RESEARCH BIOLOGIST.
Frank Fast.
I doc.u.ment flora and fauna for the government of New Caledonia, which is a country in the South Pacific. I go to these islands that no one lives on-a lot of them no one has ever been to before-and I develop lists of everything that"s there. All the creatures and plants and all that. Then I submit this information to their Parks and Reserve Department so they know what exists. I don"t work for New Cal"s government, they just allow me to conduct my research because they benefit from it. Of course, I benefit from it, too. It"s a completely unique research environment, and also, I"m allowed to retrieve gecko lizards from these islands that I then breed for my own uses.
I have no formal training of any kind. No education. Nothing like that. The thing was, when I was a kid, I had a lot of problems. I didn"t spend much time at home. I was kind of hard to handle. I got placed in a boarding academy by my parents and the church, and this couple from the church who worked as missionaries down in South America kind of adopted me and they said, "You need to go with what you know. Where"s your heart?" And I said, "I really like the forest, I like the desert, I like the animals." So they were like, "Well, you need to pursue that." So I did. I"d come home with a bull snake I"d caught and instead of hearing, "Get that d.a.m.n thing out of the house," they"d say, "Cool, let"s buy you a fish tank and we"ll keep it for a while."
I didn"t want to live in a bedroom-I wanted a jungle in my room. I kept bringing in plants, kept digging things up. I always wanted to go to the plant store and the pet store and stuff like that. I"ve got pictures of me when I was ten years old with crows and racc.o.o.ns on my back. And then, when I was about eleven, I got a job at Children"s Zoo here in Lincoln, Nebraska. The curator of their reptile house quit and a good friend of my family"s was the director of the entire zoo and he hired me on.
I wasn"t exactly the curator of the reptiles, but I was the person taking care of them for almost a year. Kids don"t get a lot of respect- but I did. I was there, I showed up every day. They even sent me to a few seminars to learn how to take care of reptiles in a zoo environment. I was eager to learn and I learned a lot. And then the University of Nebraska at Omaha decided to start a herpetological society. Herpetology is the study of reptiles and amphibians. Well, I was one of the founding members of that when I was around eleven years old. Everybody else was in their thirties and forties, but I developed some respect because I had a job at the zoo.
It may seem odd that I did all that so young, but at the time, herpetology was in its infancy. Reptiles were a novelty. You had to travel across the United States to go to a zoo that had a reptile collection. Today, there"s literally thousands of books on reptiles, but when I first got interested in them, there were a couple dozen, not just in the United States, but in the world.
As I grew older and matured, my relationships with my peers grew, and these were people who were curators at zoos and in charge of research groups and inst.i.tutions and stuff, and they"ve got a lot of pull. If they care about you, they"ll make things happen. Talking to them, I realized that to have a career of some kind, I needed to specialize. I like exotic animals, so I narrowed it down to reptiles, then I narrowed it down to geckos, and then I narrowed it down to nothing but geckos from New Caledonia. That"s extremely specialized and there are only, as far as I know, a couple other people who specialize in this type of gecko, and I probably have within the top three or four collections so far as number and quality. The reason that I did it was just because it"s where my heart was. I just felt very strongly about this type of animal, is all. I don"t know why, I can"t explain it. There is no real explanation. The very first one I ever saw was in a book.
So what I do now is I work in New Caledonia independently. I don"t work for any inst.i.tution or government. I"m totally independent. They need the information to abide by international trade laws and agreements and I give it to them. It"s a symbiotic relationship. I get to bring back a certain amount of animals that I collect, and I get to breed them. That means I can provide zoos and other public inst.i.tutions with captive-bred offspring-and that"s the whole key. I make what are called "breeding loans." They pay me for the breeding use of my geckos, so they get the babies and I use that money to take care of the adults and for further research. That way, when inst.i.tutions and zoos and such want to have animals for educational purposes, they don"t have to go out and collect them-they can get them from me. So the wild population can stay intact.
