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.”
Boomerangers: Meet College Grads Who Have Moved Back Home
THE HUFFINGTON POST, published June 22, 2010
In the film Tiny Furniture a 22-year-old girl called Aura returns home to her artist mother in a TriBeCa loft with a useless film theory degree, 357 hits on her YouTube page, and her tail between her legs.
Throwing away her clogs, she dives into a new life very similar to the one she had before college. She steals $20 bills out of her mother’s Prada purse, parties on East Village fire escapes, and drinks her mom’s wine.
Roughly put, that’s the story of Lena Dunham, who wrote, directed, and played the leading role in this movie, which received the narrative film prize at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference. It’s also the story of an increasing number of young New Yorkers who live with their parents to save money while trying to launch their careers.
“The advantages of living at home are myriad,” Dunham said. “The tangible are food, laundry, magazine subscriptions, someone to nurse you when you are sick; the intangible are warmth, support, humor, and the feeling of being truly home.”
In 1980, 11 percent of 25-34 year-olds in New York lived in multi-generational households. By 2008 that number had jumped to 20 percent, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center.
In Manhattan the number of people in this age group living in their parents’ homes increased by 40 percent from 2000 to 2008, all the more evidence that it has become more socially acceptable to return home to mom and dad.
This phenomenon has been accentuated by almost two years of a weak economy. Some of the laid-off young adults went back to living at home to save cash, as did recent graduates looking for jobs that are not there or going through diabolic cycles of unpaid internships.
Raised in New York, Sara Allen graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design with a BFA in writing last March. Then she had two fancy internships in New York, one at a public relations firm, the other at a high-end event planning firm. But nothing came out of them, and she is now living with her parents in Sugar Hill, a small town tucked in the mountains of New Hampshire, where they recently started a bed-and-breakfast.
“It’s a little bit like living in a fish tank here,” she said over Skype, during a break from looking for jobs on LinkedIn and Twitter. “But right now I can’t afford living on my own in New York. It’s expensive.”
These sons and daughters of baby boomers who have come back home after college for economic reasons have been labeled by some sociologists as “boomerangers,” signaling a new type of relationship between parents and their offspring.
“Parents should treat them like adults, and they should come back home expecting that they will have to behave like adults,” said Susan Morris Shaffer, an educator for more than 35 years and co-author of the parenting guide, Mom, Can I Move Back In With You? “They should treat their parents the way they would roommates, not expecting them to do their laundry or have dinner on the table.”
One of the hot issues for boomerang parents is whether or not to charge rent. Some parents charge their children no rent. Some ask for a market rate rent, others for a percentage of their children’s income, and a few have devised an escalating rent scheme to put a bit of pressure on them.
Experts like Linda Perlman, a psychotherapist who co-authored Mom, Can I Move Back In With You? and the mother of a successful boomeranger, thinks that making children pay rent is only one way to teach them financial responsibility.
“The whole point of staying at home is to save money so that they can get out,” she said. “Rather than financially, they can give back in kind; they could cook dinner, clean a little bit after dinner, give a ride to a sister to the gym.”
That’s more or less what happens at the Dunhams’, where Lena doesn’t pay rent but tries to contribute to household chores.
“I take out the trash, wash the dishes, pick up milk from the store, keep my music down,” she said. “It’s a real team effort.”
Living with your parents after college and asking them for spending money after your teen years have long been regarded as something only losers do and something kids and parents should be ashamed of. But the recession has taken away much of that stigma.
“We would have rather been homeless than been back with our parents,” said Shaffer. “Now it’s not a failure if your child has to move back.”
For young adults like Allen and Dunham, it certainly wasn’t shameful.
“It would have been more shameful struggling in Bushwick obscurity just to prove a point,” Dunham said. “I really like my parents, and they have excellent taste in food, décor and media. So they presented a better roommate option than most.”
