(Dave Eggers, Jennifer Lentfer, Rajasvini Bhansali, Mimi Lok) In a world of 24-hour news cycles and soundbites, whose stories get heard, and whose don't? How can we challenge the single story portrayal of human rights issues and of marginalized communities? This event sparks a conversation about the power of the story in human rights, and the roles of two organizations-Voice of Witness, a literary and human rights nonprofit, and Idex, an international development organization-in amplifying unheard voices in the United States and around the world.

Published Date: September 13, 2017

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:01):

Welcome to the A W P Podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2017 A W P conference in Washington dc. The recording features Mimi Locke, Jennifer Linford, Dave Eggers, and Rajas Benny Bon. You'll now hear Dave Eggers provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:27):

Yeah, Mimi and I are going to sort of, we're all going to moderate each other. We're all friends, and we're going to try to engage you guys as much as we can early on and have a dialogue. Voice of Witness is a nonprofit oral history series that started in 2004. Each of the 14 books we've published so far attempts to take an issue or historical moment and add to it nuance and complexity in hopes of edifying our audience and turning statistics back into humans. We do this through listening to those affected by human rights crises and publishing their narratives with their full participation. We aim to give their narratives a novelistic level of detail to best engage the reader and engender empathy. I'm going to introduce our executive director, Mimi Locke, who you just met. Mimi is a writer and editor whose work builds on almost 20 years experience in literary arts and education in the uk, China, and the us. She's the co-founder and executive director of Voice of Witness and a recipient of the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for Social Progress. Can we thank Mimi for coming? It's just a way to get us clapping early on. I think next to her is Jennifer Lent for She is a Nebraska Farm girl turned international aid worker as creator of how matters.org. She is one of foreign policy magazine's, 100 women to follow on Twitter. She's the director of communications at IDEXX and is currently co-editing a book on funding visionary Grassroots Leaders. Thank you. Jennifer,

Speaker 3 (00:02:13):

You want to introduce mea?

Speaker 2 (00:02:17):

I'm Dave. I'm one on the Board of Voice of Witness, and I get to cheer Mimi on these days and Mimi's going to introduce Lorena.

Speaker 4 (00:02:27):

Well, before we get to that, I just want to also mention that Dave is a co-founder of Voice of Witness and he conceived of the book series, and I just want to give a quick overview before we hear from some excerpts from other voices in our book series, as well as a book series that Dave just mentioned. We'll have an education program and among the issues that we've covered, some of which you can see represented here on this table, we've covered issues abroad in Zimbabwe and in Sudan and Columbia as well as here in the us. I think we'd all agree you don't have to look too far to find a human rights crisis, especially in this day and age. So this book feels ever more timely. Patriot Acts, which is narratives from narratives of post nine 11 injustice. And we also have compiled, one of the first books that I worked on was Underground America Book of Stories from undocumented immigrants, and then we've also done books on Palestine and former presence of Chicago public housing. We've, we wanted to share before we launch into the chatty part of this session, just wanted to share a couple more excerpts from the narrative. So I think we have someone, a very nice volunteer from the audience who agreed to read Adams story from Patriots. Rita, thank you.

Speaker 4 (00:04:02):

And as our reader just making her way to the stage, I want to tell you just a little bit of context about this narrator. So we interviewed Adamma. She told us Adamma was a 16 year old Muslim girl living in Harlem, her family originally from Guinea, and the one morning on March 24th, 2005, the F B I raided her home at dawn under completely unfounded suspicions of her being a suicide bomber. So the part with entering her narrative right now as a moment where the raid is happening,

Speaker 5 (00:04:39):

What did I do? The morning of March 24th, 2005, my family and I were in the house sleeping. Someone knocked on the door and my mom woke up and went and opened it. Three men barged in these men barged in waking us up. I always sleep with the blanket over my head. They pull the blanket off my head. I look up, I see a man, he said, you've got to get out. I'm like, what the hell? What's going on? I saw about 10 to 15 people in our apartment and right outside our door in the hallway, they were mostly men, but there were also two women. Some had F B I jackets and others were from the police department and the D H Ss. We were all forced out of the bed and told to sit in the living room. They were going through papers, throwing stuff around, yelling and talking to each other.

Speaker 5 (00:05:49):

Then whispering, I heard them yelling at my mother in the background and my mom can't speak much English, and they were pulling her into the kitchen yelling at her, we're going to deport you and your whole family this whole time. I was thinking, what's going on? What are they talking about? I knew my dad had an issue with his papers, but I didn't think my mom did. They kept saying, we're going to send all of you back to your country. Then I saw my dad walking in handcuffs. They had gone to the mosque to get him. It was the scariest thing you ever could see. I had just never seen my father so powerless. He was always this guy whom you didn't mess with. If he said, do it, you did it. He was just someone you didn't cross paths with. They took him to the kitchen, whispered something to him, he sat down, looked at us, he said, everything's going to be fine, don't worry. And then I knew nothing was fine. I knew something was wrong. They told him to tell us what was going on. He told us that they were going to arrest him and they were going to take him away. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (00:07:23):

Thank you, Molly.