All the geckos that I collect from an island, I only breed with other geckos from that same island. So I have to keep very extensive records. And transporting them is very difficult. I feed my geckos jarred baby foods-bananas, peaches-which is easy, but you have to transport them in special crates that allow oxygen and don"t allow cold in. They"re very big crates and it"s really hard getting through customs. They have a tough time accepting that a long-haired guy like me is legally importing rare, protected animals. I have so much paperwork and I am so legal. I do everything to the gnat"s a.s.s, but they still take hours, sometimes a whole day. They"ll pull the lining out of my suitcases, look inside the lenses of my camera, search me, X-ray everything, bring in dogs, everything. They even go to the extent of calling the government of New Caledonia and asking them, "Does Frank Fast have permission to do this?" I mean, they will not let me pa.s.s till they go through everything. Because they just can"t comprehend it.
In 1997, the French reneged on a seventy-year-old promise to give the islands back to the natives of New Caledonia, so there was war over there and they couldn"t guarantee our safety. So we didn"t go. But otherwise I make a trip every year for about a month each time. I bring a ton of equipment with me-tents, knives, climbing ropes, canteens, rafts, walkie-talkies, all our food. Then we set up a base camp and we use video cameras and notebooks and checklists to do our cataloguing of the flora and fauna. Then we go for the lizards. To find these geckos, you need a flashlight and the knowledge of where to look. That"s what it"s all about-you have to know where to look. We don"t say the names of specific islands when we publish in magazines because poachers would go there. The animals are worth a lot of money. People smuggle them and can get up to a thousand bucks each, because this specific kind of gecko is only found one place in the entire world. They"re huge. Three inches is the average for a gecko-these can get up to fifteen inches long. They don"t have predators because there are no native mammals in the islands.
New Caledonia is a great place to go for research, but it"s not a place to live. Nothing lasts in a tropical environment. You destroy your health, you suffer, you go without food and water. I"ve wrecked myself over this, lost a lot of weight. I used to be substantial-now I am a shadow. I ruined my kidneys from dehydration. One time I spent almost twelve hours tripping bad because I"d eaten rotten coconuts. The meat looked good, tasted good, everything was fine, but there was something wrong with the coconut. I was tripping so bad, I was puking and c.r.a.pping myself. Totally dehydrated. I hallucinated, had tunnel vision. I was gone, gone. And I"m away from home a lot, so it"s tough on a marriage. I"m telling you, it"s not fun. I won"t do it forever. I"m doing it now, but it"s not fun. I mean, I love to do it and I"m doing my part for the animals and the environment, but I wouldn"t want to be in the field all the time.
Since I don"t have an education, I can"t get employment working for a zoo or botanical garden, because they have to hire people with degrees in order for them to get the funding they need to support themselves. I could get some kind of a job, I"m sure, but I don"t want to have to suck a.s.s for anyone. I"d rather live my own life independently, do what I do independently-research, write articles, breed my lizards. What more could you want?
It"s an eternal ritual-the salmon come
back to the same streams and rivers
they were sp.a.w.ned in. And I"m there
just waiting for them with a net.
COMMERCIAL FISHERMAN.
Ian Bruce.
About eight years ago, I started coming up to Alaska to work in the canneries during the summers. I saw that you could make a decent living on the fishing boats and I guess I was kind of disgusted with this world, you know? I wanted a change. So I moved up here to Kodiak to fish. I worked as a deck hand and then, four years ago, I bought a license that allows me to harvest fish. It costs about fifty grand and it"s good for beyond a lifetime. I can will it to my children.
So now I lease a boat. It"s just like leasing an office s.p.a.ce or something. I"m the captain. It"s kind of like the old military where you sort of bought a position. I bought my captain"s position when I got my license. I hire a crew, typically college students. They"re coveted because they"re real savvy. Much better than a lot of derelicts that you"re forced to hire sometimes. They have some sense of personal s.p.a.ce. They"re generally cleaner.
In the summers, I fish salmon on a forty-foot boat with a quarter-mile-long net. We only catch salmon, none of the by-catch that often makes the press-dolphins and stuff-just pure salmon. The season starts every June. It"s an eternal ritual-the salmon come back to the same streams and rivers they were sp.a.w.ned in. And I"m there just waiting for them with a net. It"s all highly regulated and the days are long-twenty hours-but it"s very easy work. Mostly, you just have to fight the tedium waiting for the salmon to swim into your nets.
