Laid-Off City Employee, Struggles To Get Health Care For Teenage Daughter
THE HUFFINGTON POST, published July 22, 2010
“A couple of weeks ago I got discouraged,” said Special Terry, a nine-year veteran of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “My daughter said ‘I hope what happened to you doesn’t make you forget about your dreams and aspirations.’”
What happened to Terry was a worst case scenario. She knew that the Department had to lay some people off due to budget cuts, but she hoped she wasn’t one of them.
After all, Terry was one of the most experienced social workers in her office. She had been working for the Department for years as a public health educator and correctional counselor, transitioning people from jail back into their communities. She had skills. She was about to get a Master’s in Education from Long Island University.
In early May, however, together with three other colleagues, she received a letter. Her last day of work for the City was May 14. On that day she lost her health insurance as well.
Until that point, Terry, a 45-year-old single parent of two daughters, had done well for herself and her family. She was earning $1,352 every two weeks, enough to pay the $679 rent for low-income housing in the North Bronx and support her daughters. Her older daughter, Chrisshawmba, 22, graduated from college last year with a degree in Criminal Justice. Her younger one, Erica, 13, is in middle school.
But suddenly the only money she gets is $380 weekly from unemployment. Like many other New Yorkers battling the economic downturn, she entered a different, uncertain world. It’s a world where if your daughter gets sick, you don’t know how to pay for the hospital. It’s a world where you scramble to cover rent while desperately looking for jobs. And you have to do everything at the same time, quickly.
Terry has always made a point of was having good medical care for her children, but now, with health insurance gone, she just prays that her kids don’t get ill. In early July, however, an insect bit her daughter, sending her to the emergency room. When Terry told the doctors she had no insurance, they panicked, she said, and told her to apply for Medicaid. But because she collects unemployment she is ineligible for Medicaid. Her daughter feels better, but Terry is worried about the medical bill waiting around the corner.
Terry is also concerned about her younger brother’s son, Dejon, the sick, two-year-old boy she is raising. Dejon’s mother passed away last August, and nobody else can care for him. Born prematurely, Dejon’s lungs never developed completely. In the last 11 months he has had three hospitalizations for pneumonia.
For Terry, who had never experienced unemployment before, the most humiliating aspect of her new life was applying for food stamps. She felt other people would see her as someone who exploits the system, rather than as someone who needs a little help to get back on her feet.
“When people lose their jobs and go to agencies where people receive on-going assistance, they kind of view you like you are a loser,” said Terry, who feels she is not begging, only getting her due. She eventually successfully applied online for food stamps through LIFT, a non-profit organization whose stated mission is to combat poverty and expand opportunity.
In between tending to the baby, counting her pennies at the grocery store, and showing up in court to get her rent adjusted to match her new, lowered income, Terry frantically scours the internet for jobs.
In two months she has scored three interviews, including one with Odyssey House, a drug treatment center based in New York City. But she has still received no callbacks. The memory of the lost job she loved motivates Terry to keep looking for positions and keeps depression at bay.
Terry will get her Master’s in Education in September. She is confident she will land some job by the end of August. She also still hasn’t given up on her dream, founding an organization to help integrate formerly incarcerated people back into her neighborhood, the Edenwald Projects in the North Bronx.
That brings her back to her daughter’s words about her aspirations, which make her feel better.
“I’m gonna get back out there again,” she said. “It’s just a matter of time.”
Teachers learn write from wrong at this cursive class
THE HUFFINGTON POST, published 6 November, 2009
A group of Brooklyn teachers went back to school this week for some vital retraining. Computer skills? New Math? No, good old-fashioned handwriting.
About 70 educators attended a workshop at Boerum Hill’s PS 261 on Pacific Street on Tuesday organized by Handwriting Without Tears, a national group that hopes to keep handwriting from becoming a lost art in an age of standardized testing and emphasis on keyboard skills.
“Let’s learn pencil grasp,” shouted the workshop leader, Diane Eldridge, starting off with that most-basic of skills because, she said, she recently saw a child holding a pencil as if it were a Stone Age tool.
Several teachers nodded knowingly. Others stared at the chalk with puzzled faces. A couple, looking slightly embarrassed, glanced down at their pens to see if, they too, were guilty of the offense.
Eldridge told teachers that the key is preparing to hold a pen properly.
“Writing is like scuba diving,” she said. “Before jumping into the ocean, you need to jump into a pool.”
During the workshop, teachers were asked to bang wooden sticks, clap their hands and sing — all strategies for preparing kids for the act of writing.
