Chapter 15. The Ministry, Part II
A new era begins on Easy Street, then another and another
It was 5:00 p.m. one midsummer day in 2022 when I arrived at the ministry to accompany Juan Carbaña on outreach. I found him in the office, working furiously on his laptop. He greeted me warmly but briefly. I suspected his mind was not yet on camp outreach. Later, when he was free to talk, my suspicions were confirmed. It was clear he hadn’t spent a moment thinking about where we might go that night. Normally, he knows days in advance which workers need what and who will be expecting us. But now, he was just starting to think about it.
I suggested some camps we might visit, and he started calling workers. One after another either didn’t answer their phone or had no idea when they would be done working that day. With the sun already falling over the fields surrounding the ministry campus, the van still empty, and Juan calling workers, I wasn’t sure outreach would even happen that night.
I was growing increasingly concerned about Juan. The ministry had been running for four months without a permanent executive director. More staff had left during that time, some voluntarily and some not, with their responsibilities seeming to land by default on Juan. The board of directors had hired an interim executive director in April, but he was new to the world of farmworkers. So Juan had more responsibilities than ever before. Still, I was amazed by his determination to make this all work, and his apparent allergy to the word “no” when asked to help people in need. Juan is a natural at this line of work. But it was not his first calling.
Juan Carabaña Escudero was born in 1966 in Madrid, Spain. His father (source of the Carabaña part, which he uses today as his last name) worked in the marketing department of Palmolive, or “pal-mo-LEE-vay,” as they pronounced it, he tells me with a wide grin that gives way to his trademark laugh, both deep and infectious. His mother (source of the Escudero half of his surname) was a seamstress until marriage, when she became a homemaker.
“We are a simple people, I guess,” says Juan.
Juan grew up with his mom and dad, two brothers, and one sister. The family of six lived in the city district of Hortaleza, which translates loosely to the place where vegetables grow, fitting for his eventual job in the fields of eastern North Carolina. But his career path would first take him through the field of science.
In 1998, he and his wife, Montserraut Caballero Martinez, who goes by Montse, emigrated to the United States, each with a PhD in molecular biology. Accompanying them were two daughters, ages three and five, who would later be joined by a son born here. Juan would spend nine years in the immunology department at Duke University and a few more at UNC Chapel Hill. Montse would spend several years as a UNC and Duke researcher as well. Much of Juan’s research focused on histones, proteins now relatively well known for their function in regulating gene expression, and on transformational ideas for treating glaucoma. At the time, it was all cutting-edge stuff, and his glee for this kind of discovery still comes through when he talks about it.
“Those were beautiful years,” he says with a broad smile and pleasing Spanish accent.
Juan knew his research would eventually help people, but it would be many years before his fundamental research resulted in actual drugs or treatments, which also made funding difficult. As is true for many scientists, the constant chore of finding someone to fund his research made him start wondering if there might be a better use of his time. He and Montse were also saddened by the routine, common in academia, of making great friends only to see them move away. It’s why they started going to church, but not to the Catholic church they were born into. They found Catholicism in the United States much stricter than in Spain. The more liberal Episcopal Church seemed just right. So that’s where they went.
Juan found the farmworkers of North Carolina around 2010. That’s when he began leading youth groups at their family church in Durham, El Buen Pastor, making regular trips to the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry to visit labor camps with students and to help with the annual fall festival for farmworkers. Something about meeting those farmworkers and providing them with very basic necessities—food, clothing, toiletries, information—appealed deeply to him. And of course, he could speak with them, after making some minor adjustments between the Spanish of Spain and the Spanish of Mexico. Juan could ask them about what was going on, what they needed most, and just get to know them. Unlike his medical research, there was an immediate and tangible connection between the work he was doing and the help it could provide to people who needed it, people like farmworkers.
When the ministry offered him a full-time job as interim executive director in 2015, Juan jumped at the chance—despite the daily 150 mile round-trip commute this would require. When the ministry hired Alejandra Bravo Barrera as permanent executive director in 2018, Juan became their program director. At least, I think that was his title. He’s not so sure himself.
