Thanksgiving in Tucson

Yesterday I experienced the warmest Thanksgiving of my life: 71 and sunny. I have a hard time believing it is practically December because it is so warm here (although I keep hearing people say things like, "Now that it's getting colder...").

The first event of my Thanksgiving was attending an afternoon potluck at an apartment complex. The property manager had called us about a month ago to ask if we could be involved in helping to teach the people about Thanksgiving. About 28/34 families living there are refugee families, and the rest are Spanish-speaking. The refugees are primarily from Bhutan (but ethnically Nepalese), and there are also families from Somalia and Afghanistan.

We partnered with St. Francis in the Foothills UMC to make the event happen. They brought tables, chairs, and a traditional Thanksgiving dish to pass. The property manager supplied the plates, silverware, napkins, and drinks. He also supplied the families with ingredients for them to make their own traditional food to bring. The longer we were outside, the more people kept coming and bringing food, so that it was difficult to find enough room on the tables for everything! People had been encouraged to bring vegan dishes if possible since many residents are vegan. (With dishes like turkey this is obviously impossible though.)

The food was all delicious and I was thrilled to have so many different types of food to try! I was so full from my first plate that I couldn't even eat dessert. I spent time meeting people from St. Francis as well as refugees. Some could speak English and some couldn't, and often it seemed the children old enough to be in school could speak some English while their younger siblings and parents or grandparents could not. At one point I sat with a mother and daughter from Afghanistan and a man from Bhutan as they talked. The man from Bhutan switched between a language they all understood (but which I clearly didn't) and English. It is my hope to learn some basic phrases in many of these languages so that I can at least exchange a few words with the refugees who don't speak English.

After the event ended, I went with Fran and her son to their friends' home for Thanksgiving dinner. The house was full of family and friends and delicious food. Before the meal started, everyone had a turn to share their name and something they were grateful for, which was nice. The conversations were many, lively, and interesting, ranging in topics from Cuba to Obamacare to caregivers to memories from the day JFK was assassinated. We also had eight children running around as well as a dog and a cat. Since several of the families are Jewish, we also celebrated the second night of Hanukkah. The story of Hanukkah was told and the candles on the Menorahs were still burning when I left.

Although I missed my family and my own traditions, and the dear friends with whom I celebrated Thanksgiving in the past few years, I still had a wonderful Thanksgiving.

And, to top it all off, Iskashitaa's new joint culinary venture was featured in the paper yesterday! I was able to attend the cooking retreat and it was a wonderful experience. See the article here.

Apples and Onions

When we talk about highs and lows, our director likes to call them "apples and onions." (Because those are food resources. She also told me that I can use a carrot to hit people to get them to start following food product inventory protocol. Carrots are also a food resource.)

Apples are good things; onions are negative (which isn't quite accurate because I do like onions.) Anyway, today I wanted to share lots of different little things, so it seemed better to put them into this list. I'll start with the onions so I can end on a good note. 

Onions: 

-It's hard to make friends. I feel lonely often. Even though I am making some friends, I don't always see them often. I also want to be able to do other things. It's hard to go places because it is getting dark so early and I don't like traveling alone in the dark. 

-Though I enjoy Arizona, I miss Michigan a lot. I miss my family, my friends, my work, my Bible study, learning Chinese, the MSU campus, my dorm room, the trees, the water, the weather...I'm not sure if this will diminish as time goes on because I feel like I am still in a culture shock stage. 

-Sometimes I feel stressed out by my work. I like it but it can be chaotic and confusing at times. 

Apples: 

-My Dad and Lori visited me this weekend. We had such a wonderful time! It was so good to see them. We were able to visit some beautiful places in Tucson that I have not been able to see yet, like Gates Pass for the sunset and the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, which was amazing. 

-When Dad, Lori, and I went to the food workshop on Saturday, one of the refugees who met my dad told him that he would be a father to me when my dad was in Michigan. I almost cried. 

-Tonight we had a wonderful Food for Thought dinner. We have these dinners every other month at a restaurant either owned by refugees or which hires refugees. The idea is to support these businesses, to have cross-cultural conversations, and to form new friendships. This month we ate at a Vietnamese restaurant called Pho 88, which is owned by several people who were Vietnamese refugees. I was nervous about everything leading up to the event, but it ended up turning out very well. We had wonderful conversations, lots of laughter, and representatives from 5 different countries.

To end, these are some of the wonderful pictures my dad took this weekend: 

Lori and I watching the sunset at Gates Pass. 

Sunset at Gates Pass, looking east 

My dad and me after the food workshop. 

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.