Christina Saeteurn sporting APEN T-shirt at the U.S. Social Forum's Opening March.

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Today was the first day of workshops and the APEN team spread out to take advantage and soak up all the great learning!

Christina Saeteurn, APEN youth member, on Thursday’s workshops:

We started the morning off with a bang at a workshop on Hurricane Katrina: “They Left Us Here to Die: Katrina and Ethnic Cleansing in New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf” by the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund.

“The Katrina workshop was a great learning experience. I learned a lot from just listening to people, more than I would listening to the news. I heard what is REALLY happening, not sugar coated. All the speakers were really strong.” To the left is a member of the People's Hurricane Relief Fund.

“The second workshop I went to reminded me of APEN. The workshop was “Youth of Color Organizing Youth of Color in the Environmental Justice Movement” by Little Village Environmental Justice from Chicago. They do environmental work, but it’s in Chicago. The area they work in has a lot of factories, which really hurts the Latino community.”

“The third workshop was a workshop by AYPAL (Asian Pacific Islander Youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership) about imperialism. We did a game where we made our own country & constitution. There were simulations where imperialist countries controlled religion, culture, and if other countries refused to trade with them, they bombed them.”

Sound familiar?

The evening’s plenaries were dynamic, relevant, and inspiring.

A diverse set of activists spoke on a panel on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Viola Francois Washington of the Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund, Sharon Harshaw of Coastal Women for Change gave passionate testimony about the devastation they saw friends, family, and community go through in Louisiana and Mississippi. Uyen Le of the National Alliance of Vietnamese American Service Agencies spoke about the challenges for non-traditional extended Vietnamese families to access government funding and the government’s lack of knowledge of the Vietnamese community. Javier Gallardo of the New Orleans Worker Center spoke about Latino workers who are at their employers’ whims because of their ability to take their passports away, and the fact that workers are sold between employers for $2000 a head. He asks why jobs aren’t going to the African American community and exclaimed, “they want Latinos and Blacks to fight – the new slaves against the old.” The crowd -- black, brown and yellow -- rose to its feet chanting “Si Se Puede!”

The key message of the panel was captured very well by one of the respondents. “Katrina is a reality, not a symbol. Katrina was a bad storm. But it’s a symbol of the deep inequities in this country. If you’re doing criminal justice work, you’re living Katrina. If you’re fighting for health care, you’re living Katrina. If you’re working on housing, you’re living Katrina.”

After 12 hours of workshops and speakers, the APEN team and friends unwound in our rooms with pizza and ice cream. We ended the night with Christina Saeteurn practicing for her big speech at tomorrow’s environmental justice press conference on the “Toxic Waste and Race at 20 year Report.” After some initial squirming, Christina settled in & blew us all away!