“I’m not very good with titles,” Juan tells me. Perhaps that is true. What he’s quite good at is summoning his interpersonal skills and charisma, intelligence and resourcefulness, and a boundless inner drive to improve the lives of migrant and seasonal farmworkers in any way that he possibly can. Rolling into a camp, tapping his horn to announce our presence just like Father Tony did in earlier years, Juan draws workers out of camp buildings with his welcoming voice.
“¡Buenas noches a todos! ¿Cómo están ustedes?” he yells out, greeting everyone and asking how they are doing. Before long, Juan is encircled by workers hanging on his every word as he asks them about their day and shares some news, always making eye contact and smiling, genuinely happy, as if there is no other place he would rather be. There isn’t.
At midyear 2022, when I arrived to accompany Juan on camp outreach, he was overseeing not just that program but hurricane disaster response (still going on since 2018), Covid education and vaccination events, and the twice-monthly food distributions that two hundred fifty local families depended on. Juan was working ten- to twelve-hour days—more than seventy hours on some weeks—not including the two and a half hours he spent behind the wheel for his daily commute. He was also writing grant proposals and supervising junior staff and interns. When the ministry’s donation manager had resigned, that job also fell to Juan. There simply weren’t enough hours in the day for him to do everything, such as lining up all the required food for the next distribution.
“There will be no bread on Saturday,” Juan said to me, sounding more defeated than anything. He hadn’t called the bakery that normally provides it. “I just haven’t had time.”
By 6:20 p.m., we were finally loading the ministry van with things to take to the camps, the first of which would be a gamble, as Juan couldn’t get through to any workers there. We’d try it anyway. Workers at the second camp said they would be there but not until later.
Two other volunteers joined me in taking things from Juan, who was hunting and pecking through piles in la bodega, then loading them into the van. The warehouse was a disaster. Ever since the donation manager quit, there’d been nobody to organize the non-stop stream of incoming stuff. It was filled with growing mountains of donations.
Just after seven, the four of us climbed into the van, and Juan pulled it onto Easy Street. This was not the ideal hour to be starting outreach. One has only a short window to do this, from the time workers arrive at their camps after a long day of work in the fields to when they go to sleep—around three hours. That’s just enough time for workers to shower, eat dinner, and call home. You don’t want to take too much of it. With the driving time between camps, and the uncertainty of whether workers will even be at a camp when you get there, you’re lucky to make it to one or two camps. That night, I wasn’t feeling so lucky.
The first camp was about fifteen minutes away. As we pulled in, my fears of an empty camp appeared to come true. We could see no workers nor any buses. Juan pulled the van as far as we can go, then got out. He spotted two men at the farthest trailer and went to speak with them as the rest of us stayed back. Before long, a smiling Juan returned to the van with four men at his heels, all of them smiling and laughing like a group of old friends—I think they were talking about soccer. Then Juan introduced the rest of us and began his usual pitch.
We opened the back doors of the van and started pulling out bins of clothing, hygiene kits, and water bottles. As the four men began going through the bins, a school bus pulled off the highway and into the camp. It parked just behind our van. Within minutes, Juan was surrounded by a circle of twenty-five men. He was smiling and asking questions and making them laugh. I don’t know how he does this. This onetime microbiologist from Spain must be exhausted, I realized, doing multiple full-time jobs all at once. And here he was, more than twelve hours into his workday, making these guys feel like they were the most important people in the world.
Driving to the next camp, I was outwardly vocal with how well things went but inwardly regretful for doubting Juan’s ability to pull that off. And then he did it again, pulling yet another rabbit from his magical hat. At the second camp, workers had already had dinner but held off calls to home until taking in all that Juan had to give. The sun was kissing the horizon good night as the men finished going through the bins, helping us close them up and load them back into the van. Minutes later, it was too dark to see, so we said our buenas noches by the light of our iPhones and headed out.