Speaker 2 (00:07:29):

Molly, by the way, is the head of the telling room. Do you guys know this nonprofit based out of Portland, Maine? It gives the opportunities for adults from many walks of life, but many asylum seekers and refugees living in the Maine area gives them a voice and publishes their work. And it's an incredible nonprofit that's grown beautifully over the years and doing parallel work. So please look up the telling room, and if you're ever in the neighborhood, I'm sure they could use more volunteers too. So thank you for doing that. Mo, while we're on OTs story, how many high school teachers are there here in the room? Anybody? Oh, alright. A lot of you guys. So I had a class for 11 years called the Best American Non-Required Reading, and it was high schoolers from all over the Bay Area. And we would read contemporary literature every week and then talk about it.

Speaker 2 (00:08:19):

And then at the end of the year, we would create an anthology of our favorite pieces from literary magazines and websites and books and comics and everything in between. And the work that they were most compelled to and most moved by was oral history. And oral history is I think one of the most teachable forms of literature. I think it's electrifying for students of high school, on and up, high school and college. It can humanize a complex issue. It can move, I think apathetic or disengaged students to action and even lives of activism. And when we read Adama's story in our class, I'd never seen the kids so engaged because they're 16 and 17, Tima 17, they had been hearing about the War on Terror for many years, but it hadn't been brought home to them and humanized and sort of see, they couldn't see themselves in it necessarily.

Speaker 2 (00:09:20):

And here they had this 17 year old speaking in their same voice, same age, same other shared experiences, but suddenly it became very real to them. And I'd never seen this class of 22 so energized and thinking what they could do, who they could write a letter to, how could they protest? And then a few weeks later, we read a narrative from Myanmar and then they all wanted to go to Myanmar and join the resistance there. And so there's something very teachable about it, but there's something very sort of, there's an awakening I think that happens through first person narratives. I think high schoolers are drawn to nonfiction, they're drawn to first person narratives, and they're drawn to stories from the contemporary world that sort of make that real to them. So for all those reasons, we're going to spend a lot of time pushing very hard for the teaching of oral history in classrooms. And we'll be here to talk your ear off about it afterward too. But yeah,

Speaker 4 (00:10:18):

You've actually accidentally walked into the oral history Evangelist Church. And to piggyback off what David just mentioned, one thing that is just astounding to me is when we hear from educators of all levels and all backgrounds who are using these books. So in the case of Patriot Acts, in the case of this book and Invisible Hands, our book on human rights and the global economy, we hear from teachers who are teaching upper middle school level all the way through to a graduate level. We recently heard that someone was teaching Underground America in law school at N Y U Law, Stanford and Cornell. And so it has so many different applications. So just out of interest of has anyone teaching creative writing fiction or nonfiction in the room, okay, so seriously consider these oral history, in particular voice witness oral histories as a way in which to craft first person narratives, whether it's within your fiction or nonfiction class.

Speaker 4 (00:11:22):

And a lot of the, we edit these stories as if they're short stories. We stay faithful to the narrator's words. I just want to reiterate the fact that all of these narratives are based off or drawn from first person interviews. So one-on-one interviews and reams and reams of transcripts condensed into a succinct, almost like a feature length movie of someone's life. But many of the same principles of literary editing apply to the editing crafting of these stories. So the last, except I want to share from the series is from Underground America, which is everyone's been asking us about. Everyone's been coming to our table today saying, oh, this is so important because this and this and immigration, Islamophobia. That's just as you know, they're just at the forefront of so many people's minds right now, and these stories are more important than ever. And we have, who's our Lorraina reader? Hi, Naomi. Hi, Naomi. And I met today. Hi.

Speaker 4 (00:12:36):

So Naomi's going to read an excerpt from Lorraine's Narrative from Underground America, and I must want to see a little bit about Lorraine before we get into this little excerpt from her story. We interviewed Lorraina about 10 years ago when she was a college student. She was full-time college student juggling that workload with a part-time job at a real estate office. She was originally from Mexico. She crossed over into the US when she was six years old with her mother and her brothers, and we're going to drop into a story at the point where she's crossing the desert.

