(upbeat music)
- Hello and welcome to In Wisconsin.
I'm Patty Lowe.
Each week we bring you stories about the people and issues
that make up life in our state.
This week all of our stories have a bit of
a Thanksgiving feel, starting with a feast at
the kids' cafe in Racine.
We'll hear why this meal has people saying thanks
for more than one reason.
Further north, students are working to ease racial tensions
between Native Americans and non-Indians.
And in a country of immigrants, a traditional Wisconsin business
grows from struggling to successful
when it takes on a more world view.
We'll have all that plus a 15 acre corn maze
just ahead in Wisconsin.
(upbeat music)
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and life in Wisconsin running smoothly,
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ideas on the web.
- A lavish Thanksgiving dinner is the traditional centerpiece
to this holiday weekend, but many families aren't
able to put out such a bountiful spread.
Each day, thousands of people in Wisconsin,
many of them children go to bed hungry.
To help fill this need, one agency sponsors Kids Cafe,
where children come for dinner, companionship, and hope.
Reporter Frederica Freiberg takes us to
the Kids Cafe in Racine.
- The night is cold and wet outside the African Methodist
Episcopal Church.
But inside, the church basement is warm and welcoming and fun.
You get to come here free and you get to see friends,
you get to play games.
- Eight-year-old Jonathan plays checkers.
Tables are filled with toddlers to middle schoolers
with plenty to do.
- You ever find a puzzle you're looking for?
Have you done your homework yet?
- Chuck and Juanita Tyler are in charge
of this weekly drop-in, this day 50 children sign in.
- They just come by ourselves 'cause it's fun to come.
- What would you be doing if you weren't here?
- Plan best you'd want.
- I was just doing a little, we're gonna play a little game
with the third graders.
- The late afternoon starts with games like this
math-fact time trial and army of volunteers
encourages hitting the books with Chuck Tyler
rallying the troops.
- You sure?
Lavar, these are don't work.
- You get to do lots of fun things
and you get to do your homework here.
And it's easier 'cause grownups get to help you.
- The grownups in this church basement volunteer here
to fill the kids up, not just with caring attention,
but also with a hot meal, because this
is a kids' cafe site.
So while half the volunteers help with homework,
- Okay.
- The other half works in the kitchen.
Every Wednesday this group prepares a nutritious dinner
for however many kids show up.
They get the food from second harvest,
a nationwide food bank with two chapters in Wisconsin.
- We have seen an increasing need.
There are now five kids' cafes throughout
our service territory.
This one here in Racine, two in Milwaukee,
a brand new one that just opened on the north side
of the city within months.
And then there's also one in Appleton
and there's also one in Green Bay.
- Chuck Tyler worked for three decades
for the city of Racine, but left there for this.
- I see a need to be here.
You know, I see where they need us.
It's important that we're here to give them
some kind of nutrition smell at least once a week.
I see where they need help with their homework.
And most of all, I see where they need our presence.
- The smells of a special dinner begin to fill
the busy room.
This night, the Racine Kids Cafe cooked up a giant Thanksgiving
feast for the children.
- We're serving turkey, cornbread dressing, gravy,
green beans, macaroni and cheese, corn pudding,
sweet potatoes with the cons on top,
sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top.
What's your favorite part of Thanksgiving dinner?
- The turkey and the pumpkin pie.
- You want some some more, Harley?
- You want this?
- Do you like eating them?
- Yes.
- We all do.
- Why, man?
- It's just nice to see them.
To see them eat.
To think some people don't get a good meal every day.
And that's why they have this program.
- What's exciting?
- That and to make a difference in other ways.
- I see a need to be part of their lives
because I don't know what's happening at home sometimes.
But I know when they come here, you know,
I just see it seems like we're feeling some kind of void.
- Filling a void with warmth and caring,
good food and friendly faces.
- The Kids Cafe always sends the children home
with any leftovers so they can share them
with the rest of their family.
