Different Worlds - Same Dreams

By: Alenka Lawrence (The Catholic Times, May 22, 2011)

It's not news that Americans are the world's biggest charitable givers - both in terms of money and time.  And I can't help noticing it.  Recently I was down in glitzy Naples, Florida, where it's hard to look beyond the upscale shopping, the gated communities, the endless manicured golf courses.  But Florida is also America's winter agriculture powerhouse, with its citrus groves, fields of melons and strawberries and tomatoes.  And the people who tend those fields are largely migrants, who stream up from Mexico, from Guatemala, from Haiti, looking for work.  If you go a little inland from the Naples beaches to a town called Immokalee, you can see how the migrant workers live.  No million-dollar condominiums for the likes of them.  Home is often a rusty trailer, shared between 15 men - or three familes.  Read more...