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?