Chapter 4. The Ministry
One tough job on Easy Street
It began as the Clothing Closet Ministry. In 1978, volunteers from a handful of Episcopal churches in North Carolina began distributing clothing to migrant farmworkers from a trailer. It was parked at the Tri-County Community Health Clinic in Sampson County, in the eastern part of the state, in the town of Dunn on the implausibly named Easy Street.
In 1981, someone donated a station wagon to what by then was known as the Episcopal Migrant Ministry. Katerina Whitley, a parishioner and one of the driving forces behind the nascent social services operation, thought they might use it to connect farmworkers with health services at the clinic. Working with the legendary Rev. Lex Mathews and with the backing of the local bishop, she secured funds to hire an outreach worker. But there was a foreign language matter to deal with. And the language was not Spanish.
In the 1970s and early ’80s, between fifty and one hundred thousand refugees fled the island nation of Haiti to seek better lives in the US. Located 700 miles or so southeast of Florida, economic and political conditions in Haiti had become dire. This was around the same time as the historic Mariel boatlift, when refugees fleeing Cuba flooded Miami. The US government did not know what to do with this sudden flow of refugees. We imprisoned many of them. This prompted public outcry, legal action, and ultimately, President Jimmy Carter’s signature on the Cuban-Haitian Entrant Act of 1980. Desperate and now authorized for work, many Haitians found themselves in North Carolina doing crop work, recruited by crew bosses in Florida who transported them north. Their living conditions here were not very nice. According to a 1982 article in The Goldsboro News-Argus:
The camps range from trailers—some with flush toilets—to shacks not fit for animals. Some camps have only one kitchen for as many as 40 workers . . . In one Sampson County migrant camp near Timothy, 18 workers, men and women, share one six-room house. The kitchen is a large wooden slab room with one long shelf. It is lined with rotten corn, an open bag of flour, a near-empty bottle of cooking oil, and an open box of pepper . . . There are so many flies in the cooking area, it is dangerous to open your mouth.
The workers who lived in these shanties spoke Creole, a mash-up of French and various African languages. To be truly helpful, Katerina knew, any outreach worker would need to speak both English and Creole, or at least some French. Her daughter, Niki, was at that time studying French at the graduate school at UNC Chapel Hill. Did she know anyone? She did.
Thus, in 1982, the ministry hired its first outreach worker. Neil Boisen, a twenty-six-year-old grad student, musician, and amateur magician, was midway through a two-year graduate program in the languages department at UNC at the time. When Katerina offered him the job, he promptly quit school, never to finish that degree, and hopped on a bus to Sampson County. The ministry had found a driver for that donated station wagon.
The first thing Neil had to do was to learn Creole. So he took a Creole Bible to one of the camps, found some older workers who knew both French and Creole, and worked with them through Bible verses until he figured it out.
“I wasn’t fluent, but I was conversant,” Neil would tell me in a Zoom call forty years later, after I tracked him down in Thailand. “The high-frequency words are all African. The rest is all French with a funny accent.”
Most mornings, Neil would show up at the clinic to help with triage involving Haitians and, if needed, stick around to help interpret during the clinical consultations. If there were court cases involving Haitians, he would interpret for the workers in the courtroom. He spent much of his day visiting various labor camps to see if there were any issues he might help with. When time allowed, he’d stop by the clinic to see if there were any migrants who needed transport back to their camps. One time, a very pregnant woman at the clinic needed to get to the hospital, but when Neil took her there, the doctors were too busy with other patients. He helped a nurse deliver the baby, doing as directed and using his Creole to assure the mother all would be fine.
Neil loved his job. On a typical day, which might entail working sixteen to eighteen hours, he’d get some sleep in a rental house on Wilson Avenue in downtown Dunn, a short walk from Sherry’s Bakery, a regular haunt. Then he’d wake up energized for another day. One night a week, he performed tabletop magic at the Ramada Inn in Dunn. There, he got a taste of racial customs of the day after inviting a colleague at the clinic, a Black man, to come see him perform.
“I’m not welcome there,” his friend told him.
That surprised Neil, who had grown up in New York and was unaccustomed to the routine racism still plaguing the South.
“The bulk of my time was spent providing what you might call case management services, helping individuals with medical visits, lost documents, food, and legal issues,” Neil told me. “Sometimes this just involved stopping by a camp and chatting with the workers or playing dominoes and listening to their stories.”
