Focus — A Story of Note
One Person’s Mission to Foster Cultural Understanding by Debbie Bartsch
Mine is a life-long story
of navigating cuture by embracing it. Highlights of my journey will bring to light my passion for Latinos, the Latin culture, and why the landscape industry has become my home. It all started with a box of puppies. Being a young girl growing up in southern small town Wisconsin, we very rarely encountered people who were a color other than white. Kids can be sneaky. My parents would watch the news, not realizing that I was watching it too. News came from the big cities: Milwaukee and Madison. Things were different there. I could see people of color on the news and sometimes the interaction of people that were of different skin colors was very negative and for Debbie Bartsch no logical reason that I could determine at 5 years old in 1970. The 4-H Fair was a popular event. This is where I encountered the box of puppies. They were all different colors; some of them multi-colored. Color was not important to the puppies. They played, ate, and slept together and gave no thought to the appearance of each other. I got a puppy. She was brown and I named her Cinnamon. Midway through fourth grade, my father took a manufacturing job in Harvey, Illinois. Grade school there was a very different environment compared to small town Wisconsin. I was the only white student in my class. That was okay as all I needed to do was demonstrate that I was just another puppy in the same box as them.
Respect Starts in School
The Girl Scouts helped me a lot. One girl invited me and my parents to her house for dinner. Although the families were from different cultures and ethnicity, the parents all had something in common: they wanted their children to grow up learning to appreciate other cultures and colors. Later that evening my father told me that I had changed his life forever. 12
Dad got a better job so we lived in southern Kentucky from 1977 to 1980. School there was very different. There were paddles displayed on the classroom walls. Racial tension was high, especially between African Americans and white descendants of plantation owners. As a white child, I thought it best to not be mistaken as such. A small African American girl was in my math class. She was having a very difficult time, sometimes crying, so I helped her. A few weeks later she helped me when a group of black girls were about to attack me in the school bathroom. She happened to walk in and stopped them, saying I was the one who had helped her. Then I told them my box of puppies story and it all worked out.
The Chinese Connection
Fast forward to the late 1990’s. While working in the semiconductor manufactur- ing industry, I became a member of the global project management team. Our goals were to implement a global computer system and improve cultural relations. I traveled the Pacific Rim where I was exposed to various Asian cultures, which fascinated me. I embraced and celebrated the differences as much as the people there made me feel welcome and appreciated.
Lost in Translation
My first trip was to Tianjin Economic Technological Development Area in China, a few hours outside of Beijing to teach a class about the new computer system. The students all spoke English, which was considered the international language of business and fluency was required for high-school graduation. That trip is where I first experienced a cultural disconnect. By the third day, I had to ask why McDonald’s hamburgers, pork patties, and fries were magically arriving in the classroom for our lunch. A company driver had been dispatched to go to Beijing and pickup McDonald’s as they thought Westerners
The Landscape Contractor February 2022
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