Report from Florida: Alternative Spring Break

By Audrey Lane Geis

For the third year in a row, I've returned from a spring break of service work. For the third year in a row, I've returned to my home and my friends and felt slightly differently than I had before I left. I don't participate in alternative spring break because of a zeal for charity. I do, however, have a zeal for understanding the world. This often means understanding things that challenge our sense of self. Frankly, there are huge populations in our great fifty states that have been denied the respect they deserve, who are utterly misunderstood and ignored.

One of these populations is the migrant farming community of Immokalee, Florida, where I spent my break with 14 other students and two advisors. During the week, we lived among the many migrant workers and families staying at the only homeless shelter in Immokalee- the Immokalee Friendship House. In addition to cooking and cleaning around the shelter, we worked at many schools, a soup kitchen, a senior center, and various other locations.

The children varied from place to place but they all touched me deeply. At one school, I was reading a book about bedtime to a kindergarten girl named Jasmine who had black teeth. She tapped me on my arm and said to me, "Last night after bedtime a policeman woke me up to make sure I was okay because he had to come because of mommy and daddy." At another childcare center, where the three year olds we were working with didn't seem to understand the difference between speaking Spanish and speaking English, a young girl named Lorena clung to me and seemed to never want to let go. This center remains open from dawn until dusk to cater to the farmers who send their children there- but only during the seasons of the year when the crops are being harvested. During the rest of the year the center is closed since the workers travel as far north as Michigan to find work. At a third program, a young boy named Anthony repeatedly hit his head with an empty plastic bottle and told me over and over again that he hated himself. Each of these children broke my heart a little bit.

At the soup kitchen we worked in, the beautiful, brightly painted walls and Spanish music playing made the service more than civil. What is sad is that those people at the soup kitchen are usually the ones who didn't find work for the day. At the senior center where we raked away the leaves that had fallen during the winter, we witnessed an elderly woman trying to fix her cell phone by speaking with the phone company on another line. She was trying to locate the menu button, as the operator suggested, while holding her phone's SIM card in her hand. One of the other students I was with, Brandon, jumped in and helped her to make the phone work. She could not have been more grateful.

At the Friendship House that we stayed in, we broke bread with people whose lives were completely different from us. We made friends with a man named Alan, whose neck problems and past criminal history kept him from finding a job or another place to live. We met a woman, Rona, who had an associate's degree, and her young daughter, Rolonda, who was turning 12 during our stay. Our group purchased a cake and piñata and had a birthday celebration for her and Grace, one of the other students on the trip who was turning 20. It was amazing to see Rolonda genuinely have fun.

While we were in Immokalee, we slept in a community room that was also used for AA meetings, NA meetings, and other community gatherings. For this reason, we had to fold up and put away our cots and belongings every day when we awoke. By the third day, this wasn't even an inconvenience. Whenever we were returning to Immokalee from an excursion, I found myself shouting with joy that we were home. Those of us who knew any Spanish used it constantly and those of us who didn't were able to learn more than a few words. Now, sitting in my own apartment, I feel less at home than I did while in Immokalee and less at ease than I had been before going.

Today I had a discussion about the death of actress Natasha Richardson with a stockbroker who comes into the Starbucks I work at. I asked him how he was and he simply replied that he was absolutely shocked by 'her' death. He expected me to know he was talking about the actress, who meant absolutely nothing to me. Without even explaining who the 'her' was, he went on to elaborate about how grief stricken he would be if it happened to his wife, to his family. He talked about what a shock her death was to everyone and how if it happened to his wife, he wouldn't even be able to open the life insurance check. The death of this one woman affected him so immensely. I wanted to stop him and ask him if he cared about the farmers who get pesticide poisoning from the fields they work in or the many children who die of starvation in our very own country. The truth is that he probably would care if he knew, but the death of this actress simply hit closer to home.

I don't think what hits close to home should be restricted to those things that are physically close to us or have to do only with others who look like us. Caring is not about committing time. It is about standing up for what is right. It is not only about being grateful for the things we have, but also about understanding and analyzing everything that we consume. The truth is that we are all a part of the same supply chain. The people who pick our produce should matter as much to us as the people who sit next to us in our classes or the co-workers we go to lunch with. As we all search for meaning in life, whatever the manifestation of that meaning is, I would like to implore more people to concern themselves with those who they frequently consider to be the 'other'. It is very easy to remain within the confines of our everyday life, but it is much more important to challenge these constraints. The time is now to change the system.

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