After the growing season ended in 1982, Neil went to visit a friend in Taiwan, where he learned some Chinese. He came back to the ministry in 1983 to assist the ministry’s second outreach worker, Amy Trestor. After working with Amy in 1983, Neil returned to Southeast Asia, then decided to launch a career in international public health, a career that continues today.
Like Neil, the Haitian farmworkers would not stay long in North Carolina. To them, it was just a stop on their US journey from Florida to points beyond. The other North Carolina farmworkers in Neil’s day were Black Americans, here as marginalized citizens with little opportunity to do much else.
Neil was saddened by what he observed at the Black workers' camps, where elderly workers lived out their last years and younger workers struggled with alcohol and drug abuse. Neil knew the limits of what he could do. His magic extended no farther than a Ramada Inn tabletop.
“We’re patching holes,” he told a reporter back in the day. “You could hire a thousand people like me and not make a dent. The needs are endless.”
For more than forty years, an ever-changing team of ministry staff and volunteers has tried to make a dent, serving the working poor who tend to crops and otherwise power North Carolina’s agricultural industry. Amy Trestor would lead the ministry’s effort as its executive director from 1983 to 1994, expanding services well beyond labor camp outreach. The composition of the community they serve has changed dramatically since the founding of the ministry, from a mix of Black and Haitian workers in the early 1980s to virtually 100 percent Latino today.
In 1986, the Episcopal Migrant Ministry changed its name to the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry to reflect the expansion of services to workers who live in the area year-round. That same year, the ministry moved from the original trailer at the Tri-County Community Health Clinic to a rented farmhouse nearby. That’s where they began providing immigration services in response to the landmark Immigration Reform and Control Act, or IRCA, which allowed undocumented US workers to apply for permanent residency and gave birth to the H-2A temporary seasonal visa program.
In 1988, the ministry began hosting driver’s education classes in Spanish, and then classes in English as a Second Language (ESL). Their ambitions seemed to have no limits. In 1989, the ministry moved from the rental house into two donated trailers, located on property adjacent to the clinic. The ministry had purchased the property for construction of a day-care facility, which would open in 1991 as Saint Martin’s Migrant Head Start.[1]
In 1996, the ministry’s board of directors, wanting to expand its offerings beyond social services to include a sacramental ministry, hired someone who would be its driving force for more than two decades. That’s when the Rev. Anthony Rojas—Father Tony—became its sacramental minister, forming a congregation named La Sagrada Familia, providing regular religious services for the first time. He also formed soccer teams, recruiting eager players from numerous labor camps, which he visited often as he gradually took over responsibility for the ministry’s outreach program.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, ministry executive directors would come and go, but Father Tony was always there. He had found his home. In December 1998, the ministry too found a new home, on sixteen sprawling acres it had purchased from a local grower just down the road from the trailers. It was still settling into the new campus at 2989 Easy Street when three hurricanes—Dennis, Floyd, and Irene—made 1999 one of the worst years ever for hurricanes in eastern North Carolina. Hurricane relief became the number one focus of the staff for that year.[2] Soon after those cleared, the ministry got all its programs back up to speed, as if nothing had ever happened.
When Father Tony wasn’t leading outreach and otherwise serving farmworkers, he was fulfilling priestly obligations such as celebrating mass on Sunday, officiating at baptisms and quinceañeras, and so on. For all practical purposes, the ministry was Father Tony and Father Tony was the ministry. A native of Colombia with piercing eyes and a penchant for soccer, he possessed an endless well of energy, charisma, and divine inspiration.
“When I look into the face of a farmworker,” he once told a volunteer, “I see the face of God.”
Father Tony would look into countless thousands of those faces, often on visits to migrant farm labor camps, driving a ministry van loaded with donated food, clothing, toiletries and whatnot. His wife Lucia navigated from the passenger seat. This remarkable couple would lead the ministry for more than twenty years and no doubt knew this community better than anyone else. They knew the location of countless labor camps, thousands of workers, and many of those workers’ personal stories. Father Tony was well known for giving out his cell phone number at the end of outreach visits and encouraging farmworkers to call him at any time of day or night.
In 2013, my daughter, Greta and I got to go with Father Tony to a camp. We and a group of students from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill had filled hundreds of plastic grocery bags with donated toothbrushes, toothpaste, and other toiletries, then loaded them into the ministry van before climbing in ourselves.
