Events

On Saturday I spent all day at an event at the St. Mark's UMC in northwest Tucson. It was a "Masterpiece Festival" with lots of crafters and vendors. It was a really neat show, but I didn't get to see much outside of the bake sale (at which I got some pumpkin bread!)
We set up to sell our food products and African baskets made by refugees. It was a warm day but we were glad to be in the shade, where it was comfortable. We did pretty well in sales, especially since we split our product between 3 events. The Farmer's Market happens every Saturday, so that was one of the events, and the other was a sale at the UNICEF store for UN Day.

Event days (for sales) consist of trying to set up a visually appealing display and then engaging people who come by our booth. Even if they are not interested in buying something, we still want to share with them about Iskashitaa. We are always looking for volunteers, and we are also trying to spread the word about our harvesting program so we can keep food from going to waste! It's always great to hear people say, "My neighbor has a huge grapefruit tree; I'll give them your flyer!"
We have a lot of events coming up as the holiday season draws nearer. This is a busy time of year for us. We have lots of sales, and lots of people purchasing products for Christmas gifts. This means lots of food preservation workshops to actually make these products!
This weekend we are having our next food workshop, and we plan to make a wide range of items:

• Pumpkin butter
• Apple butter
• Cinnamon apple sauce
• Lemon Curd
• Ruby Red Grapefruit Curd
• Dressings
• Prickly Pear Syrup

We will be doing a lot with apples and pumpkins. On Friday we had a huge apple harvest in partnership with Brown's Apple Orchard in Wilcox. Because Halloween is this week, lots of pumpkin patches are letting us come harvest their excess pumpkins starting November 1st! We will have a lot to do. On a personal note, this weekend my Dad is coming to visit! He's going to join us for the food workshop, and I'm hoping we'll be able to see some of the great landmarks around Tucson. 

Pictures from the event at St. Mark's on Saturday. 

The green basket in the back is one of my favorites. Beautiful. These baskets take weeks to make. 

Recent Days

Just some quick bullet points about what I've been up to lately. This week has been a quieter one for me (though still pretty stressful, just fewer events.)

• On Friday we had a food preservation workshop.My main contribution here was peeling garlic for about 2 hours. It's fortunate that I like garlic, because my hands smelled like it for a few days afterward. It is great to be able to connect with more of the volunteers, though. It makes it a lot easier for me to find volunteers for upcoming workshops. At our next workshop, I'm looking forward to working with pears and pumpkins! Tomorrow we are having a big pear harvest at an orchard outside the city. (I'm not going, but I'll be working with the pears!) 
• This week I have been trying to get some other logistical things done. The main issue has been trying to find a new location for our Refugee 101 volunteer training. We wanted to hold it in a more central location that is accessible by bus. I think we have finally found somewhere, but it has been quite the process! Hopefully tomorrow it will all be solidified. 
• Saturday I am going to be at an art show all day selling Iskashitaa's crafts and food products. 
• I've continued going to Wesley on Wednesdays and for the past two weeks I have gone to the small group/Bible study/life group on Sunday. I like the Sunday meetings because of the opportunity for discussion and reflection, and of course interacting with people outside of work. Beginning to have some friendships that are more than surface-level has been a wonderful development for me in the past couple weeks. Now I am just hoping that I can expand this by getting involved in some other activities. 
• I biked to church on Sunday morning, and despite getting a little turned around on my way there, it went pretty well. I was late for the service but I still enjoyed it. I especially like that the chapel is open between services for anyone who would like to take communion. 
• Looking forward to resting on my days off this Sunday/Monday, and also to seeing my dad next weekend!!! 

moving forward

Today was a good day for many reasons:

• We now have a MICROWAVE at the office! Heather and I are thrilled; this greatly expands our lunch options!! 

• We got Google Voice for our office cell phone. It can transcribe messages and email them to you, and we are beyond excited about this. We get lots of calls and we don't have the staff capacity to go through them, especially during the weekend when no one checks the messages. Having to listen to 15 voicemails on a Monday morning is not the best feeling. Though the transcription will obviously not be perfect (especially when we are taking messages from refugees), it will be extremely helpful and cut down on the amount of time we spend going through the messages. 

• I rode my bike for the first time. I have been avoiding it because riding in the city makes me very nervous. But Heather and I had a meeting today and the best way to get there was via bike, and she is much more experienced than I am with the biking. It felt good to be riding a bike again, even though I am woefully out of shape.
  
  The best part about today was the meeting that Heather and I had. Last week I received a call from a man who is a manager of an apartment complex. He explained that nearly all of their tenants (28/34 families) are refugee families (and the remaining families are Spanish-speaking.) The owner the refugees to learn about Thanksgiving and they were looking for a group who worked with refugees to come do some sort of presentation about Thanksgiving.We are now working with them on preparing this event for Thanksgiving Day. I won't write too much more about it now, but I feel so thankful to be a part of this!
  
