleyball. Other than Alison (my housemate) spraining an ankle on Monday, both were great nights. It's a nice way to pick up all the little idiomatic expressions that I'd never learn from a book, plus it's great to have enough free time to just go hang out at a park for 2 hours. I just keep thinking "this is the exact type of thing I always felt guilty doing during college, but now it's completely guilt-free." Life is good, people. Also, I was also able to go for a 4-mile run alone with a Guatemalan friend, Alex (his picture is on the Picasa page), tonight. He speaks almost no English, so it was great practice for me. As I've mentioned, he's very patient and clear when he speaks, which makes him the perfect conversation partner. In another long, tragic story, he lost his job last week, so I don't know how much longer he'll be in town. Still, I'm grateful to have friends like him around.

All right, I think that about wraps it up for me here. I'll do my best to get another post up maybe sometime this weekend, but until then, I hope you're all enjoying your respective lives and cities!

Pictures, Updates, and Links

2009-09-19T19:00:00.001-07:00

Most of you probably got this information in email form, but I just uploaded a few new pictures on my Picasa site (which is also now a link in the sidebar). There aren't many, but there are pictures of my housemates and some new friends for anyone who's interested.

I also put up links to those general posts that I did over the past week (which will probably seem more pertinent later in the year) and to official websites for a lot of the organizations that I work with or through.

Finally, I added a link to the blog I had for the cartoons that I drew for the John Carroll newspaper (for those of you who didn't have the privilege of reading The Carroll News every week).

The First Few Weeks

2009-09-18T16:40:00.000-07:00

I think that all of the below posts cover all of the general information you need to get a good feel for Immokalee. I'll probably be referring back to the Coalition (CIW), Student/Farmworker Alliance, and Interfaith Action quite a bit over the coming year, so you can always pull up those old posts if you need a refresher. Also, thank you to those of you who have let me know that you're finding this useful so far - I'm glad that you're interested in what I'm doing, and I'll try to regularly update you and keep your interest.

For this post, I'm going to do my best to summarize my first few weeks here, and then we should finally be caught up. Fortunately, the weeks were all different enough to count as their own significant time periods, so I'll break them up that way.

The first week - I got to Fort Myers on Sunday, the 30th, around the same time as Liz (the other first-year HMVS volunteer). Alison (a returning volunteer) picked us up and we all came back to Immokalee (about 45 minutes away) that evening. On the flight in, I went to sit in the Emergency Exit row in the plane when a flight attendant stopped and asked my age. When I told her 22, she laughed and walked away saying "Honey, you don't look it." Half-way through the flight, I noticed a plaque next to me that read "You must be 15 years or older to sit in this aisle."

That first week, Liz and I pretty much just bummed around town and got a feel for the different job sites we could volunteer at. We stopped by the Habitat office and went to the work site, I spent a day in the soup kitchen, we spent some time at the Coalition, and both got trained at Social Services.

That weekend, Margaret (the other returning volunteer) flew into Fort Myers on Friday, and the three of us drove out to meet her there, along with about 10 other people from Immokalee. Most of them were going to dinner at a friend's house, then all of us met up in downtown Fort Myers and wandered around to bars. I spent the better part of the evening at an all-female minister table (Lutheran, Unitarian Universalist, Presbyterian), so it was a pretty enjoyable and interesting night. I ended the week with a trip to the beach with Liz, Margaret, and Katie (a former HMVS volunteer who still lives in Immokalee). A friend of mine in med school called me to lament his first round of tests, and I was grateful already for my hiatus from academia.

The second week - Margaret and Alision already had their jobs lined up, so while they went to work, Liz and I continued training and setting our schedules. We would normally work 3-4 hours in the morning, and then help out in the afternoon's with registration for the after-school program that we'll be teaching at starting this coming Monday.

The week ended with something called the "Encuentro (Encounter)," which was a massive gathering for college-students hosted by the Student/Farmworke Alliance (SFA). There were probably 100 kids from a dozen or two schools, and while I was thankful to not be an actual participant every time I stopped in (a little too many meetings and workshops for me), I was still inspired enough by the strength and passion of the movement to decide that I needed to spend a morning a week at the Coalition (volunteering with SFA).

