Part II Day 64: April 24, 2010 (Somalia Diego, feeding English to the Bhutanese, and underground tacos)

Position: Volunteer Tutor and Taco Lover

Number of Day Officially Unemployed: 99

Hours Volunteered: 2

California Economic Development Department Check: $250 per week

Morning:

If we hadn't just left my girlfriend's apartment and driven east on El Cajon Boulevard from University Heights, I'd swear this wasn't San Diego. City Heights isn't the neighborhood tourists or transplants or residents come to "America's Finest City" to experience. In other words, it's not Seaport Village, Mission Bay, nor Pacific Beach.

Dark African women––dressed in colorful, flowing Muslim gowns that hide their heads and even their feet––seem to float down the streets. Old black men wearing taqiyahs, the round, embroidered Muslim hats, sit on crates and loiter in front of markets. The stores along this stretch of El Cajon Boulevard and the parallel University Avenue are a mishmash of Mexican carnicerías, Vietnamese Phở shops, Chinese salons and markets, and a couple African restaurants.

Etel and I arrive at the apartment building of the Bhutanese family we're tutoring in English, and I feel like I'm reliving a scene from Blackhawk Down. The two-story, orange-beige building is run down, the cement steps crumbling, and Somalian refugees walk the courtyard hallways or peak out of their apartments at the foreign visitors: us. When we came last week to meet the Bhutanese family for the first time, the International Rescue Committee, whom we're volunteering through, sent a Somalian woman to serve as our facilitator, though she didn't speak Nepali or Bhutanese. It was a nice, seventy-degree afternoon in San Diego that day, but the apartment was closed up and stuffy, feeling like, as my girlfriend described it, a "curry sauna."

Today, the window is open and the apartment is much cooler, though the smell of curry still dominates. The father, always sporting a beanie, and his fifteen-year-old son sit at the kitchen table and scoop a spicy rice dish from silver bowls into their mouths by hand, while the mother busies herself in the kitchen. A chubby man they say is a cousin sits next to the father and son but doesn't eat. The 82-year-old grandmother, her nose pierced by a small, golden sundial-like piece of jewelry, sits on the couch near another cousin, age 7, and nods and smiles at us. The oldest daughter, 21, who has inherited her father's crossed-eyes and speaks the most English (but lives elsewhere), has stopped by to say hello and eat. The son, 15, and youngest daughter, 11, will be participating in our tutoring sessions. By looking at the family side by side, you would swear that no one in this house is related (grandma and dad are taller and thin and almost look Afghan; mom is short and looks Native American; the oldest daughter, Indian; the son and younger daughter, possibly Latino).

The story of Bhutanese refugees is as confusing as the family's genetic expressions. The refugees are ethnically Nepali, and they historically moved from one small country sandwiched between China and India––Nepal––to another one––Bhutan––in the 1800s. Even though Bhutan is often listed as one of the happiest countries on earth (they even rate their wealth by a Gross National Happiness scale instead of a Gross National Product scale), the Buddhist majority decided they'd be much happier without the Hindu minority ethnic Nepalis, whom they imprisoned or sent to Nepal, a country who also doesn't want them. Enter refugee status. And Western efforts at resettling them.

The family has been here eight months, and while the children are in school and learning English quickly, the parents are struggling. (That's not to say the kids have it easy; the fifteen-year-old boy is experiencing the awkwardness that is high school, times ten. Even though he's handsome and dresses in hip clothing, he says kids make fun of his accent and can't understand him.) Etel and I decide she'll work with the kids while I work with the parents. I push them through two hours of awkward phonetics––they know the alphabet but not the sounds letters make––while Etel creatively has the kids doing word puzzles and playing a game naming body parts, animals, and other items based on a chosen letter: "L" leads to answers such as "leg" and "lion."

Though the family seems to have an endless supply of Cokes (they kindly offer us each one when we visit, and the dad has two today), the sparse furniture of their house speaks to their poverty. It's hard to imagine two worlds more different that the valleys and mountains of Bhutan, where the family had over 30 cattle, and the outer city of San Diego with their Somali neighbors. While we haven't bothered to ask the family if they have everything they need food-wise and whatnot (Etel and I decided they need a dictionary), they rely on their bond as a family to see them through this tough transition, and there's something very moving about that.

