This is the seventh report from the Reedley Peace Center, where we are holding a speakers series on people, land and water in the San Joaquin Valley. Called “In the Struggle,” it features individuals who have contributed to the human ecology of this place in the face of its dehumanization from the industrialization of agriculture.
Sarah Ramirez
was scheduled to speak to us Friday night about good food and its role in
eradicating poverty. Sarah is a
relatively new face in this old lineup of dedicated academics we’ve heard
about, and we looked forward to hearing from a current practitioner in the
broad field of agriculture and the common good.
Although she was raised in Pixley,
Sarah has a Ph.D. from Stanford and an impressive array of academic experience
leading up to that degree. But what
impresses us most is that she and her husband David, who also grew up in Pixley
and now teaches grade school, returned to live in, and work for the betterment
of their hometown and its people.
As she stepped to the microphone, however,
her normally sweet manner began to dissolve as her voice started to tremble and
her face contort. She wasn’t even a
paragraph into her beginning before she was crying visibly. As the director of Tulare County’s FoodLink,
she said “I wanted to talk about my hope.”
But only three days after the election, the prospects of a Trump
presidency and what it could mean for the people she serves had shoved those
hopes down a deep hole. Instead, she
spoke a little about the despair she was feeling, then sat down on the stage
and opened the mic to everyone in the room, needing to hear how others were
dealing with their dashed hopes.
It was a radical act for an
academic, but not for a community builder.
Caught offguard, people in the audience began to open up what they
thought they had packed away in order to enjoy the evening. Most of the comments circled fear and hope,
recognizing one and then choosing the other.
Sarah’s husband David read a text from a fellow teacher describing how
the white children of Trump supporters were harassing the brown children of
immigrant farm workers, waving and saying “Bye bye,” as if they would be
deported tomorrow, and of that teacher’s heroic efforts to quash that behavior,
quell the fears.
“I choose to be hopeful,” he concluded carefully, noting the
need for leadership right now. “I am
hopeful the new president will become the leader we need, not the man who we
voted for.” That statement, essentially
a statement of faith, took the breath away of even the most faithful Mennonites
in the room.
Eventually Sarah reclaimed her place
as the evening’s speaker. She told
stories from family life that sent her dedicatedly out to get an education that
might mend the social wounds she grew up with.
She spoke a little about the community garden she started on land right
downtown, on the main drag in Pixley.
And she spoke a lot about food banks, their needs and limitations. She talked about the process of obtaining the
new FoodLink facility in Exeter (formerly Pinkham’s packinghouse,) about
designing the teaching kitchen and developing the educational community garden
there. And she described her vivid intent
to convert the entire food bank industry into one that enables healthy
communities.
According to Sarah, Tulare County
has the highest childhood poverty in the state:
41%. Amidst the highest food
production nationally, this county has multiple opportunities to lower that
number, from gleaning the waste to redistributing the wealth. Many, many volunteer opportunities exist, and
locating the new facility in Exeter, where the volunteer spirit breathes
freely, may have been the smartest move Sarah, a natural community builder, has
yet made.
Except for marrying her childhood
sweetheart. As the evening wound down,
it became even more clear how this pair from Pixley, teamed up as they are to
work for the betterment of the home they hold in common, flourish from the
support they give each other. It’s an
old model, but one we’ve seen the need for in the disintegrating condition of
our rural towns. May we take this story
as a spark of light – of hope.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a rural writer who spends a lot of time looking for hope. You can send your hope sightings to her c/o
P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below. Thanks to Mark Smith for
his thoughtful conversation this week.
Come visit our space at FoodLink! ALmost all the final touches in the kitchen are complete and you really should join us for our food system alliance 2nd Tues of the month.
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