Abigail Denault, Ball State University

Dan and Karen Snouffer drove three and half hours from Columbus, Ohio to Indianapolis for a performance lasting 15 minutes.

They said it was still worth seeing their granddaughter, a drum major representing Downers Grove South High School in Illinois, perform at the Bands of America competition. After the performance, the pair wasted no time and walked back to their hotel to head home.

On their walk, the pair, who have been married for almost 56 years, seem to gravitate toward each other with small touches on the back of their arms or how they speak favoring the ear the other hears from better.

Indianapolis is not a city they visit often, but the last time was when Dan, who was a medical malpractice insurance defense attorney, was at a hospital association convention.

Travel was a major part of Dan’s career before he retired, he traveled to hospitals in seven states including several in their home state of Ohio, where he would give presentations as a part of his role at the Ohio Hospital Insurance Company. In one instance, he found himself at a small county hospital in southern Ohio around the late 1970s.

“I drove down from the Columbus area, and I’m dressed to kill. I’ve got a three-piece suit, a heavy-starched white shirt, and a neat tie,” Dan said thinking back to the fateful day back in his 30s.

During his presentation, his eyes are drawn to a figure at the end of the table. Dan said the man wore a white cowboy hat with a red checkered shirt and a bolo tie and listened intently to the presentation, but it was when he reached behind him for a waxed Coca-Cola cup.

“He spit his tobacco juice into this cup and I’m all wide-eyed. And he does it several times during my presentation, which only lasted eight minutes,” He said. 

When he asked his friend, who served as president of the medical board there, about the man in the cowboy hat, he was told it was Bob Evans. Yes, as in the southeastern Ohio farmer and founder of the restaurant chain with 500 locations dotting the Midwest and beyond.

It was one of many tales Dan tells of his life in the insurance world, an odd pair to Karen, who seems to be opposite to him as a mixed-media artist and professor emerita at Kenyon College in Ohio. Especially ironic is that Dan is colorblind, which can add a new perspective to his viewing of his wife’s art. Karen said sometimes he will make a comment about the color of something in her art and she will have to correct him.

Through both of their careers, they have traveled around the United States and the world for his work and for her various art installations and shows. One of her shows included time in France, where she held a showcase on her father’s time serving as a member of the military police (MP) in General Geroge S. Patton’s army.

The showcase followed the path of her father, based on the letters he wrote back to his wife and the tape recordings of his recounts of his time there. He arrived with units that came 10 days after D-Day. In his two and a half service, he was notably a part of the troops that liberated the Buchenwald Concentration Camp in Weimar, Germany.

Before then, he spent time in Epernay, the capital of the region of Champagne in France, where they slept in the basement of a school.

“Every day, this little girl, who was about 10-years-old, would bring them a bottle of champagne. So, my dad liked this town because they were bringing him champagne and he was eating camembert cheese,” Karen said, which prompted a laugh from Dan.

For the citizens of Epernay, the memory of Karen’s father and the American troops left a lasting impact. When the couple visited the town, they said they were treated like royalty when she mentioned her father served there.

“I happened to be there the day of a parade, and the mayor found out that my dad had been there, so he asked me to march in the parade with them,” Karen said.

A part of his service to the town involved many of the dark sides of war, including investigating war crimes, looting, rape and seeing if any German soldiers lingered.

When his troop moved on to Weimar, he saw even more of the atrocities of the war as a part of the soldiers who guided the citizens into the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. While there, Karen said he sent a letter home, telling his wife to look for his photo in Life Magazine.

The photo was a part of the series done by Margaret Bourke-White, a famous photojournalist who documented the liberation of the Buchenwald. In the scene, her father is standing near Sergeant Quinlan next to a flatbed stacked high with the corpses of those who lost their lives at the camp. In the background, she said there stood the citizens of Weimar.

“They were getting sick. You could see them covering their mouths because of the stench,” Karen said.

In her art installation, she had the elements of her father’s experience woven throughout. When visitors entered, the audio of the letters between her parents were being read and there was a smell of gardenias, the flower her father would send her mother on Easter and Mother’s Day. The flowers were placed on hanging tree trunks, which resembled the pine forests her father mentioned in Germany, but they also held a deeper, darker meaning.