Speaker 6 (00:13:20):

I remember walking through the desert. It was my mom, my stepdad, my two younger brothers and me. I was six, so my brothers were five and three. I was so hungry. That is something I don't ever wish on anybody, that kind of hunger. And the only thing I could think of was if I'm hungry, then my brothers must be hungry. I started getting worried. We were literally in the middle of the desert that night. We fell asleep in between some bushes. It was early in the morning, like six or seven o'clock when I woke up. We were in the middle of bushes on top of other bushes, so we were completely covered. It was all dry, so it was really noisy and so nobody could move. I remember waking up and I kind of jerked my foot to the side a little bit. So the bushes made a loud rustling noise.

Speaker 6 (00:14:13):

And there were actually i n s agents on the other side of the bush. There were other people with us. I think it was seven or eight of us, but they weren't family, so I don't remember who they were. It felt horrible. This was totally my fault and I knew it, and I just could not live with myself. I remember my mother and stepfather getting their hands tied with those plastic cuffs. I wanted to kick the i n s agents because I was thinking we're good people. People that get tied up are bad people. They walked us to the van and they took us to a cement holding cell. It was a big room and they were holding a lot of other people already. There was this lady with a baby, a brand new baby, like less than three months old on her back. And my mom was begging her for a little bit of Gerber that she had for her baby because we hadn't eaten or drank anything.

Speaker 6 (00:15:03):

And I don't know how many days at first the lady didn't want to give us any because that's all she had for her baby. But then she did give us some, and I remember my mom feeding us that Gerber with her finger that night. They let us go and they dropped us back across the border. Not even a day went by and we tried again. Fortunately, the second time we were successful, I remember walking through a canal, but there was no water. One of the S was holding my hand and he asked me if I was tired, if I wanted him to carry me. And I said, oh, no, I can do this. This is easy. I said, this is as easy as the three times tables. Three times one, three times two, three times three. I remember they were making fun of me because I said that.

Speaker 7 (00:15:50):

Thank you, David.

Speaker 2 (00:15:59):

Thank you, Naomi. I want to explain the genesis of this book. The first book in the series was Surviving Justice, and I got the chance to introduce Studs Turkel, the godfather of modern oral history. When he spoke at Berkeley, anybody from Chicago especially knows Studs Turkel. And he was 92 years old, still sharp as a T and still dressed to the nines and wearing Red Sox, which he always wore. And after that event in the lobby, I met a woman who said, well, if you're interested in oral history, I worked with the recently exonerated, the wrongfully convicted and exonerated men and women who were convicted and did up to 25 years in prison for crimes they didn't commit. We think we know the full story of the exonerated that life is easy once they get out of prison, but there's so much more to tell and we should do a book of oral histories of the wrongfully convicted.

Speaker 2 (00:16:57):

And this was Dr. L Voln who co-founded the series. So in that lobby after a stud circle event, we conceived of this idea of voice of witness. And a few months later I ran into Peter Orner, who's a novelist, many of as a short story writer and a novelist, but he was also a lawyer and he used to be an asylum lawyer. And so we met on Valencia Street in San Francisco, and he started telling me about his life as an asylum lawyer. And he had this experience when he was representing a man from Guatemala who was seeking asylum. He was afraid to go back to Guatemala for fear that he would be persecuted and or killed. And Peter spent months and months on his case and finally went to the judge San Francisco presented this case. And in a very short hearing, this man's asylum application was denied.

Speaker 2 (00:17:56):

And afterward a fellow colleague of Peters said, don't worry about it. It's nothing personal. The judge probably just saw too many Guatemalans today. And when he told me that story, I thought, and we had just started Voice of Witness, and I said, these stories and the story of your client need to be told we should find a way. And so Peter took it upon himself as a professor at San Francisco State to take on Underground America, and that's when he met Mimi Locke, who is a student in that class. And I wonder if you can just explain the genesis and working on that book and then lead into our next guest.

Speaker 4 (00:18:34):

So I was part of a team that Peter Orner put together. I'd already graduated, but from an M F A in creative writing. And I was really interested in helping out on this book really partly because of my own background as a children of immigrants. My parents are from China, immigrated to the uk, but also because oral history was such a big part of my life growing up, I would from the moment, from the earliest as I can remember, I would demand that my mother would tell me stories about life in the village and as a farmer back in Hong Kong, and I'd have the tape recorder on. And so this was a form of storytelling that was really meaningful to me. And working on the book, I focused on the Chinese immigration beat, but there were about 14 or 15 other folks working on the project, just scattered all over the country, interviewing people from Cameroon, from China, from Mexico, from all over the place, people who had left behind, loved ones for various reasons, try and make it in this country.

