A Town within the Heart of Trump Country Learned to Love Immigrants. Then COVID Hit.

Posted On Jul 12, 2020 By admin With Comments Off

The transformation from fowl to meat begins with carbon dioxide. The gas knockings the turkeys out; a blade finishes the job. It’s all amazingly clean, down to the vacuum-cleans that suck out their lungs. Stripped of parts and stripes, the line of analogous denuded corpses splashes into a cooling bath.

The work is repetitive, but older workers are markedly diverse. They hail from Brazil, China, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, India, Nepal, South Korea, Vietnam, Puerto Rico, and the Micronesian archipelago of Chuuk. But most of the 1,200 employees are Karen, a number of members of an ethnic group from Myanmar( historically known as Burma) whose families came to the United Moods as refugees. Their presence in Huron, South Dakota, 8,000 miles from their homeland, is an accident of record that has invigorated a dying city.

Immigration Karen workers eat lunch at the Dakota Provisions turkey processing plant.

Just before the goose weed opened in 2005, about 97 percentage of adolescents in Huron schools were white-hot. Today, exactly over a third of kindergartners and first graders are white. In 2018, the Huron area took in more people from abroad and Puerto Rico, as a share of its 18,800 -strong population, than any other place in the United State. In less than 15 times, their local communities has been going through a demographic transformation that usually takes generations.

This is the story of how Huron–the only sizable town in Beadle County, which Donald Trump carried by 37 tops in 2016 — became is not simply a magnet for immigrants but a sit where they are celebrated. It’s the story of how the deepening divide over immigration can break down when immigrants are neighbours , not abstractions–and how a small town in a cherry-red mood adopted modify when the alternative was descend and decay.

It’s also a involved floor. More than half of frontline meatpackers are immigrants, according to a Center for Economic and Policy Research analysis, and approximately 80 percentage are people of color. Relatively few US-born white people go notoriously grueling jobs in an manufacture where the average wage is about $14 an hour. For hundreds of first-generation Karen Americans, whose job prospects were often limited by not speaking English, the turkey flower was the best option accessible. It was that reality that concluded Huron’s recovery possible.

But its success was neither immediate nor inevitable: The first Karen( kuh-REN) refugees were responded with wariness, sometimes strife. But metropoli leads were determined to overcome it. Immigrants and their adherents was talking about religious and sororities to explain how Karen parties had been coerced out of their homeland. They patiently answered questions, even the ones about whether the beginners would ingest their neighbors’ bird-dogs. The janitor restructured the school system to become discrimination hopeless. Huron’s experience caters instructions for the commonwealth, although most Huronites are happy to stay out of the spotlight.

That reticence was on display in November 2018, when President Trump excused two Thanksgiving turkeys, listed Peas and Carrot. They’d come from Dakota Provisions, whose chairperson stood alongside the president in the Rose Garden. “Love South Dakota, ” Trump said about the commonwealth where a crowd at one of his appearances has only chanted “Build the wall! ”

No one mentioned the weeds where the extricated turkeys had nearly met their terminate, or the immigrants who would have slaughtered and handled them. Huron, a town that calmly undercuts so much better of the narrative about migration, was invisible.

Until unexpectedly it wasn’t. Two months after I saw in January, Huron established word as South Dakota’s first COVID-1 9 hotspot. As the virus spread through the Dakota Provisions workforce and the local Karen population, it laid bare the inequities that had always snuck behind Huron’s immigrant-led revival.

photoessays Downtown Huron.

politics Huron’s population in 1970 was 14,000. In 2005, it was less than 12,000.

Huron’s claims to prestige are the state fair it hosts each September and the world’s largest pheasant figure( 28 hoofs high-pitched, made from 22 tons of sword and fiberglass ). Regional heroes include Cheryl Ladd, who went on to play one of Charlie’s Angels, and Hubert Humphrey, who worked at his dad’s drug store on Huron’s main drag before becoming a Minnesota senator and vice president. But Huron is not white Americana in amber: Alongside the aged mom-and-pop standbies are new Asian and Latino religions, diners, and grocery stores providing a new ability of vitality.