“I hung them from the ceiling, and they started looking anthropomorphic, like swinging bodies,” She said. “Well, at Buchenwald, the way they killed people was by hanging. They didn’t have a gas chamber. So, for me, that’s what they symbolize,” She said.

The show was a success and Karen said she wished she could have shared it with her father, who died in 2000. Despite seeing the horrors of World War II, her father still shared any detail she asked. As a result, she can share his stories with her son but now also with her granddaughter.

“He was not like some of the veterans, who just did not ever want to talk about that war, understandably,” Karen said. “Whenever we asked him, Dad would talk in great detail. He said in his letters to Mom, ‘Now, I know why we’re here.’ He said it was absolutely horrible.”

For some veterans, the experiences of war were too horrific to recount. Dan said his father was also a veteran of WWII, but he refused to talk about his experiences up until the day he died.

As the years pass, the last remaining veterans of WWII die out and so do their stories, just as many stories are lost to time. Stories of school basements in Epernay and wax-coated Coca-Cola cups filled with tobacco spit are in Indianapolis, living in the people and couples that are brought to the city every day.

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Alex Haddon, Purdue University

It wasn’t love at first sight. The night Sharee, a 24-year-old single mom, met Brian, who had a job sucking out duck lungs, they stayed up for hours talking. 

From that conversation, Sharee decided he wasn’t the smartest person she’d ever met, but he also wasn’t the dumbest. After about six more conversations, she realized she liked him. 

Now, the Dotys are married and have four children together, in addition to Sharee’s first son. Brian has worked his way up at the same duck-processing company, Maple Leaf Farms, and now works as a hatchery specialist incubating duck eggs. Sharee works as a paraprofessional for children in a special education program. 

The Syracuse residents have worked their way through poverty, grief and personal trauma to build a stable, if imperfect life, for their family. 

They were in downtown Indianapolis Saturday morning passing time before their eldest daughter Satiah’s band competition. They sat under an umbrella beside the Soldier and Sailors Monument, listening to the fountain roar and the ping-pong paddles whack in the pop-up park. 

Sharee, now 38, was wearing a prayer necklace and hoop earrings, her curly black hair held back in a tight ponytail. Brian, also 38, was wearing an understated brown jacket. 

Satiah’s childhood is completely different from theirs. The 13-year-old is a straight-A student in many extracurriculars in addition to band. 

“She’ll screw around with her friends and whatnot, but she gets her work done first,” Sharee said. “She’s the only kid that figured that out.”

Like her mother, Satiah is funny, strong-willed and independent. She feels safe enough to argue with her parents and sneak extra screen time, but only a little bit.

Brian is has a somewhat strict, protective parenting style completely different from the way he was raised. Sharee said his parents were “neglectful.”

As a child, he spent entire days alone fishing with no one caring where he was. This led to brushes with serious injury. Once, he fell and cracked his head against the pier. Crediting his high pain tolerance, he found out after a doctor visit decades later that the fall had broken his skull. 

Sharee, on the other hand, had a helicopter mother and an “unsafe” dad. Her parents were divorced. She had moved through three different middle schools by the time she was Satiah’s age.

“I was way worse at 13. I was hateful. I did everything I could do to ruin my mom’s life,” Sharee said. “But I took it out on her because she was safe. I try to remember that when my kids take stuff out on me.”

Today, Sharee and Brian are doing their best to raise their children without making their parents’ mistakes. If all goes well, she said, her kids will have a childhood they won’t have to recover from. At the very least, they won’t have the same traumas they did. 

Her mother left high school and had Sharee as a teenager. Sharee, after a silly argument about curfew, left her mother’s house at eighteen, moved in with her boyfriend and within a couple of years, had her first son, Anakin. 

But she graduated from high school. 

Anakin, who was stubborn, also moved out as a teenager and also graduated from high school.

“I had made one small step ahead of my mother,” Sharee said. “So, I’m hoping his next step will just be maybe one or five more steps ahead of his mother.” 