The Cafe also sends along treat bags
full of whatever food Second Harvest provides that week.
Second Harvest gets its food from corporate
and private grocery donations.
And in just the eastern part of our state
distributes more than 50,000 pounds of food each day.
There is another Second Harvest program
serving Southern Wisconsin, which also operates Kids Cafe's
as well as other charitable food programs.
If you'd like to know more about Kids Cafe's
or Second Harvest, log on to our website at
www.wpt.org/in-wisconsin.
(upbeat music)
- Well, food is the first thing that comes to mind
when many people think of Thanksgiving.
It's also a time to reflect on why so many people
have come to this country.
In the last census, only about 1.5% of Americans
claimed some Native American ancestry.
That means the vast majority of Americans,
more than 98% are either immigrants
or descendants of immigrants.
The fact that this is a multicultural country
is reflected in a growing number of businesses
that have found multiculturalism to be the key to survival.
An example can be found in Dodge County
where one traditional Wisconsin business
has boomed by embracing more of a worldview.
- The shish cafe in Madison, where the recipes
are from Syria, but a key ingredient
for Chef Rab? Benyat comes from Wisconsin, cheese.
- We do like broal cheese, we do it with salad
and pizza, we broiled the cheese.
- Desert?
- Desert was a cheese, I mean we use a cheese a lot.
(laughing)
- Hello, why don't you, oh, even better.
- Exactly the way we cook a cancilla.
- Oh, we cook this.
- That Syrian cheese called a cava
is made in one of Wisconsin's oldest cheese factories.
For the factory owners, Paul and Vicky Sharfman,
it started with a phone call.
- We got a phone call from a man in New Jersey
whose name was Mahmoud Abul Rumi.
And Mahmoud was making his own cheese
in his own dingy storefront.
- He was a trailer.
- In New Jersey and he wanted to find a factory
to make it for him so he could go through the marketing.
- Abul Rumi came to Wisconsin to show the sharpened
cheese makers how to make a cava.
- Talk about an electric moment when this ethnic, Jordanian,
Palestinian cheese maker comes to Wisconsin
and works with older, long time Germanic
Wisconsin cheese makers and tries to explain cheese
maker to cheese maker how to make this curd.
- Well, you have two fat fingers.
We want girls with thin fingers and you have to go like this
and the German cheese makers.
- We don't do that stuff.
- This kind of cultural exchange has become commonplace at
the Sharfman's business, the specialty cheese
company of Loa, Wisconsin.
We talk to most cheese makers about culture
and they'll assume you mean bacteria.
But the specialty cheese company understanding culture has an
entirely different meaning.
- In 1991, the Sharfman's bought a struggling cheese factory
with the idea of making cheese for the growing number
of Hispanic consumers.
- And you look for what the needs are of course
and we're looking at food and the Hispanic population
ate eats a lot of cheese.
- The Sharfman's developed La Bacarica brand
through extensive testing with Hispanic consumers.
- And slowly we refined the products
until they looked like what people expected
them to look like and we were looking to
replicate cheese from home.
- In just the last few years, America's Hispanic
population has grown 13%.
And the big cheese companies have added Hispanic varieties
increasing competition.
So the specialty cheese company added more specialties
like the Syrian Akawa, the Kosher Munster and an
Indian cheese called Paneer.
- We also are a national powerhouse
in the Paneer market at this point,
which I think is very funny myself.
But you know, there it is and we sell to quite a few
Indian distribution companies.
I used to eat frozen Indian TV dinners
because at least years ago you couldn't get good Indian food
in this town and now you can.
- Now Vicki Sharfman's business makes the Paneer
used in those frozen dinners.
And the specialty cheese company has connected
Lowell Wisconsin with America's growing diversity.
- We both love it.
- Yeah.
- I don't know that it's changed our outlook so much
but it has been great to see how it has affected
the rural community, which was rural so it
didn't have the opportunity to have people of all
stripe come visit.
