Hallelujah

The last week has been wonderful at the Jubilee house. I enjoyed the weekly meeting (!?!?!?), we had an impromptu birthday dance party for a friend, we went to a bar together, and we ALL ate dinner together tonight. It has been amazing to choose to hang out together without having business to talk about. Sam and Maisha have been singing, playing piano and guitar, and sounding awesome too! Hallelujah, praise the Lord!

As is the precedent, the miracles aren't only in the house. It's been sunny out the last two whole days, chasing away our cases of Seasonal Affective Disorder. I also had a meeting with the director at Faith Mission, a nearby shelter, about the future of the bike shop. After I explained everything about how the bike shop works and how about 10 people from Faith Mission have come by since it's been cold, the director got excited about it. Its looking like the shop will find a new residence in a warehouse next to the thrift store that Faith Mission runs! That means many people will know about the shop and hopefully many clients at Faith Mission will be interested in working off their own bikes. Hallelujah, once again.

Recently Juan, a middle-aged Mexican man, has been visiting at Chain Reaction. Juan has only lived in Goshen for two years. Right now his wife has a job but he has been unemployed for a while now. He came in and worked off two nice bikes in about 12 hours. In Aguas Calientes (named for its hot springs), Mexico, he worked taking care of someone else's land and livestock. I did very little production-scale agricultural work in Honduras, but it was enough to learn that it is physically punishing. Once I had showed him a few things about fixing bikes, he started to dream about starting a bike shop in Mexico. With a few tools he could support himself into old age, not having to worry about getting up before dawn to pick hundreds of pounds of coffee off of the bushes until well into the night time. Meeting someone who aspires to learn your own not-so-prestigious trade is a good way to get slapped by your privilege. But its these occasional slaps that keep our opulence in perspective, that keep us humble.

Grumpy is another recent friend from the bike shop. He is one who just got out of the prison industrial complex. His factory job paid high in comparison to the rest of the incarcerated workforce. Working 56 hours, he was bringing a whole $31 back to his cell each week. Yeah, you do the math. He said many that he knew were saddled with jobs that paid only a tenth of what his did. I wondered if that had allowed him to save anything over his multi-year stint, but apparently the horrifying quality of the provided prison food was enough to drive anyone to the commissary for some preservative-injected plastic-wrapped industrial nourishment. Reading has taught me of the private (for profit) nature of many prisons and the slavery of millions of inmates in the USA. It must be awfully lucrative, with the state paying to house the prisoners who end up working for the companies for nothing. It made me happy to be able to give my friend Grumpy a $30 bike after a few hours.

One idea that the director at Faith Mission got excited about was the potential for a recycling program. Chain Reaction runs a recycling program that pays the bike-riding recycling collectors $15 and hour, something closer to a living wage. That can only provide employment for a couple of people for a couple of hours each week. But its enough to give people a fighting chance at some dignity. Hallelujah!