campaign stops:
Iowa: Newton, Grinnell
Illinois: Silvis, Geneseo
Indiana: South Bend, Ft. Wayne, Portland
Heading Back East Tour 2005
- In Newton, Iowa, I interviewed Fr. Ernie Braida who
coordinates a Sister Church program with a church in El Salvador.
His parishioners regularly help with food, shelter, solar power
installations, water purification systems... Our platform calls for
much more of this type of help worldwide.
- In Grinnell, Iowa, a reporter there
asked me about solutions for rural poverty. I said we'd like to see
a shift to many more small family farms, using sustainable agricultural
practices (organic growing, small technology...) to impact some of
this poverty. With more of these types of farms, there will be more
people working, more connectedness to the land from generation to
generation, and so on. Note: I once told Country
Today newspaper in northern Wisconsin that when we lose a small
family farm, we lose another part of an integral part of the fabric of
this country.
- I was interviewed by Geneseo, Illinois's newspaper.
The reporter asked what the most rewarding thing has been about
campaigning. I said: "Planting seeds." For instance,
after a talk my wife Liz and I gave to a youth group in Oklahoma City,
Oklahoma, about some of the abject poverty we'd seen on various
Native American Reservations, the group decided to go on a two-week trip
to one of the poorest Reservations in New Mexico to help.
- I gave a talk to a "Just
Faith" group at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Silvis, Illinois.
The group is focused on social justice and they were reading the
book: The Powers That Be. An excerpt from the book
reads: My friend Jack Nelson Pallmeyer once found himself walking
through the streets of Calcutta, so enraged by the poverty that he wanted
to scream at God: "How can you allow such suffering!?"
Then he came to a painful realization: "In the suffering of the
poor, God was screaming at me, in fact at all of us, and at our institutions
and social systems that cause and perpetuate hunger, poverty and
inequality."
- In Ft. Wayne, Indiana, Ft. Wayne
Journal columnist Frank Grey asked me how I had changed since I
started running for president. I said I had become much more
concerned about the plight of the poor, the environment, our kids'
futures...
- In Portland, Indiana, we met with Patty
Johnston, Director of the Pregnancy Care Center there. She recently
got a grant to teach about abstinence to local students -- in Portland's
Middle School. Is it me, or are kids growing up way too
fast these days?