Things improve in fits and starts

Sharee met Brian at a rare night out at the bar when Anakin was five. She was sober and he was the only one of a group of “douchebag” guys who didn’t buy her drunk friend a drink.

The early years of their relationship, and later marriage, were difficult. They couldn’t afford childcare so Sharee had to become a stay-at-home mom. Anakin struggled emotionally and acted out.

The couple bought their first house in 2019 after years of working their way up. Then, in the middle of the pandemic, both of Brian’s younger siblings died of drug-related complications. 

Battling grief was insanely difficult in addition to the day-to-day demands of raising a family. Brian said he distracted himself with work, but let his emotions show when his brother died, soon after his sister. 

The couple believes in letting their children see them struggle, even fight, so they learn what healthy conflict and resolution looks like. 

For all of their healthy strategies, they openly criticize themselves and their parenting. They worry that Satiah, who admits honey buns are her weakness, will struggle with self-control in the future, but they don’t know how to approach the problem without giving her body-image issues. 

They worry about their youngest son’s temper and they worry about Anakin, living on his own and working in a factory to support himself. 

But Satiyah, crouched behind a bus doing her bandmate’s makeup, is cheerful and straightforward about her parents. 

Over the phone, she described her mom as “very generous and forgiving” and her dad as “very tall, generous and mostly forgiving.” She credits her parents with her middle-school success because she listened when they told her to “get off her butt.” 

When asked why they’re so honest about their family’s struggles, Brian said they aren’t interested in showing the world a picture of themselves that doesn’t match reality. Their lives haven’t “been all rainbows and butterflies,” but they’re comfortable with their family’s identity. 

“Most people are like, ‘Why would you want to raise kids in these times?’ Well, you’ve got to raise somebody who can handle it,” Brian said. “We have to raise dragon slayers.”

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Ashlyn Myers, Franklin College

An eruption of joy bounces off the buildings on Monument Circle surrounding the small woman
bundled into her black knee-length coat and patterned scarf.

She smells the morning air swirling around her, reminiscing on a childhood that some might try to turn their back on.

She finds home wherever she goes, she says. The smells take her back home.

The pollution-scented air, in particular, reminds her of when her family heated their home with coal and wood. She knows it’s not good for the environment, and she knows most don’t enjoy the scent, but for Soňa HorǎvovalI, the pollution takes her home—nearly 5,000 miles away—to memories of growing up in Slovakia.

HorǎvovalI is in Indianapolis alone for a short business trip. She often travels for work, but it’s her first time in the Hoosier state. She finds it to be beautiful, and a bit flatter than Slovakia, but welcoming nonetheless.

In her youth, HorǎvovalI wouldn’t have had the freedom to visit Indianapolis.
In her youth, she was told the West was her enemy.

School teachers warned that the United States was planning attacks on Slovakia. They taught children that the West was coming, armed with nuclear weapons bound to destroy HorǎvovalI’s home the same way they destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“We were preparing at school for nuclear war,” HorǎvovalI said, shaking her head as if to dismiss the memory. “There were planes, they were like military planes. They were exercising above us, but I was always imagining that it was already the enemy.”

At home, HorǎvovalI was told a different tale.

HorǎvovalI said her father was always against the Communist ideals forced on citizens at the time, and the family was punished for disagreeing.

“All of what they were saying was not really true,” she said. “Their ‘We are all equal’? Bullshit. We were not. If the people were against them [the Communist Party], then they were suffering. My father didn’t agree with them, so he was a trash man. My sister, she was very talented, and she did not get into school. My brother also [did] not.”

HorǎvovalI was 14 when the Velvet Revolution, usually used to describe the peaceful transition of power in what used to be Czechoslovakia, changed life as she knew it.

She remembers watching on the television as students peacefully protested, jingling house keys in their town squares to signal support for the revolution.

“My father . . . he asked my mom, ‘Give me keys, give me keys, give me keys!’ In the living room, he was just ringing the keys,” HorǎvovalI said with a small line of tears framing her eyes.