One summer Saturday, a little before nine in the morning, I arrived at the ministry to volunteer at a food distribution. Juan was smiling especially wide as I greeted him because—he was proud to say—he had confirmed the enlistment of eight volunteers and was pretty sure at least two more would show up. It takes at least ten people to run one of these events. When I asked him who else had volunteered, he took out his phone and pulled up a note. That’s when the smile dropped from his face.
“Oh no,” he mumbled. “I double-counted. We only have four.”
Those four of us, standing with him now, surrounded by massive pallets of boxed food still shrink-wrapped in plastic, looked at one another and then at Juan. “We’ll be fine without the others,” we assured him. We were lying through our teeth. We knew that with such a small group, and the first of two hundred fifty expected cars already queueing in a holding lot up the street, this was going to be a very difficult day.[1]
In 2020, Covid had put camp outreach on hold. But the food distributions, typically held at the ministry’s campus on the first and fourth Saturdays of every month of the growing season, kept on. Juan and his team of volunteers, no matter how small, made sure of that.
The ministry has been hosting distributions of food, or repartos de despensas, as they are billed Spanish, for more than forty years. The word despensas translates to pantry in English, or stock of food. Before Covid, anyone needing food would park their car and go through a line from table to table, picking up donated groceries. Those distributions came to a halt in early 2020 as the global pandemic kept everyone indoors. Later that year, the ministry resumed distributions with one huge change: Food recipients would stay in their cars, and masked volunteers would load despensas into their trunks.
The first pandemic-era food distribution was a disaster. So many cars showed up, all at once, that they spilled out of the ministry’s parking lot and onto Easy Street—a two-lane road that quickly became impassable, with a line of cars stretching in either direction for longer than the eye could see. It didn’t take long for the police to show up and pitch in with traffic control, and to leave a message: The ministry would have to figure out something else. Fortunately, the dental clinic of the CommWell Health Center, not a half mile north, has a giant parking lot, empty on Saturdays, which they kindly offered up to the ministry. Cars could line up there to wait for the distribution to open at 11:00 a.m., when a volunteer would send batches of cars down to the ministry, carefully managing the pace so as not to block Easy Street.
Planning for food distributions kicks off during the preceding two weeks, when ministry staff reaches out to their pool of suppliers to see who has what to bring. The largest of these is the Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina, which arrives on the Friday before a distribution with several pallets, each shrink-wrapped and loaded with food items, much of it still in bulk packaging. Meat, dairy, and other perishables go into the walk-in cooler. That big metal box has been cooling food since this campus was constructed in 1998. It’s getting tired. Its refrigeration unit drips water constantly onto the floor of the cooler where food is stored. Two giant plastic bins collect the water, into which stacks of donated food fall in from time to time, ruining it. The cooler remains on a long list of facility upgrades. The rest of the food bank pallets, with items not requiring refrigeration, rest on the concrete floor of the open-air event space attached to the ministry’s main building.
By 6:30 a.m. on Saturday, with the sun just peeking over fields to the east, the first vehicle has arrived to take its place in line at the dental clinic parking lot. It’s a red pickup truck belonging to Mr. Bishop, as everyone knows him, a White septuagenarian here not just for food but to do a crucial job. Pulling orange traffic cones from his truck, he places them such that the other hundreds of vehicles, which start arriving not long after he does, will know how to line up. Then, as they arrive, he directs each one of them to the right place in the right line, gesturing just to be sure.
Down at the ministry, shortly after nine, volunteers rip shrink-wrap off boxes stacked onto pallets and put their contents out on tables. Juan walks from table to table to estimate how many ears of corn or bags of tortillas or boxes of cookies or whatever are at each station. Then he divides this by two hundred fifty and tells the volunteer how much to put into each pantry. Soon after, he’ll fill one of six grocery carts with items from each station. Shortly before eleven, he has everyone stop for final instructions. In alternating English and Spanish, he shows the model cart so everyone knows how much to put into the empty carts as they fly by. He confirms everyone knows how this will work and who will fill each role. Then, at eleven, he calls up to the dental clinic for the first batch of cars. Then he flips on music that bursts from a giant portable loudspeaker.
