#Whole blocks filled with 3-6 children families...just kids everywhere and outside all the time

[steal-this-idea]

I wonder if these changes are permanent? Like how do these laws/policies get unmade without it becoming an opportunity by opponents to claim one is "soft on crime" or some other bullshit?

I think of an old jokey apocryphal how a temporary ban on bottomless dancers would, in truth, be a permanent ban because no politician could ever craft a way to be in favor of repealing such a needless ban without incurring the opportunistic wrath of moral crusaders

So how do we let kids be free again? Because I used to walk home from school starting in the 3rd grade. I was eight. I would even sometimes go home for lunch (and no one was home either...I was just doing it because other kids got to do it so why not me? I only stopped when my teacher noticed that when I left, no one picked me up and I didn't want her to tell my Mom)

It never a big deal

One Summer, my brother and me with our downstairs neighbor (none of us older than 12) went exploring a culvert that ran under a parking lot (bunch of eels down there). It was one of the coolest things I remember doing as a kid. No one knew where we were. No supervision and most importantly, no cops were called on us (because I can't imagine we were super quiet during all this). Now you can't even cut across the parking lot without some asshole in security questioning what you're doing. (what do you think I'm doing? I'm cutting a quarter mile or more off my journey like every other pedestrian resident in this town since this place was built in the 1940s)

I think it bothers me even more because these laws were clearly created by the very same people who have fond, cherished memories of hanging around with friends/family in their childhoods, playing stickball in the streets, riding bikes several town over, playing in playgrounds without any adults around, going into corner stores to buy candy/soda, etc. Like, no one gave a fuck we were doing these things and then, suddenly, they did.

Can it be attributed to anything because it surely can't be crime. The things I just mentioned all took place during peak crime in America (the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s). Is this something else we blame on landlords or perhaps capitalism more broadly? Public spaces and good-natured fun being effectively outlawed because the "powers that be" deemed we weren't making them enough money when we "wasted" our time by simply spending it together?

Was it mostly liberal or conservative politics that brought us these lack of public spaces? Or was this one of those rare bipartisan fuckings over?

Cuz I'm tired of it

It's hard to be a civil society when our basic social nature is legislated against

[christianrizzi]

tour du senegal

Arriving in Senegal from the north you pass through the rice fields and sugar cane plantations of the region of the river bordering with Mauritania. It is customary to stock up on rice and sugar to be distributed among the villages to be visited for lunch or for the night. There are consortium stores along the road, spotted because of the parked vehicles.

Prices are not that different from those of other shops in different cities, but it is the original bag of “Riz du Senegal” and of “Sucre de Richard Toll” that makes the difference, due to a media defamation campaign on certain rice import. However, it’s always a good move to show the villagers the distant provenance and freshness of the products, for instance by saying: "two days ago I got it from Rosso Senegal rice paddy” which is the most northerly point in the country, where at the origin of Senegal all the rice and sugar came. In a nutshell, these are things that strike the people of the villages, who move on foot and have never seen the city, as much as it struck us 2 or 3 centuries ago.

For the night it is better to take advantage of the welcoming city of Saint Louis (Ndar), located between the mouth of the river Senegal and the sea; there are hotels, pensions and rooms everywhere. But the place certainly nicer to spend the night is the last peninsula called Ndar Guet, a strip of 200 meters of white sand between the ocean and the river, where you can sleep in accommodations at the edge of the beach at sea and river level: it feels a bit to be in Venice.

A characteristic of this city - which may perhaps be similar to others - is that the alleys of the old area pass through the houses, creating an immense global village where space is very limited what it is and you have to keep everything in it. Clearly everybody knows each other in the neighborhood and, as  a consequence, there are no dangers. However, as a tourist it is strange walking around and passing by a lady's room or a house toilet. In any case, tourists are not forced to enter these areas. I actually did, but only because my guide had relatives and wanted to greet them; they invited me in to, so that I had to leave the car in the middle of a narrow road where trucks loaded with fish and carts passed; but there they all know each other and it was enough for the aunt of the guide to make 2 screams and 4 laughs to the neighbors to turn it all right.

We ate and set off with some pancakes left us in a package by auntie. As we got out of the narrow lane taking the only road leading out of town towards the north, we passed in front of a motorbikes and scooters mechanic workshop: - "eeehi stop!!!! That’s my cousin out there! It’s been 2 years I haven’t see him". Ok, let’s stop by the mechanic cousin then! A bit of chatting on technical details won’t hurt after all. So we get out of the car again, it was 2:45 pm and the boys are washing their hands for lunch. Chatting around, the girls bring lunch and we eat again and then stick further around for coffee, “coffee killing” or digestivo, chatting about this and that and the old stars of local motorcycling. Locals say that now, with the paris dakar much smaller, the passing of the racers is no longer felt as it was once in the days when tourists from all over the world packed the area waiting for them; those were indeed the old glorious and golden days of saint louisen motorcycling, when the locals followed the tracks of the various champions. These days there are max 20 30 motorcycles and 15 trucks: “do you want to compare this with 1000 motorcycles, 500 cars and 300 trucks?” – the cousin asks. And in addition – the cousin continues – we also lost all the accompanying fans not making the stops in Mauritania: - "There, where you parked, we used to have European motorcyclists’ tents every year in those days; now no more, and some kids now prefer the mobile phone to the scooter ".