Afternoon:

Last weekend, while at a fortieth birthday party for one of Etel's Mexican friends, the family told us about an illegal restaurant a Mexican woman runs out of a home. And would we like to go sometime? How about "hell yeah" we said.

After our morning tutoring session with the Bhutanese family, Etel and I make the necessary arrangements to meet her friends at the house that "serves the best tacos in San Diego." While the east San Diego neighborhood is clearly poor, each house having a low chain-link or wrought-iron–fenced yard, people's perceived fears far outweigh the reality on the ground: it's not that bad. When I ask Etel's friend, who is from Mexico City, what neighborhood we are in, exactly, she whispers, "I don't know. We just call it 'the ghetto.'"

Though Etel and I park out in front of the house, we have to walk down the street and enter through a graffiti-tagged alley where an old black man and his younger, tougher-looking buddy work on an SUV's running board. Rob, the white husband of Etel's friend, meets us in the alley and walks us into the carport area, which is protected by a sliding, slatted chain-link gate. Inside, a Mexican family eats at a long picnic table. Rob ushers us into the back patio area of the house, where two more tables are shaded and hidden by worn, blue tarps that raise and lower in the soft breeze. Etel's friends speak a mixture of Spanish and English at the table, lending even more authenticity to the experience: it feels like we've crossed the border and are having lunch in Mexico.

Rob's sister-in-law gives us the rundown. We can order tacos, tostadas, sopes, or enchiladas with either potatoes, chicken, beef, or shrimp, and each costs only $1.25. The sister-in-law also tell us why, even though people bug the woman of the house to open a real restaurant, she prefers to keep her business off the grid. Besides the hassle of getting a business license, dealing with the health board, and paying taxes, payroll, and rent, she prefers to cook at home and keep the prices of her tacos inexpensive. She says she doesn't want her tacos to be $3 each, which she thinks they'd be if she went legit. She wants her food getting to the locals, the poor, and her ability to feed the neighbors has kept them quiet about her busy little home restaurant (sometimes there can be up to a 45 minute wait).

A few weeks ago, two cop cars rolled down the alley, and the woman became very nervous. She told everyone eating that if the cops should come inside, tell them it was her birthday party. And who wouldn't want to celebrate this place? The tacos and tostadas are wonderful, served watery with spoons, which Etel's friend claimed was "real Mexican style, spoons only!" I had already crammed most of my deep fried (duro) taco down with my hands before I realized the watery broth was there to soften the shell and cause you to use the spoon for eating.

It's a weird experience, because I want to proclaim the greatness of the food to everyone, to brag about the matron of the house being the Harriet Tubman of the underground taco world, but I have to keep the location secret and just admire this woman's ability to earn a living to feed her family while feeding the poor. Amen.

Part II Day 57: April 17, 2010 (the First Lady blesses the garden, famous Somalian refugees, and distinguishing between what does and doesn't get in)

Position: Volunteer

Number of Days Officially Unemployed: 92

Hours Worked: 2

This morning, my girlfriend, Etel, has brought me to New Roots Community Garden in City Heights for a regularly scheduled volunteer day. The garden was set up by San Diego's chapter of the International Rescue Committee on 2.3 acres of city-owned land for local immigrants and refugees, and it's worked by 80 immigrant farmers. Each family gets its own, small plot to organically grow whatever crop they want, ranging from prickly pear cactus, or nopales, to strawberries and other foods from around the world. I'm excited, because it's been a lifelong dream of mine to learn organic farming, and I'm thinking that volunteering at the garden might not only serve to help immigrant and refugee families but will help my own education.

Etel and I arrive a little late, so we miss most of the garden tour, led by Bilali Muya, a Somalian refugee who works at the farm as a part-time educator. Muya is beaming this morning, fresh off of being the tour guide for Michelle Obama's visit on Thursday as part of her national campaign against childhood obesity. When he finishes our tour, Muya shows some people yesterday's Union-Tribune article, in which he's pictured with the First Lady, and says, "I'm famous," in a thick Somali accent.