Huron’s status as a meatpacking city began to change when the Armour plant shut down in 1983 after works accepted a settle chipped. Paul Aylward, who dished as Huron’s mayor until June, remembers being stunned at his first paycheck when he started working at the flora in 1968. At about $120 for the week, it was similar to what he’d been doing each month in the military. By the time the unionized plant closed, Aylward was giving practically $30 an hour in today’s money. He’d go on to lead the state’s AFL-CIO, but the age of high-pitched union compensations in meatpacking was fading away.

Huron lost another meatpacking plant in 1990 and then another seven years later. The epoch of the 1997 closure of a pig slaughtering operation that hired 850 parties became known as Black Thursday. The town’s population declined from around 14,000 in 1970 to less than 12,000 in 2005. The “schools “, which once had about 200 students per grade , now had scarcely 100 in the lower grades.

“I don’t care what nationality they are,” Smoky told them. He knew anything about the Karen, but it didn’t matter. If they missed a enterprise, there was one waiting for them in Huron.

Huron’s revival began with the Hutterites, an Anabaptist group that shares beginnings with the Mennonites and the Amish and whose members live in isolated parishes, called provinces, across South Dakota. Many Hutterites, who speak a language derived from 18 th-century German accents, are turkey farmers. Very than send their turkeys to be slaughtered out of state, 44 settlements came together to form Dakota Provisions. In 2004, the new company announced that it would build a plant in Huron that would employ up to 1,000 parties. A headline in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader summed up the importance of the news: “Huron: from Gloom to Boom.”

The challenge was how to get parties to work in Huron, which is a 120 -mile drive from the very near major airport, in Sioux Falls. The task fell to Dakota Provisions’ human resources director, a Huron native called Mark Heuston, whom everyone calls Smoky. A white-bearded bear of a man–the pelt of an actual color bear he shot is splayed across the wall of his office–Smoky resembles a muscled Santa Claus, a capacity he has sometimes filled at regional Christmas events.

the big feature Mark “Smoky” Heuston.

Smoky had event with refugees from Southeast Asia; he’d worked with Hmong parties from Laos at a meatpacking weed in Wisconsin. When it came to finding out about the Karen, he said, “Truthfully, I got lucky.” He knew that the Twin Cities had among the country’s largest Hmong people. So in 2007, as he struggled to find enough employees around Huron, he went to Minnesota to draft at a Hmong community center.

“When I was interviewing individuals, I obstructed accompanying by this one room with 40, 50 parties in it, ” Smoky withdrew. The beings evidencing Smoky around said not to bother with the people in the area, who were Karen ESL students, since he was there to recruit Hmong works. “I don’t care what nationality they are, ” Smoky told them. He knew anything about the Karen, but it didn’t matter. If they missed a task, there was one waiting for them in Huron.

Tha Gerh “Tiger” Paw, her six siblings, and their parents were the first Karen family Smoky recruited to live in Huron. In 2005, they’d moved from Bangkok to St. Paul after absconding what was then the world’s longest-running civil war. During World War II, the Karen, some of whom had converted to Christianity, pushed alongside the British against the Japanese and Burma’s Bamar ethnic majority. British men predicted Karen soldiers a nation of their own after the war. Instead, the British authority demonstrated a united Burma in 1948, and civil war broken out. Of the roughly 5 million Karen in Burma, hundreds of thousands absconded the Burmese military’s assaults into the jungle and across the border into Thailand. By the late 1990 s, virtually 100,000 were living in refugee camps in Thailand.

Immigration Locals spend time at the Fair deal, one of the oldest prohibits in township.

photoessays Mae Khin Chit and Dickson Sandy.

Paw , now an employee of the South Dakota Department of Labor, was about 8 and disguise with their own families in the Burmese jungle when soldiers bordered their village. “We’re going to run, ” her leader informed her. The troops to fire, killing a blind elderly wife. A friend of Paw’s father was shot in the cervix, and as he bled out, he told her to leave him behind.

Her family, mostly barefoot, managed to escape over a mountain. When her two youthful sisters are ill, her daddy carried them. They trod for two and a half days without food before reaching a village. Eventually, they became it to Bangkok, where they would waste five years waiting for the US government to vet their application to resettle here as refugees.

politics Lah Maypaw Soe, founder of Huron’s Karen Association, cures serve meat at a fundraiser.