“¡Muchachos! ¡Muchachos!” Father Tony shouted from the open window of the van, bouncing over deep potholes on our way into a secluded camp. He honked the horn over and over as my daughter and I steadied ourselves in a back seat. I wondered how wise it was to drive on such muddy paths, but Father Tony was unfazed. Soon, workers poured out of their barracks to greet the familiar visitor, hear what news he had to share, and to gather up the toothbrushes, sweatshirts, and other essentials that we had helped Padre Tony pack into the van. A half hour later, we were on to the next camp, but not before getting seriously stuck in that mud. Both rear wheels of the van had sunk during our visit and were now spinning and sinking farther as Father Tony stepped on the gas. Fortunately, there were twenty or so remarkably fit men on the scene who leaped to the task and pushed us right out. I doubt they broke a sweat.
Other than Father Tony and Lucia, the other permanent faces at the ministry around this time were those of Assistant Director Silvia Cendejas, who had been there even longer than Father Tony, and Maria Acosta. She led a program that provided legal services to ministry clients. This “small pocket of love,” as someone later described the ministry during this era, drew on and coordinated a steady stream of volunteers to pull off all manner of charitable feats, culminating each year with a fall farmworker festival that drew thousands to the ministry campus.
The essence of the ministry’s mission was conveyed by a clever slogan on their website’s home page: God knows they need our help. God knows we have it to give.
Father Tony’s ministry served not only migrant farmworkers, but also families of workers who lived in the area year-round. One such family was that of Arcenio Navarro Reyes and his wife Alma Delia Navarro Tapia, both immigrants from Mexico, each of whom had found their first work here in the fields. By the year 2003 or so, Arcenio worked at a sod farm near the ministry, and Alma worked at home raising four kids—three boys and a girl—when the church they were attending said those kids were just too loud. So they showed up at La Sagrada Familia one Sunday where Father Tony made them feel welcome—loud kids and all. Alma soon began volunteering at the ministry, four kids in tow, to help however she could. Their daughter Patti, now twenty-six, recalls countless visits to the playground starting when she was seven. Her favorite spot was a giant yellow climbing thing no longer there. She also recalls how her parents struggled to put food on the table.
“They would give us kids the food,” Patti recalls of her parents, apologizing for getting emotional, “and they would [go hungry themselves].”
In time, her dad got his green card and a commercial driver’s license, then began a career as a truck driver for better pay. But the early days were tough. Christmas was especially hard, when Patti and her brothers saw commercials on cable TV for things they knew their parents could never afford. Her mom would ask the ministry only for clothes for the kids, but Lucia made sure to give them more than that. Patti still remembers finding a toy and chocolate bars in her Christmas gift bag one year: Snickers and Twix.
Father Tony would eventually celebrate Patti’s quinceañera Mass—an important cultural celebration of a Mexican girl’s fifteenth birthday. A few years later, Patti moved away from the area, first to Greensboro, where she earned a business degree, and then to Charlotte, where she began working as a translator, fulfilling a dream of launching a career and living in the city.
The Father Tony era would not last forever. In 2013, the ministry board of directors launched a major fundraising effort to transform this outpost on Easy Street into something bigger. A 2014 article by the Episcopal News Service painted a vivid portrait of Father Tony’s work and illustrated something else that made this place so effective. It quoted Bishop Michael Curry in reference to the bipartisan nature of sacraments and social outreach.
“That’s the work of Jesus that can be done by Republicans and Democrats,” he said.[3]
Also that year, the ministry hired Juan Carabaña, a former molecular biologist and native of Spain, as interim executive director. The board had decided to separate that role from that of lead sacramental minister, a role that remained with Father Tony. But not for long. His legendary presence would diminish over the next few years until his retirement in 2019, by which time he and Lucia had quietly disappeared.
The Rev. Frederick Clarkson, Spanish-language ministry coordinator for the Episcopal Diocese of East Carolina, become lead sacramental minister of La Sagrada Familia. Silvia Cendejas would leave in 2017, and before long Maria Acosta would move on as well. The departure of this team, the engine behind the place for more than two decades, marked the end of a long and distinctive era at the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry.
The ministry placed the capstone of its ambitious new era with the hiring in 2018 of executive director Alejandra Bravo Barrera, an experienced farmworker advocate who knew this world well. Juan gave up his interim executive director position but stayed on as community outreach program coordinator, responsible chiefly for programs such as Saturday food distributions and labor camp outreach.
Alejandra did not have much time to settle into her new job. On her first day in the office, she learned that Hurricane Florence was about to make landfall. The storm would be a baptism of lots and lots of water for this young woman who had never held a leadership position like this one before. Alejandra was undaunted. After writing an emergency grant proposal to the Episcopal Relief and Development Fund, securing much-needed funding for the purchase of food, water, and other supplies, she went to camps herself and summoned help from volunteers and other organizations to hand it out.