Speaker 4 (00:19:48):

And that was a life-changing experience for me. My background is in journalism and in fiction writing and teaching as well. And this was a form of storytelling and sort of a hybrid form of creative nonfiction and journalism. Sometimes we like to call the work, we do journalism with a cup of tea, but it was also a project that was severely lacking in funds and support and manpower. I think there were about 15 of us and three tape recorders, and we'll all be like, no, no. I booked the tape recorder for this interview and we had to fly all over the country to do these interviews, and we used air miles, slept on friends' couches. And after working on that book, I just thought, oh, this really should be something. And at the time, my visa was about to run out here, but Dave and I chatted and chatted with Loda and said, Hey, this should be a nonprofit, right?

Speaker 4 (00:20:44):

Yeah, it should be a nonprofit. And so I went to Hong Kong and then came back with some kind of shady visa type arrangement to try and set this up as a nonprofit around at the end of 2008, 2009, really good time setting up a nonprofit from scratch, financial crisis, not standing. And so thus began the second incarnation of Voice of Witness from a book series to an actual nonprofit. And then soon after that, we hired someone to help us fundraise. We started an education program, and now we're sort of onto our 16th book and about 20,000 students a year that we serve through this. Oh, thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:21:33):

I meant to do that. Mimi is the how I can

Speaker 4 (00:21:37):

Talk

Speaker 2 (00:21:37):

Myself. Yeah, no, but Mimi is the reason that Voice of Witness exists and has grown and thrived. And so she taught herself how to be an executive director and how to fundraise and how to grow what was a fledgling idea into something very real and very powerful. So anyway, I want to salute Mimi for all the work that she's done. You planted

Speaker 4 (00:22:02):

The seed and I was the gardener who came in and

Speaker 2 (00:22:04):

Grew. And now should we introduce our other guest, our next

Speaker 4 (00:22:07):

Guest? Yes. So around the time that, so this book is one of the most after our book on It's Surviving Justice Over there. Yeah. Surviving Justice. I'll book on Wrongful Conviction. And this book, these two other books are the most demanded by educators. And we run out of these all the time. So when we got to a new printing of Underground America, we asked Lorraina to write the afterward for us. She was, she's such an incredible person. Not only did she make this perilous journey from Mexico to the US when she was just six years old and showed such courage and strength and resourcefulness and resilience, but she also put herself through college, she became a fierce advocate for farm workers' rights. Her mother was a farm worker, and today she is been married for nine years. She's living in northern California. She has a five-year-old son and she runs a hugely successful real estate business with her husband. And she's going to be joining us via Skype momentarily if we couldn't get technology to work for us. So let's wait for her to get on the screen, then we can give her a warm welcome. Okay. So just give me one second.

Speaker 4 (00:23:31):

Okay.

Speaker 2 (00:23:35):

Lorraine's story overlaps with the narrative of the dreamers that and those that have benefited from the DACA legislation under Obama, and that which is under threat right now under our new president. And so Lorena has been part of so many of our events over the years. Hi Lorena. Hi

Speaker 7 (00:23:58):

Lorena. Can you hear us?

Speaker 2 (00:24:00):

Hi everybody. Say hi everyone. Welcome

Speaker 7 (00:24:04):

Everyone.

Speaker 2 (00:24:08):

Lorraine, I wondered if you could start from the start and tell us how you first met a voice of witness, interviewer, and what that process was like. And you were going on the record at a time when you had reason to be concerned about having your narrative out there, and obviously you used a pseudonym in the book. And anyway, if you can talk about what it was like to tell your story when you did.

Speaker 8 (00:24:40):

I'm probably a little bit trouble hearing you, but I think I heard the question in one word. To summarize it, it was petrified. This was something that it was never supposed to be spoken about. So I was breaking least carbon rule of being an immigrant and being neighborhood that, so it was scary and I was definitely afraid, but I was tired of being afraid and I was tired of being who was, I was a pretty good person to this country.

Speaker 7 (00:25:21):

Lorena, sorry to interrupt you we're having a bit of a hard time hearing you. Would it be possible to call you back because we hang up and then call you back? Maybe we'll get a better connection.

Speaker 8 (00:25:36):

Yes.

Speaker 7 (00:25:37):

Let's try that. Okay.

Speaker 2 (00:25:44):

While we're doing that, oh, maybe wait a second.

Speaker 7 (00:25:50):

So humans are always better than technology.

Speaker 2 (00:25:52):

Yeah.

Speaker 7 (00:25:55):

How's this?

Speaker 2 (00:25:56):

Keep it small. I think I'm fine.

Speaker 8 (00:25:57):

Can you hear me?

Speaker 2 (00:25:59):

Yeah.

Speaker 7 (00:26:00):

Yeah. That's a little better. Yeah. Okay. All right. Okay. So you were saying that it was scary, but you were tired of being afraid.

