Greetings Friends and Fellow WDAers!

JoJo, Kristen, and I arrived in Oaxaca City, Oaxaca last night after a few long days of travel (though nothing compared to the arduous three-day journey my bag took to get here from Virginia)! It has been almost a year to the day since we first met with Francisco Lopez, President of the Oregon Immigrants´ Rights Coalition (CAUSA), and embarked on a project to research the root causes of Oaxacan migration to the United States and work with Oaxacan Hometown Assosciation´s (HTAs), and the transborder communities they serve to promote sustainable community development. Our original goal was to unite Oaxacan home town associations into a coalition, but after a painful learning process both WDA and CAUSA realized this was unrealistic (and let’s face it, overambitious for us non-Oaxacan college students). However, we were fortunate that in the process we were introduced to two groups of Oaxacan immigrants working on development projects in their home communities. Since late August of this year, we have met with these HTAs, brainstormed projects, researched medical and fundraising resources to connect to the communities, and collected dental and school supplies. It´s safe to say it feels amazing to finally be on the ground seeing for ourselves what we´ve heard and learned so much about and actually getting down to action after so many iterations of our project.

Today was the first day of a jam-packed itinerary that will take us not only to Oaxaca City but the villages of Santa Maria Tindu and Barranca Fierro Mixteca. After breakfast and introductions to the rest of the delegation, which is comprised of brilliant people doing great work (hopefully a little more on this later in the trip), we spent all morning and half the afternoon with part of Mexico´s Witness for Peace team (WFP), Alexis and Dunya. It was a crash course in the origins of neoliberalism, globalization and the rise of the IMF and the World Bank, Mexico´s economic history leading up to NAFTA, a broad analysis of the agreement´s effects since its implementation in 1994, and U.S.-Mexico relations post 9-11, ie the Security and Prosperity Partnership and the Meridia Initiative. Clearly, this post could go on forever, but I´ll save our individual responses, including more details and analysis, for a separate post. We wrapped up the session with group trips to different markets to get average prices for subsistence goods such as kilos of chicken, rice, tortillas, and black beans. After dinner we calculated how many hours a worker being paid the minimum wage here, $4 a day, must work in order to afford these items, and what the equivalent cost would be in US dollars if this was the minimum wage in the states. The results were staggering; a kilo of chicken here costs more than we pay for a pound of premium steak at home and takes about half of an 8 hour work day to earn.

Our afternoon and early evening was spent listening to a wonderful presentation and engaging in a dialogue on the roots of Oaxacan migration and its effects on Oaxaca´s communities with Miguel Vasquez of EDUCA. He saw three main causes: violence and conflict, poverty, and exclusion of the indigenous community. Clearly, these roots have roots, but the overwhelming theme for the day was that until there is systemic change in both transborder relations and Mexico itself, including a renogiation of NAFTA (another separate post), these problems will not be solved and the inextricably linked cycles of poverty, violence, and exclusion will continue, with millions being forced to migrate.

In seven short hours, we will be heading out for our first visit to Santa Maria Tindu, where we will stay with families and begin work on creating media to assist in their HTA´s fundraising for a community center that public health, education, and political organization, among other things, can call home.

We will be blogging furiously upon return in three days or so, and hope you stay tuned. We can already feel ourselves becoming more articulate and educated advocates for immigrant rights, which are human rights, and all the policies that this entails. It´s going to be an amazing trip.

WDA members have completed all the different elements of the first edition of the research report for the Sadhana Clean Water Project. It can be found in pdf form here.

In many ways, this benchmark signals a close on our work on the Sadhana project, at least for the time being. The Sadhana project was an ambitious and ultimately successful undertaking, and I would like to congratulate and thank everyone who supported the project. We could not have completed any part of the project, including this report, without the significant hard work and dedication contributed by everyone who has been a part of the WDA team over the past several years. We owe you all our deepest thanks, and it has truly been a pleasure to work with each and every one of you.

- Tim Shadix

This is a very exciting benchmark, especially as we begin our next project, the Transnational Community Development Initiative.

From an article dated 30 April:

After hundreds of hours of volunteer work, WDA members Jessie Conrad, Tim Shadix, Jyotsna Shivanandan, Yukta Kumar, Daniel Bachhuber and Dr. Raechelle Mascarenhas utilized these funds to travel to India and work directly with the community members and NGOs their project aims to help.

From an article by Rashmi Menon published on 23 March 2008:

On his first trip to India, Tim Shadix may seem like an average American tourist. But this student of politics major in Whitman College, Walla Walla, US, has come down with a purpose, a social one at that. And he is not alone.

Read the whole thing on their website!

For coverage we’ve received in the past, please visit our pressroom.

From an article published yesterday:

Whitman Direct Action embodies all that Whitman promises to foster: creativity, leadership, intellectual vitality, service and global awareness.

and

WDA is unparalleled by any established Whitman program in that it is run entirely by students and it merges study abroad concepts with community service ones.

Congratulations! Let’s continue spreading the word!