Reflecting on Tuesday

The sun had not been seen yet, it was 5 AM. But it's not hard waking up when you know it will be a fun day filled with hard work, and adventures. Today all ten of us sleepily got on the school bus heading to a farm to put ourselves in the shoes of migrant farm workers. When we arrived at Bellingham Country Garden we got right to work on weeding onions, it was hard work but definitely paid off to see a weed free row of onions by 7:30 the light rain started to fall. But none of us Seattle lights should be afraid of rain! Later after weeding onions we walked over to the assortment of kale and lettuce to weed the long patches of brightly colored kale. Finally after doing the kale we clipped strawberry runners. strawberry runners are stems that grow off of the plant and usually cannot flower again so they sit there and suck nutrients from the plant that is trying to fruit. After four hours of working on the farm we ate lunch, YUM! After this tiring and sweaty part of the day we all got back in the bus heading for a warm cleansing shower at the YMCA. And then after our shower we went to the grocery store once again to try to embody the hard line of a worker, so based on how much money each "family" got while working on the fields we bought dinner with. I had a family of three, none of us too picky of eaters but we just had three dollars for all of us to eat we ended up with two boxes of fruit loops, not the healthiest. But we would have been healthier but we only had ten minutes to pick out what to get! Then we returned back for the other groups to cook, thankfully we did not have to cook since you know we only had Fruit Loops. Then after an early dinner all of us Forest Ridge Girls got back on are bus and drove for a while we past cows, horses, old barn yards, and many long stretching field that look like go on forever and ever. The fields were beautiful till the realization accrued to me that they might be beautiful on the outside but the almost non existing wages and over working of the workers were not beautiful.  The small wages and the hurt backs the workers go home with should not happen, and so we were driving to help that situation. We pulled up to what did not looked not like an apartment and not like a house. They looked like a small bland one room spaces that held entire families. After passing around fliers for the food bank on Wednesdays and trying to talk in Spanish we gathered up a small group of all ages that ended up being quite a few people. Some AGAPE participants did arts and crafts with some of the younger children while the more "sporty" AGAPE participants and migrant workers and children played an intense game of dodge ball. This game was way too intense for me, so me and a little girl named Daniela played hide and seek, drew and made friendship bracelets for each other. Today I experienced something I will never experience, today was hard work that did not just helped me but helped the workers.
~Lili H-M