Project Name: Utah Migrant Council
Location: Enterprise and Brigham City, Utah

Why did I join VISTA? At the end of the '60s, I believed it was my duty. After upheavals of the decade and two summers in Mexico, I was very aware of how lucky I am to be a middle-class, white, American female. I wanted to prove that hippies love and serve their country as well as soldiers do. I believed in the social justice, civil rights and anti-poverty movements, and that sacrifice and cooperative communal effort builds individual character and stronger societies. Plus, I was graduating from college, had no real skills or job prospects, and wanted to get away from Springfield, Illinois--preferably to exotic foreign capitals, but the Peace Corps wouldn't have me.

I remember stressing my Spanish skills and a couple of classes in urban minority issues in my VISTA application, hoping that would make them place me in New York City, Los Angeles, or Puerto Rico. VISTA was no more convinced than the Peace Corps that I could handle life outside the cornfields. They let me choose between Pine Ridge, South Dakota, or the Utah Migrant Council. Thinking it was outhouses and rattlesnakes vs. Salt Lake City, I chose the Migrant Council and ended up in Enterprise, Utah (pop 800). I was the only person in town who smoked--it fascinated the children.

The Migrant Council funded a day care center for the children of Navajo farmworkers in the area for the potato and onion harvests in the fall, staffed by me and five other VISTAs assigned to Southern Utah State College. In the two years before the center opened, six children had been run over and killed in the fields; innumerable others were continually sick from exposure to pesticides, fertilizers and bad weather. We cleaned and painted an old quonset hut, bought a lot of diapers, butcher paper and fingerpaint, and opened up--free babysitting, meals and snacks included. A week later, we still had no kids, so we hired a Navajo aide. The next day we had 40.

The day care assignment was my first career move. I dropped a couple of babies; we figured the kids were safer if I spent my time on paperwork and cooking, so I got made Director. I've been a manager and a bureaucrat ever since.

The parents were very standoffish at first, and some of them didn't seem to speak English very well, so we VISTAs earnestly set out to learn Navajo. Of course, the only people who talked to us were the kids in the day care center, so we made the best of it. Before long, the parents became extremely happy to talk with us, to the point of laughing out loud most of the time. They even started bringing strangers by to see the "biiliganas" speak Navajo. It only took us about a month to realize that Navajo as taught by 3-year-olds is Navajo baby-talk. Saving the world is a humbling experience.

Our evenings alternated between trying to make one coal stove heat an uninsulated six-room house, burying beer cans out in the country because we were afraid to let people see them in our garbage, taking Mormon lessons, and holding meetings to discuss a Migrant Council proposal to build habitable housing for the farmworkers.

The response was incredible--in return for letting them fulfill their church obligation to try to convert us, the men of the county donated 10 acres of land and built a 50-unit settlement with their own hands that very year, using plans, materials and equipment provided by the Migrant Council. Escalante Housing, Inc., is still public housing for migrant Indians, maintained by the farmers and occupied 24 years later.

By early November, the potato harvest was over and the day care center was closed. Around then, the John Birch Society sponsored a series of speeches in Enterprise, St. George and Cedar City excoriating "teenage government paid agitators sent out here to stir up the Indians." Guess who?

The lady at the laundromat told us we couldn't use her machines anymore. Our mail started disappearing. Eight wild horses somehow got trapped in our fenced yard, trapping us in the house for hours. Our coal shed caught on fire. Our house, the day care center and our cars were shot at--it's hunting season, accidental stray bullets could have come from half a mile away. We started to hear, "Oh yeah, lynchings still happen down here; why just a couple years ago...." The SUSC group moved to Cedar City, and I went to Brigham City, at the north end of the state.

The Migrant Council's area office in Brigham dealt with every conceivable issue and program. I was one of six Migrant Council VISTAs in the county. Box Elder County had a huge range of crops as well as a sugar factory, vegetable and fruit canneries, refrigeration plants, and a soup factory. Thousands of migrants came in from March through September, and another large population stayed all year round.

I ran three day care centers serving over 600 kids. Off times, I taught adult basic education and literacy classes, did housing and health surveys, wrote funding proposals and program procedural guides, sorted out donated clothing and stuff, and agitated state and county public service offices to make sure farmworkers had access to the services and were treated with respect. I did things I never heard before, and was not capable of. The problems were obvious and every bit of effort had visible results--you never get tired with that kind of encouragement. I believe we saved lives, and it was easy.

Actually, I was with the Migrant Council for five years. After my VISTA year, I worked with their employment and training program, ended up directing it, and eventually became Deputy Executive Director of the agency statewide. That got parlayed into a master's degree and eight more years as a consultant to other migrant programs around the country, and Federal, state and local employment and training agencies.

I wrote the Federal regulations for CETA Farmworker programs. I'm a published writer in management and community needs assessment. It's all an absolutely straight line from VISTA. Everything I know, I learned in VISTA--even how to drive. Every meaningful job, friend and experience I've had for the last 25 years is directly attributable to having been in VISTA. To this day, I get jobs just because when I say VISTA, people think they know who I am and where I'm coming from, and they give me the benefit of the doubt.

August 1970 to September 1971 was the funniest, scariest, most exhilarating year of my life. I am proud of every single thing I did in VISTA and completely grateful for the opportunity to have served--and for the opportunities being a VISTA has provided to me ever since. VISTA has turned out to mean everything to me.

I dance and cook great Mexican food, saw bald eagles and wild river salmon, really learned Spanish, branded cows, butchered a goat, and totally fell in love with the West and with the most hard-working, resilient, and unique people in this country. I would be a completely different person if it weren't for that one year. I would be my mother--teaching or doing a routine government job in a Midwestern semi-city, resenting the pressure to take care of my relatives, boring and sweating myself to death.

Because of VISTA I've never had to be in Springfield or anywhere else humid for more that two weeks at a time. I've lived in the West so long, I lose my balance if there are no mountains on the horizon. For me, VISTA has meant I didn't have to live flat.