Streetvibes July 2007 Edition

Streetvibes July, 2007

lar l o D e n O

Streetvibes Month July is Streetvibes Month! As part of the celebration, Streetvibes will be

participating in the Northside Fourth of July parade. The parade begins at noon and is sure to provide fun and entertainment for the whole family. We will be walking the parade route with a float and passing out information about the Streetvibes program.

Come out to show your support for Streetvibes, and remember to pick up the latest issue of our award-winning paper from on-hand vendors.

Also, remember that Streetvibes has posters and T-shirts that can be purchased for $15. Thank you for your continued support of Streetvibes - we look forward to seeing you at the parade!

Homeless Exposed to Tuberculosis

by Lynn Kilbane, RN, BSN Clinic coordinator Hamilton County Tuberculosis Control During the fall of 2006, a homeless man with tuberculosis (TB) disease in his lungs (also called pulmonary tuberculosis) spent time in Over-the-Rhine. This individual stayed at the Drop Inn Center for 17 nights. He did not realize he had tuberculosis and was not taking any medication for TB at the time. When this person talked, coughed, or laughed germs flew into the air and other people breathed in those germs. Since that time seven other individuals, who were homeless also, contracted active TB disease.

Hamilton County TB Control estimates that there were 800 residents plus staff at the Drop Inn Center who received significant exposures to the 7 individuals with active pulmonary TB disease. The staff has been screened; but only approximately 250 residents

AHA (Affordable Housing Advocates) Welcomes New Staff Person Having moved recently to the United States and to Cincinnati, I am currently a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati.

I have training in urban and human settlements. My interest in housing lies in addressing development issues geared towards prosperity for all. In the past, I have researched and gained experience with central and local governments in issues ranging from preparation of development plans, guiding and advising on urban development issues and assessing alternative ways of financing urban services.

I believe that my experiences fit very well with the mission of the Affordable Housing Advocates. I am excited to join a group that is motivated to influence policy making in housing

Published by

of the Drop Inn Center were located for testing.

The seven pulmonary TB cases stayed at the Drop Inn Center between October 12, 2006 and February 7, 2007. If you stayed at the Drop Inn Center during this time period you were exposed to contagious tuberculosis and need TB testing.

We know, from the TB skin testing we performed, that many people breathed in the TB germs and now have a positive skin test.

That is why we are recommending that all persons staying or working in shelters or frequenting social service agencies and soup kitchens in Over-the-Rhine be screened for TB at least yearly. You can be screened with a TB skin test. A skin test will tell you whether or not you have TB germs in your body. If you have a positive skin test (TB germs in your body) then you need aimed at changing living conditions of the disadvantaged in society.

I am married and have a daughter who is four and a half. In my free time I enjoy watching comedy movies and reading books. If you have any questions about AHA or myself please contact me at 513.421.7803 x 19.

Kenneth Cheruiyot

a chest x-ray to make sure your body has “walled off” the germs and made the germs go to sleep. If the germs are not “walled off” then they multiply and cause disease in your body.

A chest x-ray determines whether or not the germs are growing in your lungs.

Screening is available free of charge, if you are unemployed, at Hamilton County Tuberculosis Control or through the Homeless Med Van of the Cincinnati Health Department.

If your TB skin test was positive in the past, it will always be positive and you will need a chest x-ray to make sure your lungs are clear. All other persons, who have never been tested, do not know whether they are positive or negative, or have a history of a negative skin test should be skin tested at least yearly.

There is medication you can take if your TB skin test is positive to prevent you from getting active TB disease. Hamilton County TB Control provides this medication free of charge.

If you are HIV positive or have certain other chronic health problems you have a higher risk of developing active TB disease once you are exposed to persons with active TB disease and are strongly urged to receive TB screening.

Taking medication for TB germs is the best way to prevent you from getting active TB disease if you have a positive skin test.

If you have had health problems lasting for more than 3 weeks with either cough, chest pain, coughing up blood, shortness of breath, fever, chills, night sweats, tiredness, losing weight or a poor appetite, please make sure you get tested.

For questions about TB, please call Hamilton County TB Control: 946–7614 or 946–7618. Hamilton County TB Control is located in the Job and Family Services building on the corner of McMillan and Highland on the McMillan side of the building. There is a large green “Tuberculosis Clinic” sign above our door. Please get tested and be sure to call us for any concerns.

STREETVIBES Page 1 The Greater Cincinnati Coaltion for the Homeless

STREETVIBES, Greater Cincinnati’s alternative news source, is a newspaper written by, for, and about the homeless and contains relevant discussions of social justice,and poverty issues.

It is published once a month by the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless.

Becoming a Streetvibes Vendor is a great way for homeless and other low-income people to get back on (or stay on) their feet.

Streetvibes Vendors are given an orientation and sign a code of conduct before being given a Streetvibes Vendor badge. All profits go directly to the vendor.

The Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless is a group of shelters, agencies and individuals committed to ending homelessness in Cincinnati through coordinating services, educating the public and grassroots organizing.

GCCH Staff Georgine Getty - Executive Director John Lavelle - Administrative Coordinator Andy Freeze - Education Coordinator Lynne Ausman - VISTA Kenneth Cheruiyot - AHA Coordinator Melvin Williams - Receptionist Linda Pittman - Receptionist Susan Smith - Volunteer Leigh Tami - Intern

Vendor Code of Conduct 1. Streetvibes will be distributed for one dollar ($1). I agree not to ask for more than a dollar or solicit donations for Streetvibes by any other means. If a customer donates more than $1 for a paper, I am allowed to keep the donation.

2. I will only purchase papers from the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless (GCCH).

Each paper can be purchased for a cost of 25 cents. I will always show my badge when buying papers and if I do not have my badge I cannot buy papers.

3. I will never buy papers from and/or sell papers to other vendors.

4. I agree to treat all others – customers, staff, and other vendors – respectfully. I will not use abusive language or force someone to buy a paper. I will not give a “hard sell,” be aggressive, continue to ask after a person has verbally or non-verbally said no or make someone feel threatened.

5. I agree to stay off private property when selling Streetvibes. I will not sell Streetvibes door to door.

6. I understand that I am not an employee of Streetvibes or GCCH but a contracted worker responsible for my own well-being and income.

7. I agree not to sell additional goods or products when selling Streetvibes.

8. I will not sell Streetvibes or purchase Streetvibes under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

9. There are no territories among vendors. I will respect the space of other vendors, particularly the space of vendors who have been at a spot longer.

10. I understand that my badge is the property of Streetvibes and I will not deface it. I will present my badge when purchasing papers and display my badge when selling papers. If I lose my badge I

will pay three dollars ($3) for a new one. If my badge becomes ruined because of weather or use, I will get a new badge for one dollar ($1).

11. I understand that Streetvibes strives to be a paper that covers homelessness and poverty issues while providing a source of income for the homeless. I will try to help in this effort and spread the word.

12. I will not deceive the public by saying that I am collecting for a nonprofit charity or that I am collecting for the “homeless” in general. I will be in honest in stating that all the profits from the sale of Streetvibes go to me. I will not use the word “donation.”

13. There are special rules for selling at Findlay Market. Only two vendors may sell at Findlay Market at a time. Other rules as established by Streetvibes and Findlay Market.

14. I will attend monthly meetings. Monthly meetings will occur on the first weekday of the month. The month’s paper will be released at this meeting. Anyone who cannot make the meeting must meet with Andy, the Education Coordinator, before selling Streetvibes for that month. Ten papers will be given to those who attend the meeting.

15. It is the responsibility of each vendor to police fellow vendors or former vendors. I will report violators of the rules to GCCH. The value of the paper depends on keeping it credible.

16. I understand that any infraction of the above mentioned rules will result in suspension of my privilege to sell Streetvibes and possible termination from the program. Badges and Streetvibes papers are property of GCCH and must be surrendered upon demand.

Where your Dollar Goes

Streetvibes Jimmy Heath, Editor, Layout and Design Photographers Andy Freeze, Jimmy Heath, John Lavelle, Leigh Tami

75 Cents Goes Directly to Your Vendor

Cover Mary Ann Lederer, detail of poster for Streetvibes Streetvibes accepts letters, poems,stories, essays, original graphics, and photos. We will give preference to those who are homeless or are vendors.

Subscriptions to Streetvibes, delivered to your home each month, can be purchased for $25 per year.

Address mail to:Streetvibes Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless (GCCH) 117 East 12th Street Cincinnati, OH 45202 (513) 421-7803 e-mail: streetvibes@juno.com web: http://cincihomeless.org

STREETVIBES Page 2

Streetvibes is a program of the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless.

25 Cents Pays for Production

Streetvibes Vendor

Phone: (513) 421-7803 Streetvibes vendors purchase their papers for 25 cents per copy, then sell them for a $1.00 donation, keeping the 75 cent profit. The money used to purchase the paper goes to the individual vendor. GCCH does not profit from the sale of Streetvibes. Vendors are not fundraising for the Coalition for the Homeless.

ANDY

Buy Streetvibes From Badged Vendors ONLY

Louisville, KY - The number of homeless people sleeping in Louisville shelters and using other services dropped from 2005, according to a study released last month.

There were 10,933 homeless last year, down from 11,251 the year before — and the lowest number since 2002, according to an annual report issued by the Coalition for the Homeless.

Marlene Gordon, the coalition’s executive director, said the decline is due partly to 74 new units of federally-funded housing for the city’s chronically homeless. That population includes people who have been homeless for more than a year or at least four times in three years.

“When we have the resources, we can make it work,” Gordon said. “We can reduce it.”

British Columbia - Bylaw enforcement officers dismantled two homeless camps in downtown Maple Ridge in last month.

One was located in overgrown brush behind the Salvation Army’s Caring Place. The second was in a boat house.

Three more have been identified by district staff, not including the one Bill Evans has been complaining about for the past month and a half.