When Paw came to Minnesota as a 15 -year-old in 2005, she knew virtually no English. She expected Huron would be as diverse as the Twin Cities but found that she was the only Karen student at the “schools “. Her dad cured draft some Karen friends from Minnesota to join him. Those friends wreaked their friends. Lah Maypaw Soe, founder of Huron’s Karen Association, settles the size of the town’s Karen population now at about 2,500.

On Soe’s first day in Huron in 2009, she and her three teenagers played outside, destroying the blizzard she’d dreamed of control while growing up in a Thai refugee camp. A grey bride who was driving by squealed at them to stop eating it.

In refugee orientation discussions in Thailand, Soe had been told that some Americans wouldn’t welcome them and that she should respond with patience and kindness. She didn’t know what her neighbors necessitated when they said “fuck you, ” so she first replied with a respectful “thank you.” When she got a job as a caseworker at Lutheran Social Service, person left a observe on the agency doorway threatening to cut off her leg if Karen people impeded coming to town.

the big feature A worker at Dakota Provisions chooses a coat to wear after lunch.

Rather than withdraw, she tried to educate her neighbours. After countless darkness wasted learning English, she began a campaign to explain what had ride Karen parties to the United District. She spoke to anyone who would listen–the Lions Club, local Democratic and Republican radicals, religiou ladies–and reacted all their questions. Why can’t you live in your own country? Are you law immigrants? Are you going back?

Smoky did his own renditions. He addressed radicals like the Elks and Sertoma organizations, since elderly inhabitants were the most critical of the new immigrants. At first, he was frequently asked about cats and dogs “disappearing.” No, Smoky would say, Karen people aren’t chewing them. They may have snacked wild cats and dogs in the refugee camps, but that was because there wasn’t enough food.

What about the fish tanks in their cellars? The live chickens in their closets? Smoky assured them that he visited Karen people’s dwellings all the time. No cellar fish , no closet chickens. If he sounded a brand-new rumor spreading, he’d ask Karen beings about it. Then he’d address the rumor at the next gather before he was even asked about it.

On a ordinary daylight, Soe , now 31, volunteers for the Karen Association from 8 a. m. to 11 a.m ., toils a full transformation at a center for people with disabilities from 11 a.m. to 9 p. m ., and does another half-shift at a clinic, before returning home well after midnight. Her eldest daughter, Mu Mu, who was born in the refugee camp when Soe was 15, is distressed that her mom’s hair is already disappearing gray.

If a Karen person needs coin, she goes doorway to door soliciting subscriptions from members of the public until she has fairly. But Soe’s ambitions are beyond South Dakota. Her eventual purpose is to split period between Huron and Thailand so she can help people who remain behind in the camps. She’s already taken Mu Mu , now a rising high school elderly, back to visit.

Schools are often where the veneer of endurance is torn off. As decades of opposition to busing have become clear, countless lily-white parents who say they’re open to diversity revolt as soon as they think integration is hurting their girls. Huron started down a similar path.

“If South Dakota is going to prosper, we’re not gonna look like we did 100 year ago. We’re gonna look like the world.”

Laura Willemssen, Huron’s middle school principal, retains when Tiger Paw and her siblings started school. Karen boys who couldn’t read were arriving in Huron fresh out of refugee camps. But the middle school was committed to keeping ESL students in the same classrooms with native talkers. Regional parents weren’t delighted. There were four elementary schools in town, and they promptly self-segregated: As immigrant children began to populate the schools on one side of township, lily-white parents petitioned to move their children to class on the other side of town, or out of the district entirely.

Immigration Superintendent Terry Nebelsick at Huron High School.

Superintendent Terry Nebelsick decided that Huron wasn’t going to be a place with “poor sections and rich sections.” Nebelsick says he was guided by “agape” cherish, a Greek term for the universal and absolute loyalty modeled by Jesus. In 2011, he and his staff arrived at a progressive solution: They would replace the four elementary schools with three new class. One serve the points all of Huron’s kindergartners and first graders, another would report second and third positions, and the last would be fourth and fifth. Instead of starting out segregated, kids in Huron would grow up in the same schools.

The plan faced deterrents, starting with the $22 million price tag. Its followers promoted a referendum quantify to lock a alliance problem. It would require a two-thirds majority to pass. Huron inhabitants were being asked to tax themselves in part to pay for school integration. Nebelsick and the measure’s backers talked to anyone who had questions and made a point of showing respect to those who differed. A citizens’ committee promoting the measure chosen an unlikely tag line in a district that then-President Obama lost by nearly 20 percentage points: “Yes we can.” The measure wound up getting 72 percent of the vote.

photoessays Karen youth act at a fundraiser for the Karen Association.