The thing to keep in mind is that the salmon returns here are totally healthy. In fact, that"s one of our problems. Alaska"s salmon keep coming back in almost obscene numbers. Nature"s run amok. It lowers the price. There"s only so much canned salmon the world can consume. When was the last time you ate a can of salmon? That"s how the ones I catch typically end up-being canned because they come in such a big wallop that they can"t be fileted or smoked. You"ve got to slap it in the can, hope someone buys it. But there"s not too many people buying cans of salmon. One bright spot was that scare in Europe-the Mad Cow disease. The British apparently switched straight to canned salmon-something that buoyed us up for a few years, but apparently Mad Cow disease has been solved.
Anyway, that"s the summertime, salmon. The wintertime is crabs. I fish the snow crabs you get in Sizzler or Red Lobster, which are much more lucrative, but wintertime fishing is also what earns Alaskan commercial fisherman a place as the most dangerous occupation in America. One out of every hundred of us dies every season. The main reason is that you"re isolated and it"s incredibly brutal conditions. You spend twenty hours a day working with six hours of sunlight maximum and lots of ice. Most of us die from the capsizing of boats, because any water, any spray that hits the boat, it turns to ice. The boat gets top-heavy-and it"s already top-heavy because it"s stacked three stories high with thousand-pound crab cages. So then you get a little more spray, high seas, more ice-the boat capsizes. I"ve lost one good friend this year and an acquaintance that way. And it"s a particularly miserable death, because you"re trapped in a boat that sometimes floats for hours with an air pocket and you"re just sort of waiting for that pocket to disperse. There"s been several incidences of the Coast Guard arriving, hearing guys tapping from inside of this capsized boat and not being able to cut open and retrieve them fast enough.
All you can do is break the ice. A good five hours a day of any sort of wintertime fishing in Alaska is devoted to just breaking ice off the boats. I use a baseball bat and a big rubber mallet and when my arms get tired, I just stomp around the decks, breaking the ice.
The days typically start around four A.M. I straggle out on deck, after coffee, and it"s a numbers game. Each time you pull in your salmon net or you lift up your crab pots isn"t that lucrative. You have to do it twenty hours a day. And then it can be lucrative. I have acquaintances that have made eighty thousand bucks in three or four months of work. But twenty hours is a lot of time on a small boat.
My job specifically is I fling a little grappling hook that snags a buoy. These buoys are attached to about two hundred feet of line that go straight down to these big giant crab pots at the bottom of the ocean. I thread the line onto an electric coiler that hauls up a pot. I empty the pot and then I watch for another buoy and fling my grappling hook again. The greenhorns-greenhorn is the term for people who are new here-they sort the crab, measure the crab, and launch the pot again. When you do that, you have to fling that two hundred feet of line back overboard, and that"s another dangerous aspect of the job, because as the line"s whizzing overboard, on the far end of it this thousand-pound cage is sinking to the bottom of the Bering Sea, and should you get line tangled around your legs, you"re going down.
So it"s risky. Actually, it"s more than risky-it"s a brutal, archaic life. But I like it. When I go out fishing, I"m slipping into a role that humans have always played. It"s the eternal hunting party. Five guys go off, you know? And thirty thousand years ago, we went off to score a mammoth. Now we go out to score fish. It"s a hunting party- we"re hunter-gatherers.
I used to feel left out of this culture. Now, I feel like I"m some throwback, but that"s great. So I"m a throwback, so what? That"s my career. I feel sorry for someone who hasn"t experienced it. I mean, in Kodiak, particularly in summer, there"s this electric feeling-you"re in a place that totally has a purpose. It"s got a soul. In Kodiak, you fish, and the whole town revolves around you. It might be kind of a.n.a.logous to being an auto worker in Detroit during the heyday of car making in America. You"re a pillar of the community, even though you"re just a blue-collar worker. The whole community revolves around you and your industry. And that"s kind of neat. And it"s great being in a place that has a very obvious reason to be. I was just down in San Diego, which is where I grew up, and what is actually produced in San Diego? What is its reason to be? Why couldn"t whatever is being done there be done in Phoenix or Tucson? Well, Kodiak"s reason to be is obvious. It"s producing America"s seafood.