Evans has filed three complaints with the RCMP about a campsite near the bypass.

Bylaw officials confirm that more campsites are popping up around Maple Ridge as the weather warms.

RCMP visit the sites first, move the campers on and ensure the area is safe.

Private property owners are told to clean up camps on their land or they will be billed by the District of Maple Ridge if the municipality intervenes.

“We are trying to tackle the problem collectively,” he added.

Constables assigned to the downtown core of Maple Ridge are also checking the sites.

“It is part of the downtown constable mandate to get in touch with the homeless,” said Cst. Gary Slater, who admits that camps are often reestablished and are being rooted out.

McDonald hopes the collective approach to dealing with the problem will help. Staff is often accompanied by a street outreach worker, who helps camp residents find accommodation or a bed at the shelter.

“The ultimate goal is to get them help and offer them healthy alternatives,” McDonald said.

Birmingham, AL - To show homeless veterans that their service to country is appreciated, two local advocates rode their Harley-Davidson to the Vietnam War Memorial.

Cecilia and Mike Luna, who work at the Sapp Shelter and Downtown Rescue Mission, went to Washington with hundreds of other motorcycle riders for the Run for the Wall, which aims to promote healing in veterans and their families.

The Lunas have a specially made flag they’re getting homeless veterans to sign along the way. It was displayed at the Vietnam War Memorial, where cyclists will pay tribute to those killed or wounded in that war.

While they wish to honor all veterans, of specific interest to the Lunas are homeless veterans. Through their work, they’ve encountered numerous veterans suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome and addiction.

“So many of our Vietnam vets are here because of mental illness, and cutting through the red tape of getting VA benefits is so frustrating,” Cecilia Luna said. “Sometimes they just give up.

“It breaks my heart to think that the way they were treated by our country after they came back from war contributed to them being in this situation. They weren’t told ‘thank you.’ They were spit on and told they were baby killers. It is time we make amends.”

The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans estimates that about a quarter of the country’s homeless have served in the military.

On any given night, about 200,000 veterans are in shelters or on the street.

Over the course of a year, 400,000 veterans will be without a home, and nearly onethird of them served in a war zone, according to coalition statistics.

Chattanooga, TN - For several years ministries and organizations have set up at Miller Park to help people who are homeless. Chattanooga Mayor Ron Littlefield wants to be known as the mayor who helps those in need, but a move by city hall last month has some people questioning that.

Churches and social organizations have been meeting the homeless and poor at Miller Park several days a week to feed them, offer help and spiritual guidance. They were told to leave The city now says church leaders who want to help the homeless must apply for a permit through the department of Parks and Recreation.

Pastor Barry Kidwell, of the Forrest Avenue United Methodist Church, said “it’s just gonna move it (the homeless) somewhere else.

Kidwell and others question whether this move is aimed toward getting homeless people out of downtown for the Riverbend Festival.

Kidwell said churches will still meet at Miller Park on Sundays and Wednesdays and take the homeless somewhere else to eat if they have to, but will not give up on their efforts to help.

Tucson, AZ - A Tucson man has been sentenced to five years in prison in the beating death of a homeless military veteran.

Judge Edgar Acuna of Pima County Superior Court could have placed Tranquillino Hernandez on probation or sent him to prison for up to 12.5 years.

Hernandez entered a guilty plea last month to manslaughter in the May 2006 death of Jerry Wayne Walding, 54.

Walding struck Hernandez on the head with a beer bottle on May 9, 2006, prompting Hernandez to beat Walding with a rock, defense attorney John Sando said.

Hernandez continued to beat Walding after he fell to the ground.

Walding was found dead behind a Tucson hardware store. Hernandez was found nearby in a wash.

Acuna sentenced Hernandez to a concurrent prison sentence of 1.5 years in that case.

Hernandez was given credit for the 378 days he’s already served in custody.

Albuquerque, NM - Ever wonder if handing change to a homeless person harms rather than helps?

The city and the Downtown Action Team hope an initiative will take the guilt out of giving.

Under the program, old mechanical parking meters will serve as donation boxes for agencies that serve the homeless. They’ll be an alternative to giving panhandlers money directly, said Brian Morris, executive director for the Downtown Action Team.

The mechanical meters are slowly being phased out in their curbside role, replaced by kiosks that accept paper money, credit cards or coins and print a receipt to put on your dashboard.

Morris said it’s not clear how many donation meters there will be or where they’ll sit, but they will most likely be in heavily traveled areas such as Downtown, where panhandling is most likely to occur.

“Our goal is to curb panhandling,” Morris said. “When you give to a panhandler, you don’t know if you’re truly helping the homeless.”

Debbie Ortega, executive director of Denver’s Road Home, said the program was launched in March.

“It is still early to say if it’s been successful,” she said. “But there is a lot of interest in people to get involved and spread the word.”

Ortega said that within the first month, Road Home generated $38,000 from 36 donation meters installed throughout Denver’s Downtown.

Morris said, when all the Albuquerque donation meters are set up, the Downtown Action Team plans to partner with United Way of Central New Mexico to distribute the money to homeless shelters.

Seattle, WA - A brush-cutter clearing blackberry bushes for a highway project accidentally killed a homeless man in a sleeping bag, authorities said.

Police had warned transients to leave the area, and a special subcontracting crew had also worked to remove human waste, needles and other drug paraphenalia from a mile long section under the freeway.

The Transportation Department said the tractor, with an 18-foot rotary arm, had been operating for about a half hour one Saturday morning when the man was hit.

Isaac Palmer, 62, died of skull fractures and brain lacerations caused by sharp and bluntforce head trauma, the King County Medical Examiner’s Office said.

STREETVIBES Page 3

A Few Words of Thanks

by Cleo Wombles My name is Cleo Wombles and I have been selling Streetvibes for about three and a half years. I was homeless and lived in shelters and ate at soup kitchens.

I want to thank everybody at Streetvibes and the kind people who have contributed to me for Streetvibes.

I have moved up from homelessness to my own apartment.

When I’m not selling Streetvibes, Cleo Wombles I have been working part-time painting, landscaping, and doing janitorial work. Because of people like you, I have been able to get ahead.

There is a short story I would like to share with you. One time I was asking a man getting into a car if he wanted to buy Streetvibes. He

said no. For some reason, I lingered for a moment. I came to find out that this man was stealing the car. The real owner of the car came back to the car because he forgot that he had left his keys in the vehicler. He yelled and told the man to get out of his car.

The man took off and ran away.

The owner of the car looked at me and said thanks for staying a little while longer, his car might have been stolen. The man gave me a kind donation for the paper. I told him thanks and God bless.

That was a rare situation. I’m just glad the man’s car wasn’t stolen.

It is people like that man that keep me selling the paper. Thanks to all who buy Streetvibes from me and the other vendors.

Darfur in Turmoil

by Lynne Ausman In early 2003, the conflict in the Darfur region of the Sudan became international news when rebel groups began attacking government targets because they felt that their villages and communities were being ignored by the Sudanese Government.

There are three main ethnic groups who claim the Darfur region: the mostly nomadic Arabs, and two African ethnic groups: the Massaleet and the Zagawa.

To complicate matters further, the two African ethnic groups feel that the Sudanese government is favoring the Arabs and are linked to the Janjaweed, an Arab militia accused of trying to cleanse the region of black Africans. The government denies their link to the Janjaweed. However, refugees report that following government air raids, the Janjaweed attack villages on the ground, stealing anything of value and killing the men and raping and killing the women.

In the US, human rights groups believe that genocide is taking place as the attacks are targeting the black Darfurians; however, the United Nations (UN) is reluctant to agree. The UN has stopped short of calling it genocide but admit that war crimes have been committed. It is difficult for the UN to properly determine if genocide is taking place as fighting is so severe that humanitarian aide and peace keepers are having trouble crossing the border.

In addition, the Sudanese government has prohibited the UN from entering the country. Currently, the African

Union (AU) is the only peacekeeping force allowed to enter Sudan.

However, this force is small and inexperienced and has not had much success. The international community is calling for an increased UN presence and the AU is happy to join forces, but the Sudanese Government refuses to cooperate.

The fighting has caused more than 2 million civilians to be forced from their homes and more than 400,000 have been killed.

These 2 million refugees are fleeing to the neighboring countries of Chad and the Central African Republic.

These refugee camps, however, are anything but a safe refuge from the fighting and are causing turmoil in the host countries.

There are many refugee camps along the borders, with some of the larger camps housing between 10 and 30 thousand refugees. Refugees battle heat, lack of fresh water, food and medical supplies, and the imminent threat of violence. Many of the refugees are impoverished farmers and herders who cannot grow crops in the rocky desert. Getting humanitarian aide, fresh food and

STREETVIBES Page 4

A Tribute to Roy Kaiser

by Mark Baker On May 2, 2007 a good friend of mine and long time advocate of housing for the indigent passed away.

I met Roy more than 30 years ago when we both worked at the old 12th Street Clinic providing health care for residents of the Over-The-Rhine and West End of Cincinnati. He went on to help plan and become district health officer at the new Elm St. Clinic. He retired from the Cincinnati Health Dept. in 1991.

From 1988 to 1992 he worked on the Spring St. Project on Saturdays and Wednesday evenings. Roy’s passion was housing for the poor and for the next 16 years he worked with the OTR Housing Network, Preserving Affordable Housing, Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless, as well as working with the Mt. Healthy Clinic.

Roy served on many boards over the years: Neighborhood Health Care, Inc., Oral Health Council, Bethany House, and several years ago joined me in serving on Epic’s board providing shared housing for the elderly in the West End. Roy’s final project was to organize the development of an empty building at 13th and Vine into Venice on Vine, an excellent pizza parlor water is difficult because the Janjaweed and other militias linger just a few miles away. The camps in Chad have reported attacks by Chadian nationals.