“He was so proud, and I was proud with him that we suddenly can have freedom.” 

HorǎvovalI first traveled to the United States just four years after the Velvet Revolution. Her sister lived in Washington and invited HorǎvovalI to visit.

Seeing firsthand what was once only known to her as “The West” was surreal, she said.

Fresh off the revolution, she remembers being shocked by the diversity of cultures and backgrounds in the U.S. She didn’t experience what she was taught as a child, she said.

Contrary to the propaganda heard in her youth, people were friendly. They wanted to hear her stories, and they greeted her whenever she walked by.

More than 30 years after her initial visit to the States, the initial glamor of the U.S. has worn off. Though she said it might just be her perception now, she said her travels, including her current visit to Indianapolis, have made her see a noticeable difference between U.S. cities and where she currently lives in Germany with her husband and two sons.

In the U.S., she said she sees more people living on the street than she used to, people don’t go on morning strolls like they used to and cities aren’t quite as lively as they used to be.

Regardless of the issues she sees during her travels, she stays motivated because of her love for exploration and her love for people.

“People are all the same no matter where you go,” HorǎvovalI said. “You have to travel to know
that.”

Even in Indiana, a state hosting just over 17,000 Slovaks, according to World Population Review, HorǎvovalI has a way of feeling at home.

“Oh my god! That is lovely!” HorǎvovalI cackled and pointed as she saw a pedal pub drive by, with its passengers slurping down beers just after noon. “Drinking beer is a national sport in Germany! That’s just like home.”

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Israel Schuman, Purdue University

New blood meets an age-old calling

She wears spotless white sneakers, he wears mud-tinged cowboy boots.

They’re walking together through downtown Indianapolis, past a wedding party where men in suits and women in traditional Indian gowns dance in the street, on their way to a coffee shop.  The man, Colton Conley, was at the shop yesterday, where he found a latte he likes. He’s not much of a coffee drinker; there are no coffee shops where he’s from.

They’re both a long way from home.

Conley flew in from Louisiana, where he grew up on a cattle farm and attends Louisiana Tech, for the National FFA Convention. The woman, Morgan Watkins, drove from Missouri. They’re here early, carrying notebooks full of material they’ll need later, when they’ll go through the beginnings of a three-day interview process that could land them on the six-person national officer board. Thirty-five others are vying for those spots.

“Big butterflies,” Conley says through a deep breath. “The more that I study about agriculture, the more I realize I don’t know.” Watkins nods her agreement as he says it.

The two will give a speech tonight that’s impossible to prepare for; they’ll draw a topic from a hat and research for 20 minutes before presenting. Conley “absolutely bombed” the same task in high school. 

“Extemporaneous speaking,” Conley says it’s called, with a twang acquired in a deep-south town where you buy makeup at a Dollar General. “I sucked at it when I first started.”

Lucky for him, he’s spent years in FFA. The organization may now better prepare its members for tasks like those than the ones Conley dreams of performing when he buys his own farm someday. It’s a recent, essential organizational shift, the two say.

“It’s a lot of what we call soft skills, your ability to articulate yourself, your beliefs, becoming grounded,” Conley says. “We are teaching students through agricultural education how to prepare for their future.”

The future of agriculture is murky at best, and plain dark at worst – “Farmers right now are at their all-time low,” Watkins says – and that makes the expansion of FFA, and the agricultural community with it, vital.

Watkins exemplifies that expansion. She’s a city girl, with blond-dyed hair and pink-painted nails, from a large suburb of Kansas City, Mo; her only connection to farming was a distant cousin. She made her own connection as a high schooler through a project where she interviewed students on different agriculture-related products. She talked to one who filed a patent for a GMC trucks. 

“I realized the true net of diversity our industry has,” she says.

Her passion for that diversity, though, took her away from agriculture’s roots. Ever since an internship last summer where she worked closely with crop farmers, she’s committed to giving people like her an appreciation for those who feed urban life from its outskirts.

A particular interaction did it. She was meeting with a farmer, pitching him on using one of her company’s seed brands. “I was a little nervous going in and chatting with him,” she confesses. 