Speaker 8 (00:26:12):

I'm tired of hiding. I'm tired of hiding my assets and everything that I was capable of. So with the opportunity presented itself, I just finished a very, very life changing internship in North Carolina that I worked very, very hard to earn. And the bridge need to do, had to fly across that look. But of to that internship being so enlightened and actually hearing my voice be heard during that internship was a little catalyst that allowed me to share my board good time. And she needs to where we're at now.

Speaker 2 (00:27:10):

Lorena, are you guys able to get most of, yes. Okay. It's a little jumpy, but I think it, it's okay. Lorraine, can you talk about, we talk a lot as interviewers about how, and I always love the Dave ey quote from StoryCorp when he says, listening is an act of love. We think that, and I agree with that so much where the process of being heard and this many hours, sometimes it's 12 hours and many weeks or sometimes months off and on together, that the interviewers and the narrators talk and create and publish this narrative. Can you talk about that part of it being listened to and being heard and digging deeper into your story than maybe you had in telling it to anybody else? We all have a short version of our life story that we tell, but this process requires a depth of detail that is, I think, unprecedented in other parts of our lives normally.

Speaker 9 (00:28:27):

Yeah, I had never shared this much detail with anybody up until that point. I don't think very many people now know that much detail of my life. I'm a very, very private person as it is, especially with this aspect of my life. So

Speaker 10 (00:28:45):

It was challenging, but my interviewer was a David Hill. He made sure and went to every effort to make me feel comfortable and safe. So once he unlocked that door, I don't think he could stop me from talking.

Speaker 2 (00:29:08):

Once your narrative was published, can you talk about the moment you saw it in print and saw, I think what we talk about a lot voice of witness is how so many of the narratives have had their narratives distorted, have had them taken from them, they've been labeled, they've been misconstrued. And here our attempt is to allow the narrators to reclaim their story and to make it just right to approve of the final text so that when it goes to press, there's no surprises. And your story is your story again. And can you talk about seeing it in print and the aftermath of the book?

Speaker 10 (00:29:52):

It gave me that validity that I have been seeing for such a long time that I actually existed. I now have proof in writing that I exist in this country up until then. So it gave me an identity, gave me just validity and knowing that I am a person and I'm a valuable person, valuable enough to be in a book somewhere.

Speaker 7 (00:30:22):

Can you tell us a little bit about, I mean, that was 10 years ago that you shared your story with us. Can you tell us a little bit about how life is like for you now? I remember when we spoke last week, you said you were about to make a big move.

Speaker 10 (00:30:36):

Yeah, we said we just made a big move. It's funny because I don't know if you guys can see the canvas behind me, but it says, everything happens for a reason. When you think things are falling apart, they might just be falling into place. And when I was being interviewed by David, it was some of the most traumatic times that I had experienced. The place that I was working at was being investigated by the Department of Real Estate and the F B I. And I mean, it was a huge, huge ordeal. So it was a very, very scary time in my life, and I just kept thinking, I think I'm just adding what took the fire here by speaking up about my story. Not only did that give me courage, and I defeated that huge monster that I had built up in my head for such a long time, but it taught me how to properly run this business that I have, that have grown exponentially in the past three years. And it has provided me with the gut that I needed to make the moves that I needed to move both personally and professionally and just stop being scared to let go of something good, go after something better, which is what America is about.

Speaker 2 (00:32:14):

Thank you. And I think it's inevitable that we have to bring this up to the present moment. We had eight years I think, where there was progress made with DACA and other legislation, and there were certainly setbacks too. But the moment that we find ourselves in now, and here we are gathered in DC not too far from the White House, which is communicating some very scary ideas. And I think ideas that come from a clear lack of empathy. And we're going to talk a lot about empathy today. I don't think it's any coincidence that are the current occupant of the White House doesn't read and how that results in his worldview and that lack of empathy. But can you talk about from your perspective and looking back and looking back into the next generation to young people, I work with young people, a lot of our nonprofits, a two 60 C and a two six Valencia around the country where this is on the minds of so many young people who are 8, 9, 10 years old who go to bed with fear, who wake up with fear, whose families live with fear every day. And I wonder, from your perspective, is it shocking to find ourselves backpedaling so much that we have retreated to this level of fear that we thought maybe we were progressing past? Sorry, I'm going on and on, but I'll let you, you know what I mean?

Speaker 10 (00:33:56):

Yeah. I still feel like a dreamer. I still identify myself as an immigrant, and my heart hurts for every single person that lives with that fear every single day because I know what it's like to be afraid of the local police department, of a sheriff, of any sort of a government entity, even going to a bank. I remember what that fear was like. I don't know if that'll ever go away, but I was just having this conversation with somebody that is a dreamer and is putting his goals on hold and his plans on hold just because he doesn't know what's going to happen. And I feel like that's when the bad people win. That's how they win. I don't think that we should let fear dictate our lives. Yes, it is a reality. I'm not trying to bury my head in the sand and pretend like it doesn't exist, but until anything concrete happens, I just say keep moving forward. No matter how slowly forward is forward. And don't let anyone or anything or any potential of anything stop you from your goals and from your dreams. Your goals are your goals and your dreams are your dreams, and you are the only one that can stop 'em from becoming a reality.