Women and girls are favored targets by the Janjaweed, who are kidnapping and raping fleeing refugees. Some women have reported being kidnapped, turned into sex slaves, and then released weeks later by the Janjaweed.

Recently, the US government has turned its attention to the conflict in Darfur calling it genocide and demanding increased UN Security Council sanctions. However, these UN sanctions are unlikely since China – Sudan’s largest supporter, has a permanent veto in the Security Council and will not agree to increased economic sanctions. The US, however, has imposed its own economic sanctions on Sudanese businesses that are believed to be involved in the violence – they are barred from trading and banking in the US. These American sanctions are prompting the European Union to consider adopting similar sanctions.

Lack of international cooperation and collaboration is

Roy Kaiser at work and also home to PIP (Power Inspires Progress) whose purpose is to train inner city men and women and help them develop good work skills.

Roy left behind a wonderful, supportive wife, Marian, 5 sons and many grandchildren who will miss him greatly. As my good friend, I will also miss him. Roy cared passionately about making this community a better place by wanting all its residents to have decent housing and better lives. worsening the conflict. While individual countries and the UN acknowledge that there is a conflict and that thousands of civilians are being killed, pro active steps to end the conflict are not occurring. When fighting does cease, we are likely to find that the problem was much worse than initially expected due to the hesitation of the international community to become involved. This happened in the small African country of Rwanda in 1994. The international community ignored the problem and when they finally took notice it was too late - thousands of innocent civilians had been killed.

Various community groups are calling on congress to enact legislation including the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act, the Civilian Protection Act and the No-fly Zone, among others. In Ohio, Senator Sherrod Brown (Democrat) and Senator George Voinovich (Republican) have been supportive and have voted in favor of legislation to stop the genocide. The House Representatives, however, have not been so supportive. Representative Steve Chabot (Republican, Ohio District 1) and Representative Jean Schmidt (Republican, Ohio District 2) voted for the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act, a NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) Bridging Force and a Presidential Special Envoy but fell short in allocating funds towards protection and humanitarian aid. Contact your representatives and ask for continued and increased support to stop the genocide in Darfur.

Go Figure

The State of Affordable Housing

2,500,000 +

22,500

Darfurians who have lost their homes since the outbreak of the conflict.

UN Troops authorized by Security Council Resolution 1706 for Darfur (August 2006)

1,000,000 +

1706

Postcards delivered to President George W. Bush by the Save Darfur Coalition

The number assigned to the UN Security Council Resolution that authorized a UN force for Darfur

714,570

41

Emails sent to George W. Bush protesting genocide in Darfur

Number of countries in which events took place on the Global Day for Darfur (September 17)

400,000 + The estimated Death Toll, as estimated by experts and organizations on the ground

50,000 + Rally participants at the National Mall Washington, DC (April 30)

2+ Number of years since the crisis in Darfur was labeled a genocide

by US President George W. Bush (September 9, 2004)

0 Number of UN-led Peacekeeping Troops Deployed to Darfur

Minimum Wage Increased

by Leigh Tami For the past ten years, the federal minimum wage in the United States has been stuck at $5.15 per hour. $5.15 per hour, for one full-time minimum wage worker, means roughly $206 per week. $206 per week for 52 weeks, or one year, comes out to $10,712 per year.

For a family of two (which, keep in mind, does not include children), this yearly income is still $3,000 below the federal poverty line.

While this kind of hourly wage may have been adequate ten years ago, a rise in the cost of living and other effects of inflation make this kind of pay significantly less than a living wage. For $5.15 per hour, full-time hardworking Americans are hardly able to support themselves.

Additionally, such a low wage does not take into account expenses of children, medical emergencies, or any other unforeseen charges for an

individual living paycheck to paycheck, as many low wage workers in America do.

For a nation such as the United States which boasts enormous economic prosperity, this aptly named “minimum wage” surpasses inadequate and crosses over into the realm of absurd on the scale of economic injustice. There has been absolutely no reason to institutionalize poverty through such low wages in a wealthy nation such as ours.

On November 7, 2006, 56.65% of Ohioans agreed that a change was in order and passed Issue 2 for the implementation of the Ohio Fair Minimum Wage Amendment. Following in the footsteps of 22 other states, Ohio raised its minimum wage above federal level to accommodate today’s economy.

As of January 2007, the minimum wage in Ohio was raised from $5.15 to $6.85 per hour- a significant

by Matt Cohen I came to the Homeless Coalition last September to assume the position of Affordable Housing Advocates (AHA) Coordinator.

Knowing little about the housing environment in Cincinnati, I had few expectations for the coming year.

Now, as my tenure with AHA is coming to an end, I find myself reflecting back on the previous nine months, and am glad I had no expectations. The state of affordable housing in Cincinnati is a sad affair and conditions in the city Matt Cohen are discouraging.

Ours is a city that privatized its planning function, granting too much power to development groups such as 3CDC. Ours is a city of the Nuisance Ordinance, giving lowincome households disincentives to seek help from authorities. Ours is the city that can’t get the Banks off the ground (or out of the flood plain).

And if they do ever break ground, the Banks may or may not include affordable housing units for the ignored socioeconomic groups that may or may not be included in the development process.

We live in a community that hosts political campaigns with candidates that slander each other by accusing their opponents of supporting affordable housing. In

Southwest Ohio, candidates threaten that votes for their opponents will bring minorities and poor people into their neighborhoods. AHA tried to get political candidates to sign a pledge denouncing such negative campaign tactics in the future, but none of the parties supported it.

This is a community that must take housing issues more seriously.

Good, safe, accessible, affordable housing is a necessity to all. Shelter is one of the defining contributors to a stable, productive life and shares the same importance as access to food and nourishment. The problem in our community is that a significant population lacks the good, safe, accessible affordable housing it needs to lead positive, productive lives. The foreclosure rate in the region should be enough to convince anyone of that.

But there is still some reason to hope. It is reassuring to know that a coalition of passionate individuals is working tirelessly to make a change.

I am encouraged that the Affordable Housing Advocates will continue to watchdog the region and advocate for changes in policy and perspective. I wish them luck. I wish the city of Cincinnati luck as well, because I know it needs it.

Congratulations to Venice Pizza For Being Recognized As Best Organization by OTR Chamber of Commerce increase in hourly pay. As part of this Amendment, on September 30 of every year (beginning in 2007), this state minimum wage will be increased (effective the following January) according to the rate of inflation and cost of living for the previous year. This amendment raises the wage for more than 700,000 Ohio workers who on average provide for one half of their families’ weekly earnings.

Shortly following, as of May 2007, Congress voted 348 to 73 for the first time in a decade to increase the federal minimum wage over a period of two years by $2.10, raising it from $5.15 to $7.25.

This is the first federal increase in the minimum wage since September 1997 when it was raised from $4.75 to $5.15 under former President Clinton.

The raise in wage is gradual over the prescribed two year period, beginning two months after President Bush signs the Bill, when the wage increases to $5.85 per hour.

One year following, federal minimum wage will be at $6.55- two years later, it will be at $7.25. The motion to increase the minimum wage is part of the Iraq war spending Bill, and will affect an estimated 5.6 million workers currently earning less than $7.25/hour, who constitute roughly four percent of the workforce.

As previously mentioned, a $5.15/hour wage for a full time worker comes out to about $10,712 per year.

With the increased wage, a low-wage worker’s income increases to about $15,000 per year- a significant difference, especially for families supporting children.

This long overdue wage increase has been a huge victory for the American lower middle class, and is certainly a gigantic step in the right direction for the restoration of the value of minimum wage and a hard day’s work.

STREETVIBES Page 5

Is Something Great Happening In Cincinnati?

by Sam McKinley “I definitely feel like there are some really cool things happening in Cincinnati,” said Dan Korman, owner of recently-opened Park + Vine “Green General Store” in Over The Rhine.

This was in response to my grousing about economic and political conditions in Cincinnati and Ohio, and how they seemed to reinforce each other in a vicious circle. Before he said he was moving back to Cincinnati and opening a store, I had even declared that I should really move my family out to the Bay Area of California.

Except this was a year and a half ago, and Park + Vine didn’t exist. In fact, Dan was still living in Chicago, back in Cincinnati visiting family and scoping things out for his planned store.

I hadn’t seen Dan in at least 10 years, since college, but ran into him at Findlay Market. He was talking to a woman he had also run into there, whom he hadn’t seen since high school. I found out she was moving her business to Price Hill to be part of Imago, “a nonprofit ecological organization that creates tangible ways to live in harmony with the Earth,” according to their website.

I was at Findlay Market with my family.

I had proposed to my wife that we try shopping there, because I thought we should try to supply our family needs from local businesses, especially from organic producers. I got her to try it out as a fun thing to do one weekend, but she got hooked on the fun of marketing that way and then saw the importance of buying from local producers and organic producers.

There was enough Serendipity, Kismet, or Coincidence flying around for me to suspend my discouragement with Cincinnati and at least try on Dan’s point of view. I capitalize Coincidence because I think it’s not really random when it piles up like that. When more than one Coincidence comes together, I think it’s a strong indication that you’re where you’re supposed to be, doing what you’re supposed to be doing.

I did some research on the internet that night and found that there were some pretty cool things happening in Cincinnati. Imago was certainly applying its pressure in the right direction. From Findlay Market, I was familiar with quite a few businesses who were doing their bit. The Streetvibes I bought at Findlay Market was a voice for caring what becomes of actual people while giant economic forces play their games. I began to look for “cool” things happening in Cincinnati, instead of seeing everything through the lens of “too conservative” and “economically depressed.”

About two months ago, I brought up Dan’s point about “some really cool things happening in Cincinnati” to a friend. I added my take on it, that things were bubbling up from the grassroots level, namely small, locally-owned businesses with economic, social, and ecological consciousness, in all combinations. My friend came up with the idea of compiling a directory of all of them. Patronize a business from the directory and you know that your money stays local and you’re furthering economic justice, social improvement, or good ecological management.

