Yesterday I had a very interesting conversation with Mary, Ralph\u2019s mother. She said that this year was the first year that Ralph was in the compassion program, and his older brother has never been in the compassion program, that their need is very recent.<\/p>\n
Mary\u2019s husband has the skills of a mechanic and a mason, but there is no work in Haiti. He was working in the Bahamas as an illegal so he could send money back to them so they could live. They caught him and sent him back to Haiti. She works sometimes as a cook, but it doesn\u2019t bring in very much money at all, and her husband cannot find any work now.<\/p>\n
I asked why they didn\u2019t apply for a Visa; she said that it used to be that Visa\u2019s were much easier to come by, if you had money \u2013 around 1,000$ US (which is a years worth of rent) \u2013 but now, you can\u2019t even get them that way anymore. They give out so few Visa\u2019s that it\u2019s near impossible to get them, and there is probably no possibility of ever getting a visa after being caught illegally in another country.<\/p>\n
Apparently the economics of Visa\u2019s goes something like this: very few Visa\u2019s are given to people wanting to go to countries that are economically better than their own country \u2013 they are afraid the people will skip town and not come back. Additionally, for every one migrant worker there is a worker that is displaced, replaced from that country.<\/p>\n
And yet, these migrant workers will do the jobs that a lot of people don\u2019t want to do in the country they are going to \u2013 mostly because they are hard, tireless and difficult, and sometimes even dangerous. Most of the time these migrant workers work VERY hard, because they are supporting so many people that they can\u2019t afford to be displaced, and the very little they get paid is like a fortune in the country they come from.<\/p>\n
Towards the end of the day Mary described her situation and told me that their greatest need right now is financial; they pay about $80 US a month for their rent\u2026 I found out that the average Haitian income sometimes ranges a little higher than I previously thought \u2013 between $30-80 a month, but with a rent of $80 a month, that doesn\u2019t leave anything for food.<\/p>\n
Now that I\u2019ve seen the impacts first hand from the immigrant workers perspective, with my own eyes, I may very well be in the process of changing my views\u2026 Odd how experiences can do that to you\u2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday I had a very interesting conversation with Mary, Ralph\u2019s mother. She said that this year was the first year that Ralph was in the compassion program, and his older brother has never been in the compassion program, that their need is very recent. Mary\u2019s husband has the skills of a mechanic and a mason, … Continue reading “The other side of the story\u2026”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/darthjedi.logiodice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/darthjedi.logiodice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/darthjedi.logiodice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darthjedi.logiodice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darthjedi.logiodice.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/darthjedi.logiodice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/darthjedi.logiodice.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darthjedi.logiodice.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darthjedi.logiodice.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}