SLO County couple builds 12-foot sign to thank farmworkers on the job during coronavirus
While many San Luis Obispo County residents have focused on thanking healthcare workers toiling away throughout the coronavirus pandemic, Ann and Tim Hou noticed that another group seemed to be left out:
Farmworkers.
Every day, the Hous would see agriculture workers in the valley below their Nipomo home, which is situated at the edge of the Mesa.
They saw the workers showing up to their jobs every day, working in the cold fog and hot sun to provide food to the county and beyond in spite of the COVID-19 restrictions keeping other people at home.
“We would see those people working down there and we were thinking ‘Gee, they’re putting themselves at risk also, so that we can have food to eat,’” Ann Hou told The Tribune in a phone interview. “We oughta give them a thank you.”
So the Hous constructed two large signs to display at the fence line of their backyard in mid-April.
The first was a smaller, four-foot tall one constructed out of old vertical blinds that read “Thank u.”
Hou said her husband worried that that one wouldn’t be big enough to be seen in the fields below, so he got out some tarps and painted “Gracias” across them in large letters.
The final result was a 12-foot sign that the couple set up with the smaller one, both overlooking the edge of the Mesa.
Then they gathered a group of their neighbors to show up along the fence line, and banged on pots and pans to try to get the attention of the workers below.
It worked — from a distance, they could see some of those workers waving and taking pictures of the signs.
The signs didn’t stay up for long, due to sweeping Nipomo Mesa winds, but the Hous were happy with their simple — yet important — gesture.
“We need to be thanking the doctors, but we need to be thanking the field workers too,” she said. “So we did.”
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