What a gift it has been to design a calendar which honors friendship. It has offered me the opportunity to reflect on how precious all friends are, how they encourage us to do our best, how they share our ups and downs and, most of all, let us know how much we are valued and loved. I am very enthused about the result, seeing that it offers some of the most uplifting images I have ever presented.

The photographs chosen for “Gracias por los Amigos”, tenth calendar in the series, represent many kinds of friendships with and within the farmworking community. They portray friendships among children and young people in Migrant and Seasonal Head Start and Migrant Education Programs, between students and teachers, among adults who work together in the fields, friendships within extended families, cross-cultural friendships as well as friendships that develop between outreach workers and their clients who are facing so many challenges in today’s immigrant communities. I hope these photographs awaken or rekindle your desire to befriend these worthy people.

To those who choose to order “Gracias por los Amigos”, thank you! May it be a delightful, daily reminder of your own special friends and, if given as gifts, a way of letting those close to you know how much they are appreciated and loved. Also, a special “thank you” goes out to the many friends, both new and old, who contributed so much to the success of my photographic endeavors in New York State this summer. It was a wonderful, memorable experience which I will always treasure.

Wishing you a year filled with lots of time for friends.

Peace, Celia Roberts, photographer and publisher

Introduction

For her tenth calendar noted photographer Celia Roberts has picked a hopeful, if not a challenging theme: Amigos/Friends. The opportunity before us is to see essential benefits of friendship. The challenge for many of us outside of the rural communities is to find avenues for entering into a friendship with rural and agricultural workers.

Now for those of us in urban and suburban areas, this may seem like an impossible undertaking. The distance between urban and rural is vast; the borderlands between culture and language are challenging and class differences can easily blind our appreciation of one another. And yet, by looking at the photographs offered in this calendar you can see that our shared humanity is there, and our ability to grasp that realization is the starting point to a journey that will help us find our way.

The more we feel the humanity of our brothers and sisters, the more hope can grow as we recognize the necessity of friendship. May this simple recognition lead us to a fuller appreciation of what we can learn from these worthy people about the depth and opportunity of life.

— The Rev. Richard Witt, Executive Director, Rural and Migrant Ministry