FORT MYERS (Florida) NEWS-PRESS

March 3, 2010

Students help Immokalee farmworkers during spring break

BY DAVE BREITENSTEIN

Spring breakers coming to Immokalee spend time with the Student Farmworker Alliance, Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Immokalee Friendship House and on local farms, experiencing a day packing tomatoes and hearing why workers are pushing for living wages.

Spring break is under way at the usual hot spots: Cancun, Cozumel, Daytona Beach and South Padre Island.

But Immokalee?

Forty-five miles inland from the parties on Fort Myers Beach, Southwest Florida’s poorest community is rolling out its welcome mat for spring breakers. They aren’t looking for fun in the sun but a chance to explore the life of a farmworker — low wages, long hours, no benefits, substandard housing and grueling conditions.

Alternative spring breaks, as they’re called, are nothing new. But American students typically visit economically depressed nations like Guatemala or Haiti, where they reconstruct dilapidated homes, tutor children years behind in their education and spearhead community cleanups.

“You don’t have to go places like Haiti and the Dominican Republic to see people’s human rights violated, poverty and human slavery,” said Marc Rodrigues, 29, a member of the Student Farmworker Alliance based in Collier County. “Immokalee, unfortunately, is becoming known as a place where you can see Third World conditions.”

About 300 to 400 college students from 15 institutions are slated to visit Immokalee this month.

Economics are leading some students on domestic alternative breaks. When factoring in international flights, beachfront high-rise hotels and entertainment, the cost of traditional spring breaks exceeds $1,000. A dozen Vanderbilt University students, for example, are paying $275 each for their Immokalee trip, a fee subsidized by the college.

“Cost is an issue, but Vanderbilt has a lot of students who are very community-minded,” said senior Paige Harmony, a 21-year-old English major who’ll board an Immokalee-bound bus at 6 a.m. Saturday. “There seems be a trend of compassion among the latest generation of college students.”

Spring breakers coming to Immokalee spend time with the Student Farmworker Alliance, Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Immokalee Friendship House and on local farms, experiencing a day packing tomatoes and hearing why workers are pushing for living wages.

Andrea Lovecchio, a 21-year-old junior at Gannon University in Pennsylvania, has volunteered in soup kitchens, nursing homes and child care centers, but said a few days in Immokalee changed her definition of poverty.

“It was such a culture shock,” said Lovecchio, a pre-physical therapy major. “Even though we’re still in the U.S., it is so different from the impoverished people we see at home.”

On Tuesday, Gannon students visited Star Farms, sorting and packing tomatoes. Farm manager Stephen Perez, 26, began working in the fields when he was 9. If he wanted a new shirt or shoes, he had to work for it. That meant waking up at 3 a.m. to get a jump on other pickers. It meant traveling to Alabama, North Carolina, Ohio or wherever a crop was in season. It meant toiling in poverty for much of his childhood.

“You can talk to them and explain it, but you really don’t know what it’s like until you live it,” Perez said.

After a week’s time, they understand, according to Gregg Kaufman, a government instructor and coordinator for civic engagement at Georgia College and State University.

“Once we got there and saw the community, and realized there was such a stark difference between Naples and Immokalee, that made a big impact on students,” said Kaufman, who led groups to Immokalee the past three years.

“The disparity between haves and have-nots, the rich and the poor, became very clear for our students.”