While the First Lady's visit was meant to highlight healthy food alternatives for poor children, it also highlighted the gap between being an important, rich woman and a poor immigrant or regular person in the United States. As you can read in the Union-Tribune article, to protect Michelle Obama, her visit was an invite-only event, and many immigrants and neighbors were kept out of the garden and practically locked in their yards by the Secret Service (which has its own interesting history). Hardly a good lesson in true democracy, but, nonetheless, a great lesson in American timocracy.

This morning, there must be close to fifty volunteers, consisting mostly of white people, ranging from children to old men, and a few young Mexican-American men that are part of a MAAC project program. The development coordinator has us break up into groups of ten and move off into different parts of the garden. At least two of the volunteers in our group belong to a Meetup.com group called "Do-gooders Who Drink," composed of people who head to a local watering hole for a beer after they volunteer.

Muya leads our small group out of the garden and into the neighboring area, where a small stretch of natural grasses and trees border a creek. He takes us over to a large mulch pile in the field, which, he explained earlier, helps keep snails and other unwanted pests out of the garden. When he talked about the mulch, he took on the role of the snail and twisted and squirmed as he explained how the sharp edges of the mulch particles would stab into his body and make it unpleasant to slime across. He tells us to weed a small area between the mulch pile and the garden's Cyclone fence, so we can spread the mulch and connect it with the other area, covered in an older layer of sun-faded mulch.

As with every group project that's not well organized, instructions are sketchy and misunderstood. Our group of ten quickly rips through the entire area, weeding the strip from the mulch pile clear out to the road. The dusty, herbal smell of the pulled weeds takes me back to my childhood of weeding our yard in Clovis, and shoveling the mulch later will remind me of shoveling horse manure out of our old barn for twenty-five cents a wheelbarrow full. Though it's hot, it feels good to perform some manuel labor out here, to get close to the earth and its smells.

While Etel and I carefully remove the black and white striped snails we find and throw them out into the brush toward the river as we weed, a teenager nearby has interpreted their "pest" status as a call to genocide. Every time he, his brother, or his mother finds snails, he gathers them into a small pile and crushes them under his oversized tennis shoes. Since ladybugs' diet of aphids makes them beneficial to the garden, they receive the same teen's admiration and careful transfer. He's learning the important distinction of what we want kept out of the garden and what we want to let into the garden.

As we continue pulling weeds and spreading the mulch, we encounter earwigs, pinacate beetles, and a large cockroach in the mulch pile. While these bugs are unpleasant and make some people squeal, I'm more worried that someone's going to accidentally find a rattlesnake in the deep grass we're tromping through.

While we weed, Muya tells us that he's from the minority Bantu tribe in Somalia and how they're recent immigrants to the U.S., and how he was a farmer over there and misses his land. It's strange to think about how people from all over the world––"Somalia, Cambodia, Burma, Uganda, Congo, Kenya, Mexico, Vietnam, and Guatemala"––and from different backgrounds––farmers, shepherds, etc.––have been plopped down in urban San Diego and are now sharing this small wedge of land and the neighborhood of City Heights.

After we spread most of the mulch and many of our volunteers have disappeared, I take a short break with Muya, whose been working his way around to the different groups, and we search the nearby, oversized bush for bee hives. We don't see any, but the bees are buzzing in and out of two areas within the bush.

When we're almost done spreading the mulch pile, the development coordinator comes out and sees what we've done. She's incredulous, telling us she only wanted a four-foot wide mulch path between the garden fence and the field. "I can't believe they did this," she says, as Muya, looking like a scorned child, turns to survey the mulch spread thin over the entire weeded area. The five of us volunteers that are left spend the next half hour or so grumbling and raking up the mulch and shoveling it into a trash can and wheelbarrow, then hauling it over to the fence to create the path.