Not long after that, while reading my Streetvibes, it occurred to me that maybe such a directory could start with advertisers in Streetvibes. They don’t run many (often any) ads now, so they’re obviously not dependent on the revenue. They could actually make advertising decisions from an editorial standpoint: these businesses and institutions say, stand for, and do things we support.

I very soon found myself in a job interview at GCCH/AHA. I suggested my idea of Streetvibes’ selling ads for businesses that were locally-owned and conscious. Exec.

Director Georgine Getty suggested I write an article about this idea and here we are.

So what about that, locally-owned businesses? Are you just interested in making money, or are you interested in the health of your city and area? Since you’re not sending your

Jimmy’s Motorcycle Adventures

How’s My Driving?

555-1313

profits all over the world (no publicly-held corporations need apply), you’re already contributing extra to the general welfare of the area. Once upon a time, the people who made money here got involved and did what they could to make their city as much a source of pride as their businesses. The ones who are remembered as truly great didn’t just build big institutions, like museums, libraries, and universities, but also contributed to making life better for everyone.

I think we have a burgeoning movement of small businesses who aren’t just in it for the money. There are actual non-profits. Then there are many businesses who try for profit, but only within the context of their values, whether they’re economic, ecological, or social.

Wouldn’t it be great to see them all advertising in one place? Wouldn’t their potential customers like to have one place to look, where they could know a business has been vetted as being in line with their own values?

You’re reading an article about this idea, but the producers of Streetvibes haven’t said they’d go for it as I write this. I haven’t asked a second time, but we’ll see how it goes. Reader response would be helpful here.

Sam McKinley, of Madeira, is a former computer guy, turned small-time activist.

He’ll be starting on a Master of Community Planning degree in the Fall.

The Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless and Streetvibes wish to thank Panera Bread at Gilmore Square in Fairfield for their donations of bread, pastries bagels and sweets.

These are used throughout the week by our vendors people who frequent the lobby to use the phone or get out of the heat.

“The helmet saved me!”

STREETVIBES Page 6

Jaywalkers

by Michael Henson This is the fifth in a series on poverty and addiction.

Some more notes on dignity, poverty, addiction: In twelve step recovery meetings, people tell their stories of “what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now.” Again and again, the story is of dignity lost and dignity restored. You won’t hear the word “dignity” used much, but I believe that when an alcoholic tells “what it was like,” dignity is what is battered by the drink. When an addict tells “what it’s like now,” she is telling the story of a newfound dignity.

“What happened” is in part that a vision of true dignity somehow emerged from the chaos and the addict/ alcoholic could no longer tolerate the assault on the dignity that drinking and using entail. The false fronts that are part of the active addiction and that undermine true dignity began to fall away, so that something like a real dignity, one that is built from the inside out, can develop.

Poverty complicates this process.

Poverty complicates everything.

Not everyone agrees with that.

There are people who will tell you that the disease of addiction affects everyone in exactly the same way, no matter what their socio-economic level.

I understand the motive behind this insistence. We do not want to go back to the days when very few people understood the disease of alcoholism and addiction and there were a lot of failed attempts to explain the behavior of the substance abuser in moral, psychological, psychiatric, social, sociological, theological and many other –logical terms, none of which matched the available science and none of which were successful in helping solve the problem of the addict.

So poverty does not explain addiction. But poverty complicates addiction.

Because poverty complicates everything.

One day, on Main Street, I tried to pull into a parking space. On the sidewalk nearby, a young woman was pushing her baby in a stroller. She had it in mind, apparently, to cross the street.

The empty space where I wanted to park my car gave her just the gap she needed. I had already started to back into the space, but she looked me dead in the eye, pushed the stroller off the curb, and waited in my parking space for the traffic to clear.

I have an innate solidarity with jaywalkers. I lived in Chicago for a year and, in Chicago, jaywalking is something like a civic duty. But I suppose this was one of my lowsolidarity days. I wanted to get into that parking space and onto my errand.

Stupid, I thought, for that young woman to endanger herself and her child. But she did not seem to care much for what I thought, for once she had stopped me with that dead-in-theeye glare, she did not look at me again.

Perhaps she had been to Chicago too.

Without a backward glance toward me, she waited for the last of the cars to pass and she headed on across Main Street toward an errand of her own, Her head was erect and her shoulders square.

Stupid, I still wanted to think once I finally pulled in to the space she had finally left me. But there was something in her stance and in her walk and in her rigidly southward gaze that told me something else was at work besides stubbornness and irresponsibility.

I believe now she was standing on her dignity.

She was doing it the best way she knew how at that moment.

For dignity is a relational thing, a stance one person takes toward another, a stance which says, I will take your insult if I must, but I will not allow it to alter my conception of myself, nor will I alter my action if I can help it.

To anyone who has experienced indignity, that is,

humiliation, insult, or disrespect — anyone who has been imprisoned, abused, cheated, shamed— to anyone like this, dignity has a meaning which is quite clear. It needs no lengthy explanation, nor even words.

To put it into words anyway, dignity is the refusal to be demeaned in spite of demeaning circumstances.

Dignity provides insulation against insult and humiliation. Dignity has the added dimension of preservation of the sense of self. If a person lives in dignity, then he or she lives free of insult, not because there is no insult, but because her dignity is proof against the pressure, threat, and damage of the world.

This is true even when the insult is from within. A person insults the self by choices that sell out the self, the true self, not the “self” we talk about when we are self-centered or self-absorbed, not the self we pray to be free from in the Third Step Prayer, but the true self that we speak of when we say, ‘to thine own self be true.” The self that lie, cheats, or betrays, sells out the true self and destroys the dignity of the person.

Therefore, to have dignity is to be free of the necessity to bargain away pieces of the self for survival But there are certain situations and conditions that tend to diminish the self and put dignity at risk. An extreme case is slavery, where indignity attacks the self like a shark. The modern workplace can feel very undignified at times; indignity attacks us there mostly in nibbles. Abusive relationships, schools, playgrounds, the streets —all can be situations which demand more of the self than the self should have to give. To be in the position where one has to beg, to accept insult for the sake of survival, chips away at the self. It demeans; it destroys dignity; it creates indignity. We know it is indignity when the situation leaves us feeling rankled, cheapened, shamed, and embarrassed.

And this is what poverty, classic poverty in which one class of persons is placed subservient to another, forces on the individual, a constant daily choice

between surrender of selfhood and survival. .For the alcoholic in poverty, the problem of dignity is doubled, for the insult of the world around is compounded with the insult the individual inflicts on the self through his or her use and the behavior that results.

And then, in recovery, he or she has to accept something like a loss of dignity if they ever expect to get help. Maybe it is not dignity that is being lost at that point, but the false front of it, the illusion of it. But at the time, it often feels as if all dignity has been stripped away. The protective ego must be put in check.

He or she must come to a place where the only way out is through the sort of supplication which seems to destroy dignity. The sense of self becomes a burden.

Right at that moment, if the addict or alcoholic has a vision of true dignity, he or she might “come to believe” there is hope.

But again, poverty complicates things. There is so much to assault the self in the daily grind of poverty, that it can be monstrously complicated to sort out what is a stand on dignity from what is a false front.

So what about this young woman with the stroller? I have no idea if she is alcoholic or addict; she comes up here because of that erect head and square shoulders, marks of a person who will not be bowed by circumstance.

I can only imagine what assaults on her dignity she must endure, so I no longer think of her as stupid or irresponsible.

She simply was not in a mood to beg or bargain. She did not intend to ask permission to use what was more her street than mine. She was standing on her dignity. I can complain that it was the wrong way to do it, but dignity on Main Street can be in short supply. So, if I ever cross her again, she can have my parking space for as long as she needs it.

Not that she cares. Which is as it should be.

Giving Back to the Community I recently met a longtime resident of OTR who remembers the action and how the repercussions drew national attention. The The Contact Center controversy caused such a stir that understands that stories about poverty don’t sell. That stories about CBS news magazine and “60 class and race don’t sell. That stories minutes” decided to do a story.

Former CBS news anchor and “60 about inequality don’t sell. And yet our Over-the-Rhine organization – an minutes” reporter Ed Bradley, organization that has been in existence according to longtime resident Jackie Roley, visited the Contact Center. for over thirty years, has been The story was called “People instrumental in helping to fight poverty Against Displacement.” as it relates to class, race and The publicity that followed inequality. helped mobilize low and moderateDuring this span of time income people to organize and hold we’ve witnessed situations where elected officials accountable. residents were basically uprooted Unfortunately, that was then from their homes and property as a result of “project development.” This and this is now. Voter turnout during elections has declined in OTR over process is commonly referred to as the years. We need to re-energize gentrification.

by William Wallace, Voter Project Coordinator, Contact Center

the residents and encourage people to get involved in the political process.

Communities that vote receive increased attention from, and better access to their elected officials.

Which in turn, leads to more effective representation. Plus, it’s ludicrous to complain if you don’t vote!

Fast-forward twenty five years later and we are once again experiencing “project development” and as a result more OTR residents are being forced to relocate and move elsewhere. The Contact center, interestingly, is smack dab in the middle.

We remind our critics that there are decent, hardworking people in this part of town and not just prostitutes and drug-dealers with guns. We are still a non-profit,

community based organization that works to advocate for low and moderate-income people. The Contact Center does not spend a lot of time talking about what needs to be done. In partnering with the Ohio Empowerment Coalition and Benefits Rights Advocacy Group (BRAG), we’ve attended several hearings at the statehouse already this year regarding the Health Care in State Budge Bill (HB 119).

The Contact Centers’ mission is clear. We see the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and the dwindling middle class getting squeezed. As we see it, the Contact Center’s role in advocacy is more important than ever. Our organization has a rich history: a history that should be told.

