Churches offer support and friendship to migrant farm workers
DELTA, BC—In 2008, Cedar Park Mennonite Brethren Church invited seasonal farm workers from Mexico and Guatemala to their Thanksgiving banquet. Little did they know they were launching what is now a multi-church ministry across the Fraser Delta.
"Partly why we got started in our community," says pastor Dave Esau, "was hearing…horror stories from other places—some very difficult housing conditions and isolation that workers were experiencing in some of the places further out in the [Fraser] Valley."
Cooperating in this ministry are Mennonite Brethren, Baptist and Church of God churches in Richmond and Delta. Separately, they offer ESL classes, Bible studies and worship services in Spanish. Together, they host twice-monthly soccer games followed by a barbeque and a worship service.
"Nobody could do it all on their own," says Esau, "so how that came together really was a God thing."
Carlos Carrion heads the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in B.C. and Yukon's migrant workers ministry. He works closely with these churches and others in Abbotsford and Chilliwack.
"The main point of the ministry," he says, "is to make the workers' time here in Canada a little bit easier and better—going to the stores, going to the doctor, having activities with other workers. It's not only just to go and preach to them."
Close to 3,000 men come to B.C. every year under seasonal-worker agreements signed with Mexico and Guatemala in 2005. Here, they can earn in one day what would take them a week to earn back home.
The Mexicans can stay for up to eight months, the Guatemalans for up to two years. The employers decide which workers they want to have come back again.
Yet some employers have proven to be less than ideal. In a new study, co-author Gerardo Otero, a sociologist at Simon Fraser University, reports that more than one in four workers surveyed say their housing is hazardous to their health.
For example, before housing became available in Delta, some were put up at a hotel in Vancouver. "I went there and it was infested with bedbugs," Otero says. "That was pretty distressing to them."
Otero blames the problem on a lack of government regulations and enforcement. But Carrion says sometimes it is the workers themselves who fail to measure up.
"There are a lot of people who are waiting to get into this program, so it's easy for the employers to just get rid of some workers and hire others," he says. "In some cases, the employer is right doing this, because the workers don't behave—some drink, some are causing problems, complaining too much or not producing. It's 50-50."
Still, their main complaint seems to be the loneliness and isolation brought on by long separations from their families and made worse by an inability to speak English. And it is here—by performing simple acts of kindness—that churches are having the most impact.
Cedar Park, for example, has taken some of these men on outings to the mountains and raised $2,000 to help one Guatemalan worker pay for his daughter's brain surgery.
"Those are the things that we need to keep doing and keep encouraging people to do in order to make these people feel at home," says Ernesto Pinto, who broadcasts to Latin America on the Winnipeg-based Family Life Network. He was also the speaker at this year's Thanksgiving banquet at Cedar Park.
And, says Esau, "We found out at the end of [the banquet] that several workers came to faith in Christ."
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