Halfway Point Reflections

Thanks to all of you who are reading this blog and letting me know what you think and what you are learning about me and the issues I am presenting.  I know the last entry was long and detailed.  This will be shorter.

I am still in recovery mode from my cold.  Such is life.  I am grateful to have the space to do it in my own home rather than having to recover in an office environment where every sneeze and blow of the nose causes people to shudder.  It will take time.

I was able to attend church on Sunday and joyfully sing.  I  believe that singing is a very healing activity.  I was so moved by being able to join my voice with others and in swaying to the African rhythms of the BUF choir as they enchanted us with a special Alleluia chorus.   Our closing hymn was the traditional Easter alleluia set to the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lo, the Earth is Risen Today.   I was able to trill with the best of them while singing the refrain.   The whole experience was just what I needed.  Earlier in the year I purchased a new hymnal and dedicated it to my daughter Kate Bronwyn Oakley, who died on May 12, 2002.  She was a singer and deeply connected to our faith tradition.  I found the hymnal and read her name and started to cry in her memory.  I ended up shedding tears off and on during the day and the next.  A wave of grief that I am grateful to experience.  Being in a faith community, whichever one calls to us, is a protective factor for coping with life for those who find harbor there.  I was moved to remember the myriad of rosaries that were left by migrants at the chapel at San Juan Bosco Albergue in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico.  I brought one home and placed it on my own altar of remembrance to remind me of the loss and hopes that I share with the women and men on the journey.

Rosaries being offered as gifts to our delegation.  For fellow travelers. San Juan Bosco Albergue.

I am at a halfway point of this sabbatical and I thought it would be good to reflect on what I have learned to date.  The list is not exhaustive but what is popping for me on this beautiful April morning in Bellingham.

1. Brown lives matter.  The United States has created an intolerable web of policies around immigration and trade that have acted as destructively as how the American Indians were treated, how the Jews were treated during WW2 by this country and other countries that would not aid their escape or even even recognize what was happening in Germany and Poland.  I believe more firmly than ever that we need to take off our blinders about what we as taxpayers are supporting at our mostly southern border - torture, discrimination of the worst sort, death by neglect and more.  It is not pretty and we need to be mindful of this situation not just in the present tense but in how survivors are coping with the losses of their families and livelihoods and separations from their dear ones.  We need to be cognizant of the perils of the journeys our policies are supporting and take responsibility for making an ethical stand.  I have been changed by my experiences on this trip.  

2.  There are many wonderful samaritans, scholars, educators, politicians, activists and survivors whose voices are speaking out and who need to be heard over and over.  I was so impressed by the work that is being done in Arizona that I am more hopeful that the generation of students who are now in high school and college will be part of the change.  

3. There are some improvements we can make in how we structure our programs.  I came away from my SW trip full of ideas about how to incorporate conversations and activities that focus on sexuality, racial/ethnic pride, safety and immigration into our program.  I am still gathering ideas and will continue to do so when I visit NYC next week.

4. I am ready to start acting on what I am learning.  I am starting to explore foundations that might give to our project revision.  I am thinking about expanding our program to serve younger children and their families.  I am ready to plan the May 3rd service at my church about the Immigration Justice Journey.  Mike and I will be doing that together.  I am ready to live the next 3 months to the fullest.

5.  I have been overwhelmed by the generosity I have experienced on this journey to date.  I have stayed at private homes in Arizona, California and Oregon.  A big shout out to our friends Barbara and Ron for showing us hospitality in Portal, Arizona; to friends Marilyn and Dale for allowing us shelter and space to enjoy Healing Waters in Desert Edge, California; to Debbie and Rick for sheltering us in Portland on the journey and twice more before the end of June; Marie Provine and Mike Shelton in Tempe Arizona.  The generosity of people who have shared their work and passion with me: Emrys Staton, Anna Ochoa O'Leary, Jose Rodas, Andrea Romero in Tucson; Darcy Dixon and all her crew in Santa Cruz County, Arizona; Cathi Lamp and her team in dry Tulare County; Benny Rodriguez at Bethlehem Center in Visalia; David Ginsburg and Lucia Kaiser at UC Davis; Marcel Horowitz and her team at Yolo County CE; Lorena Carranza at Sacramento Food Bank and Family Services; and Rebecca White and her Latino Resilience Enterprise Team in Tempe.  Most of all a deep sense of gratitude and relief that my husband Michael came along for the ride and ended up being pulled into the conversation.  I am grateful for the miles he drove and for his company.