In some ways, the economic downturn has brought America closer to Europe in terms of parents supporting kids in their twenties, although the United States is still far from challenging countries like Italy, the long-established land of mammoni, mama’s
boys who don’t think twice about having their mothers wash their clothes or cook their food well into their thirties.
“If my kid asks me something like that, I’m gonna whack him on the side of his head,” Shaffer said. “But parents should stop whining about their kids being at home, make it a win-win situation, and turn it into an opportunity to coach them a little bit more.”
Rare Bookstore, Skyline Books, Closes Doors After 20 Years
DAILY NEWS, published 3 February, 2010
Say goodbye to yet another dusty, musty piece of vanishing Manhattan.
All that’s now left of Skyline Books is a sign in the window reading “End of an Era. Thanks for 20 Great Years.”
That’s how long Robert Warren’s used book store at 13 W. 18th St. lasted - a kind of hole-in- the-wall home to a universe of rare books, from first editions of Beat Generation classics like “The Dharma Bums,” to pornographic Italian comics to an autographed copy of Charles Bukowski’s “Post Office.”
But last Saturday, Warren, 55, bid the neighborhood farewell. He says he can’t afford to renew the lease, which increased by more than 50%.
“The evils are three,” he said, combing through a copy of an $8,000 first edition of “Les Americans” by Robert Frank. “The big book chains, Amazon.com and online auctions like eBay.”
For years, the Bronx native collected books, scouting for them at fairs and estate sales.
Warren says Skyline Books was his life, its employees his family, among them his “fiancée,” Linda, a 12-year-old, 15-pound gray tabby cat fond of jumping the shelves.
“Linda is the manager in command,” said human store manager Christopher Cosgrove. “She is cold with dogs but super-friendly with customers.”
“You know why I come here?” asked Joseph Jesselli, a reporter for thesmokinggun.com, a couple of days before the closing. “For the creaking floor, the dust, the feeling of a book in your hands.”
Others would show up just to meet other bibliophiles.
“This place was a communion between people who love books and history,” said Jennifer Parkhurst, a former English teacher who was flipping through “First Selected Poems” by William Packard, whom she called a friend.
Last week, Warren was walking around his racks, reshuffling travel guides and philosophy pamphlets, making sure they were not trashed by customers.
“For them, they are just books,” he said, picking up a children’s tale, “Horseshoe Tree” by Lucy Daniels and stroking it. “But I know them one by one.”
Warren plans to donate most of his collection - about 10,000 books valued at $75,000 - to New Alternatives, a nonprofit that works with homeless kids. Warren says he wants to share his treasure trove with younger generations.
For himself, Warren will only keep a bright red poster, a Republican banner from the Spanish Civil War, which he plans to put in his living room. Many customers had inquired about buying the poster, but were rebuffed by the steep asking price - $10,000. That’s a joke, because it’s actually not for sale.
“Sometimes there are things that have no price,” Warren said. “Like this shop; it was my baby.”
Karina Ioffee contributed reporting and editing
I’m Innocent. Just Check My Status on Facebook.
THE NEW YORK TIMES, published 11 November, 2009
The message on Rodney Bradford’s Facebook page, posted at 11:49 a.m. on Oct. 17, asked where his pancakes were. The words were typed from a computer in his father’s apartment in Harlem.
At the time, the sentence, written in street slang, was just another navel-gazing, cryptic Facebook status update — meaningless to anyone besides Mr. Bradford. But when Mr. Bradford, 19, was arrested the next day as a suspect in a robbery at the Farragut Houses in Brooklyn, where he lives, the words took on greater importance. They became his alibi.
His defense lawyer, Robert Reuland, told a Brooklyn assistant district attorney, Lindsay Gerdes, about the Facebook entry, which was made at the time of the robbery. The district attorney subpoenaed Facebook to verify that the words had been typed from a computer at an apartment at 71 West 118th Street in Manhattan, the home of Mr. Bradford’s father. When that was confirmed, the charges were dropped.