There"s this sort of glorious feel to it-and you know, it"s also a very open-minded and liberal feeling. All of the great towns of the Renaissance were maritime towns. And the thing that makes them liberal is because people are forced to have an open mind. Because in fishing there"s a sort of common denominator. If you can tie a good knot, you"re hired. It doesn"t matter if you"re Laotian, Filipino, Portuguese, whatever. And a fishing town is one of the few places in America where a blue-collar worker can feel proud. You are responsible for the whole town. If your job is erased, then the town will be erased. Whereas, if you work in Southern California, you"re irrelevant. Who knows what ultimately drives that economy? So there"s this wonderful simplicity to your role in the community here.
And here"s another thing: you"re self-employed. You"re no longer a wage earner working the nine-to-five deal. You"re an entrepreneur, and you get paid a percentage of the cash. It"s profit sharing. Even my deck hands are profit-sharers. And the reason for that is you couldn"t pay a person a flat wage high enough to do some of the things this demands.
The problem is, I don"t know what the future is. Some years I make good money, some years I don"t. One year my summer earnings doubled in a single afternoon because the Tokyo fish market had a bidding war. And then another summer, they decreased by half because Emperor Hirohito died, and j.a.pan went into some sort of cultural abhorrence of fish. And j.a.pan"s a big market, so there it was. It"s unpredictable.
What is predictable is that I"m gonna get busted up eventually. I mean, all my fishing friends have been mangled at least once. The fatality rate is only maybe one percent but the mangling rate is much higher. Hernias, broken collarbones, broken ribs, frostbite, squashed fingers. I myself got a half-inch of my finger chewed up in a coiler and I also have a knee that"s bent out of shape. But that"s dwelling on the negative. I don"t necessarily have to come to a grim end. In ten years, if I keep doing well, I see myself running a boat solely in the summertime, which I always will do. I"ll always fish, as long as I physically can. Even if the money dropped out, I"d still fish. I enjoy it so much. I fit the role.
They fight. They"re wild animals.
BUFFALO RANCHER.
Ray O. Smith.
In 1945, I bought a few cows, started ranching. Things grew from there, but I didn"t like the lifestyle of raising cows. Not enough profit for all the work. I tried some other animals a bit-some elk, some hogs-nothing seriously. Then in 1962, I traded some of my cattle to a guy who had buffalo. I found out that buffalo does a lot better than cattle, so I started selling cows and buying buffalo. I sold my last beef cow in 1984 and you couldn"t run fast enough to get me back in the business.
Today I have a ranch in Longford, Kansas, east of Salina. Eighteen hundred and ten acres. I only have buffalo.
Buffalo got a lot going that other animals don"t have. The market is established. It"s low in cholesterol and low in fat and people are fat conscious, you know that. Other meats don"t have that advantage. Right now, buffalo goes for about two thousand four hundred dollars a head. Beef cows go for three hundred and fifty dollars a head. No comparison as far as I"m concerned. It"s been a good business for me. My retirement"s all set.
I have a little less than three hundred head. But it"s calving season, so I should be getting around ninety more presently. I won"t sell all of the calves because I need breeding stock. I might sell forty-five of them. Maybe more. I like to keep around three hundred head. I had about six hundred at my high time, but my sons had other interests and I couldn"t do it alone. Three hundred is about all I can handle.
I do a lot of things with them. I feed them and water them, sort them, keep records. In the summer, I have them in five pastures. In the winter I put three pastures of animals together because it"s less gates to go through, less time to spend outside on cold winter days. Just before Thanksgiving, I round them up and get them ready for winter quarters, treat them for parasites. That"s a busy time. Those days are about all buffalo.
Mike the hand works with me. He doesn"t like buffalo, though. He"s afraid of them and doesn"t want to have to do with them. They fight. They"re wild animals. So Mike just helps part-time. He worked till noon today.
