The thieves burst into the Thai restaurant wielding guns and demands and left with hundreds of dollars in hard earned cash. Ramaesh Bhagirat, who opened Thai Orchid on Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington DC, was so shaken by the armed- robbery last December that he considered closing up shop just after 6 months in business.
But a few days later, something almost as surprising happened. More than a dozen residents of the restaurant’s surrounding neighborhood, who heard about the robbery, pleaded for Bhagirat to stay. Thai Orchid, set in a hardscrabble neighborhood on the brink of change, was one of the only sit down restaurants east of the Anacostia River, and residents had come to enjoy the tasty lunch and dinner specials as well as the friendly owners. They also asked Bhagirat if he would consider not putting up bullet proof glass in front of the counter, to maintain what had become a comfortable eatery.
Bhagirat, who has lived in the nearby neighborhood of Fort DuPont for 20 years, listened to his neighbors pleas and decided to stay. He opened the restaurant a year ago so that his wife, a experienced Thai chef, could ply her trade and develop a business of her own.
“We were really scared by the robbery, but we knew these were our friends and neighbors and we wanted to hear their requests,” said Bhagirat, 58.
And in return for staying open, the residents decided to return the favor: Every second Tuesday several dozen pop up for a community dinner to help support his efforts to stay in business, which continues to fall short of expectations. The dinners are usually attended by more than about 30 people and the hundreds of dollars that Bhagirat receives helps him sustain the restaurant’s operations.
“We have enough trouble trying to get restaurants to come over here, and the ones that do, we want to support,” said Maceo Thomas, a real estate agent and community organizer who came up with the idea for the monthly dinners. He lives near Fort Dupont Park and for several years has taken an active role in creating events for the communities east of the river. “I felt it was our responsibility to rally with financial support.”
Good news for the hundreds of thousands of children worldwide who suffer from sickle-cell anemia, the often painful genetic disease that largely affects people of African descent. Here’s what Howard University released this morning:
“Clinical trials conducted at Howard University College of Medicine and 12 other medical institutions across the nation have discovered a treatment that dramatically reduces pain, inflammation and hospitalization time and eases other symptoms in young children suffering from sickle cell anemia.”
The release goes on say that doctors, in a four-year study, found that “using the drug hydroxycarbamide (also called hydroxyurea) in very young children with sickle cell anemia was safe and markedly reduced episodes of pain and other problems. Hydroxycarbamide has been used in adults for several decades for a variety of cancer treatments and is approved for use in adults with sickle cell anemia.”
Sickle cell anemia involves red blood cells that develop abnormal - or sickled- shapes that are unable to pass through capillaries and slow down the flow of blood through the body. These sickled cells also break down faster than normal blood cells, leading to anemia. Complications include severe pain, strokes, damage to different organs of body and premature death.
Howard officials said that the findings will be published in this week’s edition of The Lancet, the world’s leading medical journal and suggest that use of hydroxycarbamide “should now be the standard of care for all children with sickle cell disease.”
Also from the release: “Children who received the hydroxycarbamide therapy were half as likely to experience pain, five times less likely to have painful inflammation of the hands or feet and three times less likely to experience acute chest syndrome than the children who did not.”
Here’s how Dr. Sohail Rana, professor of pediatrics in the Department of Pediatrics at Howard University College of Medicine and director of pediatric hematology at Howard University Hospital and one of the investigators on the study described the results:
“This is a significant breakthrough in the treatment of this disease, particularly for our very young patients,” Rana said. “To be able to dramatically diminish the pain that these young children suffer because of this disease is truly an important step forward. We hope all clinicians will now adopt this treatment for their patients.”
For more info: http://www.howard.edu/newsroom/default.htm
Stacey Smith is a social worker at Bread For the City, a social service agency in Southeast Washington. For the native Washingtonian, the work is more of a calling than a 9 to 5 and he relishes the responsibility through a humble approach to his life and the lives of others.
I don’t look at this as a job. It’s destiny. Period. Don’t give me no titles. I’m just a human being, man. I’ve been blessed. I tell God to keep blessing me everyday. Give me what I need, so I can keep blessing my people. That’s all I need. I’m in love that. My life has been that way. I like it. I love it. I love my life. I don’t want a whole lot. I look at providing for my kids. Give me a small house. I want a place that I can hear. Where I can hear a drip. I want to hear the crickets. I want to hear everything. I want to hear my house. I want to hear my boys in my house. I wanna know: where you at? I want to hear everything. That’s fine with me. Give me the basic necessities of what I need. And I’m good with that. I love them that way. That’s where I’m at. I love staying there. I love being there. No one is going to take me from there.
I’m involved in trying to help our people get jobs. What they need. But it’s not really about the jobs, it’s about self-sufficiency. It’s about mental health. It’s about health and about being healthy. My responsibility is to remind people to have a human quality. Remind people about their birthright…about the need for a good quality of life. That is very, very important.