“This is the first case that I’m aware of in which a Facebook update has been used as alibi evidence,” said John G. Browning, a lawyer in Dallas who studies social networking and the law. “We are going to see more of that because of how prevalent social networking has become.”
With more people revealing the details of their lives online, sites like Facebook, MySpaceand Twitter are providing evidence in legal battles.
Up to now, social networking activity has mostly been used as prosecutorial evidence, Mr. Browning said. He cited a burglary case in September in Martinsburg, Pa., in which the burglar used the victim’s computer to log on to Facebook and forgot to log off. The police followed the digital trail to Jonathan G. Parker, 19, who was arrested.
As part of his defense, a suspect in an Indiana murder case, Ian J. Clark, claimed he was not the kind of man who could kill his girlfriend’s child. But remarks he was found to have posted on MySpace left him vulnerable to character examination, Mr. Browning said, contributing to his conviction and a sentence of life in prison without parole.
In civil cases, too, online communications have helped strengthen evidence, especially indivorce cases, where they are often used as proof of cheating.
And postings by a probationary sheriff’s deputy, Brian Quinn, 26, of Marion County, Fla., on his MySpace page led to his firing in June 2006 for “conduct unbecoming an officer.”
Such cases are becoming more prevalent in part because Congress in 2006 mandated changes to the federal rules of civil procedure, expanding the acceptance of electronically stored information as evidence.
With the use of a Facebook update as an alibi, such communications may also be used to prove innocence, Mr. Browning said.
Mr. Bradford’s arrest was for the mugging at gunpoint of Jeremy Dunklebarger and Rolando Perez-Lorenzo at 11:50 a.m. on Oct. 17, according to Mr. Reuland, Mr. Bradford’s lawyer.
Mr. Bradford, who was facing charges in a previous robbery, contended he was in Harlem at the time of the Oct. 17 robbery — a claim supported by Mr. Bradford’s father, Rodney Bradford Sr., and his stepmother, Ernestine Bradford, Mr. Reuland said.
Mr. Reuland acknowledged that, in principle, anyone who knew Mr. Bradford’s user name and password could have typed the Facebook update, but he regards it as unlikely.
“This implies a level of criminal genius that you would not expect from a young boy like this; he is not Dr. Evil,” Mr. Reuland said, adding that the Facebook entry was just “icing on the cake,” since his client had other witnesses who provided an alibi.
Jonah Bruno, a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, said he could not discuss details of the case because it was sealed. But he acknowledged that Facebook was crucial to the charges’ being dropped.
But Joseph A. Pollini, who teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said prosecutors should not have been so quick to drop the charges.
“With a user name and password, anyone can input data in a Facebook page,” Mr. Pollini said.
“Some of the brightest people on the Internet are teenagers,” he said. “They know the Internet better than a lot of people. Why? Because they use it all the time.”
Please check out a longer version of the story here.
If you want to know how this story came about click here.
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.
Man Is Acquitted in Fake Dynamite Case
THE NEW YORK TIMES - City Room, published 21 October, 2009
A judge on Wednesday acquitted a Brooklyn maintenance worker who was arrested in 2007 for carrying a bundle of fake dynamite he found in the trash.
Ending a bench trial, the judge, Acting Justice Vincent M. Del Giudice of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, scoffed at prosecutors’ argument that the worker, Robert Lopez, intentionally caused a scare when he sat on his stoop with the theatrical prop.
“Would you prosecute all the people who sit on their porch with a lighter that looks like a grenade?” Justice Del Giudice asked one of the prosecutors, Brandon Story.
The saga unfolded on July 22, 2007, when Mr. Lopez was taking out the garbage at Cadman Towers, an apartment complex on Clark Street in Brooklyn Heights. He said he found what was a clearly bogus bundle of dynamite.
Mr. Lopez took the prop with him, with plans to turn it into a piggy bank, figuring the hollow sticks were perfect for piling quarters. He was on his way home when two transit workers spotted the fake bomb and called the police.