But through the conversation, she realized that if she could just convince the farmer that her company would best serve his customers – people who eat, put another way – she could close the sale. He just wanted the best for them.

“That led me to the firm belief that the definition of a servant leader is an American farmer,” she says.

“It’s a noble industry,” Conley says. “They work extremely hard and believe in what they do.”

That’s why they’re both concerned about where farming is headed. There’s an old saying Conley knows:

“Grandpa starts the farm, dad continues it, son destroys it.”

__

“Farmers are not rich people,” Watkins says, and laughs at the statement’s obviousness.

And they fight an uphill battle. The USDA recently released it’s five-year farm census, revealing that just 1% of America’s population are farmers; “One percent feeding the 100%,” Conley says.

The Purdue University Ag Economy Barometer Index, a nationwide measure of the ag economy, fell to its lowest level since 2016 in October. Farmers are most pessimistic about future conditions. In short, sons are destroying farms faster than people like Conley can replenish them. 

Watkins’ brother, the definition of a hick, she says, dreams of owning his own farm, of being his own boss. But he says it’s impossible to do without one being passed through the family.

“It breaks my heart,” she says, and shows the need for more help for young farmers in an industry dying for them. The average age of a farmer in America is 58, Conley recites.

Much of that help comes from government funding, on the national and state level, to ease startup costs like those for land and tractors. The best farmers can win money, like the $30,000 Conley knows was awarded to a Louisiana farmer through the Farm Bureau. But there’s still not enough to go around, as Conley and Watkins urge, along with politicians the country over.

“We need to get past partisanship and start focusing on agriculture,” Conley says. “We can sit on our sides of the fence, but on both sides we’re eating.”

What most don’t understand, the two say, is that the single mom leaving the grocery store with sticker shock has more reason to feel for farmers than be upset at the prices of the food they grow.

“I think it’s important to bridge the gap between the two,” Watkins says. “You know, yeah, your food prices are high, but the farmers are not to blame.”

Most of them are just “praying they break even,” Watkins says, as crop prices continue to languish. It’s had a mental health toll; opioid addiction is 1.5 times more common among farmers, suicide 3.5 times more common. Crop growers one disaster from losing everything live in areas and come from generations where feelings often are buried.

It’s these problems and others, like the increasing complexity of farming that allows one farmer to feed more people than ever, while at the same time alienating the older generation, that FFA is needed to address. Conley and Watkins, should they gain acceptance to the national officer board, will practice that problem solving. They’ll go from meetings with sponsors and supporters to meetings with students, listening and sharing concerns from across the agriculture world. 

Collaboration is the only way forward, Conley thinks, and it starts in fiercely student-led FFA. It will be students, in fact, who decide whether Conley and Watkins make the board.

One time, at a state delegation Conley attended with 400 FFA student leaders, he saw his peers come together. The topic was a summer retreat for FFA members. It’s a lot of fun Conley says – there’s a zipline – but it isn’t cheap.

When discussion on raising the price of admission came up, everyone had something to say. 

“Even the kids in the back of the room on their phones started watching,” Conley says.

Some said the additional activities the increased costs would allow were worth it; others said going was already expensive enough. In the end, the former group won the vote, and the cost was raised. But the result isn’t the important part, Conley says as he leans forward and puts his elbows on the table. His eyes are wide. “The impact comes from the student voices.”

The two, friends since meeting at an FFA event in high school, review notes for possible speech topics for a while before getting up to leave. The latte was as good as it was yesterday, Conley assures.

Then they go back onto the sidewalks of the concrete island so far from farms, where very soon a slice of the those noble farmers’ future will be decided. 

People everywhere, the ones who eat anyway, are counting on them.

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Jay Upshaw, Indiana University

The city of Indianapolis always has always had various sites that brought different people around the world to come visit. This weekend in particular, The Lucas Stadium and Convention Center seemed to be a popular site. The stadium opened in 2008, and since its inception, it has managed to draw hundreds of thousands of spectators a year. On the weekend of October 19, three people were visiting the stadium. 