6.  I have done some really fun things along the way.  We had a wonderful family reunion at our cousin Marc's home in Palm Springs.  We spent a night in Ashland, OR, on the way home and saw Guys and Dolls at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (preparation for going to NYC :>)).  We toured windmills, hiked, ate marvelous food, brought home a huge amount of fresh dates, deepened friendships and made new ones, took a side trip to San Diego and visited old friends there, explored Davis, California and I got to attend my first ever spring training game last week in Arizona!  Go Mariners!  They won, it was 95 degrees and I had a great time.

Dark blue clothes in 95 degree weather?  HOT!

7.  I really enjoy blogging.  I promised a shorter post today so I think I will let it go here.  As always, I am grateful for your readership and continued support.  I love hearing from family and friends who are reading.  We are off to NYC a week from tomorrow.  I will post once more before we head out!

Thanks for reading!

Butterflies at the Desert Botanical Gardens near Tempe, a reminder that life is short and to seize the day!

Tucson Treasures, Part Three

I am really grateful to have the time to reflect on all that I did, saw and learned in Tucson.  We are spending the week with our friends Marilyn and Dale in Desert Edge, California.  I think that everyone at Healing Waters Park, where they live, who sees me working away every morning on my laptop probably wonder what that woman is working on that keeps her away from the desert.  It is lovely at the end of my work to take a break and enjoy the area.  This morning I am working outside and hummingbirds are visiting me on their way to and from the orange tree that is in blossom.  The smell of the orange blossoms is so sweet that I am lulled into a sense of peace and well being.  Mike has been hiking, biking and enjoying life in the desert while I work.  I think it has been a good trip for him and he is taking full advantage of having his bike on the trip.  He has been riding a 31 mile loop up and down hills and is quite happy to be warm!

Orange blossom

Baby hummers

So, back to reflecting on Tucson.  The day after I visited with Anna and her class on migration, I drive into town to interview Emrys Staton in depth. I met him at the Borderlinks facility where he is a board member and where I had originally met him during our Immigration Justice experience.  Emrys is an social justice activist, theology student and a person with a great deal of integrity who grew up in Arizona.  He came to Tucson from Northern Arizona and was raised as a Unitarian Universalist.  He was exposed to the concepts of suffering and political engagement as a means to alleviate suffering as a child, both through his religious education and by the examples set by his politically involved parents.  It seems to have stuck with him.  He majored in geography with an emphasis on social justice at the University of Arizona.  He told me that he was a sophomore in college on September 11, 2001.  He reported alot of hate being present on campus immediately following the attacks.  He joined Beyond Tolerance, a campus group formed to help mitigate the climate of hate.  His journey towards the activism he now engages in continued by befriending a group of Sudanese refugees who had been settled in Tucson by the UN High Commission on Refugees to attend the university.  He learned from them what it personally meant to be a refugee.  These young men had left their homes at the ages of 9 and 10 to travel safety and it took years of struggle and horrible treatment to arrive in Tucson.  Emrys was horrified by the stories they told.

Emrys

By the end of college he was working in independent media on food and justice issues and would attend protests and actions and be beaten up and then report the experience. This preceded the blog and other social media era.  It was the only way to get the truth out about how demonstrators were being treated.

