Pastor Phil Johnson showed Osoyoos Rotarians his cellphone that a transient from Quebec attempted to destroy. The problems with this one couple were the only major blight on what he otherwise described as a “great summer” working with young pickers. Johnson wants the town to seek provincial assistance in accommodating the pickers. (Richard McGuire photo)

Osoyoos Baptist Church filled a needed role this summer, providing a landing place for young fruit pickers, Pastor Phil Johnson told town council last week.

Johnson urged council to seek provincial assistance when council members attend this year’s Union of B.C. Municipalities (UBCM) annual convention Sept. 10-14 in Whistler.

“While as a church this is not our direct problem, we certainly want to help,” Johnson told council at their Aug. 20 committee of the whole meeting. “We see it as a huge need in our community. We’re sorry that we weren’t better prepared for everything that we wanted to do and as a result there was some inconvenience for our neighbours. We recognize that.”

The church provided a camping place on a lot behind the church that’s in the agricultural land reserve. Johnson estimates the church hosted about 300 different campers over the summer, with the maximum number at one time reaching about 200.

Although there were some complaints from neighbours, Johnson believes overall complaints about pickers in Osoyoos were down this year – particularly with fewer complaints about them hanging around the beach at Gyro Park.

Johnson’s appearance at council followed an Aug. 9 presentation he made at the Rotary Club of Osoyoos. The two talks covered many of the same points, but in his talk at Rotary, Johnson spoke more about some of the people from 43 countries who came to the church.

At both talks, he emphasized that Osoyoos is unique because it gets the first fruit of the year and so pickers arrive here first.

From Osoyoos, they spread out to other places such as Creston, Keremeos or north in the Okanagan, he added.

It was because Osoyoos draws the year’s first pickers that the Baptist Church got involved in providing “accidental camping” in 2017, the first of the two years pickers have camped there, he said.

The two previous years, cherry picking started around the May long weekend, much earlier than usual. As a result, many young people showed up early in 2017, only to find that in a normal year, picking starts weeks later.

Johnson said pickers told him they couldn’t afford the $30 to $40 a night to stay in commercial campgrounds while they waited.

Councillors asked why growers don’t do more to provide accommodation for pickers.

Johnson said many do, and the ones that provide good accommodation have no trouble obtaining workers.

“I think some of those farmers have figured out that if they want to have pickers for 4 o’clock, 80 per cent of these kids don’t have cars,” said Johnson. “They’ve got to be here (at the orchard).”

But the experiences varied at different farms, he noted. Some pickers found camps with wi-fi, a kitchen tent for cooking and clean bathrooms.

Others returned to the church saying the camps were filthy, bathrooms were disgusting and some of the farmers made inappropriate comments to the young women.

“They weren’t feeling safe and didn’t feel like they could stay there,” he said. “And that farmer lost workers.”

He emphasized that picker accommodation doesn’t have to be fancy – just a place where pickers can camp, cook and use the bathrooms.

“They’re not coming expecting to be able to stay in the Taj Mahal, but they need a place where they can stay that’s simple and clean,” he said.

But in its role as a “landing pad,” the church provided a place for pickers to stay when they were between picking jobs.

“Sometimes that (fruit) variety finishes and farmers don’t want them there when they’re not picking,” he said. “So they need a place they can go until they find the next place. That’s essentially how we found it working.”

Farmers, he said, had a central place at the church where they could come when they needed workers, he said.

“(The pickers) would get up at 4 o’clock and be dressed and sitting with their picking bucket and farmers would come in and say, ‘I need six,’ ‘I need eight,’ and load them up and take them off to go picking,” said Johnson. “It gave the farmers a place where they knew that they could come looking. The kids knew that if (they) hadn’t gotten someplace the night before, there was a good chance (they) might be able to get something in the morning.”

Johnson noted that there is also a need to accommodate those working in the hospitality industry, but he said hospitality workers are here four to six months, while the pickers come for four to six weeks.

In his presentations to council and Rotary, he mentioned some of the numbers of people the church served.

Through the early summer, church volunteers served 3,284 meals on Saturday evenings, with the highest attendance being 882. They also provided an estimated 3,000 showers.

A garbage bin had to be emptied twice a week and it was overflowing. The church was only able to obtain two portable toilets, and these had to be emptied daily.

At his talk to Rotary, he mentioned how the proportion of young Mexicans has increased significantly in recent years while the proportion of Québécois has fallen.

Mayor Sue McKortoff observed that if the pickers weren’t camping at the church, they might be camping along the canal or at other places through town.

“We know that you’ve run into problems, we’ve certainly heard about them here too,” she said. “It’s something that we all need to deal with.”

Rotarian Cheryle King, who attends the church, acknowledged that there have been derogatory comments about the church looking after these kids in the summer.

But she said she found the young people very appreciative for what the church was doing and she felt positive about it.

“Our kids aren’t going to go out and do the crops,” she said. “Those crops aren’t going to come in without these kids. It’s not going to happen.”

RICHARD McGUIRE

Osoyoos Times