“Any requests?!” he shouts.
With music blaring and everyone on their toes, the next two hours are like a cross between a pop-up street dance, factory assembly line, and McDonald’s drive-through. Loaders greet clients and empty carts into their trunks before sending them off. “¡Gracias por esperar!” they shout. Thank you for waiting! Then a runner replaces the empty cart with a full one and runs the empty one back to the tables to load it again.
With cars ever lurching through, Juan keeps an eye on things, shouting audible adjustments to what’s going into the carts. “Too much cookies!” he’ll yell, or “Not enough camotes!” Camotes are sweet potatoes. Nobody’s grammar is perfect during this time, and many of our shouts are a mix of English and Spanish.
Juan almost always loads cars himself. The only problem is that he knows nearly every family who shows up and can’t help but engage in conversation. They’ve been waiting in their cars for two, three, or four hours. Just seeing his smiling face, and getting to exchange a few words, is as precious to them as the food going into their trunks. Other volunteers know to keep an eye out for this tender delay, and to occasionally nudge Juan to the next car.
Two or three hours later, either the cars run out before the food does, or the food runs out first. In case of the former, volunteers might be sent home with food and the balance saved for camp outreach. In the latter case, Juan sends a group text to the ministry community: Se nos terminaron las despensas por hoy, he thumbs into his phone. We’re out of groceries for today.
In 2022, Juan and his crews put more than four thousand loads of groceries into vehicles. Most were driven by Latinos but not all. The first one loaded belongs to Mr. Bishop, in return for his priceless service of arriving before daybreak to set up cones and line up cars. He doesn’t work in agriculture, nor do most of the other non-Latino families who wait in that long line of cars for some food. The ministry will, of course, feed anyone, no questions asked—even the ministry’s White neighbors in the run-down house just across the street, the one with a Confederate flag on a pole in the backyard. According to Juan, they’ve come over for groceries.
“I’ll be right back,” said Juan, on that morning of a food distribution when he had double counted his list of expected volunteers. He jumped into his aging SUV and headed over to the clinic where dozens of cars were already in line. He explained the situation to some of their passengers. He did not have enough volunteers, he told them, apologizing through his mask, so the wait today could be much longer than usual. But if some of them would come over and help prepare and distribute despensas, then everyone would get their food sooner. Within minutes, he had all the volunteers he needed. The distribution that day was one of the fastest I’d ever seen.
In October of every year, most H-2A farmworkers in eastern North Carolina are beginning to return to Mexico. Some workers on contract with the North Carolina Growers Association, having the flexibility to change employers, go out the mountains in the western part of the state to cut pinos, or Christmas trees. This is also when the ministry’s camp outreach program winds down.
For Juan and me, our last outreach excursion of 2022 was at once typical and unusual. Workers at a camp well known to Juan had asked if we might bring warmer clothing on account of the rapidly cooling temperatures. That was the typical part. The unusual part was their dinner invitation. Would Juan and I join them for a feast to celebrate the end of the season?
Within minutes of arrival, we were all enjoying the smell of beef cooking on a grill, the taste of homemade salsa, and the sound of Mexican norteño music blasting from a small speaker. After nearly an hour, our bellies full of bowl after bowl of food placed before us, I reminded Juan we had another camp to go to. We packed things up and were ready to roll when a worker extended two cold bottles of beer for the road. Fortunately, he hadn’t yet opened them, so I could politely accept.
“¿Quién quiere cerveza?” I asked at the next camp. Who wants a beer?
The men here gave me a look of concern—the ministry is not known for delivering beer. I assured them this was a special occasion and handed over the still-cold bottles. After handing over boxes of groceries, we were invited to sit at the picnic table inside the trailer where they prepare and eat their meals. I glanced at the floor tiles and was struck by how worn they are. The linoleum appeared to be original, but more than half had been scuffed away, so that much of what you step on today is the Masonite sub floor—which fills more than half the area in some spots. How long does it take to scuff a floor like this? Twenty years? Fifty?