One visitor to the Lucas Oil Stadium is 43-year-old David Miller. 

Miller works as an engineer at an automobile factory in Kansas City, Missouri. He spends so much time at work that it’s difficult to get some time off. But, the time he does get off, he tries spending it with his family. 

Millers had never actually thought about coming to Indianapolis, not even for vacation. Usually, his family would visit somewhere sunny and by the beach. But this weekend was a special occasion. 

“I’ve never been to Indy before,” Miller said. “But, I think it’s pretty cool,” 

At Lucas Stadium, his daughter was competing in a regional band competition playing the saxophone. The competition, known as the 2024 Bands of America Indianapolis Super Regional Competition, took place from Oct 18 to Oct 19. Miller’s daughter has played since she started high school and was excited to come down to the city for the first time to play in the competition. Despite having country roots, Miller’s daughter seems to have grown particularly fond of the city as well.

“She was born in the country,” Miller said. “It took her a little bit to get used to all the bigness of it, but yeah she likes it.”

On Saturday, during one of the competition breaks, Miller was wandering exploring the streets of Indianapolis. He hadn’t ever been to the city and was interested in taking in the various sites. Miller and his family were only in town for the day, so he was determined to make the time count. He was very interested in seeing how the restaurants in Indy held up to the ones in his hometown. 

“In Missouri, we have barbecue, so we’re really known for that,” he said. “I’m interested in seeing what they have out here,”

Though he didn’t have time to take much of the city in, Miller says the visit does make him want to come back and take a deeper dive into what the city has to offer.

“It seems like a place I’d like to get to see more of,” Miller said. “I don’t know enough to make a judgment, but it seems like people put a lot of pride and effort into making it a place people want to see,” 

One person who is familiar with the city, or at least how it used to be, is 47-year-old Michael Sevell. 

Michael Sevell was actually born in New Jersey. His mother, Fannie Marie Sevell, had moved to the city in her early 20s and settled in Scotch Plains. As a result, Michael actually lived in New Jersey all his life only leaving to attend college in the city of Indianapolis in the 90s. Though he has history in the city, he does not come to visit often, but he still thinks holds some fondness for the place. 

 “I went to college here in the 90s, so it got a lot bigger,” Sevell said. “It’s got a lot wider but…it’s a nice little city,” 

He now works as a delivery driver for a pizza store. And, he had taken some time off of work to come back. For the first time in over 20 years, Michael decided to visit Indianapolis for a Colts game. On Sunday, the Colts were taking on the Miami Dolphins at The Lucas Stadium in their home city of Indianapolis. He was excited to watch the Colts play in their home city for the first time in a year. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t imagine being in the city if it weren’t for the game. 

“I don’t really know any people out here,” Sevell said. “So if I ever come back, it would be for another football game or something like that,” 

Another person in town for the game is Bryan Grunwaldn, an engineer in his mid-twenties. 

Grunwaldn is an Engineer from Detroit, Michigan. This week he is visiting Indy and has a schedule full of events stationed around the Lucas Oil Stadium. On Saturday, he was walking through the Colts Stadium Store for football merchandise. Though he was not particularly a fan of the Colts, he was a fan of football and excited to show his pride during the Game on Sunday. 

“I’m a fan of football,” Grunwaldn said. “They’re home this week, so that’s exciting.”

The only reason he came to town in the first place was for an engineering convention. His friend got invited to The 97th National FFA Convention and Expo taking place on Oct. 23-26. On its website, the convention says it aims to help grow the future generation of leaders. 

“It’s a country-wide thing where a bunch of engineers come together,” Grunwaldn said. “It’s like a leadership program.”

Grunwaldn was surprised by how different Indianapolis was from Detroit, especially since he did not come to visit the city often. And, though the two cities have their differences, he still feels like Indianapolis had something to offer. 

“I guess one word I would use for Indy is beautiful,” Grunwaldn said. “I think the city is just absolutely beautiful from what I’ve been seeing,”

After the convention, he has to go back home to his job back in Detroit. But, he says, his visit so far has been amazing. Unlike Sevell, Grunwaldn would definitely be open to coming back and exploring more of the city. 