Thanks to the new immigrants, the number of newborn endure each year in Beadle County virtually redoubled between 2005 and 2015. To alter the growing student body, Huron academies have added about 115 employees. The elementary school band and orchestra has been an increase from about 25 to more than 100, while the football unit, whose actors are chiefly Latino and Karen, virtually acquired a territory championship. “The legacy of Huron is that if South Dakota is going to prosper–if its municipals are going to be here for the next century–we’re not gonna look like we did 100 years ago, ” Nebelsick said. “We’re gonna look like the world.”

As Huron became known for its immigrant person, defending gangs at high school sports would shriek, “You’re from Huron.” It was meant as an offense, but the town’s teenagers came up with a choru of their own: “We are Huron! ” “I think people come to Huron and say,’ Look at the diversification, ’” Willemssen said. “I don’t experience the diversification as much anymore. I just see our kids.”

Two of her students took me on a expedition of the secondary school. We stopped in on a girls’ choir class. After learning that I was there to write about in-migration, the schoolteacher asked her students born outside Huron to share where they were from. The first responses–Illinois, Florida, New Jersey–weren’t what she was looking for. “Okay, that’s very cool, ” she said. “Internationally, where do we come from? ” Thailand. Cambodia. Malaysia. Vietnam. “We’re quite a melting pot, ” she said. Then the girls launched into a tune. “Now let us all sing together, ” they sang, “of peace, peacefulnes, agreement on earth.”

No place, of course, is a blissful chorus. Really before I got to Huron, two Karen residents, senilities 17 and 21, were arrested for supposedly shooting at( and missing) a police officer. A grey Huron man responded to the news on Facebook by writing about immigrants, “GET THEM OUTTA OUR STATE AND COUNTRY.” But on a platform not known for moderation and self-discipline, the vast majority of commenters made no mention of the suspects’ ethnicity. Then-Mayor Aylward said none of the people who called him about the shooting brought up immigration.

I’d come to Huron in January to observe its 10 th annual revel of the Karen New Year. Several hundred people, primarily Karen, attended a rite that was almost like a cross between a pageant and a civics task, with troupes of boys and girls performing Karen dances and songs interspersed with upbeat address from Soe and Aylward.

politics Members of the Karen community make up a large portion of the churchgoers at First Baptist Church.

the big feature

Smoky, who, like the mayor, was wearing a Karen tunic, strike a solemn mood that irked some Karen beings in the gathering. He said God had called on him to discuss two rising problems in the Karen community: medications and suicide. He made clear that the issues weren’t unique to Karen people, but he worried that mothers weren’t spotting the signs of treat treating and weren’t taking advantage of mental health services. A Karen worker at Dakota Provisions, who requested anonymity, last-minute told me that he felt it depicted his community with an overly broad brush. The same things don’t get said when a white person does something wrong, he explained.

A banquet of Karen samosas and noodles restored the mood. The nutrient was established with the grey attendees’ spice-averse palates in knowledge, but there were also McDonald’s burgers stacked on the tables just in case. Smoky had introduced me to the crowd during his speech, and an older white woman stopped by to chitchat. She intimated that she’d been opposed to the immigration at first but had eventually come around to it. She left before I had a chance to ask why.

In 2012, the Burmese government reached a cease-fire with Karen separatists, ending a 63 -year civil war. The number of Karen refugees arriving in the United Government has plummeted in the past few decades, coming from more than 12,500 in 2008 to 1,658 last year. There is no longer a steady stream of Karen beings for Smoky to bring in, and many of the original recruits have moved on to jobs at other local businesses.

At the turkey seed, I spoke with Oscar Luque, the man Smoky is grooming to supplant him when Smoky retires in three years. Luque, a Panamanian who came to the United District to play college baseball, said he couldn’t condemned young Americans for not wanting to work in meatpacking. It’s repetitive and gory cultivate. One position involves removing turkeys’ testicles, which are then fried and sold at baseball games as “Fowl Balls.” One Dakota Provisions job announcement began: “Kill. 1st Shift Only. Will be operating gas chamber…Will hang turkeys on wrinkle and hinder production line going.”