- I think everybody at the firm has grown as a result of that.
I think that's really one of the things
that we're most proud of as well.
- It's cool, it's definitely cool.
- Cool but also good business and a growing one in Wisconsin.
10 years ago specialty and artisan Jesus
accounted for only 4% of state cheese production.
Today it's 13%.
State Secretary Rod Nilsis-Duen says Wisconsin
is well suited to specialty cheese making.
- It's such a good fit for Wisconsin
because we got the right size farm, small farms.
We've got a lot of existing small cheese plants
and probably as important as anything else.
We've got a long, long tradition in cheese making.
- But it's actually a non-traditional cheese
that today is the specialty cheese companies
fastest growing product.
In the 90s Paul Sharfman patented a process
to bake cheese into a hard crunchy chip.
They sold it as cheese and crackers without the crackers
or just the cheese.
- It was expensive and crunchy and salty
and weird but it was cheese and crackers
without the crackers.
And by early 1997 it was a dismal failure.
I had a lot of pretty boxes and no sales.
- Until just the cheese caught the attention
of Dr.
Robert Atkins.
- This is now the summer of 1997.
Atkins has just started this catalog
and he's searching for a crunchy munchy
that can be in his catalog.
What's crunchy munchy that's on the Atkins diet?
Answer, nothing.
- Well there was pork rinds, which-- - Which--
- Made famous by the first George Bush president.
- Which he didn't-- - There wasn't, there wasn't,
no one was crazy for pork rinds.
- But low carbohydrate dieters have gone crazy
for just the cheese.
To keep up with great demand, the specialty cheese company
is bought an old school in the neighboring
town of Riesville.
They've converted it to a factory
and hired dozens of local people.
Like Ruthie Snow, who now works in the building
where she once went to high school.
- Lots of good memories.
(laughs)
Lots of good memories.
I was prom queen in the gym.
- That gym now holds boxes and boxes
of just the cheese ready to be shipped.
Some of it ordered over the internet
and processed by Ruthie Snow.
Another change from her high school days.
- I'm aging myself now.
(laughs)
Oh, we got the electric typewriters
and that was very cool.
The internet was so far away.
So far away.
I find it exciting to ship out to all these different
international places and in a little town like
this, it's pretty cool.
- Whether it's over the World Wide Web,
a Syrian immigrants kitchen, or a favorite Indian meal,
Wisconsin's cheese makers are finding new homes
for the state's most famous product.
(upbeat music)
Relationships between Native Americans
and others have been complicated and diverse
since the first European settlers arrived
on this continent.
Even today, it's sometimes difficult for some
to understand important aspects of other cultures.
In Northern Wisconsin, students from Managua
and Lacta Flambo are trying to create
better cultural understanding between Native Americans
and non-Indians.
(crowd cheering)
- They were born during tumultuous times.
During the 1980s for two weeks each spring,
their parents squared off on violent boat landings
over Ojibwe spear fishing.
- A lot of those values were passed down.
And if the parents didn't change their minds
20 some years ago, then their kids
are already set up with those values.
- My dad, I know he was involved in that.
I know he was called a spear and people would be
on the dog saying stuff, no, we're throwing cans
or that on and stuff, but...
- Do you have any memory of those days?
- No, no, no.
- Many in the Managua, Lacta Flambo area,
agree that racism is a community problem.
According to federal and independent studies,
like this one conducted by the US Commission on Civil Rights,
spear fishing did not cause the cultural misunderstanding
but certainly contributed to it.
(crowd cheering)
- The children of the boat landings live with its legacy.
- Just because the violence part of it kind of diminished
doesn't mean that spirit that was behind it went away.
So I think it still affects everything one
of us pretty deeply.
- This is ILI, the Intercultural Leadership Initiative,
a unique program at Lakeland Union High School in Managua.
It attempts to bring native and non-native students
together to bridge the cultural divide
that separates the two communities.
- Honestly, I didn't know what to think
when I first went to ILI.
