ICE-Free Refugee Day Celebration (And More)

RAIS (Refugee Assistance and Immigration Services) is among the groups that help folks under the umbrella of Catholic Social Services in Anchorage,  (I'd also say I've never seen a trace of proselytizing  in any of the RAIS activities.)

Yesterday, Thursday, June 26, was the first day of their summer CSA program pick up.  That's Community Supported Agriculture - a program where consumers pay farmers upfront and then pick up fresh vegetables every week.  In Alaska, that is necessarily limited to summer.  

I first learned and blogged the term CSA in March 2009 when I was a volunteer with an NGO (non-governmental organization, what we call non-profit) in Chiangmai, Thailand.  Here's that post which talks about CSAs in general and what was happening in Chiangmai specifically.  

Because it was the first day of Grow North Farm's 2025 CSA distribution there was also a celebration for World Refugee day. with music, dancing, art activities, and food from around the world. (That sentence was more or less lifted and edited from the email I got from RAIS.

For the rest of the summer, in addition to the subscribers picking up their veggies, there will be booths where other refugee farmers will be selling their crops.  Here's a blog post from 2022 showing you the variety of things for sale. It's always colorful and people are often wearing the clothing they would wear in their original countries.  There are also people selling baked goods.  The one that captured me last summer - the Egyptian Kitchen - won't be here this summer.  They are in Egypt until fall.  Lots of folks will miss their incredible home made cookies.  

Yesterday, I only saw a couple of tents where people were selling veggies and preserved food.  Most of the booths were services available in Anchorage.  The library was there - my mind's going blank - and there were a number of groups with various arts and crafts activities for kids.  

I spent more time at the Choosing Our Roots table, because it was a group I knew nothing about.  This is Adam in the photo.  He's head of the Board of Directors.  Later, the Executive Director Chami joined us.  Basically this groups helps queer youth find housing and get their feet on the ground.  They work with various groups including Alaska Housing, Alaska Children's Trust, Covenant House, and RAIS.

'Youth' means about 15 to 25.  Chami said she herself had been homeless with a baby and worked herself out of that situation and is now a social worker (I'm pretty sure that's what she said) and a licensed therapist (I'm sure she said that).  So she can counsel these youth with first hand experience of what they are going through.  

This was a very colorful (in the literal sense of that word) event and a photographer's buffet.  Except it wasn't.  Many of the people, for cultural reasons, do not want to be photographed.  

And as the title hints, two different people I mentioned this event to responded, "So ICE will be there?"

So no, I don't want to give ICE any assistance in identifying potential targets.  

I took only a few pictures.  Of course I should have taken pictures of the vegetables, but I wasn't thinking.  We got, as our CSA email listed:  

• Radish
• Spinach
• Sorrel
• Bok Choi
• Either Chamsur or Arugula

Don't know what Chamsur is?  Well, the RAIS email tells us not only what it is, but also how to use it.

"Chamsur is the Nepalese word for Garden Cress - a green which is popular in mountainous regions of Nepal and Afghanistan. Nepalese farmers brought seeds to Fresh International Gardens to experiment with growing Chamsur in Alaska - it proved to be well suited to Anchorage and has grown at the farm every year since! 

Include garden cress in any soup, salad, or sandwich for a tangy flavor. The taste is very similar to that of arugula, so it works great in any wraps, sandwiches, or salads! Add this Green Salad with Garden Cress to your list of tasty summer salads! Or use both your spinach and chamsur in this Chamsur Palungo recipe."

Don't know what to do with sorrel?  Another hint from the email:

"Sorrel is another tangy green, bright and lemony and makes a lovely Ukrainian Sorrel Soup - perfect for a rainy summer day."

I did take a few pictures and I've smudged out the faces of kids and people who might not want ICE to know they were there.  

And if ICE was there, they were unmasked and unarmed and just chilling with everyone else.  Here are a couple of pictures.  

I'm trying folks.  I've got pieces of about five posts that haven't been posted.  So many other things are luring me from the blog.  