While I'm shoveling mulch into the trash can, I have my back to the bee-infested bush. I feel a bee land on the back of my neck. As someone who has harvested honey, I would think I could control my natural reaction, which is to freak out and swat at the bee. I hurry away from the bush and continue brushing my shoulder with panicked swats. I finally calm myself down, even though I can still hear the bee on my back, and I calmly ask the snail crusher's brother if I have a bee on my back. "No," he says. The problem is, I can still hear and feel the bee on my shoulder, which means it's inside my shirt now. I'm waiting for the burn of the inevitable sting, but rip my shirt off over my head anyway. The bee flies off, and both of us are left mutually unharmed.

By now, Etel and I are sweaty, dirty, and possibly sun-burned, so we're ready to go home and clean up for our afternoon visit with a Bhutanese refugee family, whom we'll be tutoring in English and cultural adjustment. While we haven't had any direct contact with the "poor" we're helping, except Muya, it feels good to volunteer. Our task today may have been menial, but it was necessary, and it allows the refugees and immigrants to concentrate on the important work while they're in the garden tending their crops. I need to get further involved, so I can learn more about organic farming and crops while continuing to help feed the poor.

Part II Day 49: April 9, 2010 (lying about hunger, starvation by the numbers, and distinguishing between need and want)

Position: Conference Attendee

Number of Days Officially Unemployed: 84

I'm spending the week in Denver to attend a writers' conference, and my friend Jake and I find ourselves smoking cigarettes outside of an Irish pub on this Friday night. I don't normally smoke cigarettes, and I don't inhale, but we've had a few beers and I decide to join Jake for a smoke to keep him company.

We're standing here, appreciating what Steve Almond calls Denver's "fancy, barren downtown," when we're approached on the sidewalk by an overweight black woman showing no signs of inanition––exhaustion from lack of nourishment. She tells us she and her daughter, who is not present, haven't eaten in two days, and she asks if we can give her money for food. While her story is almost plausible, since, according to this ABC Channel 7 News report, 60 percent of the homeless in Denver are families with children, Jake and I say we don't have any money for her. She says she's pregnant, too, but then asks for a cigarette. Jake says no.

I ask her what kind of homeless shelters they have in Denver, and she says, "Not very good ones. They've got nothin' for women." I tell her I find that hard to believe, because many cities have shelters set up especially for women and children. She says that's not the case in Denver. But the truth is, even though the Denver metro area has a slightly higher estimated homeless population than San Diego––9,091 to our 7,892––they have several "soup kitchens," including Food Bank of the Rockies, Metro Food Bank, Rose of Sharon Food Bank, and Thornton Community Food Bank, and they have at least twenty-one homeless shelters or services, such as the Denver Rescue Mission, The Father Ed Judy House, and several that specifically serve women and children, such as The Gathering Place, The Family Tree, and The Women's Bean Project, all of which can be found on The Homeless Shelter Directory (who knew it existed?).

While I'm tempted to tell the woman an interesting fact about the human body––it can survive 4 to 8 weeks, and even up to 25 weeks considering her body fat, without food––I tell her I have Clif Bars in my backpack that I'd be happy to share with her. She refuses and walks off. I guess she is either caught up in the euphoria that can come through starvation or she wasn't all that hungry.

Jake says, "Man, you handled that well. She obviously wasn't looking for food." I tell him I've been volunteering at a homeless shelter and there are usually resources for the hungry in cities like Denver. I tell him about how the San Diego facility stresses independence, that you're not supposed to give residents smokes or money, that they have to earn it. And I tell Jake that I haven't seen many homeless people who look like they're actually starving.

I can't even find reliable statistics about any people starving in the U.S., though different sources peg it anywhere from 1-120 per year (you can find an interesting forum about the subject over at, oh, God, Fox News's Sean Hannity page––don't say I've never sighted a conservative source). Even worldwide starvation death statistics vary widely, because, according to World Hunger Notes, many deaths attributed to starvation are also counting undernutrition as the underlying cause in deaths from diarrhea, malaria, pneumonia, and measles. Which I guess they should. According to this United Nations report, entitled "The Right to Food," 826 million people suffer from malnutrition, the worst areas being Asia (24%) and sub-Saharan Africa (34%). "Most of the victims suffer from what the Food and Agricultural Organization calls 'extreme hunger', (sic) with an average daily intake of 300 calories less than the minimum quantity for survival."