See for me, I live my life living for my means. Having the bare necessities. I use this example with the people I talk with. I say “If I have a whole lot of meat, and I take it to a butcher and I tell him: ‘give me the good meat’ there might be a whole lot of meat but when you get to it, it’s about the good meat . And that’s good, because that’s what I need. Not the fat and all the cartilage. The good meat is the bare necessities.” I live my life the same way. My mother always told me: if you have a sandwich and you don’t need all of it, give someone the other half. That’s what you need. I live my life the same way. Give me what I need and keep it moving. Just keep moving. I live my life that way. I do that. I get a loaf of bread, use what I need and then share.
We have to remind people, like politicians, to stop playing with people’s lives, man. Stop getting caught up in all this money. We get caught up into this other stuff; we’re dealing with people lives. People are so convoluted, they are not respecting life. How could you do that? You got to respect people’s lives man. People are living. And the unfortunate thing is that you’ve got people out here who don’t really understand what life is. And people who don’t appreciate it. That charges me. That makes me angry. It makes me angry, man. We have people who people are dying. Children are dying. From homelessness and poverty. We are dealing with someone’s life.
William Borum, a native of the District, has spent most of his 50 years behind bars for dealing drugs and felony embezzlement. He’s been out for 2 years now: May 28, 2009 was his release day. It took him 17 months to get a full-time-on-the books-job. Now, six months in, he helps us understand a basic question: what does it feel like to work again?
I feel like a man. I feel like a man, because I’m responsible. This is what a brother of mine, who’s now a preacher, said to me the other day: He said he can tell I’m doing the right thing because when I call him on my home phone, my real name comes up on his caller id. Not some alias. MY name. That’s because the cable bill in MY name. (Laughs) Responsible, see? I’m driving around the city in a car that’s in my name. I’m not rolling around in no stolen vehicle. I can smile.
I was told one day, by my boss, he said I was their guy. They wanted me here. My boss said he saw something in me. I started out, they’ve paid me minimum wage for 6 months. But I stuck it out. They hired me the first day at minimum wage and now they are about to double my salary and I’m about to get full benefits. You know, man? For 6 months I’ve been making minimum wage. I toughed that thing out. My company said: “No you don’t have to do that.” They wanted to pay more a little more. But I wanted to. I toughed it out. Because I see something.
Now, you see, I know how to get government contracts. I know how to sit in front of the mayor, Kwame Brown, and it’s just by being clean and sober. Since 1989 this is the first time I’ve been out for more than 6 months at a time. I made a decision: that’s it. No more I’m not going back.
And I tell my brothers out here on the street: I was there. I try to talk with them and they say. “Aww man, you don’t know what it’s like out here.” And I tell them: “You don’t think I know? Let’s sit down and talk. Let me tell you something. You think I don’t know? You don’t think I was in the back garages, smoking crack? You don’t think I’ve done all that? I was out there more than 20 years and could never stay home more than 6 months.” They can’t tell me. If they would give themselves a chance, if they knew than they were; these men… man we’re the ones that can make a difference in the world, if they just knew.
I’m telling you man, I won’t take this for granted again. I can walk outside, I see people up and walk down the street, and I can look them in the eye. When I was high, man I used to walk up and down the street and not look a man in the eye. I’d look people up and down and my look would say: “What you want from me? What can I get from you?” I’m never taking it for granted again.
Did we have to cheer?
If it was my call, and I knew where he was, I woulda said, “He gotta fall.”
Especially after he bragged about how he toppled them towers, ya’ll.
Ten long years, two presidencies and untold tapes showing him gloating in front of the families of all the people who died on those planes, in those towers and at the Pentagon.
Osama bin Laden. Had. To. Go.
But I also sympathize with those who shrunk away from the cheering crowds. Even those who have forfeited their right to live, and for whom we shed no tears, jumping up and down at their death didn’t seem quite right.
(Source: therootdc)
Curtis Watkins has a simple plan: make sure that children who live in a new housing development in the Marshall Heights section of Washington, DC see welcoming black male faces in the morning on their way to school. So, every Tuesday and Thursday, at the crack of dawn, from now through the end of the school year, he and a brigade of community activists will walk the streets of the neighborhood in Ward 7, east of the Anacostia River, greeting elementary and high school students as they walk to class. Their greeting is often as simple as this: “Good morning, young brother, young sisters!”
“Most of these kids don’t see positive male role models, brothers who are just out and about looking out for their well being,” Watkins said as he strolled down E Street, SE piping up with his greeting to a trio of girls who were scurrying to J.C. Nalle Elementary School. The girls looked a little confused at first, then murmured a “Good morning” back.
“It’ll take them a little while to get used to us, but they’ll start asking us, ‘what y’all dong out here?’ It’s just about having a presence in the community.”
The early morning efforts is known as “Safe Passage,” and Watkins and his crew - Eli McCarthy, William Lawson, Hernando Viveros, Edward King and Kaneil Williams- see it as a building block to developing positive relationships between kids in their neighborhood and their elders. While there is certainly a public safety angle - Watkins hopes their presence will diffuse any problems that might arise between school kids- it’s also a chance for adults to be present in the children’s lives- in an old school way.
“We want these kids to feel warm,” said William Lawson, who also walks around the Clay Terrace and Lincoln Heights public housing complexes on Monday and Wednesday. “Who knows, maybe just our presence one morning will make one of these kid’s day.”