As Mr. Lopez sat on the stoop of his apartment building, at 46 St. Felix Street, catching his breath on the hot summer day, the police descended on him.
Mr. Lopez, 40, was indicted on charges of violating a state law that makes “placing a false bomb or hazardous substance” a felony that carries up to four years in prison.
Mr. Story and a fellow prosecutor, Christopher Eribo, argued that Mr. Lopez caused public alarm by carrying the device from his job to his home and by “placing” it on his stoop.
Joshua Horowitz, Mr. Lopez’s lawyer, insisted his client was a victim of overzealous prosecution.
“My client was just resting on the porch of his own house where he had been living for four years, would he ever wanted to hurt his neighbors?” he said.
Shortly before the judge’s verdict, which came after months of postponed hearing, Mr. Horowitz had advised Mr. Lopez to consider taking a plea deal that would have given him three years’ probation.
“Why should I plead guilty if I haven’t done anything?” Mr. Lopez said before entering the courtroom.
Mr. Lopez, who has no job, said he was soon going to be homeless because he had no money for rent. But he said he was more worried for his mother, who he said received a diagnosis of cancer last week.
“My mom is going to be happy, my sister is going to be happy, all my family is going to be happy,” Mr. Lopez said. “And the bond guy is going to clap his hands — every time I see him he asks me why I’m still going there.”
Mr. Horowitz said coming out of the court, “I feel on top of the world. It’s like winning the World Series.”
Mr. Lopez looked at him and smiled.
“Remember my promise?” Mr. Lopez asked his attorney. “Now I have to take you to a steak restaurant.”
Mr. Horowitz did not decline the offer.
Remittances a pittance: Ecuador feels pain of U.S. economic ills
DAILY NEWS, published 23 June, 2009
Rosa Martinez used to stroll to the local money transfer office in Corona every week to send $200 to her family in Cuenca,Ecuador.
She still goes to the Delgado Travel office, but not to send money. Instead, it is she who collects a little cash from those family members in Cuenca.
“My husband used to earn $140 a day working three, four days a week as a construction worker,” said Martinez, 48. “Now he gets $80 a day and works two, maximum three days a week.”
The economic downturn has battered the nation in recent months, but it also has deeply affected countries like Ecuador, where a recently improved standard of living has devolved with less money flowing from immigrants working in the U.S.
“I hope that God fixes this mess,” Martinez said. “If not, we’ll have to go back to Cuenca.”
Hector Delgado, president of Delgado Travel, which has 70 offices in Ecuador and 29 in New York, began seeing a decrease in money transfers last fall.
“At the beginning, it was a slight reduction of 5% in October,” he said. “But then we went up to 9%, 15%, up to 22% in February.”
Data released recently by the Central Bank of Ecuador confirms the trend: Remittances decreased by 8.6% in 2008. They amounted to $3.1 million in 2007, dwindled to about $2.8 million last year and are continuing to fall.
In Queens, the struggle of Ecuadoran immigrants can be seen at “la parada,” or “the stop,” a stretch on 69th St. and 37th Ave. between a small grassy park dotted with yellow tulips and a basketball court.
Day laborers like Enrique Cunas arrive at 6 a.m. and wait for pickup trucks to pull over. Men swarm the truck when the driver yells, “I got jobs!”
The workers rely on a patchwork of jobs to feed families 3,000 miles away and fuel their dreams of building Swiss chalet-style houses to enjoy when they go back to Ecuador. But these days, most hardly make enough money to keep their beds in cramped apartments.
“I have six kids in Ecuador,” said Cunas, a builder from Naranjito, a village of 13,000 in Guayas. “When I speak to my wife and my kids, I ask them to understand that the situation is kind of difficult here. It really is.”
By 4 p.m., workers who haven’t found a job for the day start kicking a soccer ball around in the basketball court.
“At least we can have some fun playing ball,” said José Morales, 22, a construction worker.
