Robert

Robert stood in his roadside stand, selling peaches and plums. He wore overalls and a wide-brimmed straw hat. He had a stubby white beard. He was white, and a native of the county. He had travelled around the world, but now, he had settled here in South Carolina. He worked here,in the farm's warehouse and also in a special kitchen that sold peach flavored ice cream.

I told him about our health program. He was amazed. He had never gotten insurance before. He said that he'd tell his fellow workers about it.

Our stories, our Dreams

We visited the camp at which Juan lives. Banda music was playing. People were talking. After signing the form on the hood of our car, outside the camp fence, Juan Covarrubias said that there was too much noise at the camp.
So, we left. We stopped in the parking lot of the packing plant and offices, but Juan said that he was afraid of us being questioned for being in the parking lot so late at night.
So, we talked instead on the bleachers at Pelion Park, a place that Juan did not know, but which Pedro found by GPS.
Juan looked at both of us, even though I was silent most of the time.
While we spoke, the light got dimmer, and the background noise of birds changed to insects and barking dogs. We started by talking about family, which for Juan was an important theme, because he said he came to the U.S. to earn money, so that they could have a better life. He said that if he had a choice, he would live in Mexico, because there people celebrate more. The theme of “distracción” as he called it (which in English would better be translated as “diversion” than distraction by the way he used it) came up repeatedly, as did the theme of time.
For Juan, the pace of work in the fields seemed far faster than the pace of work in construction. Hearing it for the first time, and again on the recording, I thought of the workers I had seen picking corn and putting it on a conveyor belt at the fastest pace possible before taking a break to listen to us. I felt like it was an important observation, because it’s easy to think of life in the country as slow compared to city life, which is not always true.
Juan did not feel like sharing any jokes that field workers use to pass the time, because he said that it is easy to forget them when concentrating on other things. He also said that while drinking life is different from life without drinking or smoking, and that if he was to quit either, breaks would be quite different, sadder “mas triste,” even while acknowledging that it is normal. He said that he now has gone 5 years without drinking or smoking, because of work, repeating that such a life makes him feel better, but sadder. He later says that sports work just as well as drugs and alcohol for those who do them.
“Yo soy una persona muy tímida” he said, at the end of the interview. In some ways his style of talking confirmed this. He talked in a calm, quiet voice, and sometimes stuttered before coming to a particular point. However, he seemed eager to make several points about the life of a farm worker, his own life, and life in general, that “shy” does not quite do justice to him. “Te voy a decir una cosa” he said repeatedly, which roughly translates as “I’ll tell you one thing.”
We end the interview but I continue recording. Pedro and Juan continue, talking about the purpose of the interview, and work with the health clinic, and he expressed his gratitude, although he said that he had been suspicious of the people giving out the cards at first.
The documentary of Juan's life is not yet online. You can see some other saf interns' documentary projects here.

Fast and Slow.

Some people call the country life slow. In some ways it may be slow. People do talk slower, and nothing is a block away. Evenings and time off from work can be slow too. Too slow. If you can’t drive anywhere you are stuck sitting around in the evening, watching TV, listening to music, or trying to strike up conversations. I sat with the workers in one camp, on a plastic bucket like them, as the light died down. As far as work goes, though it’s as fast as any factory or holiday-season checkout line, only with heat thrown in to make it worse. They do get breaks for water, but it's not as though there's anything slow about the work itself. One farm let us stop the workers while they were working in a cornfield so that we could register them for our program. Some of the workers even wanted to have their pictures taken. Official SCPHC rules were that I could not use pictures of people’s faces for publicity. Still, I got some amazing pictures and videos. Such as this one, which I took before they stopped:

The video doesn't capture the sheer noise of it, you'll just have to imagine that.

Driven

Before I go any further about South Carolina, I should mention that most of the time I wasn’t alone. Like all Student Action with Farmworkers interns, I lived and worked with another intern. My intern partner was Pedro. He grew up in Georgia and cut tobacco for a living. He was now in college preparing for a career in medicine, possibly nursing or medical translation.

