It's Farmworker Awareness Week!

So, today I read a very compelling book called 'My Guantanamo Diary'. It's a simply written, honest, straightforward book about a translator who worked at Guantanamo Bay. She was studying law at the time and was also fluent in Pashtu, and so was the best choice for a translator for the pro bono (read: working fo' free) lawyers who chose to represent the inmates of the prison. 

Her job was so much cooler than yours is.

And it's much better than the last book I read, which was 'The Wilderness', by Samantha Harvey. It's about a man with Alzheimer's who is retracing his generally boring life in a marshland and telling us about it. The 'plot twist'- if it can be called that, is that he mixes up people's names because he has Alzheimer's. This 'twist' is introduced and fully explained within the first few chapters of the book. We then spend the next three-fourths of the novel dwelling on that. It was depressing, confused and left you with that grey, mealy, amoral feeling in your mouth like after you read a Russian novel, but without any of the compelling situational and political imagery.

Spoiler alert: It's about getting old. 

But back to Guantanamo Diary, the good book.

It reminds me of the time that I spent working as a social worker for an organization called SAF, which, if you've never heard of it, (and you probably haven't) is a small organization that ensures migrant farmworkers in the southeast are given proper rights and ensures that they receive fair treatment at the hands of their employers. Because unfortunately, this doesn't always happen. Myself and over a dozen other interns witnessed a lot of mistreatment of people who were legally residing in this country, just because of the fact that they were migrants, and could be taken advantage of. No one should be kept in work camps, or be deprived of access to medical care and blah blah blah, humanitarian rant. It's a big deal to me. It changed my life and my perspective on the world. I also realized that most people don't care, and you can't make them. 

As the reader you just want to know about the book. I'm getting to that, don't worry!

But first! This paragraph: 

During my time at SAF, I realized that I had unknowingly held a large number of stereotypes about farmworkers and their lives. I also realized that I was woefully uninformed about where my food came from. Most importantly, I realized that I knew nothing about the human side of the people who provided me with my food. And guess what? It's Farmworker Awareness Week, so BE AWARE! Go out and buy some food locally. Get your food from somewhere that doesn't cause human suffering within the greatest nation in the world. From a chicken factory that doesn't give people frostbite and cause their numbed fingers to get hacked off by machinery before they're even aware of it. From a farm that pays at least minimum wage for work that even Georgian prisoners won't do. That doesn't house 40 workers in cement buildings the size of a trailer, with rooms only large enough for a cot and a suitcase. 

And now, to awkwardly segue: 

This kind of eye-opening experience is the case with the author of this book, Mahvish Rukhsana Khan, only on a much higher level, involving law, and involving international prisoners accused of terrorism. 

Although I don't know how far I'm willing to go politically to actually help the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay, the least I can do for some slacktivism is to provide this small salient fact, which is really the backbone of the novel, and was provided through The Seton Hall Report. 

"Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 

86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. 

This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies."

There are several of these studies, and not all of them are quoted in the book, but you can access them through their wikipedia. 

So there you have it. That's the point of the book. I'd like to point out that I'm neither a student of law nor a political extremist or etc. (insert all disclaimers here), and that I haven't done any prolonged delving into the topic other than to read this book, check out its sources, and read the criticisms of the novel, of which there were few. This is a book review of a compelling story with some disturbing possibilities, and I felt strongly enough about it to want to talk about it, albeit only to my blog, and not to- well, the four walls, my cold cup of coffee, and my pile of laundry I need to fold. It's a book that challenges you, that makes you think, and whether or not I believe the allegations to be true, I believe that is what a good book should do. Read it.