[Day laborers wait in the area of a McDonald's near Madison Avenue and West Front Street in Plainfield for work. "The economy situation is very tough lately. It almost feels like I'm in jail, I'm a prisoner," said Nahe Maeis, 33, of Honduras, through an interpreter. / STAFF PHOTO: KATHY JOHNSON]
Written by MARK SPIVEY / STAFF WRITER
PLAINFIELD — He has been here more than three years, but the one thing Nahe Maeis still can't get used to is the cold.
Maeis was noticeably uncomfortable one recent morning when temperatures failed to top 30 degrees amid a relentless, biting wind. Many parts of the 33-year-old's native Honduras almost never experience high temperatures below 80 degrees, but he was on a mission that hasn't changed since he arrived here: to find enough work to support his wife, who stayed behind. It's not an easy task. Maeis said he often earns more in a single day here than he could earn in a week in Honduras, one of the Western Hemisphere's poorest nations. But while this city's summers offer seemingly limitless opportunities to flag down a passenger van or pickup truck and get whisked away to perform landscaping, construction or moving work for about $10 per hour, winters are another story. "You have to have a lot of luck, because in the winter there's not much work," Maeis explained through Michael Gonzalez, who served as an interpreter for each of the interviews reflected in this article. "The economy situation is very tough lately. It almost feels like I'm in jail, I'm a prisoner." The silver lining is the simple fact that Maeis isn't alone. In fact, he's a member of an informal yet tight-knit fraternity of the estimated hundreds of day laborers living in the Queen City, many of whom gather like clockwork at dawn each day near the intersection of West Front Street and Madison Avenue to solicit work. A half-dozen day laborers who recently agreed to interviews with the Courier News shared remarkably similar stories: they all came to the city less than a decade ago from various nations in Latin America, independently drawn by the opportunity to earn more money. "We come here for the dream of being able to help our families out . . . that way they can be better off than we are one day," Felix Manzano, a 44-year-old native of Ecuador, said. "It's a big sacrifice to come here, just the fact that we have to leave our homes and everything we know."
Posts
8:16 PM, Feb. 12, 2011 | 22Comments
ReplyDelete[Day laborers wait in the area of a McDonald's near Madison Avenue and West Front Street in Plainfield for work. "The economy situation is very tough lately. It almost feels like I'm in jail, I'm a prisoner," said Nahe Maeis, 33, of Honduras, through an interpreter. / STAFF PHOTO: KATHY JOHNSON]
Written by MARK SPIVEY / STAFF WRITER
PLAINFIELD — He has been here more than three years, but the one thing Nahe Maeis still can't get used to is the cold.
Maeis was noticeably uncomfortable one recent morning when temperatures failed to top 30 degrees amid a relentless, biting wind. Many parts of the 33-year-old's native Honduras almost never experience high temperatures below 80 degrees, but he was on a mission that hasn't changed since he arrived here: to find enough work to support his wife, who stayed behind.
It's not an easy task. Maeis said he often earns more in a single day here than he could earn in a week in Honduras, one of the Western Hemisphere's poorest nations. But while this city's summers offer seemingly limitless opportunities to flag down a passenger van or pickup truck and get whisked away to perform landscaping, construction or moving work for about $10 per hour, winters are another story.
"You have to have a lot of luck, because in the winter there's not much work," Maeis explained through Michael Gonzalez, who served as an interpreter for each of the interviews reflected in this article. "The economy situation is very tough lately. It almost feels like I'm in jail, I'm a prisoner."
The silver lining is the simple fact that Maeis isn't alone. In fact, he's a member of an informal yet tight-knit fraternity of the estimated hundreds of day laborers living in the Queen City, many of whom gather like clockwork at dawn each day near the intersection of West Front Street and Madison Avenue to solicit work.
A half-dozen day laborers who recently agreed to interviews with the Courier News shared remarkably similar stories: they all came to the city less than a decade ago from various nations in Latin America, independently drawn by the opportunity to earn more money.
"We come here for the dream of being able to help our families out . . . that way they can be better off than we are one day," Felix Manzano, a 44-year-old native of Ecuador, said. "It's a big sacrifice to come here, just the fact that we have to leave our homes and everything we know."