STREETVIBES Page 7

Homeless Youth: Often Overlooked and Pushed Aside

by Linda Pittman Cincinnati - It is a common misconception that the average homeless person is an older adult living in a shelter or on the streets. In reality, 30% of the homeless population in Cincinnati are children, where the average age is nine. Since most shelters do not accept children, they are “displaced” (i.e., living with other family members and friends). How then can they receive help? There are several excellent agencies in the Greater Cincinnati area who are committed to helping young people: Lighthouse Youth Services Lighthouse has three programs for unaccompanied runaway and homeless kids. The Youth Crisis Center is for minors up to the age 18 (if still a full-time student) and is a 20-bed facility located on Jefferson Avenue in Clifton across from Burnett Woods.

There is also a Transitional Living Program (short term, 18 to 24 months) affiliated with Shelter Plus Care consisting of permanent supported housing which requires the individual to be involved in 30 hours of productive activity a week (working, going to school or volunteering) and also provides life skill classes.

Bethany House The Anthony House in Coryville is a Day Center. The youth outreach program focuses on teens to young adults and takes place three afternoons a week. It provides survival supplies to live on the streets or in a squat. It was started in 1972 as a runaway shelter but now provides runaways and displaced youth with a safe place to come during the

day. A nurse is available during the day to help with youth who need assistance.

Bethany House Bethany House collaborates with others to provide a full range of housing, education and assistance programs to homeless and disadvantaged women and children.

It began in 1984 and provides case management for approximately 400 women and children annually. They only accept minors accompanied by their mothers, and in rare cases, fathers. Boys over 12 years old are not accepted at the facility but are placed off site. Programs provided include a Child/Parent Program focusing on the special, emotional, physical and relational needs of homeless children in crisis The Life Skills Literacy Program, transportation assistance, meals, laundry and supervised child care are also available at Bethany House. Also available is access to physical and mental health care professionals, referral services and relocation assistance.

Post Shelter Support includes follow-up home visits and post shelter assistance to former guests who have successfully completed the shelter program and are designed to maintain stable housing, income and family life.

Interfaith Hospitality Network of Greater Cincinnati Interfaith began in 1991 and is an affiliate of Family Promise. It provides hospitality in the form of shelter, meals and caring fellowship. Local churches host homeless families at night and then the families are taken to the Day Center during the day. The Day Center is located in Lower Price Hill on St. Michael Street and serves as a home base by providing adult education classes, a kitchen, laundry facilities, showers, free telephones, a mailing address, computer facilities and a children’s playroom.

Host congregations are area churches that provide three meals a day, private sleeping space, and volunteer to create a “home away from home” for the families. Case managers help families find and maintain permanent housing while vans transport families to appointments, interviews and day care. A bus transports families back and forth between the

Interfaith Hospitality Network congregations and the Day Center. School-age children attend school and receive after-school tutoring through Project Connect.

Project Connect Project Connect serves Butler, Clermont, Hamilton and Warren Counties and is designed to remove barriers to education exclusively to homeless youth. Since 1996, when the federal government mandated that homeless children be given the same educational opportunities, Project Connect has been providing supplies and transportation to and from school for homeless youth.

The age limit is 18 years old unless the individual has special needs or access to a GED alternative. Project Connect is located in the Hayes Porter Elementary School on Poplar Street. Statistics have shown that students who do not attend Project Connect’s summer camp (see June article “OTR, Kids, and Summer”) fall way behind their grade level during the summer. However it has been shown that students who go through one of Project Connects summer activities stay at or exceed their grade level when returning to school in the Fall.

A new division, Faces Without Places, helps children to succeed in their education by providing special needs education, summer reading programs, school supplies, uniforms, books and transportation to and from school.

City creating office to help homeless

by John Futty Reprinted with permission from the Columbus Dispatch Some of Columbus’ most significant homeless camps have disappeared in the past 10 months.

In a coordinated effort involving city departments and homeless-advocacy groups, eight camps were cleaned up and most of the residents were relocated to permanent housing.

City officials hope to continue the momentum by creating an Office of Homeless Advocacy within the mayor’s administration, Mayor Michael B. Coleman and City Council President Michael C. Mentel announced yesterday.

“We need consistency in addressing this issue,” Coleman said after speaking to more than 700 people at the Greater Columbus Convention Center during the Mel Schottenstein Birthday Celebration, an annual luncheon benefiting the Community Shelter Board.

Mentel said the City Council is committed to creating and funding the office, though the cost

STREETVIBES Page 8

of the program and the size of the staff haven’t been determined.

The mayor’s administration will oversee the office, Coleman said, because it does so with so many of the city departments and has “the necessary clout” to mobilize their efforts.

Virtually every city department, from Public Health to Public Safety, plays a role in addressing homelessness, he said.

The city also is developing a formal protocol for responding to the health and safety problems associated with homeless camps and other incidents of street homelessness, Coleman and Mentel said.

“We’re doing it with dignity and we’re doing it with respect,” said Erika Clark Jones, the mayor’s policy director.

The office and the protocol are further steps in the city’s partnership with the Community Shelter Board and social-service agencies that assist the homeless.

The protocol requires that those living in a homeless camp be told when the camp will be cleaned up and be assisted in finding permanent housing.

That approach was used in the cleanups of eight homeless camps since August, said Barbara Poppe, executive director of the Community Shelter Board.

The four largest camps that were cleaned up were at Neil Avenue and Vine Street near the Arena District; N. High Street and Arcadia Avenue in Clintonville; west of Moler Street near the Whittier Peninsula; and along the Scioto River bike path between Veterans Memorial and Souder Avenue.

Of the 107 people who lived in the eight camps, 66 were relocated to permanent housing, Poppe said.

On any given day, 200 to 300 homeless people are on the streets of Columbus, she said.

Since starting its Rebuilding Lives program nine years ago, the shelter board has nearly reached its goal of creating 800 units of permanent rental housing for homeless people.

The city plans to seek voters’ approval next year on a bond package that will include funding for more affordable housing, Coleman said.

25,000 people will experience homelessness at some point in Cincinnati this year • 29% of the homeless in Cincinnati are children • In the last fif-

Cincinnati Urban Experience College, High School, and Youth Group students will come to Cincinnati, Ohio to learn about issues of homelessness and poverty through service, educational experiences, and reflection. Participants will come to a greater understanding of and empathy for the complexities of poverty in an urban environment through experiential learning and guided reflection.

Program Components: Service: Groups perform service at agencies and organizations in Urban Cincinnati that deal with poverty and homelessness issues directly. Through service work, participants have personal experiences with issues and gain knowledge.

Education: Participants will take part in activities that teach them about poverty issues. Examples include speakers, education activities, experiential/simulation exercises, and videos.

Reflection: Discussion of service, education, experiences, and observations among peers. Focus on drawing connections and learning.

Living: Participants live together in a simple community setting. Ideally, they stay in the community in which they are serving and learning.

For more information contact: Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless Andy Freeze 117 East 12th St. Cincinnati, OH 45202

Phone: (513) 421-7803 x 14 Email: andytfreeze@yahoo.com www.cincihomeless.org

homelessness in Cincinnati are lack of affordable housing and the loss of income • A person on food stamps in Ohio receives on average $1.04 per meal

teen years the homeless population has risen 150% in Cincinnati • The leading causes of

STREETVIBES Page 9

Riot

by Richard Hague This month’s guest columnist, Richard Hague, teaches at Purcell Marion High School and heads an award-winning creative writing program. He is an award winner himself, many times, for his poems, essays, and stories. “Riot” will appear in Public Hearings, forthcoming from Word Press in 2008.

Over-The-Rhine, Cincinnati, April 2001 “Hurt or scorned people are places where real enemies hide. - William Stafford, “Report To Crazy Horse” Who can wonder that the laws of society at times be forgotten by those whom the eyes of society habitually overlook, and whom the heart of society often seems to discard? - Dr John Simon, City Medical Report, London, 1849 “Even the best of men err in judging the conduct of one with the recesses of whose condition he is not acquainted.- Melville, “Benito Cereno” April, early, and the city locked down, blood bright on the stones of the alley where Timothy Thomas was shot, bright on his Dollar Store t-shirt, bright on the clenched knuckles of the police.

The treasury of Fear is filling.

Fear is the greatest capitalist, gathering unto itself and unto its vast corporation the partners Frenzy, Panic, Terror, Rage.

Now Fear has made you, city, its latest catalogue, its vivid marketing of itself— Saturday Night specials, fully loaded high-caliber deals, corpses of young black men in alleys, grim-faced denying and stonewalling cops, red-lined neighborhoods of poverty and woe, sputtering councilmen, shrieking backstreet martyrs and agitators, children up and down Vine Street chewing their fingers and weeping.

And on the catalogue’s cover a sheet of brightest metallic paper mirrors your face, city: in Fear’s catalogue, we are this month’s cover girls and cover guys, the main attractions.

(Self is always the greatest fear, facing Self the most personal and intimate fear, projected so that your dreams, city,

STREETVIBES Page 10

crowd with niggers, wetbacks, spics and hillbillies, queers and dykes and honkies and rag-heads, all Creatures from the Black Lagoon that goes stagnant and rank within your own fear and intolerance, poorly hidden but as surely there as your unfinished, abandoned subway.)

Nor think you will escape into your suburbs, city, for there is the subtlest, most poisonous Fear, the money-colored walls you build around yourselves, your treeless deserts of abundance, your chronic diseases of traffic, your field and grove-blasting plagues of commerce, your sprawling unplanned lack of beauty and decent sewage, your malled whited sepulcher bankrupt treasuries of success.

City, Fear builds its battalions of your inner city trash and junk, Fear erects its barricades of obfuscation and gobbledygook, then displaces endlessly the poor and the illiterate.

Fear feeds on failed school levies and selfsegregation (you, city, among the most segregated in America).

Fear haunts Findlay Market, diminishing the crowds, emptying the streets, smothering the musicians, Fear hides in the baklava and the bagels, in the short ribs and chitterlings and sausage.

