The Samoan Youth Empowerment Initiative: Cultural "Roots"

Walking on a pile of potatoes
stacked to the ceiling of a barn!

What would a trip to Southwest Michigan be without making a visit to a farm? Our area is linked closely to the agricultural business and so it has become a part of our local culture. Therefore, we were extremely lucky when both Walther Farms of Three Rivers and Fresh Farm Solutions of White Pigeon reached out to us in offering a tour of their local potato processing plants.

Our tours were arranged by Karl Ritchie, President of the Mormon Church in Sturgis and an agronomist at Walther Farms. He and his wife met us the day after Christmas to show us around the plant. All of the boys had eaten potatoes before in Samoa, although they had never seen them on this scale.

The first barn we walked into was a huge storage room where potatoes were stacked to the ceiling. We walked to an adjacent room where sorters were pulling bad potatoes off a conveyor belt, while the good ones passed by and were loaded into the bed of an 18 wheeler semi-truck! The boys seemed very interested, as was I, in the entire process and for them to see the technology involved in the business was also especially important. All of their families grow plantations of taro, bananas and other local Samoan crops, but for them to see the agriculture meet the technology world was inspiring in a new way. It goes along with the goals of this trip—to make them see things in a different way, or larger than they had thought about things before.

At Fresh Farm Solutions in White Pigeon, we got to see more of that technology as multiple conveyor belts sorted potatoes and dumped them into huge bins which would then be boxed or bagged. Our tour guide, Ron Vandervelde, did a great job of explaining things and we left with a better understanding of what went into a bag of potato chips. Later that day at the store the boys were pointing at bags of potatoes and asking if it came from where we had visited.

Walther Farms was also extremely generous in helping the boys prepare for the cold weather! Their business donated money for the boys to buy warm clothes and boots with and Karl and Michelle assisted in the shopping. They also took the boys out for their first Mexican food and while we were inside eating it started to snow for the first time since the boys had arrived! It made for a great day and we again were delighted by the warmth and hospitality of the local community to reach out to our program.