“If it wasn’t for anything else, just to visit, I would definitely come back”

The Lucas Oil Stadium continues to attract visitors from all over the country to come and see what Indianapolis has to offer. If it’s not a band competition, it’s a football game. The center has something for everyone.

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Kyle Smedley, Ball State University

INDIANAPOLIS – Maciej Mazur wore a Detroit Red Wings hoodie and a tan, flat-billed
Chicago Bulls hat with the tag still on it. He and his partner, Agata, both smiled as they read the
description of a Tom Jernstedt statue nestled on the corner of Georgia and Illinois Street.

The Polish couple didn’t know who Jernstedt was, and what they read on the sign likely won’t make much of an impact on them. It was just another step toward fully immersing themselves in
another new, American city.

It was the Mazurs fourth time visiting the United States but their first in Indiana. While they arrived in America less than a week ago, they drove around the Midwest to visit cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cincinnati and Indianapolis. Aside from Chicago, none of the cities the Mazurs spent time in this week are normally large tourist locations.

The two associated the Circle City with the Indianapolis 500, as most do, but they realized in less than 24 hours that the city was much more than the racing capital of the world when they visited Howl at the Moon and Pearl Street Pizzeria & Pub last night.

To them, visiting Indianapolis and America itself offers a welcome distraction from the harsh realities that face much of East Europe.

Maciej still remembers February 24, 2022. It was a Thursday, and Russia officially invaded Ukraine after eight previous years of war.

By Friday, the Mazurs made all three of their rental apartments available to host Ukrainian families seeking safety, free of charge.

“Almost every day, we were picking up people from the railway station,” Maciej said.

Poland is one of seven countries bordering Ukraine, and the Mazurs’ home city of Warsaw is less than six hours away from Lviv, the sixth largest city in Ukraine. Their three extra apartments quickly filled.

“I remember we were on the phone for days trying to find some place for the families to live,” Agata said.

When Russia first invaded Ukraine, Agata remembered regularly packing and unpacking small rucksacks in case she, Maciej and their three-year-old son, Mikolaj, had to flee their home country. Nearly three years later, the Russia-Ukraine war is commonplace in Poland.

Maciej said he reads newspaper articles about bombings in Ukraine daily. In his words, citizens of Poland have learned how to live with the tensions of war hanging over them.

The Mazurs expected the United States’ atmosphere to feel the same as it does in Europe, given the upcoming Presidential Election in less than three weeks. While they have seen enough of apolitical presence to understand that a major election is coming sooner rather than later, they were surprised by a lack of campaign advertisements in every major U.S. city they have visited compared to the bombardment of election-based promotions in Poland.

While Maciej and Agata enjoy sight-seeing, watching musicals and learning about the U.S. cities they have traveled to, their main reason for traveling overseas was to learn more about the election. The Mazurs have paid attention from afar, and their goal this October was to visit as many swing states as possible.

They realize Indiana is not quite one of those, but that’s why traveling through Wisconsin and Michigan was a priority.

“We really feel the support coming from (the U.S.) right now, and I wouldn’t like it to change,” Agata said. “We are really lucky to have the option to travel. Hopefully it will stay this way.”

Maciej was eager to chime in.

“That’s why it’s so important for this war to be over,” he said.
It’s a 10-hour flight from Warsaw to the U.S., but Agata said America has truly felt like home during her sporadic visits. Although Maciej’s parents are keeping Mikolaj while they visit the U.S., Maciej said he intends for his son’s first trip out of Poland to be a visit to America.

“Right now, he’s focused on throwing stones, not visiting big cities,” Maciej said.

The Mazurs know Polish natives who have already bought apartments or houses in countries like Spain, just in case they need to leave the country if Russia decides to invade. If the situation arose, the Mazurs have considered the U.S. as their relocation option.

In fact, they laughed as they pictured enrolling Mikolaj in an American high school or university more than a decade from now. Whether or not Indianapolis becomes a significant location on the Mazur’s tour across the Midwest, they happily welcome any U.S. destination as a refuge from the war-based uncertainties that surround their home country.

