Home Care In Mecca, CA

The smell of South Asian spices wafts from the “Blends and Curries” food counter.

Conversations in Hindi and Gujurati flood the bustling hallways, which quickly get packed as students pour in and out of classes.

Cliques of Indian youth, who appear to make up a majority of the student population, take full advantage of common areas to study, lounge around or wait for class to begin.

Everywhere you look at the main campus of Conestoga College, there’s ample proof of an explosion of international students.

The school has become a poster child for aggressive international student recruitment.

Its efforts have brought in a flood of new money — a stark contrast to the financial pressures students themselves face — but also raised questions within the institution about the sustainability of that growth, and the motivations behind it.

And as the federal government seeks to stem international student flows with a two-year cap on study permits, even the immigration minister has singled the college out.

The southwestern Ontario college had 37,000 study permits approved and extended in 2023 — the most in Canada — which marks a 31-per-cent increase from the previous year.

Its student population has more than doubled in four years to about 45,000, and international students now vastly outnumber domestic ones. The main campus in Kitchener, Ont., alone is now home to more than 20,000 students.

Faculty and students seem to agree things have gone too far.

“No organization can grow at that pace, and do it right, that quickly,” said Leopold Koff, a union leader representing faculty, counsellors and librarians at Conestoga.

Faculty members have turned into nomads with no fixed desks, a change the union says was prompted by the college’s desire to build more classrooms to accommodate a larger student population. The college says the change reflects a post-pandemic hybrid working model.

At the student union office, more than a hundred students come in and out within an hour to grab a free snack — one of many programs Conestoga Students Inc. offers to help a growing number of food-insecure students.

Instructors are complaining that many students lack fundamental skills, which in turn makes their jobs more difficult, said Koff.

“They don’t have the basic three Rs: reading, writing, arithmetic,” he said.

Making matters worse, Koff said students have been too busy working to focus on their studies. He singled out Ottawa’s decision during the pandemic to temporarily allow international students to work more than 20 hours a week.

“That is opening up a huge catastrophe for the students,” he said. “They will take advantage of that. … They need the money.”

Vikki Poirier, another union leader who represents support staff, conceded the college has hired more people to keep up with the school’s growth.

But she said new hires need time to get up to speed, and in the meantime, staff are facing massive workloads as they process more students.

Both union leaders said they have raised concerns with the school’s administration — but they don’t feel heard.

“Our perception of administration of the college these days … is that it’s a river of money. And if you get in the way of that river of money, you’re going to be plowed over,” Koff said.

Conestoga’s finances have been generously padded by international student tuition fees, which can sometimes be three times more than those for Canadian students.

Financial statements show the public college had a $106-million surplus for the 2022-23 year. That’s up from just $2.5 million in 2014-2015.

Conestoga declined a request to interview its administration.

In a statement, the college defended its recruitment levels.

“Colleges and universities across the country have been welcoming international students as part of their financial viability strategy given the flatlining of public funding in recent years,” the statement said.

“Students who come to Conestoga from other countries have enabled us to reinvest our surplus in new buildings and in-demand programs, both of which drive economic growth. Domestic and international students now enjoy best-in-class facilities funded by the surplus.”

Conestoga also touted the contribution its students make to the regional economy and the role they play in filling labour shortages. It also defended its admissions standards, noting its requirements are “similar to, or higher, than other colleges.”

The individual stories of international students at Conestoga suggest many of them are experiencing hardship, at the same time as the college amasses a fortune.

While some students are lucky enough that their parents can afford to pay for their tuition and living expenses, others must take out loans and rely on employment to pay their bills.

Bijith Powathu and Fredin Benny both took out educational loans in India to pay for their first-year tuition.

Now, they’re working full-time jobs at a factory and warehouse, respectively, to pay for their second-year fees.

The young men said balancing work and school means sleep often goes to the wayside.

When Powathu is scheduled for a night shift at his factory job in Mount Forest, Ont., he drives 85 kilometres directly to class in the morning.

“Straight from work I have to come here to manage. Sometimes sleepless nights,” Powathu said.

Many Indian students describe how challenging it is to find work back home, where youth unemployment is sky-high. According to the Centre for Indian Economy, the unemployment rate for youth aged 20 to 24 in India was 44 per cent between October and December 2023.