Emrys became in involved in No More Deaths(NMD) from the beginning.  He attended the inaugural event, a Memorial Day 2004 cross border march between Nogales Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora.  He went first as an independent/citizen news reporter and later as a core member of the organization.  A year later he was fully involved and living with a group of activists who were all dedicated to NMD. He spent time at the first encampment NMD in the desert in the summer months of 2004. The encampment provides first aid, water and respite for migrants crossing the desert in the hottest months of the year.  It still operates and is now sanctioned by the International Red Cross which makes it a little safer than some other humanitarian operations from being raided by law enforcement and anti-immigrant vigilantes.  

I asked Emrys what victories he has seen in his 10 years of work with NMD.  He shared the following:

• There are a lot of people we have kept alive.  We have countered the policies of the US Border Patrol that includes enforcement through deterrence, even if death is a "collateral."
• There many immigrant groups who are now fighting to make the political change,  and they had to survive in order to be activists.
•  They (NMD) are one of the only groups that can call out the Border Patrol.  He believes that we should defund Border Patrol.  The theme that I saw in the office of Borderlinks in posters is Revitalize Not Militarize Border Communities.  He believes this should be the message for all of our borders.  All land 100 miles in from the border is now under the purview of the Border Control.    He stated that we need to be very alert to the role the Border Patrol is playing.  Even as they become integrated into the community the enforcement aspect becomes subtly integrated into the community.  What if a border patrol dad becomes assistant boy scout leader - will he be welcoming to undocumented boys and/or families.  Or a soccer coach or 4-H leader (I add this because that is the youth development program in my world)?
• The revision of police policy in how immigrants are treated for routine infractions of the law.  Immigration papers will no longer be sought.  The policy was big news in Tucson and upsetting to the crafters of the infamous SB 1070.  It is good to know that one significant community is fighting back.  It follows revisions of policies that will no longer check school children for immigration papers in the Tucson area.  
• Emrys wholeheartedly endorsed Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Homeland by Todd Miller.  Todd has a really informative blog.  I intend to order it from my independent bookseller!

I asked Emrys what he sees as future needs for both NMD and all of us who are concerned with immigrant justice.  His answers were not always easy to hear.  He said that the work for the future for NMD is solidarity with immigrant-led groups and movements.  Allegiance with black-lives matter.  Prison industry targets both black and brown skins.  He shared that the International Red Cross endorses the work of NMD.  "We work within international humanitarian guidelines.    We need to keep on message that we are doing that here.  We (our society) need to think about decolonizing the concept of humanitarianism.  It is seen as something that people of privilege do.

We need to look at people most effected by conditions taking leadership for making the change.  We have to hear and believe their voices.  We need to use language that tells the facts and avoid the use of language that creates veneer of legitimacy.  We need to hear what they are saying: They (the US government immigration agents and policies) are “terrorizing and kidnapping” us and our children.  Then we need to take the voices seriously.

Lots to think about from our conversation.  

Thanks for reading.

Tucson Treasures, Part Two

In my last post I wrote about my conversation with Jose Rodas.  He was so generous in connecting me with Dr. Anna Ochoa O'Leary.  Anna is an Associate Professor in the Department of  Mexican American Studies in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Arizona.   Jose walked me across campus to the Cesar Chavez Building where the department is housed.  He let me know that the Department Chair, Dr. Richard Ruiz, had died suddenly on February 6.  The department was reeling from the loss of its beloved leader.  An article in the UA Campus news shares the story of this remarkable man.  As we walked into the building we came to an altar dedicated to Dr. Ruiz.  It was beautiful.

Altar in Cesar Chavez Building

I took a moment to appreciate the memorial to a man who I never met, who was very close to me in age and whom has had lasting impact in his life and work.  I was so moved and am still by beauty of the altar and how the very public expression of grief can be healing for everyone.