Fear blights the flowers of the vendor, stalks the honey-gatherer, rapes the paper-maker and the cooks.

Fear sits legless on the steps of City Hall, begging for change, and you, O city, outlaw begging for change.

Riot has slept for years under the steel basement doors of Main Street.

Riot has hung out at Vine & Elder, sprinted glass-breakingly crazy through Mohawk and Madville, smoked reefer and crack at 14th and Clay, shot heroin in the parking lot of the Boudinot LaRosa’s while Petie Rose bunted dull one-liners in the kitchen.

Why have you not seen Riot in his red shirt, the tattered schoolbook freshly thrown from his hand?

You have ogled Riot in her tight white dress, cut low over her tattooed chest.

Why have you been surprised to find Riot at your door, hawking blood, stealing the keys of your car, spray-painting the columns of your new temple stadium?

For Riot knows your name—it is scrawled on a piece of paper in Riot’s left pocket, paper wet with rain that has leaked through the roof of Riot’s broken classrooms in Evanston, scrawled in angry lipstick on the West End Marathon’s restroom’s mirror, it is scratched invisibly into the bricks of Yeatman’s Cove next to the names of the others, it wanders the history of Tall Stacks, looking for black men to carry its loads.

It hangs like a bloody sword from the hand of Cincinnatus.

Do not think Riot always speaks harshly.

Riot whispers in your ear, City, Riot curls up like a dog of small fire under your Hyde Park bed at night, Riot rides the metro past the Stowe House and remembers all its haunted rooms, its tightlipped mute displays.

Riot silently scales the monument at North Bend, waving its bloody sweatshirt.

Riot rides shotgun, wary, wordless, with the Chief of Police.

Despite all of your haranguing and all of your testing and all of your mandating and sacking of your faculties, despite your callowness and cruelty, city, Riot can’t spell. Riot can’t count. Riots sits in a schoolroom where the students appear to be dying, where the walls are hung with peels of paint like the skin of flogged slaves, where brown stains the size of secret massacres darken the corridors, where classmates named Denesha and D’Juan disappear over Christmas, never to return, where teachers lose sleep over spelling errors and multiple-choice tests on Citizenship.

Failure in the Proficiencies— how obvious on your streets, how clear in your downtown gunshot alleys, how perfectly accomplished in your mostly-white powers and your black defendants, how expressed admirably in your school statistics, and your self-indicting demographics— how completely and successfully, city, you fail your own citizenship proficiencies.

(What is it you are testing,

what facts ignoring, what truths turning your backs on, you who make the tests, you who think bullying with percentiles is less offensive than bullying with fists?

Legislators, testers: heal thy selves.)

Riot lives where most mayors, hotshots, high muckamucks have never lived or would dare to live; Riot lives where the governor would never send his own children to kindergarten; Riot limps to its job in the inner city school cafeteria where it hawks french fries and cholesterol to its own nieces and nephews, and eats its own dignity and sickens itself; Riot refuses to be patronized or even to demand what it is entitled to, being denied so many times; Riot requires immediate gratification after centuries of being put off, lives poorly, eats poorly, drinks too much, smokes too much, can’t imagine a better life, breaks every bottle it sees on the street, tears the branches off planted trees, walks as an infant with bloody feet in front of its own trashed house and sets fire to its own garage; Riot lives in another universe from the Garden Show and the Hyde Park Gold Coast mansion tours and the Cardinal Pacelli School Best-Dressed and Most Likely to Succeed.

Riot eats flowers and burns mansions and takes up the phone book and chooses addresses at random. Riot wakes you up, city, from the sleep of your spirit and your heart, it cries out in the wilderness, and you are either Moses, city, or you are Pharaoh.

Riot makes these demands, even without speaking— a Mayoral Proficiency exam, a corporate CEO Mercy and Justice accountability exam, fixing the athletic teams’ bungling and shredding of millions of tax dollars.

City planners, you have failed, traffic clogging all the orange-barrelled ignored infrastructural highways and byways, so that Road Rage, Riot’s cousin, moves to town

and squats under every freeway overpass, loading and pointing its guns.

Universities, you have mostly failed, the city is little better for you, the citizens no more peaceable, civil, tolerant, understanding, the environment no more protected, the wealth no better distributed, the coalitions no healthier nor abundant nor effective, the citizenry little the wiser for all your departments and programs and degrees.

Riot demands a Patience and Forbearance exam, Riot requires a major in Self-Examination, a Chancellor of the Study of Studies, an Ombudsman of Decency and Retribution, a Dean of orderly discourse.

Still, Riot continues to live in the black and Appalachian and Cambodian and Latino pointed fingers, in the wake of the bailed-out CEO motoring off in his sleek yacht of money while the shareholders’ futures flatten like slashed city tires.

Riot has stood with its heart on its sleeve, with its hand out in peace, and has waited for centuries in line in the interminably opaque uninhabited answeringmachine bureaucracies of passing the buck and hoarding.

Riot wanted to move, but couldn’t.

Riot wanted to learn to read, but the building was cold and the rain came in.

Riot stood before the Music Hall and asked to listen, and the answer was No Panhandling.

Riot wanted a better place to live, but the landlord was in Florida, counting the gelt.

Riot wanted equality but the scales were tipped by privilege and custom and fear.

Riot wanted quiet nights but the sirens of the police stabbed it in the side and the blue flashing lights strobed it into nightmare.

Riot wanted protection and was given assault.

City, will God help you if you continue your evil ways?

Will God be satisfied with mostly white schools and mostly black schools?

Will God be satisfied with the BMW gated community Haves and the locked-down abandoned-to-the-Metro Have Nots?

Will God be satisfied with shrieking and cursing

in the place of singing and healing?

Will God sit down at your tables and negotiate justice?

Is justice negotiable?

Is liberty negotiable?

Is poverty a crime?

Is hunger a vice?

Is ignorance to be upheld?

Is callousness to be rewarded?

City, draw a line around yourself, and beyond that line, say No More.

Freeways, subdivisions—no more enervating sprawl.

Reinhabit yourself, city, your busted blocks, your wasted vacancies, your beautiful cast-iron downtown storefronts and brownstones and walk-ups, reinhabit them all with well-meaning people, people abandoning the isolation and privilege of the segregated suburbs, abandoning the temples of Mammon off the freeways, abandoning the mall parking lots, returning them to trees and crops and birds; people rebuilding their own downtown, repairing the infrastructures of spirit, building bridges of talk and story-sharing and glee.

Do not spread yourself thin, do not continue to flee yourself, but concentrate your efforts and your wealth and your justice where they are needed most, City, make Vine Street paradise, Main a haven of delight, the West End a jazzy fellowship, downtown a crowded dance of sidewalk ballets and chess games and street rap and thriving vendors.

Otherwise, city, Riot will become your next mayor, seizing a lifetime term, and you will continue to empty, to fold up, to die, and there will be no there, city, and without a center there can be no direction from which to venture forth toward the future, or to gather in to celebrate the past.

You will be lost inside yourself, O city, you will be a fallen temple, ruin, your people a tribe of wanderers in the desert of yourself: Shall you overcome, city, or be overcome?

STREETVIBES Page 11

Preparing foster kids for life on their own

by Margo Pierce Excerpt reprinted with permission from CityBeat.

Turning on the oven and popping in a frozen pizza for about 20 minutes doesn’t seem difficult. The directions on the box are explicit.

Some boxes even have a picture of a dial on the stove turned to 350 degrees. So what is there to screw up?

“We walked into this place: ‘Something’s burning in here,’” says Mark Kroner, describing a visit to a teenager’s apartment. “He goes, ‘Yeah, I’m making a pizza.’ He opened up the oven, and he had a pile of sticks in the oven and this pizza sitting on top of it.

“He grew up in an Appalachian family with no money — the utilities had been shut off. That’s how they cooked, gathering wood in the city. You would never think that you would have to teach someone not to do that.”

The boy with the pizza is one of the approximately 25,000 kids in some form of child protective services in the United States who will “age out” of the system at 18. The goal of independent living programs is to teach the soonto-be-adults how to be self-sufficient.

In conjunction with Hamilton County Job and Family Services and Juvenile Court, which has legal custody of kids removed from their parents’ care, Lighthouse puts teens who are working or going to school into their own furnished apartment and pays all of their bills — rent, utilities and an allowance for food and clothes — as a hands-on method for teaching them how to survive.

“A big part of our job is to help kids understand what they don’t know,” Kroner says. “We put them out there and we assume they know a lot of things they don’t know. Or we’ll assume they don’t know a lot of things that they do know.

“They come to us at 17 1/2 with no knowledge of the bus system or even money.

They’ve been infantilized by the system, which is made up of lots of good people. But they’re not thinking about the reality of these kids being gone at 17 1/2 and 18.”

Cooperation works The child welfare system is designed to take care of and protect children who have been

abandoned, neglected, abused and removed from their families. The intention is good, but when you have a county system responsible for caring for children — in Hamilton County, that number fluctuates daily but hovers around 700 — the already difficult job of parenting is complicated by the fact that social workers, caseworkers and judges all have to decide and agree upon what’s in a child’s best interest.

When it became apparent that abruptly cutting off support to these kids at age 18 was causing serious problems — homelessness being

STREETVIBES Page 12

the most immediate — Hamilton County created a program that is now a best-practices model emulated all over the country.

From the beginning, Lighthouse Youth Services (lys.org) proposed an approach based on practical knowledge gained from providing youth homeless shelters, at-risk-youth emergency service programs, group homes and foster care families.

However, getting three different agencies to agree about the best way to facilitate and support growth while providing a safety net that wouldn’t undermine the goal of self-sufficiency was a huge challenge.

“There was a lot of tension between the courts and the county,” Kroner says. “There’s still a lot of tension about how long these kids can stay ... that’s based on deficit realities. But at this point in time you have all three parties sitting down together on a regular basis saying, ‘Given the realities, what’s the best thing we can do? What do we need to do?’