On one of these trips, searching for farmworkers in need, Alejandra would learn of and speak on the phone with a woman alone at home with a newborn child. Their home was surrounded by water. The woman was alone because her husband, who worked at a hog farm, had been ordered to stay at work to be sure no piglets drowned—his wife and baby had to fend for themselves. Alejandra called someone who could bring the mom some food by boat, then got a call back from the stranded mom letting her know it arrived. There was canned tomato soup and other food the Latina mom had little idea what to do with, but it was food.
At one camp, the supervisor told Alejandra there were no problems there. Everything was fine, he assured her, and they did not need any of the food she was offering. Alejandra slipped her phone number to one of the workers anyway, and soon got a call back. They needed food and water, the stove and refrigerator had stopped working, and their mattresses were all soaked and beginning to grow mold. Alejandra sent them air mattresses and other supplies.
Hurricane disaster response would consume Alejandra and the rest of the ministry staff for months. And it would teach her about more than just how to serve this community after a disaster. She gained a new appreciation for its very breadth, beyond the migrant and seasonal crop workers. This Latino community also includes many thousands of men and women who raise, slaughter, and package the meat of an astonishing number of chickens, turkeys, and hogs.
“All these local people are struggling,” Alejandra recalled learning when we spoke. “Sometimes worse than the H-2As.”
And she learned yet something else about this community: It was filled with natural-born leaders, several of whom she would hire as promotores. Alejandra did not invent the concept, in which community members are trained to deliver assistance, usually involving health care, but she brought it to the ministry in a big way. Within two years, there were more than a dozen promotores—women and men with full-time jobs as agricultural laborers—going to farmworker homes, tiendas, the parking lots of meat plants, and wherever else they could share information about available resources for the recovery from hurricanes and how to prepare for the next one.
Keeping community at the center became Alejandra’s guiding principle. The God knows they need our help slogan came down from the website, replaced by information about an array of new programs including cooking classes and lobbying trips to state lawmakers in Raleigh. A women’s group formed to grow herbs on a new garden plot, which they turned into soap and medicines based on age-old recipes passed down through generations. It was an all-new era on Easy Street.
To Alejandra and many other farmworker advocates, the storms of 2018—Hurricane Florence was followed just weeks later by Tropical Storm Michael—seemed the worst thing that could possibly happen to the farmworker community of eastern North Carolina. And then came Covid.
At the ministry, if there were any silver lining to the global pandemic brought on in early 2020 by the infectious disease known formally as COVID-19—caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2, which would infect and kill nearly seven million people worldwide—it was the preparedness from that recent year of hurricanes. Alejandra and her team had experience responding to a disaster touching every member of this community, and a program staffed with people ready to act. The promotores got new training as soon as it was available, this time on things like the truth about vaccines, to push back on outlandish claims on social media and a general lack of information.
The community training was accompanied by a massive vaccination effort—thousands would get shots in their arms at the ministry campus. Their food distributions, which used to feed roughly one hundred families once a month, would now feed up to three hundred families twice a month. And when Alejandra learned that some farmworkers might not be entitled to government stimulus money, she solicited donations, some as small as ten dollars, until her staff had $50,000 to distribute directly to farmworkers and farmworker families in need.
By the start of 2022, Alejandra had led the ministry through two hurricanes and a global pandemic. There were physical artifacts of her time there as well. The old buildings on campus were still showing their age—rusty fixtures in the washrooms, courtyard rafters riddled with bird droppings. A proper renovation would cost millions. But there were new things too, such as a giant new donations warehouse known as la bodega, a smooth concrete path connecting it with the main building, and a brand-new, gleaming white box truck complete with a hydraulic lift gate. And her promotores program was putting community members to work providing vital services.
Alejandra had transformed the ministry, but she had other callings and felt the staff could continue their work without her. In mid-February 2022, she announced her departure. By the end of the month, she was gone, and the ministry board of directors found itself searching for a new executive director. In the meantime, one-time interim executive director Juan Carabaña found himself once again pretty much running the place.
[1] The facility today is home to East Coast Migrant Head Start. The trailers out back, one-time homes of the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry and a sister agency called the NC Farmworkers Project, are still there.
[2] It would again in 2018.
[3] A descendant of enslaved Africans and son of an Episcopal priest, Michael Curry was then bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina. In 2015, his scope of responsibility expanded considerably. That’s when he was elected presiding bishop, and chief executive officer, of the entire Episcopal Church. He is the first Black person ever to fill that role.