Honestly, I was like, yeah, we're gonna be fighting racism
and it's gonna be all righteous.
So then it really, for me, I didn't join ILI to meet people.
I joined ILI because I was like, we have a problem in
this school and this is what needs to happen.
And then I was like, whoa, like, this is so
much more about people.
And it really became much less of a cause to me
as just a cool place to hang out.
- That was exactly what organizers had
hoped would happen.
Bring students from different cultural backgrounds together
for fun and conversation.
And maybe they discovered they actually liked each other.
- It's working slowly.
I can see progress a student at a time,
which is that's what we focus on.
It's all about relationships.
- Bob Covar coordinates ILI.
- They're an amazing group of kids
because they had the weight of this program on their shoulders
from the very beginning.
We didn't really know what we were doing.
Nobody had done this before.
- Today, ILI is hosting a cultural fair
at the high school.
- When you go on, it turns into a spark.
It turns into a call.
And it's like, that's how you get the light in the scene.
- When I came in the school, like,
I was one of them people, like, I don't know,
didn't let people in, except for the people that I was
friends with the year before.
- That's what we hear about in grade school.
The big spirit native guys that, you know,
you're gonna get feet up for something.
And I mean, it's not like that at all.
I think one of the most important things about ILI
is that you get to know people as people.
Not the labels that have been forced on them
by community prejudices and stuff.
- Lawrence Mann carried the big scary native guy label.
- Cultural day is his brainchild, a
day to put fear aside and celebrate diversity.
- They start to realize that they're just people
from different cultures are just the same as them.
The only thing that's different is their culture.
They're still humans.
And when they realize that they walk away
a little feeling a lot better and actually kind of
feeling kind of a connection with the other cultures
because they had a chance to participate in some of
their cultural activities.
- Several of the students say it would be easier
if the school was multicultural.
Instead, it is overwhelmingly bicultural,
Native American and white.
The groups have been polarized for so long.
People expect racism and find it around every corner.
- I think there are a lot of times problems
that aren't actually racially based
or labeled as that.
If there's a conflict between a girlfriend
and a boyfriend that are biracial,
they'll just be like, oh, there's some big racial problem
going down and down in the cafeteria and it's not.
And it just gets mislabeled.
- The healing process is something that
takes a long time, takes decades, one
child at a time, to rethink history, to
rethink perspectives and rethink the perspectives
that are passed on from generation to generation
and it's happening.
- But apparently not fast enough.
Despite the pocas, Mexican yo-yos, and German chocolates,
there was the perception that this was Native American day.
Nearly half the white students were absent.
Their parents signed letters, excusing them from
the days of events.
- Just like, you know, it gets me upset
that people are doing this.
We spend 180 days of the year learning about white history
and white English and white literature.
And then one day we devote to people
who are different than us and everyone leaves.
- The fair was Top Havian Native American culture.
Intentionally so, according to the Intercultural
Leadership Initiative, so it could be introduced
to white students in a safe, friendly atmosphere.
- Everybody follows.
We're achieving the greatest question of all.
Personal fulfillment.
- Those who stayed home, missed Olympic gold medalist,
turned motivational speaker Billy Mills,
a Lakota su from the Pine Ridge Reservation
and Popstar Janna, a Lumbee Indian from North Carolina,
whose autograph was the hottest ticket in town.
And the powwow with food, singing, and dancing.
- And we want all those other people to be a part of it,
but we can't make people do what they don't want to do
or what they might be afraid to do.
So we just lead by example.
- And that is where ILI says it has truly made a difference.
There are just about 100 students
who belong to the organization at the high school level,
but there are more than 500 elementary school children
who have joined and most of them were here today.
- The kids that are in the high school
that have not been able to be a part of the program,
they're part of the old script, which is to be
afraid of each other, to distrust each other,
that they can't be friends, that they're gonna
fight with each other.
And these younger kids are part of that new script.