July and August is breeding season. The mothers have their calves in April and May-one calf each. We"ve had twins sometimes but not often. When you breed them, you use a smaller pasture, you put one bull with twenty cows. You get twenty calves.
When they"re calving, you don"t worry about them. You let them take care of themselves. Beef cows, you have to see the mothers on a regular basis, you know? Each morning, noon, and evening. They have a lot of problems giving birth.
Buffalo are different because they"re a wild animal. Survival of the fittest. Man"s done so much to cows. He has tried to change everything. For a while, in the early eighties, man wanted cows who were low to the ground and we got a dwarf problem. Then they got real long like a racehorse. Now, they"re way up off the ground and long. They"ve done the same thing with hogs. But the buffalo aren"t at that stage yet. When man has that much control over an animal, problems happen. Breeding problems, disease, everything. Wild animals survive because man hasn"t had that much to do with them.
I don"t remember how many cows I lost with birth problems, but buffalo you don"t have to worry about. Maybe two, three buffalo cows out of a hundred have a problem with calving. If they"re in trouble during birth, I just let the calves die. Feed them to my cats then.
When they"re born, you earmark them and put them with their mother in the corral so you know who their mother is two years later when you want to breed them. You have a good set of records that way. In the corral, they pair up together, stand together, nurse, or whatever. Then you wean them. You keep them with their mothers for three days, and then send them back to the fields. And you keep the bulls away because they"ll go after the calves.
We have a straggler once in a while. One"s born out of season. Doesn"t happen much-three or four out of one hundred have September babies instead of April. Call them stragglers. Nothing you can do for them unless you want to take the bulls out the first of September, separate them like you would for an April birth, but that"s a ch.o.r.e and a lot of work so I just let nature take its course.
I sell my buffalo sight unseen and sometimes before they"re even born. Some of the calves that are coming out right now were spoken for a year ago. That"s because of my experience and good reputation. I don"t advertise, I sell by my reputation. I took them to Denver in the early eighties to the National Western Stock Show. It"s the granddaddy of all livestock shows. They have cattle and horses, too. We won a lot of awards there.
I do all my own deals with the buyers. They come after them with trucks or stock trailers. That way I don"t have to pay for transportation and don"t have to pay commission. It"s all private.
I"ve not had much negative experience in this. I lost a few stock over the years-maybe three or four of them for various reasons. Lightning. Six years ago, I got hurt pretty bad. It was my fault. I didn"t get out of the way. A buffalo just ran over me. I was laid up in the hospital for twenty-three days. I went to the gate to let one of them out and he made a line for me, ran over me and just kept going. He crushed my hip, broke some ribs, and cut my lip in half. Tore my tongue in two.
You"re dealing with a wild animal here. They"re hard to handle when excited so you have to be patient all the time. I drove calves two miles to pasture a couple of days ago, and I let them walk instead of making them run. It took longer that way but you do it like it ought to be done. If they get excited, they get in trouble. They"ll run into a fence or break it down, so be patient. Slow. Keep your mouth shut. Best way to handle them is put some duct tape over your mouth. If they get excited, they"ll get lost or get away, you"ll scare them. When you sort them, be quiet. Patient and slow. Cattle people whoop and holler around cattle, you don"t handle buffalo like that. Duct tape is a good investment. You can tell buffalo people from cattle people blindfolded because buffalo people keep their mouth shut and cattle people whoop and holler.
I like this life. I don"t know if I can say why. I don"t know if I have the right words. I"m proud of the fact that I got into it and succeeded at it. Buffalo are an important part in American history. There"s the pride and prestige in raising them. The meat is better. Our working corral is the best in the world. n.o.body disputes that. And n.o.body bosses me around much.
I actually gave the ranch to one of my four sons in 1988. He"s the only one wanted it and cared to have it. The others-their wives had some influence on them.
My son works destroying timber or brush. If it gets too hot, the buffalo go on top of the hill with the wind under them. They don"t get under the tree for shade. They don"t need shelter or shade, so why do we need trees? We clear them and burn them off to make room for gra.s.s to grow. So that"s what my son does. He doesn"t have much part in managing the ranch. He owns it, but I manage it for him. The checks go to him. He gets all the profits, actually, even though he"s not really managing it. But I"m not gonna be around forever.