The conversation turned to their return to Mexico. Did they know the date? Not yet. Were they looking forward to going home? What a dumb question, I realized before the words were out of my mouth. Their silent smiles told me they too though it a dumb question, but they politely nodded their heads anyway.
Realizing our time was short, and with Juan’s help to be sure I got the Spanish right, I told them I could imagine some of what they miss from home—their wives, their children, the food at their dinner tables, their houses. But I asked them what they miss the most. What is one thing they miss more than anything else?
Their eyes left mine as they turned their heads to give it some thought. I resisted the urge to keep talking and let the silence be. After several moments, I wondered if they would ever answer and considered moving the conversation onto something else.
“Después de la cena, para dar un paseo con mi familia,” one of them said at last. After dinner, to take a walk with my family.
Other workers nodded their heads in agreement and added to the response. It doesn’t matter where they go, when they are home in Mexico. Maybe to a neighbor’s house, or to a tienda, or just through the streets of the town where they live, wandering at whim. And that’s the key, it seems. The workers at this camp, from every February to every December, can only go to a few different places. They can’t just stroll. They can’t use their free time as they wish.
One of the men poked his finger hard onto the tabletop. “Trabajo. Casa. Trabajo. Casa,” he said to me, emphasizing each word with a poke. Work. Camp. Work. Camp. He went on like this. Work. Camp. Store. Camp. Work. He kept going until he saw me nodding hard in agreement. I get it, I assured him. I get it. And I do.
Liberty. They miss the simple liberty of strolling with loved ones, a liberty that people like me take for granted.
A couple of months later, each of those men was back in Mexico, taking walks with their family as they wished. Then, as the new year of 2023 began, so did buses begin bringing H-2A workers back to North Carolina. And so did Juan prepare for another year of outreach.
Driving after work to the ministry, to accompany Juan on our first outreach excursion of the year, I slowed down a few miles north of the ministry. I wanted to see a field I had passed dozens of times the year before. Over the growing season, I had watched countless tobacco plants go from knee-high to me-high, admiring their flowers before they were snapped off. I later saw the once-regal plants turned into funny-looking things with all their lower leaves stripped off, as if undressed from the waist down. Then they were just stalks with no leaves at all. And then they were gone. Now, the fields were carpeted with emerging winter wheat. It looked to me like crabgrass.
Outreach that night was productive, slowed only by the extra time Juan took to ask workers about their winter breaks and to answer their questions about his. Juan seemed energized for the new year, rested and ready to do his job.
A few months later, on a Friday afternoon in March 2023, a young man in Mexico reached out to me on WhatsApp. I had been keeping in touch with a few H-2A farmworkers, including this one, during their time in Mexico between the 2022 and 2023 growing seasons. This energetic young man was known in camp as a milusos, or handyman, for his tenacity and smarts for repairing window AC units, washing machines, or anything else that needed fixing. He was one of the happiest workers I’d met all year, always moving and curious and just a pleasure to be around.
Now, with the new season underway, after a few pleasantries, this milusos got to the point. His dad, a veteran farmworker, would be arriving back in North Carolina the next day. Might the ministry bring some groceries to tide them over until their first payday?
Por supuesto, I replied. Of course. I sent a quick text to Juan, offering to go with him on outreach to the camp. As this was on a Friday afternoon, I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t reply right away. He was no doubt recruiting volunteers for the food distribution the next morning. I also knew he liked to sometimes take off Mondays after a food distribution, so when that day came and went, I still wasn’t too surprised.
On Tuesday morning, I got a reply from my text to Juan. But it wasn’t from Juan.
“I thought someone was to tell you,” the unidentified person wrote. “Juan is no longer with EFWM.”
Somebody else at the ministry was clearly monitoring his phone for calls and messages. I was stunned. In the moments that followed, I tried to think of all possible explanations and only came up with two. One, he had resigned. No way. He would have told me. Two, he was fired. No way, I thought. But if that was the only other explanation, then, well, yes way. I settled for maybe way as I texted Juan’s wife, Montse.