I'm trying to decide if I really want to duplicate last summer's 1000 miles (1600+ kilometers) of biking.  I'm at 740k so far.  (That's slightly ahead of last summer.  But there were bike-able days in March this year, and last year I was biking hard the second half of the summer.)

I'm doing Duolingo Turkish everyday.  Sometimes I feel like it's hopeless because it's focused on everything but my speaking.  And while I'm gathering vocabulary and a loose understanding of the grammar (and all the fascinating but maddening suffixes which change tense, change who is acting, indicate coming and going, and many other conditions), I don't think I can actually use it to make oral conversation.  Speaking uses other muscles and parts of the brain than reading, writing, and even listening.  But Turkey is the last place on my list of places I promised myself I'd go to another time.  I passed it up while I was a student in Germany and decided more time in Greece for then, and Istanbul later.  Later is going to be never if I don't do it soon.  

And now I'm taking letters every Monday afternoon to my two Senators and my member of Congress.  I'm trying to find different ways to try to break through to them.  But I do believe that numbers matter to legislators, so I encourage others in Anchorage to join the group.  Just go to their offices (510 L Street for the Senators, 6th and 7th floors, and half a block away (1016 W Sixth Ave Suite #406) between 4pm and 5pm on Mondays.  There's no formal gathering, just people coming and going.  And if you miss a week or two, not a problem.  But I am getting to know the staff.  Begich has a second office in Fairbanks.  And Murkowski and Sullivan offices in Fairbanks, Juneau, Ketchikan, Matsu, Soldotna.  So you folks can also make weekly drop-offs.  

Biking gives me a chance to see what's new and changing in Anchorage, so I have pics on some of those things to put up.  I did post about the closing of Lake Otis at 42nd.  Lake Otis is back working, but work on 42nd continues.

There's somebody working on an ordinance to change local Anchorage elections to ranked choice voting (the State has that, though Republicans are trying again to do away with it) and I'm trying to get more info on who is doing this and how it's going.  I know an Assembly committee had it on their agenda this week.  This would be a great improvement.  

Frustration with Democratic establishment and their problems with the bright young, articulate, members of their party, culminating, most recently, with the Islamaphobic responses to Mamdani's apparent primary win in New York.  For example. Christopher Bouzy, the creator of Twitter alternative Spoutible, writes, "Democratic Leadership Told Rep. Jasmine Crockett She's Too Black and Too Loud."

Gardening and regularly visiting the Alaska Botanical Garden as part of one of my bike routes.  

Don't despair.  Find beauty every day.  Get outside and move your body.  (The biking and gardening) Find good folks to be around.  Find ways to resist.  

There are organizations offering lists of ways to fight back daily.  Taking action is the best antidote for hopelessness.  Here are two that send me regular (not daily) emails with list of ways I can resist:

Peoples Action Institute  

The Digital Drumbeat

Ted Talks As News - Trees And Food -The Good News The MSM Tends Not To Cover

I woke up early this morning - too early to get up, but late enough that I was awake.  So I plugged in the headset for my phone and listened to a Ted Talk.  Suzanne Simard "How Trees Talk To Each Other."

No, this wasn't some vague imagining about talking trees.  It was based on Simard's childhood and  education.  She did studies with isotopes to see how they moved from one tree to another through the mitochondria in the soil.  And how all this interconnected-ness makes forests more resilient to things like climate change.

This isn't technically 'news' because this talk is about ten years old.  And it's based on research she began that's much older.  And I've heard hints of this, but never anything so coherent that it made sense to me.  But don't take my word for it:

Next up was Jamie Oliver - Teach Every Child About Food

Screenshot from Jamie Oliver's Ted Talk

His basic message is that food is the number one cause of death in the United States. He backs it up with this chart. All the ones in red are 'diet-related diseases.' (Heart disease, cancers, stroke, diabetes.)

Jamie is a chef.  He talks about power - about fast food and markets owned by corporations and that food now is  largely processed and full of extra ingredients, while 30 years ago it was mostly fresh and local.  (This talk was given in 2010, so that would get us back  to 1980.)  He talks about portion size and labeling problems.  At home and school kids are eating food that will kill them.
Milk, he says, now has sugar added, though he's talking about chocolate milk. He uses a wheel barrow full of sugar cubes to show how much sugar kids get from five years of school lunch milk. School food systems are run by accountants, not food experts.