Immigration Unusable meat and intestines are frozen and celebrated.

Today, there are people from across the world following in the Karen’s path. In 2000, just one person to come to Beadle County from abroad or from Puerto Rico. In 2018, 499 did. With fewer Karen parties to draw from, Smoky has turned his attention to residences like Vietnam and Cambodia, where he recently went on a recruiting outing. His goal is to bring over kinfolks expending a visa that requires green cards for up to 10,000 “unskilled” employees annually. His approach is unusual in an industry that has often relied on unauthorized works from Mexico and Central America.

Although local leaders don’t mention it as much, there is a large Latino population in Huron, very. Twenty-eight percent of teenagers in Huron academies are Latino, while 21 percentage are Asian. Latinos are an essential part of the local economy but a less visibly coordinated attendance than the Karen. As refugees, Karen people quickly got green cards. Latinos in Huron often have no choice but to remain undocumented. Attention is not always supportive, and the Karen Association scarcity a Latino counterpart.

At the high school, a young woman I’ll call Florencia told me in Spanish that she’d come to the United District in 2016 from a 500 -person Guatemalan village where many lacked energy and moving sea. After sweeping the border alone, she connected a cousin in Huron and was now, at 21, in her last semester of “schools “. She’d gained a possible move to citizenship by marrying a Puerto Rican man, and they had a 9-month-old daughter.

Many others who cross the border do not have that alternative. They can work without license, but the open life led by Karen refugees is out of reach. Despite those gaps, Florencia and other Central Americans I spoke with said they did not feel discriminated against, even though they were isolated by a language barrier that is fading as a new generation of Latino and Karen babies go through Huron’s schools.

“It’s our generation’s choice to choose to integrate, to combine what we have and combine pushes and then keep changing. We don’t want to flatline at the acceptance.”

I paid a stay to the high school journalism class to lead a discussion about past press coverage of Huron. I frisked a 2014 clip from a BBC report on refugees in the town, in which a being complained about the Karen reachings. “I have ’em on both sides of me, ” he said, pointing to his neighbors’ residences. “I’ve actually learnt ’em slay a swine in the backyard. This is a retirement community. It’s extremely befuddling to see what’s happened.” Hei Say, an easygoing junior who hopes to become an elementary school teacher, was the only Karen student in the class. The serviceman, she said, was her next-door neighbor.

As the class wrapped up, a major specified Bethany brought up a quote from a 2005 Argus Leader article that stated that Huron had a choice: It could accept immigrants or fade away. “I think that was the generation before us, ” she said. “That was their choice. It wasn’t our alternative. And they chose to accept and taking forward and not to decline.”

She continued, “Now it’s our generation’s choice to choose to integrate, to combine what we have and combine thrusts and then retain ripening. We don’t want to flatline at the acceptance.”

photoessays Friends Hei Say and Khu Kle laugh together at the World’s Largest Pheasant statue in Huron.

politics The cafeteria at Huron High School.

During the pandemic, “theres been” signeds of what that might look like in practice. When COVID-1 9 came to Huron, rumors started spreading that immigrants had produced it to town. Aylward put out a statement making clear that wasn’t the case: All of the 13 actions recorded by late March were among white people. Eight more parties soon went fouled, but then the virus appeared to sink, and there were no new cases for more than 40 periods.

In May, COVID-1 9 returned to Huron. By later that month, the town was duelling 122 active infections, the large majority of who the hell is tied to Dakota Provisions and a Jack Link’s beef jerky plant south of municipality. Blanca Ramirez Gonzalez, a 23 -year-old Jack Link’s worker and baby of three who came to the United Mood from Mexico as small children, died at the Huron Regional Medical Center after testing positive. A GoFundMe page started by her aunt to help support Ramirez’s children, who range in age from 1 to 4, has raised about half of its $30,000 goal.

Smoky told me in early June that Dakota Provisions was taking people’s temperatures at the start of each shift, necessitating concealments, and arranging apportions between works on the line and in the cafeteria. He credited those measures with thwarting a big outbreak.( The Smithfield Foods plant in Sioux Falls is now connected to roughly 1, 100 infections .) But the reality of the industry sees it hard to stop the spread. The Karen worker at the seed who requested anonymity said he reckoned the embed was doing a relatively good task when it came to protecting people from the virus. Still, he said, meatpacking intends labor elbow to elbow. More than 80 of the plant’s roughly 1,200 proletarians had tested positive by late last-place month.