They fired him, she texted me back. He went in one morning to work, and they told him to pack his things and go home. They said they did not have money to pay him.
I would soon learn directly from Juan that he had lost his job in early March. He showed up one morning and was sent home. In a brief call, the ministry’s interim director, the second since Alejandra’s departure, confirmed what Montse and Juan had told me. He also emailed me a letter from the board of directors, explaining that the ministry’s budget for 2023 had been reduced to half of what it was in 2022, so they decided to eliminate Juan’s position.[2] This interim director’s term would soon end, and it wasn’t clear the ministry planned to hire another. It took me days for this new reality to sink in. Then I realized I might be witnessing not just the end of another era at the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry, but perhaps the end of the ministry itself.
In September 2023, six months after Juan’s departure, I was happy to see on Facebook the ministry was looking for volunteers to help with a food distribution. I reached out to the Rev. Frederick Clarkson—Father Fred—the priest at La Sagrada Familia who was helping to run the event, to ask how I could best help. Might I pick up farmworkers at a nearby camp first thing Sunday morning? he asked. And bring them to the ministry to help with the food distribution? I said I’d be happy to.
I was the first to arrive at the ministry on Sunday morning to park my car and pick up a van to fetch workers from camps. The sky was blue, the temperature in the high sixties. It was beautifully quiet, with only the sounds of chirping birds and the hum of the walk-in cooler, packed with donated food. Alone, I sat for a moment in the giant central breezeway where the ministry holds most of its events, imagining how many hundreds of thousands of farmworkers and family members had been in this very space over the decades—to pick up some food, attend a baptism or quinceañera or dance, or to attend a Sunday service.
At my feet, the smooth concrete floors were swept clean. But there were bits of discarded furniture all around, and other detritus scattered about. Looking up into the rafters, I saw bird droppings everywhere, as if splattered from a Jackson Pollock paintbrush. This place was showing its age. Maybe there just isn’t enough money to make a place like this work, I wondered. There was certainly little money for maintaining its vehicles. Opening the door of the ministry van I would use to pick up workers, I found the entire inside panel was gone, the window wedged shut with a piece of wood. I had to reach through dangling wires and pull on the frame of the door just to close it.
When I returned to Easy Street about an hour later, with a van load of farmworkers, other volunteers and staff had already begun setting things up. I was greeted by the cheerful face of staff member Anna Reyes. She was using an iPad to check in volunteers, take their photos to streamline future check-ins, and to print a sticker for my lapel so they could easily discern volunteers from clients.
Whoa. Wait. An iPad? Name stickers?
“Who set up this app?” I asked her, having seen nothing like this before at the ministry.
“Father Fred,” she told me. He was working with ministry board chair Michelle Bullock and other members of the executive committee to keep the ministry’s essential programs running. There were more surprises in store. Anna handed me a two-way radio to clip on my belt, so staff and key volunteers could communicate during the event. A radio?
I greeted Linda Reyes, Anna’s mom, as she set up bins of clothing to be distributed alongside the food. Among other duties, Linda managed the constant flow of donations into and out of the ministry, overseeing its very oldest program
I joined the farmworkers from my van in pitching in to help. One of my jobs was to unload stacked cartons of fresh food from the aging walk-in cooler. But first I had to empty those massive plastic bins, still collecting water 24-7 from the broken ceiling unit above, before they spilled over. Apparently, there were still no funds to repair it.
The breezeway was filled with dozens of people, everyone moving at top speed at the direction of the newest member of the ministry staff: Patti Navarro, the woman who first came to the ministry as a seven-year-old when her farmworker family needed help. After recently deciding that life in the city wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, she had returned home and taken this job to help today’s farmworker families in need. I cannot imagine anyone more motivated to help run this place than Patti.