Meanwhile, the workers’ dream homes in Ecuador sit only half-built, a sign of tough times on two continents.
“Farmers who have family in the [U.S.] were quickly building big houses in the outskirts of the town,”Nadia Balden, owner of Mayo restaurant in Cuenca, said in a phone interview. “Now, you see their lambs and cows lazily walking around the building sites.”
Nick Loomis contributed reporting
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
Trashy Treasure Leads to Felony False-Bomb Charge
THE NEW YORK TIMES, published 20 May, 2009
Robert’s Version from Damiano Beltrami on Vimeo.
As Robert Lopez tells it, his trouble began nearly two years ago when he plucked a bundle of fake dynamite from the trash in Brooklyn and took it home with plans to turn it into a piggy bank.
Now Mr. Lopez, 38, a career maintenance man with no criminal record beyond a 10-year-old marijuana possession violation, is set to appear in court on Thursday on false-bomb charges that could put him in prison for up to four years.
A Church Finds Its Radio Voice Again
THE LOCAL (NYT blog), published 9 April, 2009
Small girls in pink prom dresses held their breath. Young choir members cleared their throats quietly. Senior congregants like Lillian Ede drifted back to the times when gang members would sit in the back pews, craning their necks to see the pretty girls.
Then Bishop Carl Williams Jr. took the microphone, and the Institutional Church of God in Christ was back on the air after an absence of more than 30 years.
The March 26 evening service, broadcast two days later on WSNR radio, 620 AM, marked a milestone for the church at 170 Adelphi Street — and an acknowledgment of the transformation of the neighborhood, said Mr. Williams, whose father founded the church in 1951.
The church, home to the renowned, Grammy-nominated Institutional Church of God in Christ Radio Choir, had ended its 25-year radio run in the late 1970s, in part because, Mr. Williams said, “It was too dangerous.”
Parishioners used to pack the church for the broadcast service, which taped at 10:30 p.m. on Sundays (Mr. Williams’s father, Carl Williams Sr., picked such a late time slot to take advantage of the fact that all the other churches around were done for the day).
But the area was so crime-ridden that congregants’ cars often were vandalized, the younger Mr. Williams said.
“The church was between the projects; it was located in the area between the street gangs,” he recalled. “One was from the Fulton Street side, the other from Myrtle Avenue. One gang was called the Bishops, the other the Chaplains.”
The gangs would converge on the church, between Myrtle and Willoughby. Gang members came to flirt with female congregants but often ended up threatening parishioners and starting fights, Mr. Williams said.
“The neighborhood was in a bad shape,” Mr. Williams said, shaking his head. “Once a gospel choir from California came to visit, and as they were singing someone broke into their van and stole a lot of their sound equipment.”
The high cost of radio time was also a problem. “It turned out to be almost $800 a week,” the Bishop said. “It wasn’t profitable.”
This year, the church was able to get a much cheaper time slot on WSNR, based in Jersey City. “We pay $250 a week,” Mr. Williams said. “And we reach all of Brooklyn, New Jersey, Long Island, Queens and all the Bronx.”
The service, which tapes on Thursday nights at 8 and is broadcast Saturdays at 8:30 a.m., draws both longtime members, who now live as far away as Pennsylvania, and people from the ever-changing neighborhood.
Mr. Williams said he doesn’t see gang members amid a congregation where doctors, police officers and Wall Streeters worship side by side.
“The area is much quieter now,” he said (so quiet that the choir itself now draws noise complaints). “A lot of Wall Street yuppies have bought homes in this area, instead of spending all the time traveling out to the Island.”
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
From Baghdad via Bronx
DAILY NEWS, published 22 March, 2009
Alaa Majeed begins her day before dawn, going online in her Bronx apartment to read Sunni, Shiite and Kurd newspapers.
In the dark, quiet hours, as the journalist sips Iraqi coffee from a Yankees mug, her thoughts drift back to Baghdad.
“I miss the smell of the streets of Baghdad, the honking of the cars,” Majeed said. “Iraq is in my veins.”
