Posted on 04/20/2005 8:59:28 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
SAN PABLO - On the fourth night of her front yard hunger strike, Diana Ponce lay delirious under the carport, fighting off the chill under a fuzzy blanket emblazoned with the Mexican flag.
Neighbors sat clustered around her on white plastic lawn chairs. Children smacked at a yellow volleyball in the street. Toddlers tricycled past fence-strung banners that read "Tenemos Que Unirnos" -- We have to unite.
Outraged by recent news accounts of vigilante Mexican border hawks, the 32-year-old San Pablo woman took to the streets -- really, her driveway -- on two lawn chairs pushed together. Ponce, a diabetic, is fasting there for a week.
"How dare they call us terrorists," she said.
She refused not only food, but also water for the first two days of her fast, which ends Thursday.
Worried friends and family finally convinced her to drink fluids. Now she's sipping a kind of children's Gatorade that her husband, Feliberto Diaz, serves her before he leaves in the morning for his gardening job.
Ponce can be stubborn, relatives say.
"Once she gets into a certain cause, she really goes all the way," said her sister, Christina Gastelum.
Earlier this month, Ponce read a newspaper account of the Minuteman Project, a loose band of armed volunteers gathered in Arizona this month to catch illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican border.
President Bush has called them vigilantes, but the administration has taken no action. The group is slated to speak in front of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus next week, according to the Associated Press.
"How can the government in 2005 allow this, let people take the law into their own hands?" said Ponce, whose father came from Michoacan. "Why do they need to be armed?"
Ponce discussed a protest with her husband and her three children.
"I told him, I need to do something," Ponce said.
She considered a demonstration at the border, but then took a cue from March4Education, a Bay Area activist group. Besides walking 70 miles to Sacramento last year to protest school budget cuts, members starved themselves in Oakland and Sacramento.
Ponce marched with them, but missed the hunger strike. This time, she saw her chance, she said.
She took a week off as a manager at Century Theatres in Pleasant Hill. At home, she built her lawn chair platform, piling it with red plaid and denim comforters.
Each night at dusk she holds candlelight vigils, occasionally filmed by a TV crew. She sleeps outside on the improvised divan, in a spot usually reserved for her 1953 Fordomatic, the barbecue or, on really hot days, her free-standing pool.
She knows there are more conspicuous places for a protest.
But Ponce said she wanted news cameras to show the world her neighborhood -- a tightknit Mexican-American enclave of families with children, all of them with inalienable rights.
"And I figured the government can't get involved if it's my own property," she said.
To her right, a statue of Guadelupe clasps her hands in prayer, wooden rosary beads dripping from her plastic digits. Fatima beams in a gilt white robe, a trio of doves at her feet. A bust of Jesus flashes Ponce the peace sign.
About 8 p.m. Monday, as Ponce lay weak, the mini-congregation lit long white tapers, saucered by red plastic cups to catch the wax.
Friend Lisa Ramirez began the prayer:
"Our father, who art in heaven ..."
They repeated the prayer a second time in Spanish.
Ponce gripped a pink teddy bear, the tag dangling from its left ear. Someone turned on the TV to watch the news, but there was only the mustache of Dr. Phil.
Ponce drifted in and out of sleep. Soon, her husband would light a fire and let out her dog, Vega, a pit bull-German shepherd mix, to guard her.
Through her homebound protest, Ponce is following not only her conscience, but the stars, she said.
The day she read about the Minutemen, her Gemini horoscope (after warning her of troubles with strangers, authority figures and traveling) ended with an edict:
"Help a cause you believe in."
But then who will pay for her recuperation?
I have a granddaughter that is a diabetic - she is 5 years old--and was just diagnosed last December so I am still learning, but I do know that on several occasions she didn't eat her breakfast, and would be jumping and playing one minute, and the very next, she would be passed out, and we would have to shove cake icing or honey in her mouth--
Luckily, she "came to" after that, but what would have happened if we weren't there to put the honey or cake icing in her mouth?
Her uncle was 23, and had the flu, couldn't keep any food down, and died in the middle of the night.
That age is tough! I was diagnosed when I was five, like your granddaughter. The hardest part for little kids is not being able to recognize the warning signs. I had a number of incidents like the one you describe when I was much younger. I ran a support group a few years back for the parents of kids with diabetes, just providing info to help them through the rough spots, so I know how tough it can be. Your granddaughter is lucky to have such attentive grandparents looking after her!
I forgot to say that her uncle had type 1 diabetes that he got when HE was 5 years old---he just died a few years ago, so that makes us double careful with her--
We keep a glucagon injection with us at all time, so far the cake icing has brought her around..
That's true. I always have a snack around 8-9 o'clock. I LOVE my evening snacks! I test my sugar before I eat to be sure it's not too low (it can be early evenings)because once it got to 43 and my husband couldn't wake me up. I ended up in the hospital. That scared me. So I always have a snack unless we eat later than usual and I make a big pig of myself.
17! My heavens! That IS low, and you're still alive to tell me about it? Whew. Yes, I had the glucagon injections by the ambulance squad. I didn't even feel them nor did I feel them put in an IV! I must have really been out of it. Thank God you survived that.
To counter protest this woman's hunger strike, I will force myself to grill a steak tonight and have a large portion of banana pudding for desert. Maybe a cold one to wash it down with too.
Remember when al sharpton was on a hunger strike? he still ate Hungry Man soup and gain about 15 lbs.
A typical Berzerkely overspill wingnut. They make her out to be a recent arrival, but in reality, she's a petty bourgeois, typical East Bay Lefty. I wonder which Commie rag she was reading when she got her grand idea?
maybe this wingnut should call a COMPASSIONATE, SYMPATHETIC INTERNATIONALIST, ANTI-AMERICAN senator to hear her case - like Voinivich, McCain or Dodd.
These articles always refer to it as "the MEXICAN border". They should start calling it the UNITED STATES BORDER. It is a subtle point, but it puts a spin on it.
Yeah, but what we save in food stamps will be dwarfed by the cost of her "free" visit to the hospital ER for treatment of the effects of her hunger strike.
"How dare they call us terrorists," she said.
How dare you be so stupid, woman? Nobody is calling illegal criminal alien invaders terrorists. we're reserving that epithet for the real terrorists. And if you're here legally, we aren't even talking about you.
OTOH, if you are here illegally, what's your diabetes treatment costing California taxpayers...hmmm??
From today's Sierra Vista Herald, which serves the area where the Minutemen are, out in the boonies:
SIERRA VISTA - The Cochise County Sheriff's Department is warning residents to be on the watch for unusual behavior in wild animals after three skunks in the Sierra Vista area have tested positive for rabies.
Three other skunks were found dead.
SHHHH! She mighta started out that way.
You should see how overweight this lady is. She will probably last a year with the layers of fat stored on her body!
Poor misguided fools!
Protect our borders and coastlines from all foreign invaders!
Be Ever Vigilant!
Hunger striker: "I'm gonna keep hurting myself until you stop."
Too bad for you I'm a sadist; I'm just going to pull up a chair, eat grease burgers, sip gin & tonics, and watch. Bet I can take your pain longer than you.
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