  It was beyond encouraging to see firsthand how people with wealth and means are interested in making better the lives of others. So often it seems like business owners and apartment managers are inconsiderate of the people they work with and primarily concerned with profit. This is clearly not the case at this particular apartment complex: instead they are interested in building a community and creating a welcoming place for refugees. Seeing this gave me a concrete example of some of the ways my many business major friends might be able effect change in their futures, and that was an exciting prospect for me, too. I'm looking forward to our participation in this project and having something so worthwhile to be a part of on my Thanksgiving Day. As I told Heather on our way back, that meeting was the kind of experience that made me think: "This is why I am doing this."

Food Justice

Earlier this year I read a book called "Everyday Justice." Each chapter discussed a different justice issue linked to common items in a Westerner's life: chocolate, clothing, gas, and food, to name a few. Since reading this book, I have felt a great desire to live my life with more awareness as to how my use of these everyday objects might be contributing to slavery, injustice, and other problems in our world.

Since moving to Tucson, I have been focusing on the area of food. This is especially easy for me because Iskashitaa is food-justice minded (our programs are food-based!) and the lady I am living with is also conscious about her food choices.

Thanks to Iskashitaa and donors to Iskashitaa, I am often able to take bread and fresh produce home with me. I have been trying to buy organic (which I know is not perfect, but better than non-organic): Organic milk, eggs, sugar, flour, honey, and carrots have been some of my main purchases. I was a little nervous about the taste of the organic milk, but it is pretty good. It is also nice to know that the eggs I am eating do not come from chickens that are fed unnatural food and allowed no space to move.

I am actually hoping to be able to buy some of these things (like honey and eggs) at a farmer's market. Unfortunately on Farmer's Market days I am often busy and unable to go.

I am also trying to eat foods while they are in season! It's interesting how I never thought about the seasons for fruits that don't grow in Michigan; they are always available year round in the store! Since I want to eat more local foods, it makes sense to eat what is in season. I have been eating a lot of apples lately! (aka daily) I'm looking forward to citrus season (winter) which is our busiest harvesting season. I've never seen lemons, grapefruit, or oranges growing on actual trees and I'm hoping to take part in these harvests.

I wanted to finish my post with some pictures of the different foods I have been working with and learning about with Iskashitaa. My hope is that as time goes on I will eat more and more natural foods and less processed foods, and get acquainted with more local foods! All photos are taken from the Iskashitaa facebook page.

This is the pitaya fruit I posted about several weeks ago. We have branded it "cactus kiwi" since the inside looks so similar to kiwi!

These are calamondins or calamansi. We call them limes and they are in the kumquat family. The orange ones are ripe! They are abundant in the Philippines and also very tart! We use them to make a tart marmalade. 

These are carob pods. They grow on trees. We grind them, sift them, and then sell the powder. Today Barbara sent me home with some carob powder so I could try it out with my baking. I am currently trying to bake brownies with it. Carob powder can be used as a partial substitute for flour. When put in for some of the flour in a recipe, you can add less sugar because it is naturally sweet! I am told that the powder is also great to add to smoothies because it thickens it and adds sweetness and protein. 

We have had lots of pomegranate harvests lately, which is great because most of our refugee friends love pomegranates! 

This picture is from our last food workshop. We are cutting open the pomegranates to take out the 'seeds' to juice! 

Pomegranate has a beautiful color. It also stains clothes, whereas prickly pear (below) does not. 

Prickly pear! I had never heard of this cactus fruit before coming here. It is beautiful in color but the spines are brutal. The cooler we used after the prickly pear harvest was getting people for days after we washed it out. 

Prickly pear on the cactus. We juice the prickly pear which is a difficult, tiring, and often painful process. We have to strain the juice many times so the tiny spindles don't get inside of our product. 

These are quince! I had never heard of them before coming here. I tasted some quince for the first time today; it reminded me of applesauce but with a different flavor. They are very hard until they are cooked. We are going to use the rest of our quince to make prickly-pear quince jam. 

Tucson Meet Yourself

This past week was crazy as we were preparing to take part in a major city festival in addition to other routine items. Tucson Meet Yourself is a 3-day folklife festival featuring cultural foods, dancing, crafts, and musical performances. Downtown was transformed into an area full of tents, stages, and food stations. Local people often call the festival "Tucson Eat Yourself" because of the great amount of food there.