“We’ve had to work out a lot of these things ... and have this trust amongst all the systems.”

‘This is how’ A collaborative relationship between the county, courts and a private agency such as Lighthouse is what it takes to make sure the kids get what they need, according to Kroner.

Cincinnati’s program has been around for 25 years.

“It could very easily be a blame game when something does go wrong,” he says. “We got kids that will do some outrageous things. They’ll commit crimes. Nobody’s going to point the finger and say, ‘It’s your fault that this happened.’ Everybody goes, ‘It’s really unfortunate that this kid took this opportunity and chose to do that.’

These kids are just like every other teenager — anxious about leaving school, unsure about their future and hormonal — but they have the added issues of mental health problems stemming from their childhood, no parents to offer guidance or serve as a safety-net and limited life skills.

The Independent Living Program appears simple, but its concepts are difficult for kids to grasp. The kids are given a budget and they have to live within it; if they run out of food and money, they have to figure out how to handle the situation. Over the course of the six- to 12-month period, the kids gradually begin to take over paying their bills.

“American kids are super-sophisticated in this area but they don’t know anything about this area; they will know how to use a computer and every electronic gismo and not understand that the apartment they’re moving into belongs to somebody who’s trying to make money off them,”

Kroner says. “When they break something, they have to pay for it.

“A lot of them grew up in families that were always dependent upon public aid. The thing is, that system has been dismantled.”

Foster home-ec Emancipated in August 2006, Canon Hopey took over the lease on the apartment Lighthouse gave him the year before. He’s grateful for the practical training he received at the end of his nine years in the foster-care system.

“Budgeting,” Hopey laughs. “Oh my God, that’s got to be the biggest one. They actually had a thing that helped you with the budget. There was a budget book to keep up. You have an expense book, and you write down everything that you got to pay and how much will you have at the end of your activity. Go over your grocery list, go over your bills, put all that in and see what you have left. Being the person I am, if I don’t have anything else to do, I’ll sit there and write up an agenda. I go over my agenda every day.”

When Hopey first moved to Clifton, his agenda included finding a grocery store and coin-laundry on the bus line — he doesn’t have a car — and a place to get quarters on Sunday, when he can do his wash. It’s been difficult, but Hopey says he’s OK with that.

“You get used to being on your own, carrying on your own business, making your own appointments, doing things when you’re supposed to do it,” he says.

The key to achieving a success story like Hopey’s is up the kids, according to Kroner, but the kids need the support of a solid, consistent infrastructure.

“We’ve probably had more failures than successes, but you have to look at that over the long term,” he says. “If there are no self-sufficient 18-year-olds in America (and) if our kids aren’t self-sufficient at 18, is that a failure — or just normal?”

‘A fighting chance’ To date approximately 1,600 teens have gone through the Lighthouse Independent Living Program, and there are a lot of successes. Kroner believes this is because the approach is realistic and supportive.

Like all public programs, it could use more money, more caseworkers and more time with the kids, but Kroner also makes it clear that Cincinnati has the best of the best in place already.

Even though everyone agrees selfsufficiency training is essential for all kids in the system, independent living isn’t a one-size-fits-all way to deliver those skills.

Watson, Arnold and Kroner express frustration over the stereotypical view of kids who are in the custody of the state. That is exactly why they’re involved is supporting and promoting independent living.

“I think people have a picture in their head of foster kids; they put them somewhere along with delinquents and the scum of the earth without realizing that foster kids got here not on their own choosing,” Arnold says. “Somebody else did to them or didn’t do for them, and that’s why they’re here.

“What I’m fighting for is to give them a fighting chance, because up to this point in their lives most of them have not had anything near a fighting chance.”

Homeless Outreach Group (HOG) conducts quarterly survey

by John Lavelle It was four o’clock in the morning on May 30th, and people were filing into the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless office as if it was four in the afternoon. However, the lobby wasn’t open yet for normal, daily operations.

Homeless outreach workers were gathering to conduct a survey and count of individuals sleeping on Cincinnati’s streets.

The workers are part of the Homeless Outreach Group (HOG), a workgroup formed in 2003 to bring together street outreach workers to share information and develop common goals.

They conducted their first street survey on a cold

night in February 2004, when they discovered 24 individuals sleeping outdoors, despite freezing temperatures and five inches of snow.

Since then, the outreach workers have conducted three to four street surveys throughout each year. Armed with clipboards, cups, coffee, and donated goods, they break into teams to cover as much of the city as possible. They climb under bridges, through wooded areas, along the river, and down alleys.

The purpose is not only to document how many individuals are sleeping on the streets instead of in shelters or their own homes, but also to ask questions as to why they are on the streets, what

special needs they have, and what types of income they earn. The mornings are also a good time to do coordinated outreach and potentially meet people who haven’t had contact with an outreach worker yet. Workers share information afterward and often do follow-up outreach.

This past May, the Homeless Outreach Group encountered 55 individuals sleeping on the streets in central Cincinnati. There were large concentrations of people under several underpasses and around the Courthouse. Some outreach workers were able to reconnect with clients who had been displaced from their camps by police just days before the survey.

Down’s Syndrome Will Not Slow College-Bound Kids

by Dr. Steve Sunderland Watching young people giving testimony of how they survived the first steps into college programs kept an audience of 150 parents, youth and academics in thrall. We saw the future on the brink of being and becoming the present. Young people, 3 with Downs Syndrome, gave panel presentations, luncheon talks and power point presentations that were filled with their love of their colleges. They spoke about going to classes, taking tests, living in residence halls, eating on their own, and living life outside the expectations of a society that had “institutionalized” them.

Katie Beresford, a young woman in her twenties, gave her talk using a PowerPoint to show her history, her family, and her joy at being a college student. “I am going to be a chemist,” she said with confidence, clarity and determination. Many of us gasped at her dream, catching ourselves in the hopes she and her panelists were sharing, and we wondered if we were seeing the liberation of people previously trapped. Katie not only spoke with confidence but threw in humor, music, and a dance. “Wow!”, was the reaction.

T h i s conference was a part of a major movement to redefine who was a college student, what a college experience should be, and what kinds of supports, intellectual, psychological and instructional, were needed by those who have intellectual and emotional challenges. “As soon as a student is admitted,” Scott Lissner, Ohio State University’s ADA Coordinator,” the university or college is committed by federal law to providing whatever support will make each student a success.” Scott’s definition of a student is most inclusive and based on years of experience both helping students and counseling faculty on how to implement the spirit and letter of the federal law. A college was not only a place for a student, a certain kind of student, to come and take notes, hear lectures, and struggle with exams on their own. A college, thanks to the Americans Disability Act, was now a place where advocacy for supports, a change in attitudes of students and faculty, and creative use of technology, could be just the right ingredients for opening doors, professions, and hearts.

This is a historic change in the definition of a student and the purposes of a college. Now, with

strong parental support, positive and creative admissions directors, sympathetic faculty, able lawyers, and experienced counselors and students, a whole new group of students can enter colleges and universities with an expectation of success.

“Success” can mean coming to a college like Strive U in Portland, Maine, for two years of continuing education programs aimed at heightening life skills of people, preparing for new occupations, and helping students succeed with great enthusiasm for a life of meaning. Or, students can go to Mercer Community College in New Jersey and attend classes similar to Strive U and also enroll in traditional academic classes. Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio, is preparing a similar kind of program. Mt. St. Joseph, Cincinnati, Ohio, has a program, “Project Exel,” with over 80% success in assisting students, largely through mentoring, to both overcome their intellectual and emotional difficulties while becoming effective degree seeking college students.

This summer, the Ohio Mental Retardation/ Developmental Disability department, in alliance with the Peace Village, will offer 6 days of a “College Camp.” The goal of the educational experience is to bring together students selected by MRDD with students and faculty of the Peace Village, based at the University of Cincinnati, for a conference centered in classroom, cultural, and living and learning experiences.

A parent, Candee Basford, of Winchester, Ohio, a slim, feisty, funny and determined mother who had beaten her head against year after year of rejection, confusion, and skepticism about her daughter’s vast ability and wonderful personality, spoke for many parents in the group. “We don’t have to change our children to make them ready for college,” she said in her opening talk. “Our job is to change the system from one that labels us and our kids as invisible, irrelevant and beneath seriousness. We need to change these systems into human ones that can create relationships of caring with and for our children so that all students, with support if needed, can succeed. Her remarks, tinged from time to time by tiredness from the long battle to just get to the starting line, inspired many who heard her. Candee is not someone to take lightly. She has and reveals a kind of toughness

toward intolerance and tenderness toward people and institutions that welcome her daughter and any person seeking an education. Candee watched her daughter, Katie, dance and speak with a comfort and ease that opened the hearts of the audience.

Katie made it clear that she loved her mother and that she, Katie, had her own independent mind. Candee’s smile, attempts to interrupt Katie, and to add her own view, were neatly integrated into Katie’s solo performance. It became clearer that Katie’s success in being an independent woman also depended upon being able to bounce ideas off of Candee.

And, how the ideas bounce! At times, they were a complete team; at times, they were two high flying acrobats, amazing us with their swings and spins.

At bottom, though, we were watching two leaders that had built their strengths on being in the presence of each other so as to spark deeper capacities for love and power, while also swinging out into an air that encouraged individuality.

I spoke with Candee over dinner and learned of her struggle to find a way through the thicket of regulations and ignorant attitudes, in order to gain the glimpses of success that she had accomplished. Candee is slim, medium size, with short brown hair on top of a head that keeps moving as she communicates her enthusiasm and/or tiredness. As a change agent, she has learned how to capture learning from each major event, whether failure or success, and construct a lot of paths to success.

Yes, Katie was a teacher who happened to have Downs syndrome. Perhaps some of the comments the teacher and the class could have made about her art were kept silent out of alleged respect for how much she has accomplished. I could not tell if she was being accepted as a full member of the class at all times. I saw a fine teacher at work, creating the space to share her own story and making inviting room for the entire class.

