Advertisement And they’d recently spent six months in federal prison, targets of an immigration raid in Postville, Iowa, last May.
The five, all wearing electronic monitoring bracelets around their ankles, sang two songs for the 200 gathered at the annual Burning Bright Christmas Benefit Concert. Juventino Lopez strummed the guitar, which he’d recently learned to play at a prison in Miami.
When they finished, said Liz Rog, a Decorah resident, the applause was so loud and so heartfelt that it was obvious people were clapping for way more than the songs these men offered.
“People were saying, ‘I hear you,’” she said, “‘I see you. I respect you. I wish you well.’”
That is saying the opposite of what our government has said to these men, who along with almost 400 other mostly Guatemalan immigrants working at Agriprocessors Inc. were arrested May 12 for working without proper documentation.
While more than 200 of those were deported after being incarcerated five months, about 40 were detained in the United States to serve as witnesses for our government’s case against Agriprocessors, a kosher slaughterhouse and meat-packing plant.
Most of the remaining men, as well as about 30 women who have not yet been charged, are in Postville, where church and community efforts have provided support since the raid. Nine stay in Decorah, where the Decorah Area Faith Coalition leads the support effort.
“These nine men in Decorah are going to finally be able to take home with them, when they’re inevitably deported, some knowledge of the kindnesses and generosities that there are in this country, that we’re not only about taking advantage of them and abusing them,” said Rog, 47, a Spanish-speaker who sends out e-mail updates about the immigrants’
situation.
I met Rog at a fiesta at a Lutheran pastor’s home in Decorah last month.
When I knocked on the door, the 30 or so gathered were holding hands in a circle that snaked to the kitchen. They parted to make room for me, and then those who could prayed in Spanish before we ate.
What I felt during that prayer was similar to a feeling I had at a July interfaith rally in which people marched in Postville to stand with the immigrants and call on our government to implement immigration reform. Rog, in a phone conversation this week, captured the feeling well: “When we’re together,” she said, meaning the immigrants and Iowans, “it seems like everyone feels proud to be a human.”
Rog is married with two daughters, has spent time in Latin America and has studied liberation theology. She sees love and taking care of the poor as central to the Gospel. She grew up Lutheran but hadn’t been part of a church for three decades until joining a Unitarian Universalist congregation several years ago.
She was working at the Oneota Community
Co-op on May 12 when a friend asked whether she’d heard about the raid.
“I said, ‘A raid?’” she said, remembering her surprise. “Of course people had read about raids in seemingly faraway places, but to me it’s a word from another time and place in the universe.”
This one happened about 20 miles away, and Rog, like hundreds of other residents in Iowa, would spend the coming months engaged with the men and women affected.
People in Decorah have bought the men long underwear, helped them find work, paid their rent, given them rides and taken photographs they could send back home.
“What we can do for them might be only in the form of these small kindnesses that give them hope for humanity,” Rog said. “We might not be able to change immigration policy quickly enough to give them a just possibility to work in this country.”
Last Friday night, Rog sent out an e-mail asking people to help with the rent of a Guatemalan woman. By Saturday morning, she had $300, by Monday $1,200 and now has $2,500.
While the town of Decorah has been divided over issues in the past, Rog said, that’s not the case this time.
“Anyone who is out there saying, ‘Those illegal aliens, they should get out of here,’ they are utterly silent. So this has been a great healing for our community.”
Joe Orso works part time for the La Crosse Tribune and the Franciscan Spirituality Center. Opinions in this column are his own.
HOW TO HELP
-To help in Postville:
Contact Maryn Olson, (563) 864-7021.
-To help in Decorah:
Contact Liz Rog, (563) 382-8013 or decorahevents@gmail.com.
-To help the men and women being detained in Postville, send checks to Hispanic Ministries, Box 369, Postville IA 52162.
-To help with the general relief effort in Postville, send checks to Agri Workers Relief Fund, c/o St. Paul Lutheran Church, 116 E. Military Road, Postville, IA 52162.
A PRAYER
To help explain the work of people in Postville and Decorah, Liz Rog quotes part of a prayer by Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero, who spoke out for the poor in El Salvador and was assassinated in 1980:
This is what we are about:
We plant seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for God’s grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results,
but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are the workers, not master builders, minister, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
Pfrancis wrote on Jan 10, 2009 3:08 PM:
Will wait for it.
http://lacrossechat.madmooseforum.com "