Iskashitaa had a tent in the Heritage Foods section for all three days, where we sold our canned food products from 12-6 each day. These are the products that we make during the Food Preservation Workshops (which I coordinate.) We also had crafting demonstrators on Saturday and Sunday from 12-5. On Saturday we had some young refugee girls demonstrating knitting and crocheting, and on Sunday we had refugee women demonstrating Burundi basket weaving. We also sold our refugee-made craft items on Saturday and Sunday.

Volunteers and me at our tent at Tucson Meet Yourself on Friday morning.

I worked at the festival in our food products tent on Friday and Saturday. It was a fun experience despite being tiring and occasionally stressful. Not only are we trying to sell our products, we are also simply trying to let people know about our organization. We are always looking for volunteers and people willing to donate their trees by letting us harvest the excess fruit.

Our tent was right next to the Food Demonstration area, where a kitchen was set up for people to give cultural cooking demonstrations. This was wonderful because some of the refugee women we work with were giving cooking demonstrations. It was nice to be able to see them and support them, and some of them brought me samples of the food after they were finished!

The stage for dancing was also behind us. While I didn't see much of the dancing, it was still neat to see all the various performers getting prepared behind the stage while wearing their traditional clothing. It was a cool weekend, but I was so exhausted by the end of it!

This week Heather and I also lead our first Refugee 101 Volunteer Training. We are going to be running these monthly trainings from now on. One of my current tasks is to find a new location for the training; our current location is only accessible by car, which isn't good for Heather, me, or probably many of our potential volunteers. We were both extremely nervous, but I think doing the presentation showed me how much I have already learned. The main part I need to focus on now is learning more about the conflicts in each country and why people have fled their homes.

This week we have another food workshop. I'm hoping to get some pictures this time to share! It's a little challenging since I don't have a camera anymore, but I'm hoping to find a way.

To finish, here is a news article that was in the Arizona Daily Star about a family of Syrian asylees that we work with.

this reality

Not having a car has been difficult. It has also helped me to understand what it means to be privileged enough to have a car. It's easy for me to be annoyed about the 10 minute walk to the store in the Arizona heat, and being limited to only the groceries I can carry. It's easy to be frustrated about the long trips I have to take to get to church, the library, or anywhere else I want to go. It's easy to be upset that I always have to ask people for rides if I go somewhere after dark since I don't feel comfortable walking to my house from the bus stop in the dark.

Yet whenever I think these thoughts, I remind myself that for so many people, this is their reality. They don't have enough money to have a car. The bus is the only option. And some of them live much farther away from grocery stores and workplaces than I do. This is especially true for some of the refugees we work with. Even if they were professionals in their home country, here in the US they don't have a degree, so they are unable to get good jobs. The only way to do so would be to go through the education system here with the money they don't have. They often do not have cars and are forced to live in parts of the city that are more remote, since they are less expensive.

Today I heard someone say, "I don't know how people can just sit at the bus stops in the middle of the day with the sun beating down on them like that." And I just thought..."Because they don't have a choice.." Riding the bus exposes me to a different population. It makes me understand realities that I wouldn't have to deal with if I had a car. Having a car is a luxury that shelters me. It is easier to ignore the poor if they are on the buses and you have a car. The people who ride the bus become an abstract idea when you don't have to look into their faces. The separation makes it easier to think that the "less fortunate" are in some vague otherplace, with their names and faces and stories blurred.

At one of the bus stops I go to, I typically see people who I suspect are homeless. (I was told that Tucson has a huge homeless population. Because of the weather patterns here, many homeless people try to save enough money to buy a one way bus ticket .) They sit in the bus stops talking with each other, and when the bus comes, they continue to sit. Often people ask me for change, but I usually don't have any with me. (My bus pass is paid for by the month and the information is in the card.) Many of them seem to have mental illnesses. It is saddening to see the disproportionate amount of homeless people who have mental illnesses who are probably unable to get treatment. But that's another topic.

Earlier this week, I was sitting at a bus stop after picking up a package from the post office. It was hot and sunny, and I was worried I might get sunburned. A man with a plastic bag came by and began to search through the trash can at the bus stop looking for food. He pulled out a soft drink cup that had been thrown away and tried to drink the last of it. Then he sat down on the bench and waited for the bus with the rest of us.

I felt twisted with emotions--sadness, compassion, helplessness. We live in such a wasteful world. How often do we throw away the leftover food on our plate without a second thought? How often do we pour the rest of a drink down the drain or into the grass, or simply dump it into the trash? If we were more responsible about our consumption, what effect would that have on the hungry and the thirsty? What effect would it have on our environment and our natural resources?

A few weeks ago I wrote a post contemplating what it meant to hunger and thirst for righteousness. Hunger and thirst can cause a person to search through garbage to find relief. What do we have to search through to satisfy the hunger and thirst for righteousness?