Margaret and I went to the high-school football game with Candace (a 9th grader who will be a high school tutor in the same after-school program we work for, and whose mother works for the Coalition). We watched as Immokalee (Edgerin James's alma mater!) edged out Naples in a close contest - it reminded me of bumming around town to Sharon, Hickory, and Kennedy games, and it felt weird to be such a different person in really the same place (although, according to certain flight attendants, I probably don't look much different). Candace asked for advice on High School life, so we told her that everything that seems important (parties, who you sit with at lunch, social status) isn't , and the things that everyone else blows off (class, extra-curriculars) are actually the important things. Re-reading that makes me feel like we're a nerd-mentor program, but it's the advice I'd give to my ninth grade self, so I'm sticking to it.

The third week (this past week) - this was the first week that I went to my morning jobs in the order and basic routine that I'll do for the rest of the year (described in this post). Despite a sore throat, a stomach that had turned on me, and allergies attacks that would measure on the Richter scale (thanks to sorting old clothing on Tuesday), it was my fastest week yet. We had training on Thursday and Friday for the upcoming after-school program, where I was informed that I will definitely be with kindergarten (about 20 kids), and I met the two high school girls (Elizabeth and Tania) that will be my classroom's tutors/co-teachers. I actually spent a day in the classroom that Elizabeth tutored in last year (when I was here in January), and I remember her being no-nonsense with the kids - I'm sure I'll appreciate having her on my side.

We also went to the local park a few nights this week and played a couple hours of volleyball and basketball (mostly with people who work or volunteer at the Coalition). I told my parents that I'm glad they encouraged us to play sports as a kid - basic hand-eye coordination and the half-foot advantage I have over almost every other male on the field (Guatemalans and Mexicans are exactly giants) exponentially increases the appearance of my athletic abilities. Those nights have also been a great way to communicate and build friendships while verbal communication is still a hurdle. We wrapped the week up by sitting on our porch and drinking with friends (mostly the same people we play sports with) as the sounds of the band at the football game echoed through the streets.

This weekend, Immokalee is also holding a Central American Independence celebration (both Mexico and Guatemala had their Independence days this past week). We already attended a smaller celebration that the Coalition hosted on Tuesday night, but I'm sure we'll check out some of the town-wide festivities as well.

With that, I believe we're officially caught up! I'll do my best to post once or twice a week, and to keep you updated on the current events in my life and in Immokalee. Please keep emailing me if you've got more questions, and I'll try my best to rearrange the site to make information as easily available as possible. Thanks again for reading!

The CIW

2009-09-17T11:29:00.000-07:00

After decades of suffering the abuses described in the last post, six field-workers in Immokalee banded together to form the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in 1994. Their basic idea was that they were sick of people treated as machines instead of humans, and that while they may not all have rights in this country, they still have rights as human beings.

Over the past 15 years, they've fought to expose and help persecute 7 modern-day slavery cases, and continually work towards holding growers (and the people who buy from those growers) accountable for the labor-conditions in their fields. They have two ally organizations which help fund-raise and raise awareness for the CIW's struggle. Interfaith Action (which Alison and Margaret volunteer with) raise awareness among religious organizations, while Student/Farmworker Alliance (who I'll be volunteering with) target students in high schools and colleges across the country. The CIW also has their own board of about a dozen staff-members, all of them selected by the entire CIW, and all (or nearly all) of them former or current field-workers. Every Wednesday night, the CIW holds open meetings with the community to discuss current events and labor conditions, and these meetings attract over 200 farm workers during tomato season.

The current main goal of the Coalition for several years has been raise the price of tomatoes one penny per pound, which would mean that farm workers would recieve about 75 cents per bucket picked (instead of 40 cents). Over the past ten years, they have used petitions, rallies, marches, 10 and 30-day hunger-strikes, campus protests, and other non-violent tactics to accomplish this goal. About 5 years ago, they had their first major victory when Yum Brands (which owns Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, among others) signed an agreement to pay the extra penny-per-pound. Since then, McDonald's, Burger King, Subway, and Whole Foods have signed similar agreements with the CIW. These agreements also hold these companies accountable for the conditions in the fields they buy from, and promise that they will not buy from growers if unethical conditions are found in their fields.