Speaker 2 (00:35:38):

Thank you. Thank you so much. Lorena, can you stay for a second? We're going to talk to Jennifer and then we'll swing back to q and a. Can you stay for that? Sure. Oh, okay. Jennifer, I want to talk about the book project that you're working on and it's centered around food sovereignty. And I wonder if you could just sort of define that and why you chose to explore that in Zimbabwe and anyway.

Speaker 4 (00:36:10):

Sure. Food sovereignty is simply the freedom to choose how your food is grown. Okay. How it's made. It is a product in this country, isn't it? So as idexx, we're an organization that's worked for 30 years with grassroots leaders around the world working on the forefront of food sovereignty, climate justice, and alternative economies. And what we find, especially in this moment is that people in the global south have so much to teach us. Truthfully, the things that my grandmother knew that I have lost isn't lost. It still exists still around. So how do we reclaim that? We're hoping that this book can really inspire all of us, but I'll talk a little bit more about that as we go on. I'm sure we also know that food sovereignty is so important right now because in the industrial food system has created such a burden on our environment and is such a contributor to climate change that we've got to figure out how to feed ourselves and not hurt the planet. We absolutely know we have to do that. And so we need creative solutions. We've got to figure out how to transform these food systems. And the other thing for me, why is food sovereignty is so important in this moment is that we know from communities of color in this country, we know from people in the global south, food is resistance. It fuels us on a deep level, spiritually, emotionally, and physically. So it's an important time to look at this topic, I think.

Speaker 2 (00:37:49):

And are there stories that you, in your work that you started with like oh, stories that you knew? Because a lot of times these books, typically the editors of the books are individuals who have worked in the field that the book is covering whether or not in the case of inside this place, not of it, which is a book of narratives from women's prisons in the us. One editor had been a public defender and the other editor had worked with Justice Now Prison Reform Organization, or in Alia, maek had been a Department of Justice lawyer and then had written a book about Arab American history in this country. But everybody starts with a few stories. Oh, I wish this story needs to be told. People would understand so much more if they knew it. Were there stories in your mind that you started with?

Speaker 4 (00:38:48):

Absolutely. I thought about this as you asked that question. I thought about a lot of people, but I also thought about things that they were doing. And what we also find in our sector, our human rights global development sector, is we forget the story too. So we get into the intervention or the strategy and we forget that there's humans at it. So my mind went to strategy first, I'll confess, but then it went to a partner that is coming actually to San Francisco next week to join us. Her name is Elizabeth mfo. She is the leader of Lavia Campina as well as the Zimbabwe Small Hoarder Organic Farmers Forum. You would not know her name probably if anyone has heard of her, please, please. No. Okay. She leads a 200 million person movement, a global movement of peasant farmers. Where is her story? So this is a moment that we can let her tell us about what that means for her.

Speaker 4 (00:39:58):

Who herself is a day-to-day farmer and an activist, and what did she learn in her life, made her realize I'm going to fight to protect our ancestral knowledge and I'm going to push up against multinational companies that would sell me some seeds that I know how to save already. Right? I thought about a youth group outside of Cape Town, South Africa who was engaged in gorilla gardening. So land being such a difficult issue there. These youth, which are the future, are taking over plot of land and planting gardens, right? Resistance. So these are great stories. I'm really excited to feature them in the book.

Speaker 2 (00:40:51):

We have a new book, and this of course is of interest to Lorena too. Chasing the harvest is just about it press right now. And that's about farm workers, migrant workers in the us and there's a lot of overlapping narratives and a lot of overlapping themes. And can you talk about how you chose Zimbabwe and South Africa to focus on and what is common to the lives of migrant workers and farm workers here in the US and what's very different there?

Speaker 4 (00:41:32):

What a good question.

Speaker 2 (00:41:34):

Thank you.

