They come in trucks, on foot, in the middle of the night or the middle of the day, slipping into the alleyway running behind 7th St. in the Iron Triangle section of Richmond, and leaving behind bags of garbage, construction debris, and just about anything too big to fit into an average trash can.
In 2002, I founded the Watsonville Law Center to serve the local farm-worker community. For many years, workers have come to our office with heart-wrenching injuries: a hand amputated by machinery, a back broken falling from a tree. The hard-laboring men and women who grow fresh food for California tables endure physically grueling conditions and a high risk of accidents from heavy machinery and pesticide exposure.
In the late 1980s, I worked as a nurse in refugee camps in Uganda and Somalia, tending to some of the world’s poorest women. Then I moved back to San Francisco and was shocked by the poverty I discovered right here at home. What surprised me the most was to see pregnant women and children living in homeless shelters, or even making do on the streets.
Pioneer Elementary School in Merced has two pedestrian pathways for kids who walk to school: one’s a paved sidewalk and the other is a strip of gravel on the side of the road. A local organization is trying to bring more sidewalks to pedestrian-heavy areas like the elementary school with GIS mapping, but ongoing efforts to improve Merced’s walkability might be cut short by budget shortfalls.
California’s Legislature is so polarized over the state budget that lawmakers in recent years have mostly kicked the problem down the road. But even when lawmakers do agree and the governor goes along, they don’t have the final say. Judges do.
Even as Republicans and Democrats fight over the future of health care reform in Washington, California is quietly laying the groundwork for what could be a revolutionary change in the way government policy keeps people from needing health care in the first place.