I didn’t travel to the United States to find God. I went to write about farm workers.

But in the orchards and onion fields, in the darkened supermarkets at dawn where laborers gathered over black coffee and cheap tacos, in the pesticide-soaked nurseries where a woman lost her sight, and in a quiet church where I wept for all the injustices I had seen—God found me.

I went to tell their stories. I didn’t expect their stories would change mine.

At the time, I was an investigative journalist working on a book project. Not long after, I was feeling what my wife called “burnout”—and what I called “soul tiredness.” These days, I split my time between farming, writing and raising a family with my wife on our farm in the Irish midlands. But back then, in January and February 2020—just weeks before the Covid-19 shutdown—I was traveling across the United States, documenting the lives and struggles of migrant farm workers in the country’s fields and orchards.

The journey began in Washington, D.C., where I listened to policy experts explain what I might encounter. From there, I traveled to Florida, then gradually made my way west to California.

Farming is something I understand. I help run our family’s organic beef and sheep farm, and this journey to the United States was a return of sorts to an older part of my life. I had been telling the stories of farmworkers for over a decade as an investigative reporter in Australia. In that job, I had camped out in the Australian outback with Aboriginal communities and taken testimony from stranded Tamil refugees fleeing the end of their civil war in Sri Lanka. They might have been peoples on the fringes of life but they were real people who taught me a great deal about being a reporter but also being a human being. They gave me an insight that just despite one’s situation one can have happiness and knowledge within them. That we all have something to share with the world.

But this trip was different. It was a journey in a nation I love—but one that revealed a side I hadn’t seen before.

There are countless moments that, even five years later, stick out in my mind. To protect the identities and safety of those who shared their stories, all names in this piece have been changed.

What I Saw

In the small town of Immokalee, Fla., at 5 a.m., I came face to face with the people I had come to write about. It was pitch dark and cold as I began to talk to teenagers and elderly farm workers from Mexico and Central America, all hoping to get a day’s work at a hiring fair.

The men and women stood outside a small supermarket, spending their few dollars on black coffee and cheap tacos. For some, it would be all the food they would eat until the nightfall came again.

Immokalee means “your home” in the Mikasuki language of the Seminole people who once ruled this place. But it is no home—only a holding pen for the laborers, a place from which new volleys of labor are launched each day against the orange groves and watermelon fields that rule this land.

It was a tough place but the people were warm and giving, sharing their stories with me openly. Earlier in the trip I had broken bread with Mexican farm workers and in those meals we talked of love and life, things beyond the fruit and vegetable fields; they showed me they had rich inner lives and dreams. The dreams were in many cases the same as my own home ownership, a steady job, a good life for their children.

The light lifted, and Immokalee bared itself to my eyes. The Azteco mart was a flurry of life. People were ordering food for the day ahead, others were drinking coffee or energy drinks and despite the toughness of the situation people were smiling and sharing news. It made me think of the hiring fairs I had heard my grandparents talk about in their day back in rural Ireland. A day’s work was a great thing, a blessing that not everyone gets. There was happiness and hardship in equal measure but the people were brave and warm and that has stayed with me.

“Today I hope to work,” said José, 56-year-old man, his toothless mouth visible as he spoke. He had a kind face, a warm face, a face that was lived in. If he was lucky, he would make $50. He had already spent $10 on food that morning.

Rafael, my Mexican guide, weaved through the crowd. Now a labor organizer, this 6-foot-tall Mexican had spent 15 years as a fruit picker.

At the street corner, Mateo, a 10-year-old Guatemalan boy stood defiantly.

“I am 18 years old,” he lied, thinking I was a federal inspector.

Only here can a 10-year-old work in the fields and think this a better life.

His money—$90 to $100 a day—is sent back to his family.

José pulled me aside. “This is child labor,” he said. “This is illegal.” He wasn’t confessing; he was condemning, naming what so many knew but few dared to speak, knowing how desperately these farmworkers, even underage children, depended on the work.

