SHEPHERD ABUSE!
July 8th, 2010Last night as I watched the news they went to the story of the immigration law in Arizona. Suddenly I was captivated as I recognized the face of a local professor speaking strongly against that law. You see I met him in January and it was a difficult meeting. Here is a little background including some video clips that will help you get better acquainted with a shepherd’s life.
I have been watching this battle between the professor who is involved with a local group and the ranchers grow since February 2008 when I read a post on a local blog.
Just before Christmas a donor to the Shepherd Ministry contacted me and said he had met a man that wanted very much to talk with me. Come to find out it was the professor that I saw again on the news last night. In January I met with him briefly at a coffee shop in Grand Junction. I was so nervous and upset by the imbalanced presentation in the videos that I couldn’t sit down to have an extended conversation with him as he wanted. I just wanted to avoid anything that might hurt the ministry so I cut the meeting short.
Since then negative articles have abounded and a law was sponsored in the Colorado house but was later pulled. The ranchers are waiting for the next round of the battle and I can say some very good men are nervous about the futures of their businesses. This whole fight is very frustrating to me. The professor and his lawyers have done their surveys with the aid of some disgruntled shepherds but by the comments they make I can’t believe they have really learned much about sheep or a life in the country. After sleeping in sheep camps, working with sheep and just plain living with shepherds for the past ten years I will weigh in briefly here.
There are ranchers who are bad employers. They are known and they are not, in my experience, by any means the majority. The first hardship of the vast majority of the shepherds is not ranchers but loneliness. One of the first shepherds I got to know, Mauro of Peru, told me that in the first months he had no radio and no reading material of any kind. He said at nights he would lie on his bed and just wonder how his family was at home. He said he nearly went insane. An older Basque rancher I know, who came over when he was a young man, said that when he finished his first contract he told his two other brothers, who had come over as shepherds, that he was going home and not coming back as he couldn’t handle the loneliness. He later changed his mind and today has his own ranch. The loneliness takes a bit of time to adjust to but many have and in the process have built homes back in their native country and put their children through college.
But what about the abusive ranchers? The H2A visa program is a security for the shepherd. With it they have rights and can quit a bad situation and move on legally to another. Another shepherd I know came here years ago and worked for a rancher who is one of those bad characters. The shepherd quit and transferred to another ranch. He is now a resident and works in a different industry but his brother is currently a shepherd here. One evening this winter he remarked, “A shepherd’s life today is a piece of cake. Now they have DVD players and cell phones.”
Another friend, a chef from Peru working as a shepherd, was angry when he heard he was considered a slave by the professor. “Slave! Slave!” he sputtered as he pointed to his boom box and then started listing the many things he had to make his life comfortable.
There is much more that can be addressed but this is only an introduction. I have included these three videos to help you see the life a bit better. While the news clip is in Spanish I have included it so you can meet a couple of the shepherds I work with and a few of the ranchers I know. The rancher that speaks with an accent is a brother of the Basque man I spoke of in this article. He seems to have walked right off the pages of a Louis L’Amour novel. He is fluent in Basque, Spanish and English and they say he can out walk a horse!
This one is a good introduction to sheep camps.
This one I had to include! This is a good representation of the Shepherds life.
The TV news clip.