Arizona Tour

• In Gila Bend, Arizona, I met with Chris Kouach.  He is from Stockton, California, and is a quite active member of the Green Party.  Chris, his wife and their young son had just been visiting San Luis, Arizona -- the southern most point on Highway 95, about 20 miles south of Yuma.  (Kouach's wife's parents live there.)  Chris said he had just bought some land in San Luis -- to build a library on.  He said he hadn't traveled much in his life, and when he saw the poverty in San Luis (many new legal, and illegal, immigrants), he was quite moved and wanted to help.  So to help supplement education for new immigrants there, Chris believed an additional library for the town would help tremendously.  And the library would have a Green Party twist, so to speak.  Some of the sections are to include books on the environment, organic farming, small scale appropriate farming technologies...
•      We stopped in Tuba City, Arizona (just outside the Hopi Reservation).  I stumped with a group of Native American Boy Scouts, Eagle Scouts and their adult leaders.  (They were doing a service project on the ground of the Church of Latter Day Saints here.)  One of the leaders said:  "Finally, this is what I've been waiting for: an 'average Joe' for president."  Later that evening, I played in a pick-up game of basketball with some Native Americans at St. Jude's Gym.
•      In Kayente, Arizona, where a majority of the populace is Navajo, Fr. Jerome Herff said in one week he presided over three funerals, all involving drunk driving incidence in the town.  He told me a professional counselor in his congregation did a documentary on trans-generational Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome in the Navajo Tribe as a result of colonialization -- and all the atrocities that went along with that.  The theory being a beaten people (through unconscionable "ethnic cleansing") internalize the anger, the shame -- then turn it on themselves, their families.  This then leads to heightened levels of trans-generational depression, alcoholism, suicide...

     Fr. Herff in Kayente also told me he supports the group: "Feminists for Life."  He said the group, which has chapters nationwide, goes into liberal universities like Brown (Ivy League), and so on, to educate young, impressionable college students about Life issues -- so they just aren't getting all their information from Pro-Choice groups.

•