Ask Your Cucumber How It Got Here?

By Lorna Tatomir, Literacy and Evangelism Canada

Strolling down the streets of downtown Leamington on a Friday afternoon, you’ll notice shops full of luggage, running shoes, lineups of Mexican and Caribbean workers at the banks and grocery stores. Spanish/English signs, multiple Taco-serving restaurants and a hum of Spanish language and music brighten the main street. At night the sky is lit with a bright pinkish purple hue that emits from the multiple mega greenhouses, establishing Leamington as not only the Tomato Capital of Canada, but also the Greenhouse Capital of North America.

To support this massive growing industry, hands-on labour is required. The hot, physically intensive work that puts your cucumber on the table is not a first choice of employment for many Canadians. To fill the gap, the area yearly imports at least 8,000 temporary workers, from hotter, more southern countries such as Mexico and the Caribbean. There are a variety of policies tying the hands of these workers from applying for citizenship, although a few doors are opening. The main reason the workers are here is to send money back to their families. To do this, men and women are separated from their families often for over 8 months a year, some up to two years.  They live in bunkhouse type settings or even more crowded apartments in town. Much of their salary at low hourly wages can be consumed in Canada’s high cost of living and payments back to agencies who they paid thousands of dollars to for a chance for placement. They are assigned to one employer, which leaves them in this precarious setting of obligation to do whatever that employer requires, and not make any waves over challenging work settings or treatment by supervisors, under the constant shadow of being sent back on the next plane before their contract expires. This is not to paint greenhouse owners as cruel taskmasters, but rather to point out that the current system leaves an already marginalized population vulnerable.

Pausing for a moment before we crunch into our next healthy salad to ask our veggies, “How did you get here?” sounds silly, but that pause allows for a moment of reflection and “seeing” that in turn allows for the beginning of a potential awakening to the needs of Temporary Foreign Workers in our midst.

Temporary Foreign Workers do not have the advantage of free Canadian ESL programs that are geared towards people immigrating to Canada. At the moment we have a situation where people walking across the Canadian border, or landing at the nearest airport, receive far more support from the government than the people who may have laboured in Canada, year after year, growing your salad veggies. Designed loopholes in their contracts prevent their application for language training and other supportive services, and block many from applying for Canadian citizenship. There are some contracts that allow for Canadian applications, but many others that do not.  They are on their own, by the multiple thousands to pick up what language they can, after long hot hours in a greenhouse, leaving them little weekday time to pursue additional training. Bunkhouses have limited computer access for learning online and phone plans are saved for communication with their families. There have been a few scattered attempts, for example, by Frontier College, to send summer staff onsite to teach classes outside, but there is no consistent plan to offer workers the skills they would need to reach an adequate language level.

Here is the window where SOCEM partner churches and Christian ESL ministries with a vision to support this specific population will find people deeply in need of ESL and community connection so far away from their families and shut out of the usual language training systems open to other new Canadians.  

The problem for many churches is how do we reach this population with many of our church ministries already overworked or understaffed?

Sitting with a group of Mennonite women during a woman’s evening, we were enlightened by the life stories of several previous, female temporary foreign workers who had lived experience, and, after many years of working in Canada, under more user-friendly visa options, had been able to become Canadian citizens. Their stories told of long years of separation from their children, for whom they were able to send money home to support their care. But the children were being raised by family members and saw their mothers only on video calls. When the dream of reunion in Canada finally occurred after many years, their children barely knew them. These same women have utilized their difficult experiences to become workers in a service that provides NGO-based support for Temporary Workers in a local church basement.

Perhaps asking this kind of “Where did you come from and who helped you get here” questions to our greenhouse grown cucumber can lead to asking “How can we serve men and women in these settings and welcome them into our groups for fellowship?” How did this initial awareness happen? How do we become able to “see”?

It seems this “seeing” of people who are sheltered by “a cloak of invisibility” as they labour in our communities also comes with built-in barriers to reach them in ways that are meaningful for them. For this also we need to be able to have our eyes “opened” to the answers. 

What do I need to do to open my eyes, and, like the blind man who prayed to Jesus, pray “Lord I want to see?” (Luke 18:38-43)

Lorna Tatomir is a missionary serving with Literacy & Evangelism International – Canada. (See http://literacyevangelism.ca/1_22_our-missionaries.html).  She can be reached at ljtatomir@gmail.com.

Editor’s Note: For more information about the general milieu of the town of Leamington, see the 2017 newspaper article Leamington is at the frontlines of the boom in migrant workers. Here’s how it’s changed.