In college I had always traded on self deprecating humor and nervous stuttering apologies to get what I wanted or needed. Pedro was the complete opposite. He traded on deadpan bragging humor and measured words. If I had to sum Pedro up in one word, it would be “driven.” He was always figuring out ways to make our projects succeed. "I don't like being told I can't do something," he told me.

He wasn't driven in a nervous way though, or at least he did not show it. He was able to relax in his time off, even if his idea of relaxing was to go to Charleston or Burlington or check out Columbia's nightlife rather than just spend the night at home.

Many of the SAF interns like Pedro had come from similar situations to the people we were helping. Throughout my time in SAF, I spent time with people who had worked in fields or greenhouses and had now moved on to college. It struck me that what we were seeing was not exotic to them at all. It was life. It wasn't just about wanting to see the conditions of farmworkers. It was about giving back while moving ahead. It was about being driven.

Nothing and Everything

I stayed at the house of a former SAF intern's mother. The road leaving our neighborhood crossed with another road. That road means more to me every time I think about it. In one direction: The interstate, the city of Columbia, the new offices of South Carolina Primary Health Care, where I volunteered for the Migrant Health Project. People sat at their desks there in suits, dresses, and ties. Bars, fitness clubs, restaurants, and music clubs were all in that direction.

Columbia was a place of power. The State House stood there, with long sets of steps and tall collumns.

Along its sides stood monuments which told an official version of state history. There were monuments to the confederate dead, and to Strom Thurmond. Other monuments in bronze honored the state's African Americans, and their long history: from slaves in the fields of indigo, to achievements in the present day. Our landlady, Jennet, told us that in the other direction was "nothing." For her, as for most people in Columbia it was nothing. It was more suburbs.Then it was sprawling fields of peaches, corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, and plants city people couldn't tell apart from each other.

The change was nowhere near as sudden as it sounds. The countryside was not a wasteland. Big farms had offices and receptionists. Farmers and ran their fields like factories, only with hotter and tougher work.

The country was in many ways more random than the city. Downtown for one town was an old-fashioned-looking block of brick buildings that happened to include a Mexican popsicle store. In another town, the "center" of town seemed to be a white Victorian-style house serving as the office for an IGA store.

It could rain one minute out there, the next minute dust could be blowing around. The workers lived just in just about every arrangement one could think of: trailers, cinder houses, even log cabins in one place.The land was flat, but by the end of that summer, I could not see it as "nothing." For many of the people I met there, it was everything, or at least everything that they saw of South Carolina.

People who had come from far away to work the land often had no way to drive anywhere else, and no reason to do so. To them, the lights of Columbia and the steps of the capital were a faint rumor, if they were anything.

Hardest Job

We had come to the Wal-Mart pharmacy because it was the cheapest around. We were there to help a woman, who was here on a guest visa, to get some medications. Because it was lunch time though, we stopped at the Subway restaurant inside that same Wal-Mart. She shared stories about her life. She had worked at a bottling plant and at other factories along the border. “Which work was the hardest job for you?” I asked. “This one that I have now,” she said, “picking vegetables.”

Don't Take Notes

“Don’t take notes so much when you talk to them,” said Carmen to me in Spanish, as I walked back to the van.
“But if I don’t take notes,” I said, “I won’t remember.
“It’s just too official looking, like a census. It gives the wrong idea mi hijo."
Carmen was my supervisor at South Carolina Primary Health Care. She was a native of Honduras and liked to call me "mi hijo," meaning "my son."
"Take notes after you talk to them, if you need to, but don’t just write things down while they’re talking,” she said.
It was a reminder for me. I was not here to take as many notes as possible and write an amazing story to rival John Steinbeck. I was here to be helpful.

Student Action with Farmworkers put me here with South Carolina Primary Health Care's Migrant Health Program to register as many patients as possible and drive them to appointments and pharmacies. We registered documented, undocumented, and guest workers alike. Our program hardly covered anything beyond checkups. Farm managers never had to pay anything more as far as insurance goes and our program was just there to fill the gap.

If I learned anything from that summer, it was that I am not an expert, and should never claim to be one. Still, I can say what I saw. I saw entire worlds in South Carolina that I barely knew existed.