Unfortunately, less than a year after Yum Brands signed the agreement, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (which nearly every tomato grower in Florida belongs to, giving them access to shared equipment and information, a virtual necessity for the farmers) implemented a $100,000 fine to be given to any company that payed the extra penny to farm-workers. Since then, they've altered it to a fine issued per worker paid, but it still makes it nearly impossible for any company to pass the penny. While this might seem illegal, the State of Florida's Agricultural Committee is run by the same people who run the FTGE. For now, the penny per pound is being paid (by the companies that have signed) into an escrow account until the regulations are lifted.

If you listen to NPR or watch much news, you might have heard that Chipotle just scored a major victory for Florida Tomato workers. In reality, that's not the whole truth. Chipotle has resisted talks with the CIW for several years. They claim to be holding money in a seperate escrow account, but their failure to meet with the Coalition means that they are held completely unaccountable. If they wanted to, they could stop any alleged kind-doings tomorrow, with zero reprecussions.

The reason they're being so highly praised is because they just signed on with East Coast Grower's and Packers, one Florida agriculture company that has agreed to leave the FTGE and pay the extra penny per pound. In reality, Chipotle had nothing to do with East Coast making this decision - East Coast will now earn the gauranteed business of McDonalds, BK, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Whole Foods, and any other organization that has signed on with the CIW, because they will be the only group paying a fair wage to the employees in their fields. It was a very smart business move for East Coast, and while it's nice that Chipotle signed on with them, the victory was the result of over a decade of work from the CIW, not Chipotle.

The CIW has been praised as on the of the best grass-roots organizations in America. They have their own radio station, "La Tuya (Your Radio)," which they broadcast across Immokalee, and have had several members recieve national and international awards for humanitarian and anti-slavery accomplishments. If you've got more questions about the organization, you can check out their website at: http://www.ciw-online.org/. As I mentioned in a previous post, I felt like I would be missing out on a big part of Immokalee's culture if I didn't spend at least part of my time at the Coalition.

Whew! That should be my last long, general information post. I'll do my best to hit you with a quick personal summary of my first few weeks before the weekend is out, and then I should be mostly up to date. Thanks for sticking with me this far.

Life in the Fields

2009-09-17T10:53:00.000-07:00

Before I can fully explain the role of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), I think it would be better to first explain the typical lives of Immokalee farm-workers, and in the next post I'll address what the CIW is doing to change this.

If you eat any fresh tomatoes (from a store, restaurant, your school cafeteria, etc.) between December and May, there's a 90% chance that tomato came from Immokalee. Everyday, thousands of young men and women (usually under 30, as young as 12) wake up at around 3 or 4 AM in Immokalee. They pack a lunch and head to a massive parking lot in the center of town, where they wait until 5:30, hoping that a crew leader will select them to join a picking team in crudely painted red or blue school bus. After about 6:30, buses stop showing up, and nearly a quarter of the labor force goes home without a job for the day.

From there, the buses travel anywhere from 5 to 100 miles to their field. The workers then scramble (often physically fighting one another) for positions in the field closer to the collection truck, which may help them earn an extra few dollars that day. Because many of these workers are coming from different countries with their own indigenous language (Spanish is a second language to many), they are rarely able to even speak to the person next to them, and have said that they wouldn't do it if they could anyways, because "there's no time for that." After positions are settled, they wait for up to an hour or two for the sun to dry the tomatoes, because they cannot be harvested while dew is still on them. At this point, they my have been up for 6 or 7 hours and still earned nothing for the day.