Speaker 4 (00:41:36):

I

Speaker 2 (00:41:36):

Got a bunch of good ones. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (00:41:37):

Okay. Yeah. I think what we'll find in common as we embark upon this is really about the changing narrative. The fact that the narratives that are painted are just wrong. So I think that that will be a real moment of understanding. There's an interest in keeping people powerless and poor and desperate and an object of charity and pity. And I think people who especially are connected to the earth, have a sense of fortitude that city dwellers, I'm a blue stater now that ingenuity, that deep knowledge. I think we'll understand about how people are hanging onto that and claiming that in the midst of many forces coming at them. I'm excited to see that that'd be a theme. We chose Zimbabwe in South Africa because truthfully, so our organization gives grants, and one of the ways that we give grants is with trust, something called general operating Support. Any of you who run nonprofits, it is so hard to get. It means your funder has to trust you to do with what the money that you think you can do. Part of the way that we fund grassroots movements in the global south is that way. So we have to get our own money to be that way too. And we have the hardest time doing that for Africa partners.

Speaker 4 (00:43:21):

I'll just leave that there. Sorry to interrupt. Lorraina unfortunately has to go. So can you just give one great big round of applause to her? Thank you for joining us discreetly. Thanks. So back, thank you so much for letting me on. Thank you so much for joining us. You take care. Thank you, Lorena.

Speaker 2 (00:43:47):

We know each other via Skype. Lorena has been kind enough to jump in on many panels over the years, and also notably, if you read her narrative, which I urge you to do, she worked with farm workers in North Carolina. She was from California, but she went to North Carolina for an internship and became an activist advocating for the rights of farm workers in California. Farm workers typically have doing large part to the work of Cesar Chavez and everybody associated with them have more rights, and there are more regulations and protections than there are in some states like North Carolina, especially back Lorena was volunteering there. I want to talk about Jennifer oral history. How did you choose this as a vehicle to get to sort of use the work that you guys do is on the ground and why is oral history a necessary plank of that? And was it something that the rest of your organization endorsed right away, or is there skepticism about storytelling as a necessary use of time and funds?

Speaker 4 (00:45:03):

We love storytelling. Sharon Bridgeforth, playwright and performer, who our first performer is our artisan residence at idexx. So we really invest in that as an organizational strategy. I think that we continue to grapple with how to frame stories and who is telling whose story is a big question for us and one that we're happy to grapple with Voice of witness. Yeah, I think oral history matters to us because that person can own their story the whole way. And that really is important to us. Frankly, we're activists. We like to yell and say should a lot. We know that in this polarized environment that we're now part of that it's hard to argue with an oral history, isn't it? And it has all that heart and all that narrative arc that we love too. So it is powerful in many ways and we're looking forward to that part of it too.

Speaker 2 (00:46:12):

Well, and then I'll say one of the things that we sought from the beginning, and you're talking about an issue that this book is going to be based around, which is food sovereignty. But in every case, the first thing that the interviewers sit down and ask is Tell me about your childhood. Tell me about your family. And that's the first hours. I mean, first of all, the narrators are allowed to direct the conversation anywhere it goes. The narratives end up being mostly chronological, but they are the drivers of the interview process. Anytime they want to stop, they stop. If they want to discontinue the process altogether, they do. If after their narrative is complete and edited and even printed, they can still take it back. They have control over their identity as it's presented in the book. They can use a pseudonym in Underground America, all the narrators we use pseudonyms and even disguise their location for fear of them ending up on a list.

Speaker 2 (00:47:14):

And we even had a case in our book about South Sudan out of exile where one of the narrators after the book was at press and printed, felt that even though her identity was disguised, it might be discerned by authorities in cartoon who wished her family ill. So we pulped all of those books and went back to press without her narrative in it. The idea is to give the narrators a safe space where they feel safe during the entire process and afterward too. And the relationships don't end. When the books published, obviously we've known Lorena forever. I still stay in touch with narrators from Surviving Justice, and I know that Peter has, Peter Orner has had a very close ongoing relationship with many of his narrators. And as a lawyer, Peter is finishing a book called Laville that's about Haiti after the earthquake. And it's been five years in the making. And during that time, he has gone back to Haiti countless times to get updates from his narrators and make sure that everybody is doing well. And his advocacy for them definitely extends beyond the page for sure. And after the hurricane there too happened and many of the narrators were displaced. And so he becomes intimately involved in their lives. So it's a relationship that it transcends journalism and oral history and anything that goes toward furthering their humanity. And I think taking empathy to the next step is okay, is advocated and is part of the process.

Speaker 4 (00:49:03):

I think this what we've been talking about at the root of empathy and when you're facilitating someone else's story, I think what we've really been talking about is honoring someone's story of taking responsibility for it. But also we think a lot about when we're teaching oral history and we went through a two day training with the core staff of idexx in preparation for this project, we really talk about power dynamics and equity. So the minute you sit down with someone, can you just show of your hands? Anyone who's ever conducted an interview before or been interviewed? Okay, good number. The minute you sit down with someone and you are the person putting down the tape recorder and you are asking the questions, there's immediately a power dynamic. So to make someone feel at ease, to make someone feel like they're controlling the situation, there are all these little concrete things you can do to just flatten that imbalance a little bit. And we go into great depth in our methodology to address these issues. And I think it's fair to say most of us coming to a conference like this, we're coming from a place of privilege.

