S’appenin’ 1/27
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My sister has worked for many years in this community too. She works with the University of Vermont Extension agency providing health care access and English as a second language opportunities to migrant workers.
The situation along the border with Canada in the whitest state in the union is particularly oppressive. The boarder patrol can behave with impunity and will wait outside farms, medical clinics, etc. and will even respond alarmingly fast to phone calls that there are “brown people” at the local Walmart (one of the only places these people can go to send money back home to their families.) These honest, gentle, kind people live in trailers or houses, or apartments built in the dairy barns with sheets blocking all the windows afraid to show their face during the day, even to walk across the lawn from where they live to where they work.
Many of these people are our friends. They come to gatherings at our farm for birthdays, food processing parties, and Thanksgiving among other events. In early December a good friend of ours, Josefa, lost her partner – he died in his sleep. Her sons Jason and Aiden, are the same age as our sons almost 5 and around 2 yrs. They were playmates. It was hard for her to leave, but over the holidays they packed up their stuff and flew back to her family in Mexico.