Once the tomatoes are dried, the workers begin to fill their buckets. One bucket weighs 32 pounds, and once full, must be hoisted onto their shoulders and run 100 - 200 yards to the nearest collection truck, then thrown 5-10 up in the air to the man on the truck. The bucket is emptied and returned to the worker with a token inside, redeemable for about 45 cents. At that rate, workers need to pick nearly 2.5 tons of tomatoes (125 buckets) in a 10-hour day to make minimum wage. This is the same wage that they've been paid since 1978. The workers may stop for 5-10 minutes for lunch, but often have to eat with hands still soaked in pesticides, which are sometimes even sprayed while the workers are in the fields.

At some point between 5 and 8 PM, the bus loads back up, drives back to Immokalee, and the workers return home. Because many of them are undocumented, their housing options are limited. Those willing to rent to undocumented individuals will rent out a trailor that would fit maybe a four person family for $500 a week (nearly equaling Manhatten in cost per square foot). In order to meet those demands, these trailors usually house 14 or 15 people. Journalists who have visited Immokalee often refer to these conditions as "reminiscent of apartheid-era in South Africa." They go to sleep, usually with their entire family in one mattress, and repeat the cycle the next day.

If you're wondering why anyone would subject themselves to this kind of life, it's because it's better than no work at all, which is what they had in their home country. Immigration has increased dramatically since the 1994 signing of the North American Free-Trade Agreement. This made it cheaper for American agriculture companies to ship their food into Central America, but didn't reduce the subsidies these companies recieved. Because of that, they were able to sell their product for up to 30% below what it cost to make, and still make huge profits. Mexican and other Central American farmers were driven out of business by the cheap American goods, which caused many of them to head north to look for a job.

Some Americans fear that they are coming here for government assistance, but undocumented immigrants (who make up over 50% of the field workers) are ineligible to receive welfare, food stamps, medicaid, or any other government assistance. Most are simply here because they could not afford to live in their home countries anymore.

Because they have no rights, the undocumented immigrants are susceptible to exploitation from many angles. Some are kidnapped and taken as literal slaves on farms, where they are beaten, locked in the backs of trucks at night, and constantly charged by the farm-owners so that they remain constantly indebted to them. Agricultural laws allow children as young as 12 to work in the fields, so many do not nearly complete their education. They are exploited by the people who they rent from, and the entire tomato industry (particularly the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange) exploits them by paying them wages that were barely acceptable 30 years ago. A family of four with two working members can expect to make about $16,000 per year, which is $2,000 below the official poverty line for a family of that size, and $4,000 below the cost of living in Immokalee.

But hey, maybe if these lazy poor people just worked a little harder, they wouldn't be so poor. Right?

Volunteer Sites

2009-09-16T12:38:00.000-07:00

As I explained in the last post, I'm required to do X number of volunteer hours in the coming year, but I wanted to briefly explain the different places I'm planning on logging those hours at. Keep in mind that I've only been here for a little over two weeks, and the most I've done at any of the following places is 3 days, so right now it's mostly generalizations and speculations. I'll also include what day or days I'm planning on spending at each site.

Guadalupe Center After School Program - weekday afternoons, 2:30 - 5:30
This is the main staple of the HMVS diet. Just about every HM Vol does this program when they come to Immokalee, and so they mostly expect/assume we'll be part of the program unless we request not to be. Similar programs run at two local schools (Highlands and Pinecrest), but the HMVSers basically always work with Pinecrest - the program there is larger and generally contains kids that are maybe a little tougher to handle. The program runs for kids from kindergarten through second grade, and I'll (allegedly) be teaching kindergartners. Each of us is the head of a classroom of 15-22 kids, and we're basically an after-school teacher. We'll each also have 2 high school tutors with us, at least one of which is a returning tutor from a previous year. Training starts tomorrow, and the actual program starts on Monday, so I'll know a lot more about this in the coming days.

Habitat for Humanity - Monday/Wednesday, 8:00 - 12 or 2
I mentioned to a few of you that I'd be doing Habitat, and here she be. The Collier County HFH is currently working on several different houses over a half-mile or so radius, so I should get all kinds of good experience. Part of me was tempted to do more than two days a week with Habitat, but I really wanted to make sure I got a full taste of Immokalee.