I"m gonna keep working as long as I"m able, I guess. Just taking care of them for my son. The whole ranch is his. But I don"t have anything else to do, I"m not gonna rock myself to death, so I might as well do something I enjoy.
We are slaves.
POULTRY FACTORY WORKER.
Javier Lopez (translated from the Spanish by Sonia Bowe-Gutman).
I sort chicken parts in a factory in Duplin County, North Carolina. There"s a lot of poultry in this area. I don"t want to say the name of the company I work for, but you can use my real name because I"m not legally here in this country anyway. No one knows I"m here.
I work the night shift. The second shift. It starts at ten-thirty P.M.
It"s supposed to go until eight A.M. but sometimes we can go on till nine or ten. Sometimes till noon. It depends on whether we get our chickens done.
The chickens come from South Carolina. They slaughter them down there and then they cut them with machines. Everything is used. They"re de-feathered, they cut off the feet, they"re de-headed and de-necked-and they grind that in a mill and turn it into chicken feed. The rest they ship up here to us in trucks. We sort the parts. There"s around thirty-five thousand chickens per truck.
I work in Department 20 with about a thousand other people. It"s equally divided between men and women. Our job is to separate the wings, legs, and b.r.e.a.s.t.s. We also do some deboning. After we separate, another department packages the chickens and sorts them by weight. Then another department labels them and packs them in crates and stamps them for shipping. I don"t know where it goes when it leaves here. I think supermarkets, restaurants, maybe.
I just cut up and sort chickens. That"s my job. It"s cold on the hands. It"s hard on your health, because outside it"s hot, but inside the temperature has to be under fifty degrees. We get sick all yearround even if we dress warm. Ice is always falling from the ceiling on your head. Some of it gets on your feet, into your boots. Your back"s always cold, and your feet are always wet.
There used to be mats on the floor, so your feet were not in the mess on the floor. But management eliminated them because there was an accident. A woman stumbled on them. Now there is water on the floor, and your feet are always wet. My boots are always cold. Some people use sneakers but those are worse. They get wet and damp, which makes it colder. Then there are the fans that just blast away all the time, making everything more cold.
You have to be careful with the knives and the machines, because everything is so slippery. A lot of fat falls on the machines and the floor. There"s fat everywhere. Everything"s greasy. So, especially when you cut the wings, you know, there"s a disk cutter with a rotating blade, so your fingers are in danger. And if you cut yourself, you"re going to get very contaminated from bacteria in the chickens because, before you cook them, the raw chickens are full of bacteria.
I work very fast, and I"m not always checking what I"m doing, even while I"m doing dangerous work like deboning with the disk saws. We are slaves. They don"t care. If we are not done with the truck full of chickens, we cannot leave work at the end of our shift. Sometimes it"s because of mechanical breakdowns, machinery malfunction-nothing that we did, but it doesn"t matter. We can"t leave. They don"t care how long you work. You just have to be very fast. So you"re not always working safely because you have to keep up with the production line. The managers always want more production in less time.
There is no support, no help. If a worker gets behind and doesn"t keep up with the line, out they go! Much injustice, no support. The supervisor is always right, the worker is just-there. Music is forbidden, so is talking with other workers, but we still do it. Yes, we do it. But I don"t say a lot myself. I am a quiet person.
I have been here seven months. I earned five dollars and eightyfive cents an hour when I started. After three months, they raised me up to six twenty-five.
I don"t like this chicken work. I used to work in the fields, picking fruit, tobacco. I like that better. In the field, you know that you can always make your quota, sometimes by twelve or two. So sometimes you have the afternoon free. It has disadvantages-if it rains or the crop is bad, maybe you have no money. But when it is good you can make double the money. It"s better. And maybe you get some fruit too, to eat or take home. Here, they don"t even give you chickens. If I wanted some, I would have to buy them. [Laughs] But to be honest, I have no desire anymore to eat chicken.