But jobs are becoming harder to find for young people in Canada, too.

Nelson Chukwuma, president of Conestoga Students Inc. said that’s top of mind for students right now.

“Our students are having a hard time finding jobs,” he said.

Some Conestoga scholars attribute the scarcity to the increase of students in the region.

“A couple years ago, the condition was different. But now it is entirely changed. Mainly the job market,” Powathu said, describing the plight of his unemployed peers.

“So based on that, they just want to go back (home).”

Several students with anxious faces described handing out resumes on a consistent basis since arriving to Canada last September, with no success. They said there’s significant guilt in relying on their parents for support.

Chukwuma used to be an international student himself, and he has watched the campus change over time — and that change has been dramatic over the past five years amid unprecedented growth.

“We don’t think it’s sustainable,” he said.

Although his organization has financially benefited from the higher enrolments, Chukwuma said it is constantly playing catch-up when it comes to meeting students’ needs.

“I think the college needs to definitely re-evaluate their strategy because (of) the flack that we’ve gotten, not just from the professors (and) staff, but also just from the community,” Chukwuma said.

He noted that local governments didn’t have the housing and transit infrastructure to accommodate the influx.

Conestoga said it invested in eight new properties last year to address housing needs.

Many at the college also lay blame at the feet of long-term provincial underfunding coupled with few federal limits on the international student population.

For decades, a cost-of-living financial requirement tied to student permits sat at $10,000 — an amount that significantly underestimates the amount students spend on basic housing and food.

As part of a broader effort to rein in the number of temporary residents in Canada — a political liability for the Liberal government because of its impact on housing affordability — Immigration Minister Marc Miller has more than doubled the amount to $20,635.

Miller also announced that work permits for international students’ spouses would only be available for those in master’s or doctoral programs.

And in January, Miller announced that Canada would impose a two-year cap on study permits, reducing the number of new study visas by 35 per cent.

At Conestoga, this will mean a massive reduction. The Ontario government has allocated the public college just 15,000 permits out of its national share — less than half of what was approved the previous year.

While many international students have applauded the changes, the shifting goalposts are also causing anger.

One 29-year-old Nigerian student said the spousal work visa change means his wife and two daughters can’t join him in Canada as he expected.

“I’m so angry,” said the student, who did not want to be named because of concerns he could face repercussions.

“You brought me here and told me I can bring them. Now I’m here and you’re telling me I can’t bring them.”

Another federal rule change could have a significant impact on those who are working full time.

Miller announced on Monday that the temporary waiver to the limit on work hours would expire as scheduled on Tuesday. In the fall, the federal government plans to implement a new cap of 24 hours a week.

“To be clear, the purpose of the international student program is to study and not to work,” Miller said.

The immigration minister said the new cap reflects the fact that the overwhelming majority of international students work more than 20 hours a week. At the same time, it keeps students from prioritizing work over school, he said.

“We know from studies as well that when you start working in and around 30-hour levels, there is a material impact on the quality of your studies,” Miller said.

For international students such as Powathu and Benny, it’s going to mean working about 16 hours less every week — a significant financial impact.

Prior to the announcement, Powathu and Benny both said a return to 20 hours would be untenable.

Asked if they’d survive, both said: “No.”

East Valley residents came out to discuss the Environmental Protection Agency’s investigation into a Mecca power plant over alleged violations of Clean Air rules.

Local advocacy group, Leadership Council, led tonight’s meeting to get the community involved as the first step toward finding a solution.

Located off of Highway 86 in Mecca, the Desert View Power Plant (which is operated by Greenleaf Power) has recently become the center of attention.

In June of 2022, Greenleaf Power received a Notice of Violation for allegedly violating the Clean Air Act and exposing nearby communities to toxic air pollutants which include Mercury, Hydrogen Chloride, Carbon Monoxide and much more.

If these pollutants do exceed the EPA’s standards, they can have big health and environmental effects to the areas surrounding it.

“My roots are here. My parents grew up here... I live in my house that I grew up in, said Mecca resident Leticia Becerra. "I have a lot of positive memories here and then I want it to stay that way.”