Guadalupe Center Soup Kitchen/ Clothing Room - Tuesday, 9:00 - 2
The local soup kitchen serves out 100-200 hot meals a day (depending on the season), and is housed two rooms over from a free clothing room. The same woman directs both programs, so I'm able to switch back and forth between the rooms to go wherever help is needed. So far I like both options, but maybe enjoy the soup kitchen a little more. It's kind of remiscent of high school Action-Club-type work for me, which is maybe why I like it.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers - Thursday, 9:30ish - 2
I'll probably give the CIW it's own post in the coming days, but I'll do my best to summarize it here. The CIW is an organization founded by 6 farm-workers, that works to fight for the rights of all farm-workers. Since 1993, they've gotten some of the world's biggest fast food chains (Taco Bell, Burger Kind, McDonalds, Subway) and grocers (Whole Foods) to sign agreements that promise fair wages and humane treatment to field workers. They've also helped expose and prosecute 7 cases of modern-day slavery rings within the last 12 years. I couldn't really pass up the opportunity to spend time there.

Guadalupe Center Social Services - Friday, 9:00 - 1
I'll be a case worker here once a week. Basically, I just talk to clients about their basic needs, and issue them food and diapers as is necessary. It's a great job because it's the only one where I'm absolutely forced to speak spanish, which is really what's best for me. Once my spanish improves, I'll get to spend more time talking with clients about where they're from, and how they got to Immokalee, which promises to be really interesting.

There you have it, my regular schedule for the week. As I mentioned above, I'll probably put up a post about the Coalition within the next few days, and that'll probably be the last or next to last big, general, catch-up item that I post.

HMVS Explained

2009-09-16T11:54:00.000-07:00

The next most important information I can give you would probably be about the program I'm volunteering with. The name of the program is the Humility of Mary Volunteer Service (HMVS). We're sponsored by a group of Catholic nuns who go by the Humility Sisters of Mary, and are based near New Castle, PA. We had a week-long orientation/retreat in August at their home base, the Villa Maria, which was actually a pretty awesome facility.

HMVS sponsors 9 volunteers across North and South America. Two in Chile, two in Cleveland, one in Miami, and four in Immokalee. All nine of us spent the orientation week together at the Villa, where I was the only male within approximately 40,000 miles. The HM's pay for our housing, food, and gas, provide us with health care, plus give us a small personal stipend each month. They also pay for us to fly home-and-back once during the year (usually Christmas), which is pretty nice. They basically pay the basic cost of living for us, and we cover any other kind of unnecessary spending.

HMVS is also a part of something called the Catholic Network of Volunteer Services, which is how we're linked to AmeriCorps (or, depending on who you ask, "Obama's version of the SS"). All of the volunteer hours that I'll be logging over the next year will be recorded by AmeriCorps, and at the end of the year (assuming I've fulfilled my hours) I will recieve an AmeriCorps Education Award that can be used to pay off student loans or go towards future schooling. AmeriCorps offers this award up to two times to any individual, so HMVS volunteers are often able to stay for a second year (but not longer) in their location if they wish to. To summarize: I work for the HMVS, and in cooperation with AmeriCorps.

As an HMVS volunteer, my responsibilites are pretty basic: fulfill my hours, don't commit any (many?) crimes, and try to be a decent housemate. As I mentioned, I am living with three other volunteers, all of them female. Alison and Margaret are both a year older than I am, are both back for a second year with HMVS in Immokalee, and both graduated from John Carroll. I knew Margaret pretty well before coming down here because her and I went on an Service/Learning trip to Tijuana a couple of years ago, and I already semi-knew Alison from my week here in January. Liz just graduated from the University of Dayton, and heard about the program from a John Carroll/HMVS alum who she worked with at UD. So far the adjustment to an all-girl house has been mostly smooth - I try not to leave the toilet-seat up or ask too many questions about things I find in the bathroom, and that game-plan has worked out so far. Fortunately, Margaret and Liz are both big football fans (Steelers and Bengals fans, respectively), so I don't feel too awful turning SportsCenter on in the mornings. It's not completely different from living with guys, except there's a lot more ice cream/chocolate worship, Bravo watching, and dancing in general. Again, it's probably all very good for me.