Lightbulbs turned on above my head.  This isn't new to me in general. I grew up when most food was fresh or lightly processed and fruits were only available in season.  Growing up in LA meant we probably had more fresh vegetables and fruits all year than people in colder climates.   But he's talking about more than that. He's talking about taking the power back from the big agricultural corporations.  And he thinks they should be sued like the tobacco industry was.  So, you can understand why this stuff doesn't get much attention on corporate media which makes its money from advertisements from, to a great extent, the food industry - fast food, processed food, soft drinks, beer, etc.

Then came Britta Riley and A Garden In My Apartment

This talk is about hydroponics. .  Just growing some of our own food, she quotes Michael Pollen, is one of the best things we can do for the environment.  This is what got her started.  Listening to experts talk about the food problem, she quotes Pollen further, is precisely how we got to where we are.  NASA's hydroponics in space inspired her.  She wanted to get into this, but didn't want to copy the food corporations, so she set up a website where they displayed their products and they crowd sourced to keep improving the systems.  They have 18,000 people connected through the website.  R&DIY - she calls it Research and Development Do It Yourself.  Anyone around the world can duplicate these products themselves for free.   And this is now a community.  We should ditch the term consumer and get behind the people doing things themselves.  The website - rndiy.com - isn't working now.  Not sure where to find this community today.

Followed by Roger Doiron - My Subversive (Garden) Plot

Doiron took the whole idea of gardens as a way to take back food and make it healthier and fresher a little further.  His plot is to radically alter the balance of power, not just in our own country, but around the world.  Here's what he says near the beginning:  Food is a form of energy, but also a form of power.  When we encourage people to grow their own food, we're encouraging them to take power into their hands, power over their diets, power over their health, and power over their pocketbooks.  And we're also talking about taking that power away from someone else.  Those actors who have power now over food and health.  See gardening as a healthy gateway drug to food freedom.  Not long after you start a garden, you starting thinking, "I might want to learn how to cook."  He talks about Michele Obama's vegetable garden at the White House that he helped on.  And the food needs of the planet as the human population grows   Plenty to chew on.



Then, finally, I heard Ron Finley - A guerrilla Gardener in South Central LA

He got in trouble with the City of LA because he planted a food court in front of his house on the strip between the sidewalk and the street with edibles.

Screen shot from Ron Finley Ted Talk

The city owns that land, he said, but the homeowner is supposed to keep it up. Fortunately he got enough publicity to overcome that obstacle.  His job is to spread the idea of growing your own food, and in particularly in neighborhoods that are food deserts.  He says that LA owns enough vacant lots to create 20 Central Parks.


The corporate news media today - and that includes to a certain extent National Public Radio - are focused on offering a constant diet of breaking news, with headlines and video, aimed at attracting the most possible eyeballs.  We get short vignettes that often disappear and we never learn what happened.  Or the opposite, as with the never ending election coverage, where the focus is on the horserace, not where the horses are headed.  We only hear about who's up this week, this day, this hour.  Every new poll becomes top news.  Conflict sells.  What we need is cool headed analysis of the policy proposals and how candidates plan to carry them out.

What these Ted Talks suggest to me is there is a lot going on in the US (and the world), but it's not initiated by corporations and it doesn't get much coverage.  It's people taking control of their own food, in this case, something that agribusiness, which advertises widely on corporate media, doesn't really want being covered.  These people powered activities don't get covered much, unless there's conflict or violence involved - say the Keystone Pipeline standoff last year.

So I suggest you watch and listen to the positive things people are doing all over the country, the innovations that come from crowdsourcing, or in response to the disgust with the hazardous - to the environment, to health, to sustainability, to family finance - offerings of corporate America.  Check out the endless options from Ted Talks and go looking for other podcasts that do similar things.  There's lots of good news out there.  It doesn't need blood covered to be covered by the news.