Becerra has lived in Mecca her whole life, and is just one of the several residents who are concerned about these alleged violations.

“I walk all around Mecca, you know. So I'm here, I'm thinking I'm being staying healthy breathing, the air walking in the mornings, going over a new bridge. And now, I wonder if maybe I was one of the ones that took more of that air?”

It’s what drove her to be a part of the Leadership Council’s community discussion on Tuesday, to understand more about how it could impact her hometown.

“The only people that's gonna affect is us here in the community. Nobody else you know, so we have to stand up and ask questions and have some answers," Becerra said.

Becerra says she plans on living in Mecca through retirement, and is worried about what the future could hold.

“It could affect us 10 years from now. So in 10 years from now, you know, it's going to be my kids, they're going to be affected. So we want it to be a safe for many other generations.”

Greenleaf Power has responded to the EPA investigation in a statement below:

Greenleaf Power acquired and has since 2011 operated Desert View Power (DVP), a net-45 megawatt woody biomass electrical generation facility located in the eastern Coachella Valley.

On June 22, 2022, DVP received a Notice of Violation (NOV) from the US EPA regarding alleged violations for hourly exceedances and stack tests. Since that time, DVP has conducted an extensive internal review of the NOV, including through retention of a third-party consultant. Following that review, DVP has engaged with EPA to review key technical and related information, and those discussions are continuing.

DVP continues to work with EPA towards a mutually acceptable resolution of the NOV. DVP likewise continues to work with EPA and other stakeholders to assure current and ongoing compliance with applicable permit limits.

Greenleaf Power LLC, Desert View Power

Stay with News Channel 3 for continuing coverage.

Imagine for a second that the Earth is a giant cake.

Painted Canyon — an awe-inducing section of the Mecca Hills Wilderness an hour from Palm Springs — is what it would look like if you drove a knife through 600 million years worth of natural history, and pulled a slice out.

Formed by the convergence of the San Andreas Fault’s two massive plates, it’s part of one of the most unusual geologic formations of its kind in the world (which there are a lot of on the outskirts of the high desert). A varicolored badlands labyrinth, it feels like a cross between the canyon that leads to the Grail Temple in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” and a menagerie of National Park wonders.

Everywhere you turn, there’s some stupid beautiful geologic marvel: towering boulder faces that make you feel like you’re in Yosemite, unreal cone formations that look like they were plucked right out of New Mexico’s Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks, or a matrix of water-carved canyons that rival Arizona’s magical Antelope Slot.

And in some cases, the geologic marvels are stacked one on top of another — you can very literally see what looks like very distinct fault line events.

I’m just here for the ladders though.

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It’s early on a Thursday morning in April when I pull up to the trailhead with my brother-in-law Mike after rumbling down 5 miles worth of harrowingly bumpy dirt roads on the outskirts of an agriculture town.

We finally roll to a stop at the trailhead in a makeshift desert parking lot with only a couple of other cars in it, and head out on foot into the canyon. Mashed rocks crunch underneath our feet as we trudge through a creepy quiet canyon that gets narrower and then wider and then narrower and then wider, until breaking off into a natural maze of small, steep slots that you’d probably never be able to traverse were it not for the ladders.

The first time I hiked Painted Canyon 17 years ago, some of the canyons still had wooden ladders that were varying degrees of dangerous (mostly the You Could Maybe Die If You Climb This degree), but those have since all been replaced entirely by aluminum ones.

I make my way safely up the first pair we encounter in the canyon and am sort of overcome by this feeling of cheating the system: climbing a decidedly not natural thing in a decidedly natural place to reach a place you wouldn’t otherwise be able to hike.

It’s like getting a backstage pass to nature.

The Mecca Hills Wilderness became part of the now over 109 million acre National Wilderness Preservation System in 1994, and the Bureau of Land Management oversees the 26,356-acre recreation area, but based on the three different times I’ve been there in three different decades, they don’t oversee it very often.

When I went in 2010 with my dad, who hiked the entire thing in jeans (we were not an outdoors family growing up), we found extra ladders that led nowhere, and on this morning’s drive into the canyon with Mike, we passed at least one aluminum ladder that was somehow folded over, like it was a prop from a Hulk movie.