As more craftsmen precipitated misery or were disclosed at home to relatives with the virus, Dakota Provisions encountered itself abruptly on organization. Strains rose as the company scheduled those who remained healthy for longer hours and comes down to a foreman last month when the plant stood open for a Saturday shift. Roughly 100 craftsmen, many of them Karen, decided not to show up as a form of protest.

Smoky responded with an internal memoranda to personnel. “Getting together and intentionally hurting Dakota Provisions today will hurt the company financially forever ,” he wrote.” I do everything I can[ to] is in favour of Karen community every nature I can .” He contributed,” When you do something like this, I fight convincing the owners they should help you. Dakota Provisions has paid millions of dollars improving dwellings for you, training you, paid under your revels, football tournaments, and recently you when you are too sick to attend work. You had significantly baffled me! ”

It served as a remember that the Karen community had been coaxed to Huron to fill an fiscal void. Their activism threatened to upend the terms of that arrangement. The Karen worker asked me to imagine what it was like for older Karen occupants to start work at the flora. “You don’t speak English and you walk into this place, ” he said. “They just ask you to work, part, run. Do this. That. Overwork you. You want to speak up, but you don’t want to lose your job.” The memoranda left him “frustrated” and “speechless, ” peculiarly because Smoky had been there for his society “high or low.”

The memo elicited an immediate resentment after it was shared on Facebook and covered in the local press. Young Karen beings came to their community’s protection. Rebekah Htoo, whose house had moved to Huron in 2008, told a South Dakota reporter that she’d known Smoky since she was a kid and increased what he’d done for Karen people. The question was the suggestion that beings like her parents, who are continuing drove at the seed, owed him something.” We were punishment before him and we will be fine after him ,” she said.” We can be angry and critical, without subvert everything positive that he has done for us .”

Dakota Provisions CEO Ken Rutledge responded by telling laborers in another memo, “Smoky has been told never to allow this situation to happen again. To those employees who were upset, I humbly and sincerely, apologize.” Smoky told me in late June that he’d defended in person to all of the Karen workers and that things were mostly back to ordinary. New infections in the province had slowed down and the study was continuing. Employees were about to come in again that Saturday for a half-shift to kill turkeys that were born before the pandemic had begun.

The night after the journalism class, young Karen bandings dallied includes of Creedence Clearwater Revival and Guns N’ Roses on the stage where the new year’s celebration had has just taken place. I recognized the older female who had approached me after Smoky’s New Year speech.

She told me her name was Emma. She was 80, and away from the music, she explained that her viewpoints on migration had been reshaped by two Karen girls who called her school group about five years ago. Emma raised them over. One was Khu Kle Shee, an forceful junior. The other was Hei Say, whom I’d met in the journalism class.

I rationalized to Say for putting her on the spot with the video of her neighbour. “We had a misunderstanding with our neighbors, but it’s all right, ” she said. She noted that the man was wrong to call the police on them for slaughtering a hog. “We were just skinning him, ” she said. “The police didn’t care.”

Neither of the girls had known their grandparents, and Emma had become an preposterous stand-in. They announced her Grandma Emma; she called them Cookie and Hershey. “She’s watched us grow up, ” Say said. “She’s given us a lot of advice. Relationship advice. Religion advice.”

“How to be young females, ” Emma said.

When they wanted to learn how to bake, Emma taught them. They prepared her Karen food, but she couldn’t handle the heat. They roared as they described other cultural fractions. White parties cause the apples on their trees go to waste. They went to all-you-can-eat buffets, then didn’t eat that much. Kids at the high school didn’t always get the blunt Karen sense of humor. “You’re kind of ugly today, ” Karen students might tell one another. The changes could make it hard to be friends with the classmates they sometimes announced “English.”

Say and Shee acquired themselves caught between their peers and their parents, “whos working” in meatpacking. Both girlfriends knew they’d never be able to handle that kind of work. “If we were there just for an hour, ” Shee said, “we’d collapse.” Her mom and dad came home with backaches, but the girls weren’t exactly sure what their parents did all day. Neither had ever set foot inside the flowers. Shee said she hoped to go someday, but just as a pilgrim.