“Pick up a crayon, this is easy to do. I just tell my fingers what to do,” sang Eldridge. “My thumb is bent, pointer points to the tip, tall man uses his side, I tuck my last two fingers in and take them for a ride.”
All this fun, games and re-education doesn’t come cheaply — PS 261 Principal Zipporiah Mills spent $17,000 this year to get her staff up to speed on teaching cursive writing — but parents definitely approve.
“It’s a lost art,” said Klara Carames, co-president of the Parent Teacher Association at PS 261. “Nobody teaches cursive anymore, and I’m glad the school is offering this program.”
At the end of the workshop, the happiest students were indeed the teachers themselves.
Claudia Rivera, a 30-year-old special education teacher at PS 261, had entered the room typing quickly on the keyboard of her Blackberry. When she left, she was drawing a neat capital “D” on a mini-blackboard.
She looked like she had re-adjusted to the ancient tool called chalk.
A version of this story appeared in print on November 13, 2009, on page 13 of The Brooklyn Paper.
Haitian Remittances Decreasing With Economic Struggle
THE HUFFINGTON POST, published 20 May, 2009
Gertha Brice shielded herself from the rain beneath a narrow awning in East Flatbush. Sunday services had just ended at Zelateurs Union Baptist Church and Brice, in a cheerful pink suit, chatted with fellow Haitian-American parishioners about the less cheerful economy. Next door, an empty Western Union money transfer office stood as a testament to their complaints that a bad economy in New York makes for a dire situation in Haiti.
“Now the money’s gone,” Brice said, prompting nods of agreement. “But of course,” she said, “we send home what we can.”
Remittances, the money Haitians living abroad manage to send to Haiti, make up a crucial part of the small country’s economy. At least 20 percent of their Gross Domestic Product comes from remittances, mostly from Haitians living in the United States, according to statistics from the International Monetary Fund. Remittances to Haiti had been increasing steeply for the past decade but took a dramatic dip this January falling to $69 million from $104 million the previous month.
Despite a slight bump in remittances in February and March, which industry experts attribute to tax-refund season, the World Bank, IMF, Inter-American Development Bank and money transfer offices are all predicting a thinning flow of remittance money into Haiti, resulting from the global economic downturn.
This comes at a bad time for Haiti, still struggling with a multimillion dollar clean-up from last summer’s hurricane season, which destroyed over 100,000 homes, spiked inflation and stunted economic growth.
The circumstances following the storms were so dire, they prompted President René Préval to request that former President George W. Bush grant undocumented Haitians in the United States, Temporary Protected Status. This would protect them from immediate deportation back to a country that can’t afford the burden of more mouths to feed. Bush rejected the request, though the Obama administration is giving it consideration.
Back in Brooklyn, where just under 15 percent of the estimated 800,000 Haitians in the U.S. live, people are doing what they can to help their families back home, though a struggling economy is making it difficult.
Jean Lazarre, a 54-year-old Brooklyn resident who is the principle breadwinner for his wife and three children here and extended family in Haiti kept his job but still feels the affects of the recession, which he calls “the disease.”
“Before the disease, I used to send $150 to $200 home each month. But now we cannot do that. We do not make enough to help them out. But we do as much as we can. Instead of doing nothing, we send $50, $75, $100, because they really need help.”
Lazarre has been sending money back to his mother, brother and extended family since leaving Haiti in 1982, but is finding it more difficult after having his hours slashed to four days a week at Steinway and Sons Piano Company, where he has worked as a machine operator for twenty-two years. He says he feels bad about sending less.
“They really depend on us over here,” he said. “I know that every time I reduce the money over here, they suffer over there.”
Bernard Angel, another Haitian living in Brooklyn finds himself in a similar situation. A 12-hour shift driving his taxicab around Manhattan used to yield $200. Now, he’s comes home with just $150 and has slashed remittances to family.
“The other day I sent $60 for three of them. That’s $20 each. That’s like for one day. After twenty-four hours they’ll need more money, because there’s no jobs.”
According to the World Food Program, more than three-quarters of Haitians live on less than 2 dollars a day, and though food prices have come down since last year when gas prices drove food prices up internationally, hunger remains an alarming problem.
Unitransfer, a popular remittance service used by Haitians, has seen more and more clients in Lazarre and Angel’s position and fewer dollars going through their wires.
“The average used to be $160 per transaction,” said Jean-Mar Piguion, VP of sales and marketing at Unitransfer, on the phone from Florida headquarters. “Now it’s $140 and we expect that number to continue to go down.”
