I have decided to change up the
atmosphere of my blog, well at least try to change it up. This attempt is to
hopefully get my to blog more often in order for me to not forget had happened
on some crazy trip to somewhere or doing something crazy awesome! J
So what I am going to attempt is to post a blog everyday! I know it sounds
crazy!!! But I am going to try to post either a picture, a picture with a
story, a story, a quote, a song, a word, etc. Anything I think of that day I
will get home and write about it during the boring time after I get home and
before I am either making dinner or eating dinner. So with all of my loyal blog
readers as witnesses I have now pledged to write something on my blog everyday
from this day out!
Ok so on with my story for today.
Last weekend my housemates and I set off on a very, very, very, very, very,
very, very, very, very, very… long trip going west through Texas along I-10
entering into New Mexico and not taking nearly as long as Texas did to get
through to make it to our destination state of Arizona, another 3 hours or so
we finally arrived to our final destination of Tucson, AZ. While in Tucson we
were part of a delegation run by Borderlinks; a non-profit that informs people
about border issues that are happening in Tucson and all over the border of the
United States of America and Mexico. The whole trip was super informative about
tons of things that I had no idea was happening! During this trip we also met
up with the wonderful YAV/DWELLers from Hollywood! It was great having other
people to hang out with outside of SA; not trying to say I don’t love my fellow
housemates but they know what I mean! J
Throughout our time at
Borderlinks we had skits that we were involved in to allow us to see what is
actually happening to Mexico or to see how hard it is to become a United States
of America citizen or just to get the right to cross into the USA. One of the
first skits we did was to see how long it would take to get citizenship
depending on the person, so each of us got a new persona ranging from someone
from Africa to someone from Mexico. I was Antoine from Canada and I was trying
to get a green card and eventually citizenship. I was fortunate to be able to
get a green card and eventually citizenship because I went to school in
Chicago, my family knew a law firm in the USA and that law firm was willing to
pay any fees and wait as long as they needed to for me to be able to have the
job. In the long run it would take me about 5-10 years to get my green card in
order to start working and then another 10-12 years after that to get
citizenship!! That is just insane! I couldn’t imagine being someone that would
have to go through that process.
Another skit we did was the free
trade skit where we learned all about NAFTA or the North American Free Trade
Agreement or (what I like to call it) a type of agreement that the USA loves to
do on little undeveloped countries to get them to spend money that they don’t
have in order to get something that they don’t need and to screw them over
forever and to make them forever in debt to the USA. This whole thing makes me
so upset and it shows just how selfish the USA is and how greedy they are too.
So I am not going to go into all of the details about NAFTA you can look it up
yourself, but basically after NAFTA was put into place all of these
restrictions were put into place for Mexico, USA, and Canada (I don’t know to
much about the Canada part in this whole thing so lets leave them out for now
haha) and now the only country that is really having these restrictions
enforced on them in Mexico, of course right since the USA loves to pick on the
small guy just like in Panama, Ecuador, Indonesia, etc. So now Mexico is having
all of these rules about farming where they use to be able to have these shared
lands to farm on and people could make a living and now they can’t farm on
those lands anymore and the people that did are now out of jobs. One good thing
(well not really) are the maquiladoras, these factories were built in Mexico by
USA companies to make their product for less money because labor is cheaper and
then the companies get to sell in back to us for a higher profit then they
would if it was made in the USA. Sounds great right! It created jobs in Mexico
to help the farmers that lost their jobs and they got paid $35 a week more then
the minimum wage in Mexico which is $35 a week. But then when Mexico’s debt to
the USA got crazy and they needed to make more money in order to pay it back,
Mexico decided to get rid of that extra $35 a week in order to save money and
to be able to pay their debt. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!! That’s what I
think of that!
Well enough of that. During our
trip we were able to go to Mexico to the border town called Nogalas; here’s a
fun fact Nogalas, Sonora, Mexico and Nogalas, Arizona use to be one city until
NAFTA came along and put up a HUGE wall right in the middle of downtown and
divided the city. Families were separated and people couldn’t get to work
that’s how crazy that is! So we were able to stand next to this crazy big wall
that people are able to see through it, crazy right being able to see something
that you can’t get to. During our visit to the wall we learned that it takes $6
million (wait let me check that number again… yup $6 million!) to build 1 mile
or 5280 feet of wall. There is 1,969 miles along the whole border of Mexico and
the USA so if the USA was to put this new fence along the whole border it would
cost (let me do some quick math…) $11,814,000,000!! How many schools could that
fund? How many roads can that fix? How many jobs can that create? Etc. It is
crazy that our taxes are funding something that costs so much and that is so
crazy! We talked with some people about how the fence use to be a short chain
linked fence when people would play volleyball across the fence and go have
dinner in Mexico or the USA and then go home. The border was a lot better place
back when that happened it seemed when we were told those stories.
Well I have written a lot tonight
and there are still things that I am processing so I will stop for now but know
that this problem is very much real and that something needs to happen to
change it, but everyone must educate themselves on the issues first. I will
continue posting about more things that we learned about our time in Tucson!
Until next time! J
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