The Low-Down on I-Town

2009-09-15T19:51:00.000-07:00

So I'll try to give you the most basic information I can about Immokalee (or, as I was sassily told by a fifteen year old, "I-Town") without making it too boring.

Immokalee is in Southwest Florida, about an hour or so from Fort Myers and Naples, and 2-ish hours from Fort Lauderdale and Miami. Allegedly, Bradenten is also within driving distance. The town itself is pretty tiny - it's well populated (40,000 plus, depending on the season), but there's basically no where in town you can't run or bike to, and very little you need to go more than 2 miles for. It's small enough that the nearest Target/Wal-Mart/mall/movie theaters are 45 minutes away, but big enough to have all the standard fast-food and pharmacies you would expect in any town.

I heard demographics of roughly 85-90% Latino, 10% Haitain, and 1-5% other (with White being maybe 1-2%), and those seem about right to me. Most people speak some English (at least as much Spanish as I speak), and just about anyone under 20 speaks it fluenty (due to schooling).

The majority of the labor force in town is made up of migrant farm-workers, which is why the population dips to below 20,000 in some seasons (they usually head North during the summer). The primary crop that needs harvesting around here from October - May is tomatoes, which has come to be a symbol of sorts for Immokalee, but there are other crops as well. A huge amount of these workers are undocumented immigrants, many of whom have arrived within the last few years (with more coming all the time). I'll get more into the specifics of these workers when I talk about the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, but a very quick summary on them would be as follows - they work for 12-15 hours a day, pick over 2 tons of tomatoes per person per day, and make roughly $7,000 a year. Because Immokalee is such a hub for this work, it attracts more men than women, so men make up 60-70% of the Latin American population in town.

It's definitely hot, but I'm adjusting pretty quickly. As long as you don't try to run after 7 AM or before 6 PM, most other activities, including biking, are pretty bearable. Right now, it rains for an hour or three every afternoon, and it's mega-humid whenever it's not raining. Apparently, that will all go away in October when it will stop raining (until April or so), the humidity will drop, and I'll basically live in 70 degree weather for 6 months.

To be certain, it's new. But I like it - I like being able to bike anywhere, I'm getting used to being unabashedly sweaty, plus people here think I'm really tall. It's a new sensation to see a white person somewhere and say to myself "What the hell are they doing here?" but I'm pretty sure that's good for me.

Getting Starting

2009-09-15T19:35:00.000-07:00

Hey family (and maybe friends) -

A couple of people asked if I was going to do a blog for my year in Immokalee, and my original response was "no thanks." It's not required by our program, and I was kind of hoping to cut myself away from technology a little bit.

After the first couple of weeks here, though, I've decided it might not be a terrible idea. It seems like something big happens once or twice a week, and no matter how often (or rarely) I talk to anyone outside of Immokalee, there's really no way that I feel like I could keep anyone constantly up-to-date on what's new in my life. While a part of me appreciates that disconnection, I think I'll also be happier knowing that most of you have a better general idea of what I'm doing here.

It's going to be difficult for me to update regularly - I'm also trying to learn Spanish, run, draw and read, write letters to friends, and keep a personal journal, all of this in my free time, which is about to substantially cut down. Still, there are a lot of interesting things happening in Immokalee, and it would be nice to share them with the people I care most about. If it turns out that no one is reading it, that's okay - it'll pretty much just be another journal for me without all the "Dear Diary" stuff.

The title is from an afternoon bike ride I took last week. Sweating my juevos off in the Florida heat as I peddled to Winn-Dixie for pickles, tortillas, and chocolate chips, I had a beautiful moment where I let go of the bike, spread my arms out, and felt the weight of the fact that I've got such a huge adventure ahead of me.

I'll try to do a few general posts over the next couple of days to catch up on basic Immokalee info and fill you all in on my first few weeks, and then I would expect posts to slow down pretty substantially after that.