At this juncture, Gidelia's father ill, unwilling to face his daughter via video chat under a pall of self-shame, her mother’s wages insufficient to remit abroad to her daughter, a panicked Gidelia contacted Joanne.
Gidelia apologised for her prior eruptions toward an offer of help, querying if the opportunity at the meat processing plant still stood.
Joanne, an administrative officer at the plant, had secured her own job through her uncle, the head foreman, who was preferably looking for foreign labour to supplement his labour pool of a United Nations of workers on temporary visas. Such workers willingly accepted a minimum wage and negligible entitlements, too grateful or scared to demand more investments in occupational safety measures.
In the emotionally gaping chasm between Gidelia's spiralling recognition that her lifeline to support from home was no longer tenable, and accepting Joanne's job offer, Gidelia had resolved her next step was temporary.
She was educated to an elevated level, though unsure what traction Venezuelan degrees held Stateside. The idea of her education to this point being worthless in a country like America was inexplicable however.
Home for Gidelia became the southeast corner of South Dakota, bordering Iowa and Nebraska.
Sedate, albeit with little sense of community beyond the activity in the car lot in front of the Walmart and other big box stores, she roomed again, like in NYC, with her pal Joanne, whom she grew to fully appreciate for having looked out for her with this job.
Moving to South Dakota and developing a sense of where Joanne had grown up, allowed Gidelia to understand better how it was Joanne could’ve believed hard, but honest, work was not beneath her friend Gidelia.
To Joanne, it was rather a hallmark of working life in her region of the country. It attracted a sense of pride and honourability, held in esteem by the average Dakotan. More so than perhaps a senior manager, as it meant to be among the people.
In Venezuela, to be among the people, in such wretched manual work, was to be of a lower caste. Held in low regard, even to the self-worth among such labourers, always conscious of their lack of education, whatever work ethic they were able to muster.
Gidelia’s world became cuts of livestock loin and eye fillets. Her ancestors several generations before had been ranchers on a handsome plot tending beef, sowing a sense of tangibility with her lineage, albeit through a lens detached from landowning fertile pasture, in lieu of industrialised efficiency, under neon lighting, within a factory operating 24 hours a day.
Gidelia cried herself to sleep every morning after a shift for the first four days, mercifully after Joanne had left for work around 8.30am.
Thereafter though, Gidelia accepted her lot, a vestigial grudgingness counterweighting her still clear resolve to improve her lot.
She was too educated to be hoodwinked into the American dream, but willed herself up the ladder of prosperity in her newly adopted home for now.
How she could reunite with her family and boyfriend was still too painful to pragmatically consider. Correspondence with her boyfriend had ground to a halt, as she felt paralysed to maintain the connection which she felt presently helpless to remedy.
The brevity of the window to growing accustomed to the visceral aspect of the job was considerably shorter than she ever could’ve imagined. She took almost glee in what this may have suggested about her. Among her colleagues, also, their appeared zero compunction at all about the task at hand, never acknowledged at all, so far as Gidelia could tell.
Each worker’s mother tongue seemed unique to each individual. Conversational English was in relative fluency to all, though an embarrassment of modesty kept chat on the floor and tearooms to a minimum. Much to the chagrin of management, which would’ve sooner subjected a dissident staff member, clamouring for unionisation, to the mechanical cleavers of the production line, than consider concessions on conditions.
For the first time since leaving Venezuela, now indisputably of the working class, in a country less affluent than her own, she was able to, at a minimum, put herself in the shoes of the working Venezuelans who were sentimental toward the leftist rhetoric of the current regime.
The regime railed against exploitation and worker rights, however much she believed such rhetoric was lip service. She believed the regime appropriated Marx. To Gidelia, the practice, in reality, of socialist governments, however well-intentioned to begin with, invariably became stuck in a quicksand of the ‘dictatorship’ aspect of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. No modern, historical examples attested that Marxian experiments heretofore had been little more than “opiates of the masses”.
Gidelia wasn’t blind to the harms of capitalism. Particularly, her heart swelled for the ecological effects of oil spills. She was a staunch advocate of the belief in human-caused climate change, an almost violent cleavage between her father and her.
As vehemently as she on the topic, he was unable to consider it needn’t be a zero sum game between economy and the environment. Both could be taken care of in tandem, as Gidelia held. She determined she must accept he may not shift, even if she held her devotion for him as leveraged ransom on the topic.
It was only upon her realising, were the tables turned, and he behaved similarly toward her, despite his seniority and bringing her in to the world, she would wholly resent the pushy imposition.
Gidelia’s much hoped for break into the ranks of the white collar from blue served an overwhelming, welcome reprieve.
The benefactor took the form of Pud Inc., a rice pudding manufacturer site across the state line, in Iowa.
Again, the entry point had been Joanne, who’d recognised a better health care plan was available at Pud albeit without the trapeze net of nepotism via her uncle.
None of the American-born staff held much pride toward working for the meatpacking company. Not because it was gruesome, bloody work. Rather because, when they contrasted themselves with the overwhelmingly ethnically diverse staff on the factory floor, most of whom arrived on American soil via refugee programs, the stark reality was recognised of their own languishing among the lower classes of American life, without the excuse of fleeing war and persecution from a third-world country.
Though Joanne seldom set foot on the factory floor, or could recognise one of the staff if she crossed paths in a supermarket in town, she felt a faint, vestigial sense of this same sentiment.
From Joanne's internship in the Big Apple, where she’d met Gidelia, she’d gleaned unequivocally she was a Dakotan, not well suited to the cosmopolitan contrast to the prairie state way of life.
Joanne was simpler, could recognise of herself narrower of thought, though she preferred to see it through a lens of New Yorkers, and those attracted to it, were by contrast too open-minded.
She could sense within herself a faint nativism when considering the meatpacking factory floor staff. Though this may have arisen more for what her association with them said about her more than they.
Joanne kept her home in South Dakota, as the commute wasn’t at all burdensome, with no impeding traffic.
Within days, a certain dysfunction seemed to steep Joanne's new office. Her sense was several staff appeared to be on the verge of resigning, due to office politics she wasn’t yet able to put her finger on.
After some gentle enquiry why some staff appeared harried, Joanne’s supervisor acknowledged they were chronically understaffed, a swath of long-serving staff having recently resigned in waves.
Many staff were juggling what had previously been the tasks of multiple roles. Joanne asked if they needed more staff, even on a temporary basis, and her supervisor positively invited her to suggest anyone she may know.
The office had seemingly seen a raft of temporary staff come and go, knowing better to weather the dysfunction.