But as the sun rises over the Grand Concourse, Majeed’s new world comes to life, a new world far different from the world she left - actually fled - behind.
She slips into the subway without checking to see if someone is following her. She sits on the train and opens her laptop, knowing she is safe and can work on her story.
Majeed wonders: Will the editor be interested in an explosion that killed 50 people in a Baghdad market? Will he say that the story is weak because more than 100 people died yesterday?
Her doubts are only a piece of the daily puzzle that she must solve as a freelance reporter for United Press International, Public Broadcasting Service and The Washington Times newspaper.
Majeed, 35, arrived in the United States in December 2006, and quickly realized that many of her American neighbors were more concerned with football than sectarian violence in Iraq.
Some American editors were not particularly enthusiastic, either.
“In May 2007 I pitched a story about a family of Iraqi refugees in Jordan,” said Majeed. “The editor said that they had run a story already the year before.”
Majeed is also frustrated because she would like to report inside her own country, rather than from 6,000 miles away.
“Sitting in my comfortable room here in the Bronx and writing about Iraq doesn’t feel like reporting to me,” she said. “I want to talk to people, see their faces.”
But in Iraq, Majeed and her family were in danger. Iraqi journalists who worked for Western news organizations were targeted by the militia – and female journalists like Majeed were in particular danger.
“In summer 2005, after interviewing people outside Abu Ghraib prison, a stranger followed me,” she said, recalling just one of many close calls. “I was thinking ‘Oh my God, he wants to kidnap me.’ Luckily my driver picked me up just in time.”
Majeed made it to New York, where she also serves as International Reporter in Residence at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
But Majeed knows she is one of the lucky ones. Other Iraqi journalists who risked their lives for Western media outlets have seen visa applications fails due to bureaucratic glitches. And if they do get here, reality is often disillusioning. In Iraq, they were indispensable reporters. In America they are just freelancers willing to share sad stories.
In the afternoon, she picks up her two children, Yousef, 1o, and Mohammed, 8, at school. Their father sent them from Baghdad in January, reuniting them with their mother after three years apart.
“They saw blood and dead teachers in the street, neighbors kidnapped,” Majeed said sadly.
She still want to return to Iraq “when the situation like stabilizes.”
“I wold love to report what it’s happening behind the scenes. What is the real situation for women and children? Is there water? Is there electricity? What is going to happen to all these widows and orphans?”
“It is a story that needs to be told.”
In Tough Economic Times, Psychics Console
Eileen Rivera, a 24-year-old receptionist from Long Island, is a longtime believer in fortune telling. But lately she has changed her questions.
“My focus used to be 90 per cent love and relationships and 10 per cent economical,” Rivera said. “Now it’s about 20 per cent love and relationships and 80 per cent economical.”
Rivera’s fortuneteller Karin Marcello, 29, also from Long Island, says that this switch in interest from love to money is a growing trend among her eclectic clientele, which includes top managers, cashiers and lap dancers.
“People are paranoid,” she said. “They ask: Am I going to keep my job? Will I be able to afford to live in New York? Should I still invest? Will I be able to pay my mortgage? Will I have any luck selling my house?”
Traditionally, a fortuneteller only had to divine the future, but a survey of 12 New York fortunetellers and psychics suggests that as the economic crisis has deepened, clients are treating them more like cheap psychologists and sympathetic university counselors, who have to reassure more than predict.
“Before the crisis people felt they were in control of their lives,” said psychic Stacey Worlf. “Now we feel unsafe. I find that my clients want to know whether they will be OK, and when you tell them so, they feel a lot better.”
Angela Lucy, a Manhattan fortuneteller, shares her colleague Worlf’s point of view and describes what usually happens in her office once she spreads the tarot cards out on the table.
“You get knee-jerk reactions, they are panicking,” she said. “I tell them they are going to be fine and advise them to stop listening to the news.”