The report doesn't define what the minimum number of calories are for survival, but during my own 4-day low calorie experiment I mentioned elsewhere in this blog, where I got down to around 700 calories per day, I experienced nausea, euphoria, and, according to my friends, I looked "gaunt." I had the privilege of stopping my experiment and eating whatever I wanted, so I can't imagine the feeling of continued, abject hunger and starvation. I know this: it's nothing to take lightly, and it's nothing to lie about. And the next time you're on the phone with the pizza guy, don't tell him you or your children are starving and need pizza, tell him you're a little hungry and want pizza. He'll understand. It'll be there soon.

Part II Day 36: March 27, 2010 (Holden Caulfield learns how to feed the meat eating generation)

Position: Volunteer

Days Officially Unemployed: 71

This morning I drive out to Vista to attend a Meals on Wheels orientation. Besides volunteering at the homeless shelter, I want to explore other ways to feed the poor, or those in need, and Meals on Wheels seems like it most closely mirrors my job delivering pizza and pasta to the wealthy. About a dozen of us file into a nondescript commercial office building, and the wonderful woman running the place asks for our driver's licenses and proof of insurance for their records.

The majority of the attendees are older, retired people and have come for various reasons: Christian duty; the boredom of retirement; a mother who wants to spend time building her relationship with her daughter by volunteering; people who just want to help other people. When the introductions get around to me, I say, "I've spent the last thirteen years delivering pizza on and off, and I thought it would be more interesting to finally deliver food to people who need it instead of want it." The woman in charge says, "But here you don't get tips," to which I reply, "Sometimes, tips aren't worth it."

The woman in charge runs through the process of delivery and gives us facts, history and statistics, most of which are surprising. Meals on Wheels began 50 years ago when two women realized some of the elderly parishioners weren't making it to church because they were homebound. They wondered how those same people were getting food. And so it began.

I thought it was a free service for low income elderly people, but that's not really the case. The clients pay $7 per day, which gets them a lunch, a dinner, and a drink. It costs Meals on Wheels $14 to provide the food, so they subsidize every client with donated money and fundraising. They will also adjust their fees based on income level, so no one goes hungry.

The meals look like frozen TV dinners from the 1980s, complete with a meat portion, some mashed potatoes or other starch, and vegetables, such as mixed peas, carrots and corn. They provide for specialty diets, such as "low sodium" and "diabetic," but when I ask if they have a vegetarian option, the woman laughs and says, "Maybe in ten to fifteen years, but the generation we're dealing with doesn't have many vegetarians." The average age of their clients is between 80 and 81, everyone is over 60, forty-two percent are over 85, and their oldest client is 103.

Once the logistics and facts are out of the way, stories arise about the clients. There was the man who was such an asshole to the volunteers, they finally had to cut him off. And there was the woman who fell and broke her hip on a Saturday afternoon, lay on the floor all through Sunday and Monday morning, and said she only had hope because she knew her Meals on Wheels volunteer would come Monday at lunchtime (they don't deliver on Sundays but provide those meals with their Saturday deliveries). Then there is the story, and this is when the woman in charge pauses and says she always becomes "becleft" (I think she means verklempt) when she tells the story of the man who cared for his bedridden wife for five years, feeding her every meal they delivered. The woman in charge is now in tears, trying to finish the story. She continues, "He said . . . he said . . . taking care of her was the thing he was most proud of in his life." We're all a little teary eyed now.

When I think of all these stories, I realize this is why I'm here. Like a superhero, I want to feel useful and needed by people; I think we all do in some way, and that's why I was so upset yesterday at the homeless shelter when I felt superfluous. I want to save the woman with the broken hip, calm the man with the bad attitude, and finish my life feeding frozen dinners to the woman I love.

It all reminds me of the scene from J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye when Holden Caulfield describes what he wants to do with his life:

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around––nobody big, I mean––except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff––I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."

It's not so crazy . . .