Occupy UC Davis protesters set up camp, plan to stay for Thanksgiving

By Chloe Kim,
HUB Editor-in-Chief–

Article courtesy The Davis Enterprise

The weather is chilly, and the UC Davis Quad has largely emptied of the thousands of students present at the general assembly on Monday. But a significant number of hardy protesters are still there, surrounded by a small village of tents, set up to establish a more permanent presence for Occupy UCD on campus.

These protesters have developed a close community to help camp life run smoothly. The campers delegate responsibilities to committees, which are organized freely into groups in charge of various aspects of camp life such as food, communications, logistics and first aid.
The tents number more than 100, according to estimates based on a Tuesday night count.

About 200 tents donated through an Amazon.com wish list have arrived and are being erected as needed, according to Bernie Goldsmith, an Occupy UCD supporter.

Notably, activist filmmaker Michael Moore’s sister Anne, a producer on three of his films, visited the encampment on Wednesday, Goldsmith said.

Moore, a vocal supporter of the Occupy movement, recently commented to MSNBC about the pepper-spraying of protesters at UCD:
”This was just 11 students in a not very well-known UC campus. And the images of this have resonated around the world in the same way that the lone young man standing in front of the tanks at Tiananmen Square resonated.”

The number of campers at UCD was expected to decline on Thanksgiving, camper Mikee Preston, 27, predicted Wednesday.

“People will want to rejuvenate their souls and spend time with family. We’re all for that,” Preston said.

UCD senior Valentina Cekovski was among those planning to leave for Thanksgiving.

“I’m visiting a friend in San Jose. We planned this ages ago, and it’s my birthday tomorrow,” Cekovski said. “But then I’m coming back.”

However, a significant number of protesters — as many as 40, according to a Wednesday head count — were prepared to stay in camp for the holiday. Plans were in the works for a Thanksgiving meal on the Quad.

“Individual families are cooking meals and bringing in food at 2 p.m.,” Preston said Wednesday.

For 26-year-old Ryan Mars of Sacramento, the sense of community at the encampment made staying for Thanksgiving worth it.

“I’m not going to be alone for the holidays. There’s going to be a lot of people out here anyway. And people should stay out and watch the camp, and make sure things are OK,” Mars said.

Donations from community members have helped significantly, Preston said.

“Manpower-wise, we’ve been doing really good,” he said.

Food donations have been steadily streaming in since the beginning of the camp. On Wednesday, UCD Chancellor Linda Katehi personally spent more than $500 to purchase 75 meals from the ASUCD Coffee House for the protesters.

In addition to food donations, the encampment has other necessary basics, such as temporary restrooms provided by the university and a first-aid tent staffed by volunteers.

“[The first-aid tent] is open 24 hours. We have hot packs, Band-Aids, all the basics,” said first-aid volunteer Shannon Carter, a UCD sophomore.

On Wednesday, Carter handed out fliers with health and safety tips such as “dress in layers” and “stay hydrated.” The flier also included information on what to do in case the campers were pepper-sprayed: “Blink as much as possible.”

“Most of us are just volunteers. Some of us are EMTs,” Carter said. “We’re organizing training sessions on basic health and safety.”

The encampment is not without its hiccups, however.

For example, protester Sarah Thomas, 33, cited the bitter cold as a defining characteristic of her experience camping.

“Cold. Community. And very awesome, actually,” Thomas said. “But mostly cold.”

“I didn’t bring enough blankets last night,” Cekovski added. “But I’ll fix that.”

The food committee also has been struggling with the lack of cooking tools and kitchen space to feed the campers, according to Preston.

“We’ve been cooking in random kitchens wherever we can,” Preston said. “One of our biggest problems is we don’t have refrigerator space. We need food-safe buckets. Being part of the kitchen staff, it’s a stress not having utensils to cook with. A camp kitchen, that’d be really great.”

The student protesters also have another element to juggle while camping: schoolwork. The majority of students at the camp are still attending class and working at their jobs as they protest overnight.
This hasn’t been too much of a difficulty, according to UCD junior Maxx Bartko, a political science major.

“I’m pretty sure that a lot of students can identify with this: I procrastinate,” Bartko said. “So instead of maybe playing video games, and hanging out on Facebook, that’s been replaced with being here. I still do my homework late at night.”

Cekovski also has had a fairly easy time fitting in schoolwork, she said.
“There’s Internet access, so I can do homework on the lawn,” she said. “I’m still going to work. This week it’s been pretty easy. My teachers did cancel some classes.”

“It might get a little heavier around finals week, though,” she admitted.

Not all campers are UCD students, however. A sizeable chunk of protestors from other cities’ Occupy movements have come to Davis to show solidarity.

Mars and Thomas, for example, were involved with Occupy Sacramento before coming to UCD.

Mars says he chose to camp in Davis because “there’s a lot more support in Davis than we have in Sacramento right now.”

Matti Gallegos of Santa Cruz came to Davis after seeing the pepper-spray incident on the news.

“I love it. My tent is so nice. I pimped it out and it’s beautiful. It’s so much cleaner and nicer than Occupy Santa Cruz,” said Gallegos, 19.

For the protesters, the cause, as well as the sense of community, is well worth the trials of camping.

“This is standing up for our constitutional rights,” Preston said. “America is a beautiful place and I want to help make it continue to be beautiful. My good friend was sprayed on Friday. That’s why I’m here.”

Bartko has been following the Occupy movement since its inception on Wall Street two months ago. He believes camping overnight is his way to contribute to a movement that is the “first gasp of my generation saying, ‘You know what? No. No, I think we can do better,’ ” he said.

“I didn’t come here to just nod at people and passively acknowledge their existence like I do every day,” Bartko said. “There’s a real sense of neighborliness here that I’m just not familiar with. I’ve never seen it before in my life. I understand that there was this sense of community that people felt way back when that seems to have been undermined, that we’re trying to bring back. That’s what I get out of being here.”

Enterprise staff writer Cory Golden contributed to this story.