According to Dr. Bonnie Maslin, a psychologist who has worked as a psychotherapist in private practice for over twenty years, when life is out of control, as in the case of the economic crisis, some people, rather than dealing with their anxiety through traditional therapy, resort to magical thinking.
But people now want more than magical thinking and whimsical advice from their psychic readings. Entrepreneurs ask whether the bailout is going to work. Small business owners ask whether investing in real estate is still worthwhile. And even artists, usually concerned with inspiration, are now more worried about making their artwork profitable. In order to respond to their clients’ more specific and personal-finance-oriented questions, fortune tellers say they can’t just rely on tarot cards and crystal balls. These days, they’re consulting economic papers and Paul Krugman’s columns.
“I’ve always picked up on the news,” said astrologer Zoltana, “but now I buy Fortune and Forbes and look at financial articles more closely.”
Psychics say they are integrating their strong astrological backgrounds with newly acquired economic savvy to help their cards provide creative, slightly more practical solutions.
“This year Aquarius is in Jupiter, which means that money can be made in the Aquarius way: thinking outside of the box and believing in your genius,” says a fortuneteller who goes by the name Joshua the Psychic. “So, for instance, I advice clients that were in finance to try to get from that arena into more creative jobs like marketing.
Sharing Business Space to Boost Income
DAILY NEWS, published 22 December, 2008
It’s a Saturday afternoon at the Great American Laundromat in the East Tremont section of the Bronx, where Hawa Sidibe has spent the better part of her day.
But she’s not impatiently awaiting the rinse cycle — she’s busy braiding a woman’s hair into neat rows in a makeshift salon the size of a walk-in closet.
Brushes and a hair dryer fill modest shelf space, as do items for sale: socks, gold-colored belts, knockoff designer bags and DVDs of African movies.
“An outside store is expensive for me, that’s why I have it inside a Laundromat,” said Sidibe, a 26-year-old immigrant from Mali.
At a time when the profit margins of countless small businesses are shrinking, shops-within-a-shop like Sidibe’s are multiplying throughout the city.
“It’s a great way for young companies to get started,” said Cliff Schorer, an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School. “Going forward, we are going to see a lot of this.”
To offset his expenses, Laundromat owner Peter Sternhas been subletting part of his space, on Southern Blvd. near the Bronx Zoo, for five years, first bringing in a woman selling beauty products, then a tax preparer.
“Usually people spend more than two hours in a Laundromat, so the more services the customers get in that time, the better competitive advantage the shop has,” Stern said. “Hawa helps me by paying rent, but the main thing is I want to keep my customers happy.”
Jessica Rivera was one customer who loved the idea of multi-tasking. “Hawa braids my hair, my kids do their homework, my clothes get dry,” she said.
Splitting space can make for close quarters, but also can help entrepreneurs get started.
Ricardo Torres, an immigrant from Colombia, saw a For Rent sign several months ago on the window of a shop on Roosevelt Ave. in Jackson Heights,Queens. The location was prime, right near the subway.
Two businesses were already inside: a cell phone vendor and a photo developer. Torres opened a money-wiring business.
“The rent is cheaper here than if we’d have our own space, and we’d rather be smaller than waste money,” said Eduardo Maña, the manager of Torres’ business, Transmilenio Cargo. “It’s all about maximizing resources and minimizing costs.”
Whether such arrangements are legal depends on lease terms and the types of businesses. Whether they’ll be successful is another matter, since many are not natural partners.
Last year, Mamadou Diallo asked Zach Toolsee, owner of Toolsee Laundrymat onWestchesterAve. in the Bronx Riversection of the borough, if he could rent a portion of his space. Diallo, a recent immigrant from Guinea who also drives a taxi at night, wanted to set up a shop selling items like Chinese slippers, Yankee caps and bandanas.
Toolsee, facing $4,000 monthly rent and a $2,000 monthly water bill, among other charges, agreed for $1,000. A year later, both complain that business is slow.