The conference ended with a strong sense of hope and impatience. Many parents of children with Down syndrome and other problems had seen just the beginning of an effort to create an open door for their children. Many parents met people just like themselves who refuse to give up their children to labels and the attitudes that keep them in place. Young people saw many adults willing to join them in the efforts to provide serious alternatives for adult learning. We ended with conference co-chair, Janet Gara, executive director of the Down Syndrome Society of Cincinnati, promising to bring us together for even more stories about those youth and their families as they enter post secondary education. I left to the words of one set of parents: “It is a new day.”

STREETVIBES Page 13

Don’t Forget

by Elbert M. Holcomb, Jr. When you’re out there in the streets, And you’re feeling all alone, And you find this place that you started calling home.

When you come in through the door, You see this person’s sitting at the desk, You ask him a question, Take time out to listen, And give him an answer if you can, It might be important.

When you see a guy on the corner, Begging for some change, And you walk by, And he says “Hi,” Say “Hi,” Back.

Don’t just walk on by, Like you never even see him, When you see yourself getting better, and you start treating people different remember, A lot of us were in that same situation once, The only thing is we are doing something about our problem.

Don’t forget, Where you come from, Because you never know when, You might have to come back.

For an exercise in the InkTank writing group at the DropInn Center, the participants were asked to describe the worst place they ever tried to sleep. Here is one composition.

by Scott B. Insanity is how I describe my life and situations I have put myself in. How crazy is it to work for a company for two years and the majority of that time be homeless. In 2002, I would get off work at 11:30 PM and catch the last bus. I would look at the people’s faces with a look of assurance of having a place to go. I would rest as much as I could on the ride towards town.

Then there was my stop. I would go to the apartment building where just a year before I lived with my mom before she passed. People there knew me, so I would wait for someone coming in or leaving. Once inside, I would take the elevator to the seventh floor then take the stairs to the roof door landing.

The rug was dirty where the maintenance guys’ dirty shoes had tracked black debris either from the roof or the elevator shaft, yet at the time I couldn’t wait to lay on it. I would lay my coat down and would sit there listening to people on the other floors going in and out of other stairwell doors. I got to the point where I could tell by the sound of their feet how close they were to me. If I should jump up and put my shoes back on or do I even care anymore. I would lay there smelling the dust and the mixture of different kinds of food from all the floors mixing together. Boy I wished I had something to eat. I would lay there staring at the ceiling thinking of good times I had in this building but those days are gone. The hum from the elevator shaft became soothing as I tried to figure out why am I here? I better go to sleep because 7:00 AM comes quick when the maintenance guys come on duty. I take my empty wallet out of my back pocket to be more comfortable. I open it and glance at my ID which still has this address on it. In my mind I still live here.

At the Drop-In Center...

Home

by Ria Strong My home is fragments of a dream.

My home is a safe place to hide.

My home is a sleeping bag, radio and clothes.

My home is a stuffed toy wombat.

My home is in the library.

My home is electrons through cyberspace.

My home is a coffee shop.

My home is an office.

My home is a soccer court, chair wheels spinning.

My home is the beat of my djembe.

My home is a song in the chaos.

My home is cutting through water.

My home is the links between people.

My home is the four directions.

My home is the breath of the planet.

by Ria Strong “How are you?” you ask me.

How am I? I think I’m cracking up again.

Do you really want to know?

I don’t trust myself in the art room.

Craft knives can cut flesh, too.

Or are you just being polite, I won’t sit outside with you today.

When I see the cigarette butts, still-smouldering in the ashtray, I want to pick one up and burn myself with it. making conversation?

You look forward to holidays; I look forward to death.

I lie in bed at night, dreaming about it.

“How are you?” you ask me.

“Okay,” I answer.

La Isla

by Jose Ornelas He would run barefoot down Paisano St. toward La Isla where the grey cinderblock houses didn’t have running water but alma y corazon were plentiful. The river surrounded his neighborhood on three sides, just like a big American hug, welcoming and promising.

There, mama would be making tortillas by the glare of a bare lightbulb. The side to side slap of the dough would continue to be a welcome rhythm of childhood memory. A few years later the new projects in the second barrio seemed like a dream, residents could borrow the lawn mower once a week! Here the sidewalks were not broken, there was a real lawn and street lights. The best part of course was that Marcelino, his best friend, lived down the hall.

Time and again a new roof would signal a new start. Until the American dream became a reality in the suburbs; his very own lawnmower now occupied the other spot in the two car garage. But no matter where he ever was, the barrio, in the barracks, or on Main Street, it was never home until the tortillas came off the flame, hot, crispy and familiar.

STREETVIBES Page 14

Interrupted Journey

by Earle Thompson Coyote pauses arching his head, surveying the blue meadow Grey paws pad among morning glories, finding a fallen doe.

He halts his journey, cleaning himself as best as he can, finding the small deer had recently died, wounded by man.

Coyote sets aside a rib, cleaning it on the starry grass; Makes a valuable gift, polishes it, and hears magpie pass.

He invites the long-tailed one to share this good fortune Eating and gossiping, the polished rib absorbs the sun.

Are you thirsty, he asks, did he have anything to barter?

Magpie explains that the Frog people govern all the water.

At the dam, they learn he has a valuable gift to trade They discuss the amount and price, an agreement is made.

Coyote proceeds to drink the water putting one hand in ready to scoop the earth aside, when he finishes drinkin’.

Coyote destroys the dam and water rushes by. To be fair, he announces with a smile that water shall be everywhere.

Eve’s Afterglow

Untitled

by E. O. Anthony Announcing egypt-bronze skin your invitational fuschia lips surround gleaming teeth more precious than pearls.

I would swim in your smiling lake eyes to that forever milk and honey land where the pure river of life eternally proceeds out of the throne of God and of the lamb; but you are endorphin afflicted to sin again removing you from Abba our heavenly Daddy especially now that your purple blinking semaphore eyelids flutter and your mascara dribbles across your cheeks differentially eclipsing all delusions of control: this ontic pretense of sep/a/ra/tion ego boundedness as opposed to the opening upward heart leaping I-Thee-Thou More than love, grace beyond Yule-tide is Christ cleansing the conscience so much more than our thalamic exchange of electrons: bodies of many kinds and different species thermodynamically dancing in the field around the tree with twelve fruits each fruit healing our separate nations singing hallelujah.

by Melissa Mosby I sat and watched chaos As the chaos settled in In your silence I heard you scream Your mouth did not open I sat and watched As the caution became fear In your laughter I heard you cry Your eyes did not tear I heard the ache in your gaiety I saw the isolation in your friendships I felt the hunger in your fullness So I sat and watched As you pulled away and As you pushed toward Your perfect balance beam Mount and floor exercise and The dance which to you is So very necessary Yet so very difficult to maintain Again I sat and watched As the loneliness lay down And even in the spotlight Center stage You played your part Fierce, bold, witty, outgoing And we both knew It was just a role you were playing So I sat and watched And I saw you forget your lines And ad-lib Those things you thought You were supposed to say Those things you thought They wanted to hear I called to you And I sat and watched As you turned away From me as well as yourself For your glance in the mirror Sees me

Dragonfly Pond

by Paul von Kempf, JR As I lay in the cool, moist sand, mesmerized Watching the chain of events unfold around me.

Water skeeter is skating across the water while the honeybees go about their days work pollinating the blackberry blossoms.

As I lay in the cool, moist sand, watching The pesky mosquitoes take twice their weight in blood each time they strike while trout hides quietly in the shadows and frog hops onto a rock to say hello.

As I lay in the cool, moist sand, watching The stifling heat brings with it the fragrance of blossoms and the sweet smell of uncut hay.

As I lay in the cool, moist sand, watching A pair of dragonflys arrive to perform a ballet Flitting to and fro, pirouting like two ballerinas landing gently on the water, wings slowly pulsating in the sun.

As I lay in the cool, moist sand, watching a sow bug come plodding along with its hard shell and many legs but, my stomach growls hungrily unwilling, I say goodbye to my friends

Memorial Day 1999

by MJ Shaw I walk to the edge of the water. I have a handful of flowers, red and blue. One is for my daughter, Phaedra, who I know is in God’s arms. One is for my Dad’s Mom who showed me love. One is for my Mom’s Mom who shared my room when she was sick. One is for Anita Williams who shared her Indian spirit with me. And one is for Jesse James Spears, who showed his love for my sons and for Naomi, my neighbor who had the same name as my Mom, Naomi who showed me the beauty within her. One for Peter Guadalupe, who gave me my first son.

God Love Them

The Short Attention Span Gospel

by Michael Henson A man was born in a barn.

They say she was a virgin.

Wonderful things happened – Stars, angels, kings!

Terrible thingds happened – Massacres, beheadings, exile.

He lived awhile, he died on a cross.

They say he rose back up.

He traveled and he preached.

And what he preached was love.

Love God, he said, and love one another.

Love your neighbor.

Love your enemy.

Yes, even your enemy.

Love one another, Love the sinner and the prostitute.

Love the poor and even the rich.

Even the stuck-in-the-eye-of-aneedle rich.

Don’t worry about tomorrow, Just love one another.

Love your neighbor.

Love yourself.

Love the improbable.

Love the unloveable.

He went to a wedding and turned water into wine.

He did things no one could explain.

He preached from a mountain and he made loaves and fishes and he told us to love one another.

He said, yoiur siins are forgiven.

So take up your pallet and walk in the love of one another.

Couples Only

by Stan Burriss Enough time.

A sense of belonging.

This thing of coming to meals, of finding enough. A place, and enough to be left with friends behind you, and where friends should have been inside through housing that City forgets to share, while you make a place.

Then, you share it.

Given enough time, you share it

STREETVIBES Page 15