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I Am Seattle Center-Mana and Mana

MANA LEE and MANA CRAWFORDS are members of the Technical Facility Maintenance crew.  They have cleaned together at Seattle Center, where they met, for the past nine years.

MANA L: “We have fun. We do the job, and we have fun. It’s diversity. It doesn’t matter who you are, we bring different countries all together. It doesn’t matter what color you are. We love everybody. Me and [Mana C], we connect, we work together, we bond, and we do the job.

Life is easy. Life is good. When it’s time to go for your weekend, you go, but two days later you can hardly wait to come back so that we can see everybody’s happy face.  We start at 4:30am, we get up at two-something almost three o’clock, ready to go. When you walk in the door you ‘hello hello hello hello,’ and put on your smile. If you have a problem, always hang that by the door. When you walk in, big smile, everything’s going to be fine. We don’t bring our problems here. We leave it.”

MANA C: “We work together. We get to know other people. We get to know their culture and respect at the same time. They become our second family. It’s neat to learn about their cultures. Because my culture’s different too. I’m Samoan, I have differences, but we respect each other’s culture.  We bring our food and we share. That’s another thing about our team, our crew–we all eat together, we all bring our different food and share it, especially when we have our potluck, and everybody brings their own dish.

I have white grandkids, black grandkids. And I love it– it doesn’t matter who you are. I love different cultures, and I love to taste different foods. That’s the main thing. If you put love in your heart, and a smile, everything will be fine.”

#IAmSeattleCenter #TFM #DifferentCultures #respect #smile #worktogether #potluck