Today, we make our way up only a small number of ladders, having missed one very important landmark at the beginning of a hike that otherwise doesn’t have any signage:

Missing that Giant Rock Arrow meant instead of a 5-mile loop through the rest of the ladder-filled labyrinth (which are really the best parts), we did an 8-mile, reception-less hike into the Mojave desert where we spent most of the time convincing ourselves that the screenshot we had of the trail map was kinda mimicking the giant wash we were wandering through.

“It looks like there are lots of footprints here; we’re definitely going the right way,” we said over and over again.

Except we weren’t, and discovered as much when I got a single cell phone bar back that revealed we were on the clear other side of the hills.

If you don’t miss the Giant Rock Arrow, though, you’ll weave your way through the cool, shaded, steep-walled canyon (which’ll make even the hottest desert day bearable), get assists from both ladders and ropes along the way, and finally pop out on the top, where you’ll get a pretty fantastic view of Mecca Hills.

In short, there's a natural wonder in the high desert that needs to be seen to be believed, but be sure to bring lots of water, keep an eye on the rock arrow, and, of course, enjoy the cake.

The Painted Canyon trailhead is located at Painted Canyon Road in Mecca, Calif., an hour southeast of Palm Springs. If you swing a left at the giant rock arrow, it's a great 5-mile loop. And always remember: Leave no trace.

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— I accidentally found California's best coastal hike — Forget the celebs: This posh town has some of California's most stunning hikes — How to get one of the best hikes in an amazing redwood park all to yourself — This underground hike leads to an abandoned Calif. gold mine — with gold left — The easiest, most eye-popping hike on the California coast — I went to one of California’s least-visited national parks and it was magical

Not so long ago, Burmese food was rare in California. Now dozens of restaurants across San Francisco are cooking samusa soup, mohinga and other favorites.

July 31, 2023

The line to be seated at Mandalay, a decades-old Burmese restaurant in San Francisco, spilled onto the sidewalk on a recent Saturday evening. Inside the festive dining room, customers huddled around rainbow-colored tea leaf salads, spicy noodle soups and flaky parathas served with coconut dip.

A five-minute walk away, more would-be diners waited in the evening chill for a table at Burma Superstar, another popular restaurant serving a long menu of dishes from Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

More than 10 eateries in the city specialize in Burmese food, at least by my count. In the larger Bay Area, there are dozens.

I was surprised to discover this. I recently moved to San Francisco from Los Angeles, where I almost never encountered Burmese food. The cuisine is a standby of the Bay Area’s culinary scene, with dishes like samusa soupand mohinga, a catfish stew, integrated into the region’s gastronomic vernacular.

So I was curious: How did this happen?

The legacy traces back at least 40 years, to Nan Yang, which opened in Oakland’s Chinatown in 1983. The restaurant, which closed in 2013, may have been the first full-fledged Burmese spot on the West Coast, The San Francisco Chronicle has reported.

Mandalay set up shop six months later, in the summer of 1984, on a quiet stretch of California Street in the Inner Richmond neighborhood of San Francisco, an Asian American neighborhood sometimes called the city’s second Chinatown.

“They wanted to introduce Burmese food to America,” Kevin Chen said of his family members who opened Mandalay. Chen took over the establishment, now the longest-operating Burmese restaurant in the Bay Area, from his uncle in 2003. “They started with a lot of difficulty — Americans didn’t know what Burmese food was.”

A wave of Burmese immigrants came to the United States after a 1962 military takeover of Burma’s government, and then again after a national uprising in 1988. By 1990, nearly two-thirds of U.S. immigrants from Myanmar lived in California, Jeanne Batalova, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said.

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Opening restaurants allows new immigrants to make a living, champion the food of their home country and create jobs for others from their community, she said. “It’s a very typical thing that immigrants often do,” she told me.

Sipping a cup of jasmine tea under purple and green parasols hung from the ceiling of his restaurant’s dining room, Chen told me that Burmese food was something of an amalgam of the flavors of India, Thailand and China, all of which border Myanmar. Many Americans are more familiar with those cuisines, which provided an entry point for San Franciscans. Early reviewers of Nan Yang and Mandalay relied on such touchstones to explain the restaurants’ stews and salads — and to help both restaurants attract legions of devotees.