- A lot of people in the high school,
sadly enough, will probably think the same things.
They think now for the rest of their lives.
So I think that the younger kids have the best chance
of making a difference.
- Hopefully if we work with younger students,
that they learn about each other and stuff like that
by 20 years, that maybe we won't have
so much racism and stuff like that.
- 20 years from now, you all come back
for your 20 year reunion.
- How I think it's gonna be different.
- Everything kinda goes, comes in waves,
like we've been talking about in cycles.
And the racism is always gonna be there.
So it's hard to say if you can actually see
a visual change in our school.
But if there is a visual change and we'll know we're there
for the beginning of it, so that'd be pretty cool.
- Well, let me break.
- The Intercultural Leadership Initiative
is coordinated by Great Lakes Intertribal Council.
We're hoping that for once, you don't get lost
in our final story this week.
It's about a 15 acre corn maze.
The Trinon Farm near Lodi and South Central Wisconsin
boasts a maze with over three miles of twists, turns,
and dead ends.
It works like this.
You're given a puzzle piece that forms
the first section of a map.
You navigate the maze to find mailboxes
containing additional puzzle pieces
that complete the map.
After completing the map, you can also search
for secret locations within the maze.
And if you get them all, you get a prize.
Reporter Laurie Gorman caught up with three women
who tried their hand at the maze.
(upbeat music)
- This year we've planted a special variety
that will turn your interhidious turd.
If you've manhandled the corn.
- Hello.
(laughing)
- We just managed to find all of the actual mailboxes.
So we're onto the mystery location.
It's very serious.
And we're trying to decide how to go about this.
It's all about technique.
Come this way.
(laughing)
- I knew it's all about getting lost.
(laughing)
- How could you put it if you were making this thing?
- Okay, so I think you are.
So we're at the end.
- Yeah, like you know, down here would be a good batter.
- Okay, so let's go.
- I'm gonna start more skills than others.
Some of us make more laugh.
(laughing)
- On the map than others.
- More challenging for some of us.
- And others just have a fault since confidence.
- Yeah.
(laughing)
- I think we're in the first one, aren't we?
- 'Cause you went to the second one, didn't you?
- No, I went to the first one.
- We're right here.
- Okay.
- So the ends of the earth, is that what we're looking for?
- Okay, well I think we just go back this way.
- Now Chris has led us down some interesting paths.
- Are you guys going with me?
- Yeah, we're coming.
- I'm not quite sure where I am.
(laughing)
- When you get lost, show them what you do
and you get lost to me.
Wave the flag.
(laughing)
- I read someone goes, "I'm serious."
(laughing)
- Right.
(laughing)
- We're just walking around in the circle.
- You do, Chris.
(laughing)
- I found it.
- Woohoo, I got it.
(laughing)
- Yes!
We gotta let it stay up.
- Oh my gosh.
(clicking)
- Yay!
- I think we saw one of those people
that had been turned into a toe that all nasty gross thing.
(singing)
- Riding.
(laughing)
- Riding.
(laughing)
- Yay!
- Woo!
- Can you believe it?
We're gonna get priced now, because this is your trick.
(laughing)
- I think it's popcorn.
(laughing)
- We're gonna get priced.
? Way, hey up, you ride it ?
? You ride it, you ride it ?
? You're the corn, you ?
- A few other fun facts about the maze.
Alan and Angie Trinon plant the corn
in early May.
Stake out the design later that month.
And mow the corn into a maze in mid-June.
It takes the average person about 45 minutes to finish it.
You can find more information about the maze
on our website at www.wpt.org/inwisconsin.
One more note, the Chinans create a different
design each year.
So, sorry, if you try your hand at the maze next summer,
you won't have any extra advantage
after watching our report.
That's our program for this week.
Thank you for including us in your Thanksgiving weekend.
We leave you to enjoy the sunset on a wintry,
brule river.
For Inwisconsin, I'm Patty Lo.
See you next week.
(soft music)
? ?