“My dream is to start a business outside of a Laundromat,” Diallo said.
As Costs Soar, Shops Serving Hunts Point Close
THE HUNTS POINT EXPRESS, published 1 December, 2008
Until last year, John Hyun used to get up at the crack of dawn and rush to Hunts Point Cooperative Market. Hyun would get fruit and vegetables, load his van and drive to his grocery store just north of Hunts Point.
What came next was the hard day of an immigrant who tries to build his way up in New York: a 12-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week marathon, day after day, spent moving sacks of potatoes and fulfilling the often unpredictable requests of old ladies.
“They’re never happy with the size of their apples,” said Hyun.
Now John Hyun, who has tiny, weathered hands, salt and pepper hair and a face that looks as it had been carved out of stone, still works 12-hour days, but he is no longer so frantically busy.
“I don’t have customers,” Hyun said. “I really hoped that as the schools opened in September, some mothers would show up and buy some good fruit for their kids, but I was wrong.”
Ten years after its opening, Hyun’s Big Brother Market, a small family-run produce shop at the corner of Westchester Avenue and Stratford Avenue, is likely to close after New Year.
The economic crisis that has affected New York and the nation in recent months has hit small business like Hyun’s hard. With rising rent, electric and heating bills, owners have faced an up-hill battle. The Big Brother Market is a portrait in miniature of these large-scale troubles, one of many Bronx businesses battered by forces beyond its control.
“After 9/11 everything went downhill,” Hyun said with a shrug.
Grocery markets are among the businesses most affected by skyrocketing oil prices, which has made transportation more expensive, driving up wholesale food prices, and has boosted utility bills, as well.
“Transportation became so expensive that some transportation companies even stopped serving our wholesale market, Hunts Point Cooperative Market,” said Hyun. “It is no longer convenient for them. So, while prices are going up, you have fewer choices, and quality is dropping.”
Five years ago, Hyun could buy a box of 80 Extra Fancy Washington apples or Golden Delicious apples for $15. Now he spends twice as much. A 40-pound box of bananas cost him $10 five years ago. Now he spends $17 to $18.
While the cost of doing business has risen, stores like Hyun’s find it hard to pass the increases on to their customers. When he raises prices, shoppers stop coming.
“Take Brazilian mangos,” said Hyun. “At the market they cost $8.50 to $9 for nine pounds. We use to resell two mangos for $1 last year. Now we sell one mango for $2.”
As dusk falls and it’s time to close the shop, Hyun goes home to start the worst part of his day—going through his bills. Squinting into the darkening shadows, he rummages through his papers and tries to make ends meet. His wife wants a flat screen television, but there’s a bill for $2,000 for his workers’ comp. It comes first.
When he started his business in 1998, Hyun paid $3,000 a month in rent. Now he pays more than twice as much. But Hyun singles out dramatically rising utility prices as the main culprit forcing him out of business.
“My summer electricity bill is $1,400,” Hyun said. “I’ve no clue about how can it be so high. It was one grand 10 years ago, and then we had air conditioning. Or just take the last water bill, $300 for one month. Are they kidding me? Just five years ago it used to be $200 for three months.”
Other businesses in the same block as The Big Brother Market are no better off.
“The increase of basic goods such as bread, milk and eggs put us on our knees,” said Ilyas Memon, the owner of 99 Cents World. “We used to give away two dozens of eggs for $1. Now you get only one dozen for $1.99. The same applies to milk. One gallon was $2.99. Now it is $3.99.”
Eateries on Westchester Avenue are experiencing hard times too. The owner of Danny’s Athens restaurant, said her profits have dwindled by more than 30 percent in the last seven years.
Lately, before going to bed, Hyun stares for a few seconds the bright red Christmas lights on the railings of his neighbor’s door and hopes that with the holiday season more customers will enter his shop to do what customers usually do–buy.
“Before people came to the shop to shop,” Hyun said laughing. “Now most folks come just to ask for prices.”