“Without question, this is the best Burmese food I’ve ever eaten,” Bea Pixa wrote in The San Francisco Examiner in August 1984. “Honesty compels me to add that it’s also the first Burmese dinner I’ve ever eaten.”

But the success of a few Burmese restaurants in the 1980s doesn’t fully explain what’s going on now. According to Batalova, California’s Burmese immigrants are split about evenly between the Los Angeles region and the Bay Area. But so many more Burmese restaurants operate in the Bay Area.

For this final piece of the puzzle, we probably have to thank Burma Superstar.

The restaurant, on Clement Street in Inner Richmond, opened in 1992 but became a viral success after Joycelyn Lee bought it in 2000 with her husband at the time. Lee told me that when her family assumed ownership, Burmese food still felt like an uncomfortable novelty to many Americans. So she rebranded the dishes, pumped up the advertising, worked to attract American palates and sensibilities and spawned a new generation of Burmese restaurants in the Bay. Burma Superstar itself now has several spinoffs.

Without Burma Superstar, “I don’t believe we would have reached this level of popularity of Burmese food in the Bay Area,” Dennis Lin, who owns the nearby Burmese Kitchen, told The Infatuation. “All of our success goes back to what they were doing in the beginning.”

Chen also gives credit to Burma Superstar. But his restaurant retains its own longtime fans.

Many of Mandalay’s customers have moved to other parts of California, or to neighboring states, he told me. But when they visit family in the Bay Area, they always stop by Mandalay to have tea leaf salad or coconut chicken noodles. Burmese restaurants typically don’t exist in their new cities, he said.

They all tell him: “We miss your food.”

For more:

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What We’re Eating

CookingBasil-Butter PastaJuly 11, 2023

Where we’re traveling

Today’s tip comes from Neil Brown, who lives in Altadena. Neil recommends visiting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: “The (amazing!) Diego Rivera mural from the San Francisco Art Institute is on display at SFMOMA, and it’s on the ground floor, so no admission fee required!”

Tell us about your favorite places to visit in California. Email your suggestions to [email protected]. We’ll be sharing more in upcoming editions of the newsletter.

What we’re recommending

Fourteen new books coming in August.

And before you go, some good news

Marissa Bergmann was visiting New York from San Francisco in May 2021 when she met Retta Abraham. He sat down next to her at a rooftop party in Brooklyn and started chatting.

They turned out to have a lot in common. Their mothers are both of Japanese heritage, and their backgrounds had inspired in them both a vision of their future selves: to be surrounded by children and grandchildren.

Marissa, now 33, said that Retta, now 40, paused and reached out his hand: “Like in an old movie, he was like, ‘Do you want to fall in love?’” she said. “I wanted to say, ‘Yes, let’s do it,’ but I had to be cool, so I asked if we could dance first.”

They danced, and this month, they married.

Read their love story in The Times.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back tomorrow. — Soumya

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword.

Briana Scalia contributed to California Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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In 1953, 18-year-old Dennis Casebier was finishing Marine Corps boot camp in San Diego and preparing for deployment to Korea. But the Korean War ended in July of that year, before he was to ship out.

“The North Koreans must have found out I was coming,” Casebier says today. “Didn’t want to take their chances with me, I guess.”

The Marines sent Casebier to communications and electronics battalion school in San Diego instead, and later to a training center in Twentynine Palms in the Mojave Desert, near what is now Joshua Tree National Park. “That’s where I got the desert in my blood,” he says.

Casebier left the Marines and returned home to Kansas, where he studied mathematics and physics at Washburn University in Topeka. After graduation, in 1960, he took a job at the Navy’s guided missile laboratory in Corona (Riverside County).

Drawn by the remoteness and isolation of the East Mojave a couple hours away, Casebier bought an International Scout, picked up some U.S. Geological Survey maps and soon discovered a forgotten piece of California history: the Mojave Road.

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The road stretches across the desert for 130 miles between the Colorado River and Camp Cady on the Mojave River. It was part of an ancient trade route that for more than 1,000 years connected Mohave Indian settlements near the Colorado River to Chumash and Tongva villages. Explorers from Spain and North America, as well as the U.S. Army (which tried using camels here), later traveled the trail.

