Today a bittersweet event happened:

I am still technically off after getting home late, so I checked my company email being the worrywart I am. My check stub is available. So I log into the corporate payment entity that pays all the state employees their miserable salary, and yep, her insurance deductions are gone. After 4 months of haggling and another $1,000 taken away from me by Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Mississippi for insurance she couldn't even use, they've stopped. Great, right? Just got a $140 a check raise.

But it still underlines the fact that Mrs. Gimp has no insurance. I've managed to cover her for eyes, dental and cancer, and she's set for life if I ever croak, but there's no health insurance safety net. Hasn't been since that moron Thelma B. in Jackson decided to destroy the migrant program. Not only did everyone get direly poor, but the migrante kids in this state have no voice anymore. No one to tutor them. No one to help them learn the subjects their teachers (the majority anyway) could care less about teaching them. No after school programs with other kids who speak their language, laughing, playing a while, eating pizza and then getting to the grindstone of catching up and learning English so they can defend themselves. No one to take them to the doctor and translate what ayy me duele la panza comi demasiado anoche means.

It's been a year. Are the migrant kids better off, Thelma? Are they thriving and advancing? Nope. If you know so much with your pHD and all about managing programs, why do they still call me on my cellphone (And Mrs. Gimp's too), desperate for tutoring, translation, and scholastic services? Why do they tell me that the girl you left in charge, with her B.S. degree in marketing or whatever it is that is entirely not pertinent to the work, "que no sirve para nada esa guera pendeja"? She claims she's hispanic, yet she's steady speaking German to her mom on the phone all the time, or French, and the Spanish she does speak is jumbled up central american mochao spanish that no one here understands because everyone is from the country and barely speaks Spanish. When she helped us with classes for teaching English, whenever someone asked questions, she would heave this tremendous sigh and roll her eyes. She sighed like Napoleon Dynamite whenever someone would ask her to explain things. She flirted with migrant womens' husbands when on home visits, giving them advice about acting 'more american' when all it did was disturb families with advice that went against their culture. As one man once told me, "If I had wanted to marry an American, I would have." Not to say that she was giving them advice that was practical on things like family violence, etc. It was about going and getting drunk with girlfriends on Friday night, and cutting hair etc without asking the husband for his opinion beforehand, basically ignoring him and being a total bitch. This one lady in particular got really good at it too. I was willing to learn Mixteco. Were you, Thelma? Was the bitch you left in charge willing to? I don't think so.

It all basically boiled down to one minority being in charge of a program designed and FEDERALLY FUNDED to help migrant workers, and that ruling minority decided that too much aid was going to the other minority, for whom the program was designed. So she cut the body off the head by letting all the advocates, translators, and tutors go.

WHY, in this world where people have suffered so much due to racial violence and persecution, does this continue? I know the answer, it's mainly a rhetorical question. But it's horrible man.

To use a cheezy 60's expression,
Can't we all just get along?

All the while these kids are dropping out of school at 14 to go work at Marshall Durbin and Tyson because no one is equipped to teach them English now and the administrators actually look forward to them leaving school.