For the next five hours, I witnessed something reassuring at the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry. A small army of volunteers unpacked food and put it out on tables, brought out clothing to distribute alongside the food, and set up an inside room for Sunday service. Hundreds of client cars rolled into the parking lot that day. Once Father Fred’s service had ended and the food distribution began, I marveled at the orderly crowd of clients rolling grocery carts from table to table, then to their cars to unload them. Kids ran to and fro. Parishioners greeted each other. It had the air of a festival.
At 2:47 p.m., the usual community text went out: Lo sentimos ya se nos agotaron las despensas, it read. Sorry, we’ve run out of groceries.Retrieving the van, I shuttled volunteer farmworkers and boxes of groceries back their camps. After the last trip, I returned the van to the ministry, then helped clean up before starting my own drive home, reflecting on what I had just witnessed. The ministry had not, as I feared it might, shut down. It had simply undergone one of its occasional transformations, making staffing and program adjustments in response to ever shifting circumstances. It would not be the last such transformation.
Fourteen months later, in November 2024, I again volunteered at a ministry food distribution, this one featuring turkeys and hams for Thanksgiving dinners. Patti, Linda, and Anna still directed more than forty volunteers in the unloading of the Food Bank truck, setting up of tables, and carting it to more than two hundred waiting families. My first job was to operate a pallet jack, tugging tons of food from the giant truck (which now arrived on the morning of the event and not the day before) into the breezeway. I also unloaded food from the walk-in cooler, noticing those two plastic bins, still collecting water from an overhead refrigeration unit still begging for repair.
My chief job for this event was at the entrance to the ministry parking lot, on Easy Street, where I guided cars into lines in the parking lot. Sending them to the soccer field, where cars used to park, was now forbidden. The new executive director, Mauricio Chenlo, had decided the soccer field was to be preserved and maintained for soccer.
Leaders of the ministry board of directors, the Rev. Deacon Cuyler O'Connor and the Rev. Cannon Stephanie Allen, were thrilled at Mauricio’s arrival. He has decades of experience working with immigrants and Indigenous people of Latin America. He was still getting up to speed at the time of the Thanksgiving food distribution, stewarding the staff and looking for improvement opportunities, including fiscal ones, but had made some notable changes already. Among his few purchases was a riding lawn mower, which he operates himself, tending to the turf on the soccer field and the rest of the grass on the Easy Street campus—trimming not just grass but thousands of dollars from the ministry’s operating budget. And la bodega, the warehouse which for years held mountains of donations awaiting sorting, is now as organized and tidy as I have ever seen it.
The ministry is now, as always, focused on serving needs but on a smaller scale, one that leverages relationships between member churches and the ministry. Its operating budget demands frugality, but its small and spirited staff makes the best of every dollar. Seeing and speaking with Patti Navarro, and Mauricio and Linda and Anna, gives me a new appreciation for the transcendence of time at a place like this. Its staff and leadership come and go but its mission lives on, coming to the aid of people in need. That, I predict, is one thing that will never change.
But they do need to fix that cooler.
There is a sad irony to the fact the people who feed us are often too poor to feed themselves, depending on places like the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry to put food on their own tables. And not everyone who needs that food is a farmworker. As I guided cars off Easy Street into the Thanksgiving food distribution, I noticed a White couple, in their late sixties or seventies, riding in the cab of a pickup truck. Their weathered faces were expressionless—stoic—as I waved them to move their vehicle forward. Dressed in coveralls, the man looked like he could be a grower, a crop farmer who hires some of the very farmworkers in this food line with him.
He just might be.
[1] The first ministry food distribution I ever worked, about a year before this one, had a skeletal crew like this. At the end of that day, each of the 639 muscles in this human body let me know I was to never, ever do that again.
[2] Happily, and of no surprise anyone who knows him, Juan Carabaña was not unemployed for long. The outreach team at the Legal Aid of North Carolina Farmworker Unit soon welcomed him on board. So he’d still get to see farmworkers and they’d get to see him. And, with Juan’s new employer based in Raleigh, the job change shaved about a hundred miles off his daily commute.