Scenes like this greeted me throughout my journey across states, from onion pickers in Arizona to grape pickers in California. A few days later, in the Everglades, I met Luisa, a Mexican woman. She was a former farmworker who had been blinded by pesticide exposure. She sued and received a settlement, most of which she gave to an advocacy group to help other farmworker women.

These scenes—and others—were hard to wrap my head around. And yet, one thing guided the people I met: their faith. Faith that life would get better; faith that they could support their families back home; faith in God.

In El Paso, Texas, near the border with Juárez, I heard about a massacre that had taken place just a few months earlier inside a Walmart. The shooter later told authorities he targeted Mexicans and chose El Paso, a border city, “to dissuade Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants from coming to the United States,” according to a February 2023 statement from the U.S. Department of Justice announcing his guilty plea. He killed 23 people—most, but not all, Mexican Americans—in what became the deadliest attack on Latino people in modern U.S. history.

Now standing inside that Walmart, I was overcome with emotion. I thought of those—mostly Latinos—who labor in the fields. They were the hands and feet of America’s vast agriculture industry, yet they are so often treated not as our neighbors, our sisters and brothers, but as the enemy.

I took a break from my research group and stepped into a church in the city, where I met the parish priest—a gentle man. We spoke about the plight of the farmworkers. I told him I had witnessed a deportation: from the rooftop of a nearby building, I had watched people brought in by bus to a detention center, lined up, processed and taken away. I also told him about another farmworker I’d learned about, who had died in a workplace accident in Washington state. And on and on I went, unfurling my story. It all felt a world away from the quiet life I was now living in Ireland.

We spoke for a time and he blessed me. Then, I prayed in that quiet church—for all the people I had met; all the plights and sadness I had encountered. I had been reading about the need for a “church of the poor,” but another phrase Pope Francis often used stuck with me: “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”

What I learned

When I look back on that time, I see now that faith comes in different forms. Sometimes it is quiet and peaceful; at others, it is a call to shout, to speak out, to be a witness and hear God’s word even if that is hard to take.

In that church in El Paso, I heard the cry of the poor. God had brought me here not only to hear from the people of the land—but to meet the people of God.

When I finished my journey in California a few weeks later, I was shaken and dreamed often about the people I had met. Their stories stayed with me. What remains too is the greatness of ordinary people. Despite many of their situations they were hopeful about the future and their children’s future. As much as I remember the suffering I also remember the smiles and warmth. They took me, an Irish farmer and reporter, into their world and told me their truth. A gift that not everyone can get and for that I am deeply humbled and happy. In the years since, I have written three books. Each one tells the stories of the farmworkers I met; each one reveals the ways I met God through them. Maybe that was my call to action—to hear the cry Pope Francis spoke of. My answer was to spread the word in my books, to highlight what was wrong.

Father Francis Gray was a relative of mine from my home county, where he spent most of his life and ministry. But decades earlier, he had spent time ministering to the Navajo people. In a letter I read years later—shared with me by my friend and parish priest, Father Sean Casey—he wrote that sometimes we do not know why we come to a place, but that reason comes over time.

I had come to tell a story, but what I found was a truth that defied easy telling. That journey changed the way I live out my faith. Now, I found myself on a road that says speaking out is, at times, the only Christian thing to do.

I often think of that church in El Paso—of the prayers I offered there and the answers that came back. What was stirred in me then remains to this day: a blessing and a call. The call is now my mission to speak up for the people of the land and also to say that these are real people, people who have dignity and hope in their beings. Hope can lift us and I have always tried to tell not only the hard stories but the positive ones. It’s about the quiet greatness of real people. But real people also need our voices now more than ever. It is not always easy to speak out, but isn’t that what we Christians are called to do—to speak out against injustice, to hear and heed the cry of the poor, and then to take action?

John Connell is a multi award winning and bestselling Irish author. His books include The Farmers Son and The Lambing Season. He is an organic farmer on his family's farm in the Irish midlands. He also works as a journalist and documentary maker.