Despite the dismal economic forecast and the dismal, gray skies of East Flatbush, Jean Lazarre remained upbeat. “The economy will be strong again,” he said with a grin. “And then we can help them the way we used to.”
Published with Emily Feldman
Zimbabwe’s Poor Healthcare System Causing Humanitarian Crisis
THE HUFFINGTON POST, published 7 April, 2009
When the American doctor Richard Sollom went into a Zimbabwean hospital outside of the capital city Harare last December, an auditorium-size room was crammed with patients affected by cholera. A few minutes later, frantically waving his arms a slim man introduced himself.
“Are you looking for a doctor?,” he said with a laugh. “There are no doctors here. I am a nurse, I am running the place”.
Sollom asked this man — who wanted to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal — about supplies, in particular surgical gloves and other protective wear.
“Well, I keep one pair at my house,” Sollom reported the nurse as saying. “It was just a proud possession, because there are so few, that he kept his one pair of latex gloves in his home. The only thing they had well stocked in his hospital was condoms.”
The ferocious cholera epidemic, spread by water contaminated with human excrement, has killed more than 4,000 people across Zimbabwe since last August. But according to experts like Sollom, a doctor of an emergency delegation sent to Zimbabwe by the medical non-profit organization Physicians for Human Rights, this is the symptom of a worse illness, the collapse of a long-admired health system that only a few years ago was regarded as one of the most efficient in Africa.
The Physicians for Human Rights report spells out that the most basic functions of a government - clean water, sanitation and health care delivery - have collapsed in Zimbabwe. Hospitals are shutting down, like the organs of a dehydrated cholera victim. The health system had been spiraling downward for a decade, but it has deteriorated alarmingly since President Robert Mugabe’s defeat in the 2008 presidential elections. Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, won the majority vote, but was pulled out of the subsequent runoff vote because of violence against his supporters.
“Public health clinics are quite dilapidated,” said Sollom at a recent UN press conference in New York. “There is no electricity, no clean water, no supplies.”
In addition to the widely reported cholera epidemic, the report highlights increases in maternal mortality, growing malnutrition, unchecked tuberculosis, outbreaks of anthrax and, above all, disruption in HIV/AIDS treatment.
According to the report, 400 people die of AIDS every day in Zimbabwe. But now the situation is growing worse for people who have advanced cases of AIDS. They need a combination of drugs — but because of a breakdown in the country’s drug distribution system, the supplies are irregular and people are given whatever is available.
“This is a very dangerous practice,” said Prof. Chris Beyrer, director of the Center for Public Heath and Human Rights at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “This way you quickly develop resistance to these drugs; then they don’t work for you. But also if you were to transmit that resistant virus to another person, these drugs wouldn’t work for them right at the start.”
This dynamic undermines any retroviral-drug program and spirals into a larger issue, Professor Beyrer said.
“In the last two years, more than three million Zimbabweans fled the country, and for the most part are now in South Africa, the most AIDS-affected country on the planet,” Professor Beyrer added. “In this region, drug-resistant HIV could really be an enormous problem.”
What makes the situation worse is that in Zimbabwe few doctors are left. Hospitals run by young nurses are not an exception. They are almost the norm.
“People have left at all levels of society, especially from the educated, leadership levels,” said Peter Godwin, a Zimbabwean author who wrote the 2007 book ‘When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa’. “A person’s level of tolerance is directly related to your ability to leave. So if you’ve got a medical degree and lots of experience as a doctor and you have a number of job offers on your desk, you got pretty low tolerance for bad government. You don’t have to put up with that dysfunction, you have a choice, you can leave.”
The collapse of Zimbabwe’s health system has created a humanitarian crisis
in a country where people are already suffering from a crippling hyperinflation (a percentage of 8 followed by 18 zeros last December) and severe food, fuel and foreign currency shortages.
Morgan Tsvangirai was finally sworn-in as prime minister of a unity government on February 11 — thanks to a political deal brokered by the South African Development Community — while the octogenarian President Robert Mugabe maintained the post he had held since independence from Britain in 1980. Since then, however, little has changed.
In a 2008 report, the UN Development Program (UNDP) estimated that about $5 billion would be required to kick-start the economy and consequently rebuild the health system. But an unpleasant reality is dawning on Zimbabwe’s inclusive government: Those able to give money for the country’s reconstruction just do not have it.
The country’s main donors — the United States and the European Union — have adopted a wait-and-see approach before releasing any funds for economic reconstruction.
A version of this article appeared on the website of the United Nations Association of the United States of America (UNA-USA) on January 21, 2oo9
The audio slideshow also appeared on the website of UNA-USA on January 21, 2oo9