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One room and a half, family of four.
One of them sleeps on the couch, the other one sleeps on a mattress.
One of them has a room, but has everyone’s cloths in their room.
The other ones has to have a bunk bed.
You know, the kids, they don’t grow up with their own room like you would imagine.
Their private space, nothing like that.
You can hear through the wall, it’s like they were made out of paper or something.
There is no privacy.
[Music]
Everything is based on their culture, generally.
We produce a lot of apples, corns, great potatoes
I think we rival Idaho, believe it or not [laugh]
We do a lot of everything here. I think every small town,
rural, I think begin with; we have a lot of poverty.
And I think our community is probably like 70% Hispanic, maybe more.
Some of the issues is because of poverty; some of the things we face,
just basic needs, and I think a lot of folks don’t understand that.
People don’t have food to eat here.
Housing, we don’t have housing for everybody here,
things like prevention, all those other things, education,
getting ahead in life, being better educated and prosperous.
Isn’t going to come if you don’t have, again, those basic needs.
I think our clinic is one of those places that’s really helping people…
getting those services into Quincy.
And again because we are rural, getting services into Quincy
there was very few and I think we were able to bring some things to the community
for our clients, too.
I’ve been working on a study around environmental health promotion
in the home setting, using public health nurses.
And was very pleased, sort of in the second phase of our project to
learn that the promotores was also very interested in that topic.
Couples of the promotores work for the clinic, many of them are volunteers,
a couple are employed by the clinic to help people find housing and work on housing issues.
When we start to move into the second phase of the project,
they decided to focus on that and recruited some families, go to their homes,
their trailers to take pictures and talk about some housing issues.
Photovoice is a way that I think can uniquely tap into
this process. What we are doing is we giving folks cameras
and saying “please document the important issues in your community”.
And for a researcher, basically, you know, we say that Photovoice is
all about documenting the social worlds of communities, what is going on,
what issues do you wish will be improved in your communities.
And through documenting these issues, we know that folks can go places that
researchers can’t and have access to these places.
They have a perspective that we wouldn’t dream of having.
I think that through this process of gathering images, one of the things that end up happening,
a community member is hopefully, through being a part of this research process
comes to understand the issue as well, through documenting it and reflecting on it ,
and hopefully mobilizing, you know, getting together to do something about this saying,
“That’s what we love about our community and these are other things we wish were different.”
So I think it’s a reflective process, that ends up being as much
as valuable as the results that we end up getting.”
I thought it was pretty cool because, well, I heard of it because Julie contact Mary Jo,
she said she wanted some of the health promoters to get involved in it.
I thought it was cool because we were able to take pictures.”
“That’s what she said . It’s going to involve taking pictures, and you guys are all good at taking pictures
and you guys all love posting your pictures on Facebook or Myspace.
And we were like, “oh ok, its something we could do.”
And it will benefit our community at the same time.
So we just start the video, “Ok lets go for it”
We do health fairs here at the clinic and
one of them was a senior project for the girl and we did it in George.
So we decided to take the Photovoice and put up the booth.
And so the families came to me, and I just ask them,
'Hey you want to do this” and I explained it to them,
they signed up, then we chose the families and went talk to them .
That’s how we did it.
It’s something we don’t considered such a big problems in our community
but we have to realize that its in our back yard.
We go over there to George and see how people are living
and we never expected someone to actually live in those kinds of conditions.
The house we visited, the one I went to, it was really, really small
and they had only had a twin bed and they both had to live there.
The bathroom was super small and they barely had a bathtub
they only had a shower.
They didn’t have gas heat so sometimes they had to cook outside in the cold and everything.
They would use walnuts to light up the fire.
They didn’t even have a washing machine. So they washed their
clothes with the hose outside and dried the clothes on logs.
I took a photo, of a teddy bear sitting on the sofa on a car seat
and I thought it was really cute because it was sitting on the sofa.
And I thought, wow the teddy bear takes up most of the seat,
Wow, imagine two people trying to sit there together.
Also the bedroom was really small and really crowded and
only one person could fit down the hallway, cause it was so small.
The frig. was almost on top of the bed. It was really bad.
There was broken buildings, which had either burned down
or broken down; from weather or anything.
The people would tend to go over there and mess around.
There were crates and different harmful objects, that they could hurt themselves on.
I was concerned about little kids not being not being advised by their parents or anyone.
You would see a five year old walking down the street by themselves.
Having little kids on the street by themselves could cause them to get into gangs.
That’s something that needs to be empathized in the city of Quincy.
The kids, well I think its just not a good environment for them to be living in,
you know they are growing up seeing this.
They do not know that they are poor. They can be just so happy with a toy
and then they get a little older and it hits them. “Oh, I don’t have what he has.”
It is somewhat traumatizing I think,
its just not a good environment for any child to be growing up in.
I got this family that was just a mom and a little boy.
She doesn’t have a husband, so she’s raising her children alone;
Actually its two children, a baby and a small child.
While I was there she asked her little two-year-old boy
to go across the trailer-park and to deliver diapers to her other son-
or something like that. This is a long way for a little boy to walk,
from his house all the way across to his aunt’s house or cousin’s house,
I don’t know who it was.
He went caring the diapers, and to me I was just
like a shock to see a little kid that small doing this task.
Anything could happen to him, because this was not a good neighborhood.
The little boy doesn’t know how dangerous this could be for him, he was just excited
to do this and innocent to the environment.
Like I said before these young children do not know they are poor,
and they are so willing to give, even though they don’t have that much.
These places don’t have the room for kids to grow up in.
These kids don’t have dressers or closets to put their clothes,
they have to put it under the bed or
on a high self or something dangerous like that.
Well we meet Mary Jo, we got a hold of her through Maria,
and I think Mary Joe has worked with her before, so she was all for it too.
So she said, yeah come out here and come take pictures, and see this place.
Their living conditions, their rooms, their restroom,
and this was the best trailer out in that orchard.
And the conditions there were wow, the bathroom itself, the tub
was rusty there were many issues with that trailer.
I had never really been in a trailer like that or seen things like this,
but I had heard about this from people coming in and telling us.
But I had never seen this with my own eyes, so I was really shocked.
And I know many managers they just have out houses in the orchards,
which I knew but didn’t realize how of condition these homes are.
People on the outside think that everyone has a house here- they don’t.
We have lots of homeless people, but they don’t call them homeless here.
They are known as farm workers or migrant workers. They are homeless.
We have a way to provided housing so that can come work for us and
pick our produce and make a living, which helps us, make a living.
Hopefully this is a win- win situation for everyone.
I hope people do become aware of this sub-standard housing, and things like health,
things like education, are impacted and what others think of as a lack of
care of the children from the parents is not that at all.
It might be they don’t have what they basically need to be health individuals.
We are still not there yet. Hopefully people will continue to build more here.
I do know that there have been some Orchard owners in our areas that have been fabulous
and good to their folks.
They bring the people in, providing a furnished place for them,
because they want these good workers to return every year.
These are very noble folks and these are people we have in the community
and we just hope that more of them continue to do this.
This costs a lot of money; orchard owners are not in the business of housing.
They are in the business of agriculture. So I think we just need to keep at it.
To really welcome those people that are willing to come into our
community and build more housing. I think it is important.