Having witnessed this I found Anna waiting in her office for me.  She is a gracious, warm person who is very easy to speak with about difficult subjects.  She had invited me to attend her seminar the following week on the Feminization of Migration so I knew this was a chance to visit with her one on one and get her perspective on issues that were not related to the course.  We spoke about the plight of the undocumented immigrants who (as she put it) "are our neighbors who are living in the shadows."  When I asked for her thoughts on what we can do she shared the following:

• The problem is not going away by doing what we are doing.
• Sealing the border will not work.  The solution needs to be humane.
• The Mexican government does not have the will to fix the problem.
• We have to support organizations that do the work.
• We need to get people to understand that US economic policies have created the problem, especially NAFTA that lowered the price of corn and put Mexican farmers out of business.
• The problem needs thorough understanding.  We need to move away from the "Reader's Digest" version of information about the issue.
• Support ongoing work like that she is doing with the Binational Migration Institute (BMI).  Dr. O'Leary and her colleagues published a book, Uncharted Terrain, that is helping support the work of the institute.  Part of what the institute does is take students across into Mexico to learn first hand about migration and the impacts it has on human lives.  She was preparing to take her graduate class to Nogales, Sonora, that evening to visit the San Juan Bosco Albergue shelter and to interview people who were staying there.  Mike and I had the opportunity to visit the shelter on our Borderlinks delegation so I knew what the space looked like.

Anna spoke to me about some of her current work and some of the pressing issues she sees.  She is concerned about the lack of protocol for disposing of the remains of Undocumented Border Crossers (UBC).  She and her colleagues are working with NGO and government officials to work more diligently to identify the remains before disposing of them.  It sounds harsh to write about disposing of remains of UBC victims but it is what is standard practice.  The dead and the families of the deceased are some of the casualities in the undeclared war on migrants and we see this happening in not just the US but also in Mexico and other dangerous areas of Central America that are crossed.  The ambiguous loss I wrote about yesterday is a fact of life for the survivors.  Many never know the fates of where, when, how their loved ones die on the perilous journey.

She is also very concerned about the post-migration trauma that is impacting both women and children.  She echoed the sentiments of Rev. John Fife that we are destroying the fabric of more than one generation of families.  Anna later sent me an article she published in The Conversation, in November of 2014, Family Values and Deportation don't go together.  I highly recommend it to you.

Anna in her office with Cesar in the background

Anna gave me a list of pertinent documentaries that we hope to use to encourage our local film society and/or human right film festival to show.

Mike and I were fortunate to visit the Feminization of Migration class the following Monday.  The class was an intimate group of graduate students who had taken the trip to the border shelter the previous week.  We were able to listen to the debrief.  We learned about more of the challenges the migrants face.  

We also listened the discussion about two articles the students read for that night's class.  Anna later shared copies of both with me.  Some of the discussion focused on understanding the migrants from Chiapas and Oaxaca may not even speak Spanish.  There are over 17 indigenous languages in each of the states and the right to a "fair trial" in the Operation Streamline courtroom is often compromised by not having interpreters in the language.  Although some attempt is made to remove the non-Spanish speakers from the "line-up" it does not always work well.  The court is facing legal challenges brought forth by public defenders.

Here are a couple of comments I heard during the class:

• "Migration is disrupting the integrity of the family - much like it did in when Africans were imported as slaves and their families were broken up (all the time, before, during and after their arrival in this country)."
• "We (United States) dismantle the humanity of people historically.  First American Indians, then African slaves and now Mexican and Central American Immigrants."

The class watched half of a powerful film - Maria in Nobody's Land.  The class would watch part two this week.  We will hopefully watch it ourselves.  The pictures of the train, "the beast," that carries migrants through Mexico are unforgettable. The stories and faces of the El Salvadorian families searching for words of their loved ones brought tears to my eyes.  I am hoping we can watch it in Bellingham with others who care to learn more about this issue.

We left Anna's class grateful for being able to share the experience and for knowing that the issue is being thoughtfully and rigorously examined.

I hope to keep in touch with Anna and am grateful for her generosity in sharing her work and her students with me!

Thanks for reading!