It"s pretty disgusting to work with meat all the time. The factory smells very, very bad. There is a lot of bacteria. Everything is a mess. There are broken windows, and there"s no security or safety at all. Anybody can come in at night. There"s a guard, but he"s asleep half the time, and he doesn"t care. Where is the safety? We have talked with the higher people but nothing happens. In many cases there are two thefts per week in the parking lot. They said they were going to hire a policeman. But they don"t.
The company wants everything for themselves, and nothing for the workers. You have to buy your boots, ap.r.o.ns, and gloves. Boots are ten dollars. Gloves cost fifty cents and ap.r.o.ns cost four dollars and fifty cents. That"s a lot when you"re only making six twenty-five per hour. Why should they make us buy this equipment?
I have heard that some of the poultry plants are better. This is apparently one of the worst ones. If you want to go to the bathroom, it"s very difficult. Even if you need to go, you have to wait for break time and there are only two breaks per shift, and you have to eat during them. And the breaks last for half an hour each, but in reality they are less than twenty-five minutes because you have to dress and undress the gloves and things like that. They take this time away, and it"s important because if you"re going to eat, and go to the cafeteria, you still want to wash up before you go. But for the men there are only two toilets, so you have to wait in line. It takes at least five minutes to get into the bathroom just to wash your hands. And it is completely dirty and disgusting. There"s so much chlorine all over the place, it stings. It hurts your skin, your eyes burn.
Then there is the food. The "cafeteria"-and I call it that between quotes-is disgusting. They feed you chicken, chicken, chicken. It"s not good or clean there. Where you eat, it is unfortunately dark, smoky. People complain, but like with everything else, there is no discipline about cleanliness. Smoking should be done outside because the cafeteria is for eating. But there is no discipline, no respect. Nothing.
Another thing-racism. The large majority of the workers here are illegal Hispanics, like me. There"s also some legal Hispanics, some Haitians and black gringos. But most of us are illegal Hispanics. The bosses know we"re illegal, and it"s illegal for them to hire us, but we"re the cheapest, so they don"t care. We probably wouldn"t work such a bad job if we had doc.u.ments. And they always yell at us Hispanics. With the others they are more flexible, more lenient. The others come late sometimes, they talk on the phone. And they can get away with it. The black gringos that work here have more flexibility, they speak English. The blacks talk back, and they can argue because they speak English.
There are many druggies among the workers-a lot of marijuana. Lots of drugs and drinking-especially among the darker workers. But whenever something happens it is always blamed on us, the Hispanics, and the reputation of our race is affected. Every time, we all pay with our reputations. We never get a foothold, and they always stomp on us.
There is no better worker than the Hispanic. We work any hours, others don"t. But even if we work harder, because we have no papers and no English, we unfortunately get the worst deal.
I"m from Mexico, Veracruz. I paid a "coyote" to bring me here- that"s what we call the guides. It cost me one thousand and two hundred dollars. To come you have to cross a desert, so it is pretty hard, and it is dangerous. It takes four days and three nights and you can"t get out of the truck. You can"t stop. You are in these trucks, packed just like sardines, very tight, and the trucks keep moving and turning around with us inside. If you did not bring your own water you are thirsty. You cannot stand up, you cannot do anything except lie on your side and the person next to you puts their feet where your head is. It is very hard and very tiring to get to the U.S., to make this sacrifice to look for the "golden dream," the dream of all people. People say they are coming to the U.S. to make money, but many go back when they arrive here and see what awaits. They cannot stand it here.
The coyote brought us straight to the work contractors who hire us and then the farmers hire us from them. A farmer brought me up to North Carolina from Texas. I was lucky because he paid me right. Sometimes they might say, "If you come with me, I will pay you onefifty per week," or something like that, then at the end of the week they tell you, "Here, take twenty dollars." And when you complain and you say, "I need this for money for my family," they say, "No, you owe me this and that" for gas and various things and you don"t get any money. Then you have nothing. You have no money, you don"t speak the language, and you don"t know anybody. You are lost. So I was lucky because I got paid right.
I"m hoping to eventually go home and start a business. I don"t want a boss. I am ambitious to a certain extent. I want to plan and achieve something. Working for someone else-there is nothing. You need a goal. Many don"t have one, don"t think about tomorrow. I have plans.