When trains came to the Mojave in 1883, westbound wagons and stagecoaches began following the railroad corridor, and the road was all but abandoned. In the decades since, the road has become a destination for off-roaders, but remains rugged.

“Early on I could see that it had a military history,” Casebier says. “But when I began looking into the desert literature, I realized that there was hardly anything written about it.”

Now 83 and living in Bullhead City, Ariz., Casebier has become the leading authority on the Mojave Road and an expert on California desert history. He calls it a “historic artifact.” He walked the entire thing in 1975 and has driven its full length multiple times. “I wore out several Jeep CJ-7s over the years,” he says. His book “Mojave Road Guide: An Adventure Through Time” remains the definitive resource for anyone planning a trip along the route.

Today, driving the road is the automotive equivalent of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail: slow-going, immersive and unforgettable. It follows a mostly direct course across the desert and ventures through valleys of creosote into stands of Joshua trees and up through craggy mountain passes. Stops along the way include the remains of old military posts built to defend water sources, panels of American Indian petroglyphs, and curiosities like the Rock House, a stone cabin constructed in 1929 and occupied by painter Carl Faber during the 1980s.

Casebier estimates that in most years maybe 2,000 people make the full journey. The hazards are manageable, though numerous. There are sandy areas where drivers can get stuck, while flat tires come with the territory. Summers are brutally hot, and temperatures plunge on surprisingly cold winter nights.

“It shouldn’t be your first trip in a four-wheel drive,” he says. “The Mojave Road requires self-reliance. This is a real adventure, so it’s not for everybody.”

Matt Jaffe is a Southern California writer specializing in California and the West. Email: [email protected]. Twitter: @mattjaffewriter.

Why drive it

The West has plenty of unpaved desert roads, but the Mojave Road offers a rare opportunity to follow a largely intact, major historic trail for an extended distance.

“I don’t know anything else like the Mojave Road,” Dennis Casebier says. “It stretches out before you, just as if the reins are in your hands in the 1850s and 1860s. You begin to feel its spirit.”

Get the guide

These days Casebier heads out only on shorter sections of the Mojave Road. But he used to lead caravans and organize four-wheel-drive outings the full length of the route. The vehicles were connected by CB radio, and he would narrate the journeys with running commentary about the road’s history and ecology.

Now in its fourth edition, Casebier’s guide “does for readers what I used to do over the radio for a number of years,” he says. “I’m not trying to push the book too hard, though I wrote the damn thing. But you must get the guidebook. If you don’t, you’re not doing the Mojave Road — might as well travel some other desert two-tracker.”

Safety first

Almost any four-wheel-drive vehicle can handle the road, but Casebier strongly advises driving with at least one other vehicle — never go solo. Cell phone coverage is spotty at best, so you should also be able to handle basic medical emergencies and vehicle repairs. He suggests that anyone driving the road should “file a flight plan” so that a friend or family member knows the itinerary. (Before setting out, check road and weather conditions with Mojave National Preserve.)

But the key, according to Casebier, is to take the road slowly. “It’s not the place to test your vehicle, or to display your prowess to drive off-road,” he says. “Give yourself two or three days. Relax, pay attention and don’t damage the backcountry.”

A favorite place

Casebier loves the variety of terrain the road passes through — from the Colorado River to the 5,000-foot elevations through the Mid Hills region of the Providence Mountains. “You’re going through the whole spectrum of Mojave Desert flora and fauna,” he says.

Casebier is a sucker for Joshua trees, as well as sites like Fort Piute, a remote military post built in 1867, with nearby American Indian petrogylphs. But the section he enjoys most is between Marl Springs and what’s called Seventeen Mile Point, near Soda Springs.

“You’re on Cima Dome. Suddenly the road goes over the divide, and laid out before you to the West is range after range of mountains,” Casebier says. “I had a tape of music from “How the West Was Won” that I would play as we went over the rise. Still gives me goosebumps.”

The California wine industry, including Napa Valley, boomed for 25 years. Then it entered a dramatic decline. Many wineries may go out of business.