Speaker 4 (00:50:21):

I think that when we're going into a project or an issue like violence in Zimbabwe or post nine 11 Islamophobia or collecting stories of undocumented immigrants, we want to go in with this idea, not that we are saving anyone or giving them a voice that they didn't have before, but treating them as teachers. What can we learn from these people who are agreeing to sit down and share their story with us? So this is why we're so such staunch advocates of oral history as a legitimate form of history, because up against scholarly works or analytical works, it really gives you something that you might not otherwise get or the nuances and shades and textures and also some sort of conflicting opinions around the same issue.

Speaker 4 (00:51:19):

And I think that's sort of at the root of what Jennifer and IDEXX project is treating these narrators in this farmers movement, leaders in Zimbabwe and South Africa as people who have actually found solutions to the climate crisis. Right. Can you speak a little bit more about that? Yeah, exactly. I think small scale farmers as the scientific research on their methods, which are often maligned as being unscalable and not innovative, they're not all about getting the maximum yield of everything. So what we're finding though is that as this scientific knowledge gets validated that they have and the solutions are culturally relevant, what I'm hoping is that as we learn about their stories and how that supposedly small scale intervention actually allows people to stay secure and well, what I hope we take from it is our own actionable ideas about how we take more control of our food system here in the us. So I think what'll be interesting about this volume and what we're really excited about is that global to local connection. That'll be very palpable. Hopefully.

Speaker 2 (00:52:47):

I'm looking at the time and realizing we have about 12 minutes to 5 45, so we want to hear from you and whether you have a question or whether if you've taught oral history and you have an anecdote or story that you want to tell, now's the time, or if you have a question about how you might apply this methodology in your own classroom. Yeah,

Speaker 11 (00:53:20):

I've used your workbook on oral history in a class. I taught on Haiti. It was a community-based learning course, and it was 18 Drexel, university of Philadelphia students, undergraduate students with 10 Haitian immigrants. And I had the Haitian immigrants, each one, we called them, those on me, our friends, and each one had a week devoted to them where they had, it was a once a week, three hour course, and they told their story the three hours, and the 18 students were to transcribe it. And I used the workbook and I went over the workbook with the students. They transcribed the stories, and then they would choose, so each of the 18 students transcribe the 10 stories. Then they would choose which story they wanted to be their project. They would meet one-on-one with the immigrant, and they would write the oral narrative. I have to say they were breathtaking. Absolutely stunning.

Speaker 2 (00:54:15):

That's a great project. Well done How you did it. And she's referring to the power of Story, which is our classroom accompanying book sort of talks about how to teach oral history in the classroom and how to teach the different narratives on. You can

Speaker 11 (00:54:32):

Download that free on from our website.

Speaker 2 (00:54:35):

Cliff OT is the educational director at Voice of Witness, and he is amazing. And so if you call up Voice of Witness or visit in San Francisco, you'll get Cliff. He's there, cliff, at Voice of witness.org. He'll love that. I just gave out his email address, but he'll love it. Yeah, he is. He's just tireless and an amazing practitioner of oral history himself. And it started with community-based oral history, having high school students tell and solicit and listen to the stories of their neighborhood. Because so often in San Francisco, the students are from one part of town and they're going to school 45 minutes away on the other part of town. They don't know the neighborhood that they're living in that well, and the residents of that neighborhood. So he started there teaching very hyper-local oral history. But the project that you just described, it must be transformative for everybody on every side, including the narrators to be heard. That doubt is.

Speaker 11 (00:55:33):

So I need a creative writing trip to Haiti every year. So this was the piece that was missing because I hadn't met the American Haitian Americans and my students who went with me on the trip hadn't met them either. So this was such included.

Speaker 2 (00:55:49):

And you had the benefit of the narrators being in person and having that much time for everybody. There's probably a very close-knit group. When we did Surviving Justice, all of these exonerees, we brought about 11 of them all to Berkeley, and we had a weekend together, and we let them just talk to each other, and we sat on the outside and listened. We didn't know there were questions that we ask of somebody. And then when you let the narrators exchange their own questions because they have a more inside knowledge, that was mind blowing. So we printed just the transcript of that in the back of the book because it was very different than the questions that we would've thought to ask. But that group, seeing everybody in person, it was crying hugs. I mean, just nobody wanted to leave. Nobody had ever been sort of, and that's with the students that were helping. This was Berkeley students that helped with this book. So having the benefit of narrators in person, and I know the telling room knows this very well in the community and how that can tighten the fabric. That's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. Yes. And the way back,

Speaker 4 (