Borders and Heroes

 Dear Readers,

We are in the third day of Borderlinks experience and have more to come.  I am quite overcome with feelings and had a difficult time getting to sleep last night.  We have been witness to the following.  I will likely write more later about each of these pieces but I wanted to write something while my images are fresh.  In the past three days we have -

*Witnessed people whose only crime was entering the country without documents for the purpose of working and surviving brought before a judge in a Federal immigration court in leg and hand shackles to be sentenced in groups of 8-10 to time in one of our private prisons, aka Detention Centers, some for up to 6 months.  All were plea bargains.  No pictures were allowed.

*Spend time with recent deportees in a community kitchens run by the Jesuits in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico.  We have seen radical hospitality in the setting and people with very little hope and much determination treated to a Valentine's Day meal of posole, tortillas and more with balloons all around and brought to tears with the gift of music and love.

Outside the Kino Center where the meal was served.  

Pre-meal agreements and fun!

Valentine's Day Breakfast: Posole and torillas.  Horchata to drink!

Reproductions of murals and balloons decorate the wall.  Every effort is made to create hospitality and dignity in this setting.  I sensed that the memory of this  meal would help these folks at least for this day.  

*Met with women in a shelter who were all separated from their children, several had just completed 75 days in a cruel detention center before being returned from the detention center to Mexico and being dropped off to find that their money was stolen from someone within the system.  While in prison they suffered sexual abuse from prisoners and horrible treatment.  As one of the women said, "we are not criminals, we want to return to our children who are citizens and to work honestly."  There were so many tears from these beautiful young women and those of us who were privileged to hear their stories.  I lay awake last night thinking about them and hoping they will live to see their children and not be either incarcerated again, sexually exploited by narco terrorists or killed or neglected by coyotes, drug cartels or even our own border patrol or left to die in the desert.  We did not take pictures of the women but we listened and the stories and their faces live in my memory.

Some of the artifacts she shared with us. 

Shura with children's clothing.

*Heard stories from heroic Tucson area residents.  I do not think any of these folks would identify themselves as heroes but in my mind they are.  We heard from Emrys Staton who is a minister in training and one of the founders of the No More Deaths/No Mas Muertes organization that began leaving water in the desert 10 years ago to help save lives.  I hope to interview him in more depth next week.

Emrys, No More Deaths or No Mas Muertes

This morning we visited the co-organizer of the Green Valley Sahuarita Arizona Samaritans.  She is an amazing woman who moved to Green Valley from Berkeley CA and found that people were dying in the desert near her home.  She has organized a group of over 200 Samaritans in her area to help stop deaths in the desert.  Our group gathered in her hope around a table of artifacts that she had found in the desert near Green Valley.  She told the stories of what happens through the artifacts.  It was sobering.  She would not consider herself a heroine.  She told us that she is burdened every day with this work and she never gets away from it.  She is a powerful advocate for change.  She shared with us a powerful book of images by photographer Michael Hyatt: Migrant Artifacts; Magic and Loss in the Sonoran Desert published by Great Circle Books, Los Angeles.

This afternoon we spent time hearing stories of the sanctuary movement from Central American refugees that began in Tucson in the 1980's.  Rev. John Fife, one of the principals of the movement who was arrested with 15 others on a number of charges and later given 5 years probation, told the story of the movement from his experience.  He summarized the current US policy on the border of excluding the poorest of the poor from entering our country through a safe border as a gross violation of human rights and international law.  Strong words and strong convictions backed up by a deep faith in what should be done to protect all people and for the children who are now suffering as they are separated from their parents for a number of reasons.  He urged that our country develop a much broader view of what being a refugee means and how we can broaden the new sanctuary movement to protect children and their families.

I have been riding a roller coaster of despair, worry and hope over these last few days.  I think this experience will influence the rest of my sabbatical and my life for sometime to come.  I will not forget.

We finish here tomorrow and move a bit south where will be visiting agencies that serve families in Santa Cruz County, Arizona, including some in Nogales, Arizona.

Thanks for reading.