“We feel safe here,” Maciej said.

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Vanessa Torres, DePauw University

Every weekday at 6am, before the sun has a chance to rise, Luis Solis, 21, is already in his neon green vest and white hard hat getting dirty–and sometimes bloody. 

With his blue rubber gloves on, he is on a seemingly endless field of broccoli. Still an amateur, he attempts to cut the vegetable from its place on the ground, where it has been growing for the past 60 days, and cuts himself instead. Shaking, it is not until he takes off the rubber glove that Solis realizes his glove is filled with blood. He is sent home, cutting his usual 12 hour shift short. 

This is a typical day for Solis, Kevin Eia, 21, and Antonio Corona, 21, all Mexican American harvest workers for Corteva Agriscience from Imperial Valley California. 

Their parents migrated from Mexico and the only request they had for their sons was for them to finish high school. Solis, Eia, and Corona met in their high school welding class and where they later began working in the fields together. Another one of their friends, Prince Quevedo, 21, was the youngest to start working–he was fourteen. From 6am to as late as 6:30pm, the boys would plant, harvest, and pick a variety of fruits and vegetables like grapes, watermelon, cauliflower, and corn.

Corona is also a student at Imperial Valley California alongside Eia. Corona is studying cyber security while Eia is majoring in Computer Science. Currently, they and a group of coworkers are in Indianapolis on a month and a half-all-expenses paid trip to inspect corn. 

77-100% of the food energy consumed in the United States comes from crops that are not native to the region, like corn, according to the Crop Trust. Corn, also known as maize, is indigenous to Mexico.

“We were sent to look at trailers of corn and pick out the good ones and bad ones. If they have pimples on them and stuff, we throw them out,” said Solis. 

Majority of the time, harvest work is not this luxurious. Often, field workers are outside in scorching hot and freezing climates. Apart from the weather, Solis said that the pressure from their supervisors can be very difficult. “They want you to go fast, fast, fast. They don’t give you enough breaks or sometimes they even cut your breaks so you can finish the work. They don’t let you go to the restroom sometimes. It’s hard,” he sighed.  

Corona is one of the supervisors for the company. He bashfully shared that he gets paid one dollar more an hour than his friends for translating instructions to other workers, seeing as he is one of the few fluent in both English and Spanish.   

“We’re here to work, get money, and go back to over there [Mexico]. In Mexico, the salaries are much lower. They get paid $100 a week and here [US] we get paid $1,000 a week.” During the harvest season from Sept 5th through Oct 23rd, there are more opportunities to work. Out of this season, it becomes challenging to find jobs in California. 

In a scholarly article titled “The Effect of the Minimum Wage on Poverty,” it stated that in January 2019, the Mexican government announced an increase in the minimum wage: in most of the country it increased by 16 per cent, while in 43 municipalities along the U.S. border it increased by 100 per cent. After some calculations, it found that poverty along the border decreased by 2.6-3.0 percentage points. Despite this increase in wages, the amount of money they get paid in the US is still substantially more. 

Corteva Agrisciences’ purpose is to “enrich the lives of those who produce and those who consume, ensuring progress for generations to come.” Through their job, Solis, Eia, and Corona were able to move out of their parents’ home, live together, and build a life for themselves despite the strenuous working conditions. It is through their efforts that Corteva can follow through on sustainability initiatives, aiding in having access to healthy produce to sustain us. 

According to the International Center, Corteva’s official headquarters is located in Indianapolis where they have maintained a thriving agriculture research hub. Since it started, the company has donated over 75,000 pounds of produce to nearby food pantries, “marking a tremendous impact on local sustainability.” This past year, Corteva donated more than $500,000 to the people affected by the 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Turkey, close to the Syria border. 

Solis, Eia, and Corona are enjoying their break from cutting down vegetables for hours on end to sightsee in Indianapolis, a more “chill vibe” in comparison to Imperial Valley, said Solis. Yet, the boys enthusiastically agreed that above all they are looking forward to going back to Mexico, their homeland.   

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