Childhood Hunger

Bill Shore’s Letters

Letter From the Border

June 2002

Dear Friend,

Bumper stickers usually make you smile. Some can make you cry. That's what I discovered after driving hundreds of miles last week through the poorest parts of the Mississippi Delta and the Rio Grande Valley.

It wasn't the poverty in the dying towns of the Delta that got me, nor the crowded housing conditions for the children of migrant workers who are even sweeter than the fruit their fathers pick. I was prepared for both. What I wasn't prepared for was a single green bumper sticker. It was just like the kind I've seen so many times before. But it was where I saw it that made all the difference.

If America's economy boomed in the last decade, nobody told them in the boarded up towns which dot the Mississippi Delta, where they joke that even the prisoners won't stay. A $30 million prison, built by a private company and expected to generate jobs, closed shortly after it opened, when Wisconsin reneged on its decision to export prisoners there, and brought them all back.

I first visited the Delta eight years ago because it was where Martin Luther King began the Poor Peoples March. Little has changed since, except for the new casinos built in Tunica County. But for most who live in the Delta, if it weren't for bad luck they wouldn't have any at all. Women still collect rainwater in cisterns, but because of the lack of sanitation, become desperately ill with leeches. A high school senior struggling to get students to after school and summer school programs, drives a "might van" because it "might get us there and it might not."

But poor doesn't mean ordinary. The challenging conditions attract amazing people committing their lives to ameliorating them. These are places I think of as "hinges of hope", encompassing both despair and promise. The door could swing either way. If we can impact its direction, hope could flow freely instead of being locked out.

At the new community center, which is the pride of Tutwiler, we found 1968 Olympic gold medallist, Mildrette Graves, sharing her strength by teaching physical education to kids in a beautiful gymnasium. Next door is Sister Anne Brooks, one of three doctors in Tallahatchie County, at the clinic she built. An amazing woman who became a doctor at 40, after spending 18 years in a wheelchair for arthritis, she's been in Tutwiler 20 years, waging a lonely battle against diabetes, hypertension, teen pregnancy, and similar diagnoses that are accepted as inevitable but are in fact preventable.

The Rio Grande Valley is quite the opposite from the Mississippi Delta. Dry, brown and dusty where the Delta is fertile and green, its economy is booming, driven by a population explosion and a still porous border with Mexico. The town of McAllen, which served as our base, is home to the #1 and #2 Wal-Mart stores in the country. Only the migrant workers who pick the food we enjoy are left behind.

We traveled with David Arizmendi, executive director of Proyecto Azteca, which provides affordable housing by training teams of families to build pre-fabricated three-bedroom homes, to replace their migrant shacks. They produce almost 80 homes a year. Marveling at the spirit of the people, he asks: "If you are a migrant worker, making $7000 a year, where do you get off thinking you can buy a home?" But, he explains, the people are filled with "the idea that the future is going to be better. That is their mindset. And so they buy a little land. And in a year they may have been able to buy three boards. And then next year another three. And eventually they have a home."

A sense of optimism and a culture of achievement pervade the Valley. A charter school called the IDEA Academy, started by a Teach for America alum, has the strictest rules but the highest test scores in the Valley. An IDEA Academy schoolteacher tells us he is revered among the migrant families in a way teachers in the rest of the U.S. typically are not.

The migrant workers cluster into unincorporated neighborhoods called colonias. They are part of no city and have no city services. Not water or paved roads, not streetlights or street numbers. No post office either. A siren blasts when the mail truck comes. Here the west is still wild. An abandoned bus might be home as surely as a few boards cobbled together. The yards and streets are littered with stripped and abandoned cars. Dogs are chained everywhere -- the colonias' security system.

Our visit to one colonia began at a new community center. We were greeted by Mrs. Ochoa, a neatly dressed young mom who welcomed us through a translator. Children sat quietly drawing at a corner table while other mothers offered cookies and cola and described what the community center had meant to them. When we left the sun was high and the full heat of the valley was upon us.

David Arizmendi drove us through the colonias, and though it was our third such sojourn, it was still riveting, like the train wreck from which you can't look away. We pulled up at one particularly small house and David said we'd be going inside.

Really? I wondered.

"Yes, no problem. It is Mrs. Ochoa's," he explained, as if reading my mind.

"Who?"

"The woman who welcomed you at center. She is already here to greet you."

I thought there must be some mistake. That woman was so nicely dressed, and so well spoken, so happy. How could she live here? The house was two small rooms, both bedrooms, each dark, and about the size of a walk in closet. One room had two mattresses on the floor and a TV on a dresser. There were five small children staring at it from a corner of one of the mattresses. The other room, had four mattresses on bunk beds, and a dresser full of cosmetics and one large trophy. The heat was stifling. The house was so small we had to take turns going in, like a stateroom in a Marx Brothers movie, only without the laugh track. The oldest son, maybe 12, came in and held the trophy proudly. I asked if it was for basketball but he pointed to the plaque: "Top Ten Students." His younger sister's smile flashed two silver teeth, an early victim of poor nutrition.

I walked to our van and the yard's dust swirled. I turned to look at the house again. It was just a shack really. Something green affixed to the wooden front door, perfectly centered, caught my eye. I stepped toward it. It was a bumper sticker that read "Proud Parent of a Farias Elementary School Honor Student."

It stopped me in my tracks. It was almost identical to those I see in Bethesda, Maryland and Alexandria, Virginia, on SUV's kept in garages more than twice the size of Mrs. Ochoa's entire home. The bumper sticker told me more about her than she'd been able to. A woman who I thought had nothing, instead had what was most important: a pride, both gentle and fierce, in her truest measure as an American: the better life she was creating for her children. But that green bumper sticker was even more than that. It was a banner of hope in a generation. As that door swung back and forth on its rusty hinges, hope swung with it.

There are two kinds of poverty in America. There are those who don't have. And there are those who don't know. I've seen one. I've been the other. At least until last week's trip.

Nothing is more important to our ability to fight hunger and poverty with the passion the task requires, than the ongoing ability to feel something. After 18 years of this work, I'm almost numb to statistics, grant proposals, and case studies. I don't always even trust my eyes and ears. But my heart has yet to fail me, though at times it may ache.

Our first order of business is not challenging others to do more, but challenging ourselves to feel more, to resist the comforts of office, home and backyard barbecue, and force ourselves to all but trespass among those whose dialect is as different from ours as their skin color, whose opportunities may seem as constricted as their homes, but whose children are every bit as precious.

As I finish this letter, I know that a thousand miles away a nun presses a stethoscope against the chest of a man in a county with no other doctors, and a carpenter presses a nail into the pre-fabricated home that will free a family from the squalor of the colonias, and even in those colonias where thousands are still left behind, some mother, somewhere, is proudly pressing a bumper sticker against a door whose hinges open just wide enough to let in hope.

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