And after a few hours of chatting we finally left. It was not so hot anymore to reach Tambacounda from the north of Lac de Guieres, practically following the course of the Ferlo river that turned out to be so beautiful with its soft sand banks looking, when driving on them, sea-like; the sand is beautiful, yellow as the desert and the distant spaces. Sometimes, from low hills, you can see the bends of the dry water course, except for those 3 - 4 months a year that is filled with water, I imagine a lot of water because the dry river bed is quite wide.

The tracks after the end of Lac de Guieres are, as I have already said, beautiful; they create a gentle up and down on little sandy hills, where at a certain point you meet the camels with their breeder and the boys, apprentices, camel drivers who, luckyly spoke Wolof that I am able to understood a bit. The camels were in the surroundings of Yang Yang.

So we stopped because I wanted to get on the camel and we asked the camel drivers if in the area they knew someone, or a village, where they sold and butchered goats: the goat roasted in the savannah is very good and lasts in ice even 2 or 3 days.

Unfortunately, we did not find the ice and the second day we had the roasted goat with a family in Payar, where we spent the night. During lunch we then learned that there is a sort of milestone in the village of Payar indicating the geographical center of Senegal.

I did not have much petrol and from Payar we took a dirt road to Koumpentoum, where on the road we found a gas station and, given it was already sunset, we continued on the asphalt to Tambacounda to withdraw some money from an ATM and eat in a restaurant on the road which serves, if it has, the warthog; they had it and we ate it. In Tambacounda nights are very hot but hotels have air conditioning. But me and my guide preferred to sleep on a terrace – the roof of a friend's house - after eating a warthog dinner and a downing a beer. On the same large terrace, behind the stairwell, there were also sheep inside cages with cross-barnacles, we noticed the presence of the animals only in the morning despite the full moon. I chose to travel with the full moon because, if you happened to stay on the slopes by turning the lights off, you could maintain some visual references and enjoy the landscape nonetheless. This is because  I imagined that the phone with gps battery would have lasted little more, and since I had seen that the cigarette lighter did not work, I knew I had to orient myself very much even by naked eye at night. It would not be a problem to ask, except that there was the rumor that sometimes in the savannah you can meet 4wds driven by whites kidnapping children away who then go missing. This explains why, when you arrive in villages where the children are playing outside roaming the streets, they run away screaming, seeking protection from the oldest person happening to stand nearby.

On waking up on that terrace, we noticed the weather was changing; in fact, rain was expected for that day; that's why I wanted to get to Tamba in time to be in the mountains after the rain, enduring it during the trip. So I was advised against taking the streets of the park under the imminent downpour but to reach Kedougou from the state road instead, which turns up to be equally a dirt road even though there is less risk of experiencing a landslide or to get stuck in a suddenly flooded water course. The old cj6 not being very suitable for the rain advised me to find shelter under a bush and wait for it to calm down.

I had a fully-charged phone and I could check on a weather site the size of the storm: I’d say that no similar tempest had been seen in years; the big cloud covered the whole of Guinea and Liberia, reaching Mauritania and moving west; it looked as if it was in Mali and Burkina before, seemingly starting in the middle of the desert and moving towards the sea: who knows if it reached Cabo Verde later on?

Travelling with the climate change is wonderful! The sky is 1000 colors and the air has a scent of fresh grass and water; it is so inviting, especially driving a car without windows: first it was bloody hot, then it got very cold then, after the rain passed and the first sun re-emerged, warmish as in spring. But even this time, between the rain and the rough road, we reached Kedougou that was already night. After checking out the most famous hotels first, all full because of the rain, we found a room in a hotel dedicated to the great burkinabe, martyr of panafricanism, Thomas Sankara. It was a nicer hotel outside than inside the rooms, but still good enough to sleep.

The breakfast room - situated in a paillotte where birds were hiding at night and sang in the morning – was very nice; some of the staff was slow, but nice nevertheless: everything was ok.

At that point the trip got more complicated because, after the downpour, the roads are rougher and the schedule could no longer be respected; in fact, we found many cars, carts and motorized tuc tuc’s in tatters along the roads, while the boys on bicycles were now pushing them by hand, so that the roads had utterly changed.

Our driving times were drastically lengthened, so that we got to the entrance of the park just before 6, just when some barriers inside it close and can only be opened at the discretion of the guardians.

With our windowless car, we had no hope of being able to cross the park in the dark and they told us: - "either you spend the night here or we'll give you a pass to that part of Guinea and come back to Senegal behind the park"; we said "ok, we’ll have the pass then", especially because we knew there was a marabout - shortly before my guide was informed by a guy about his whereabouts - who had the ability to cure (I didn’t understand what exactly) along the road on the Guinean territory. In the end, we went there and we ate at his house until late.

When we finally resumed our trip, unfortunately we run into a military checkpoint that I did not see; we were chased and were forced to turn back, blocked all night not without moments of tension, especially because these poor soldiers were drunk as well as armed. In any case, we can say we experienced Guinean green caps at Youkounkoun.

Even Guinea, for the little I’ve seen, is very pretty; indeed, it has that more central-african look compared to Senegal. Guinea is straddling the sahel, with its villages under big trees, the milder climate, plenty of water and fruit, and with people of lighter skin and lower figure living these areas called pula futa.

Since we hit again the asphalt to return to Senegal from Kundara, we have been stopped for times since the border and had to spend the day between the police checkpoint and the customs office, all with the excuse of the visa I did not have. However, after the bureaucratic storm had passed, we held the asphalt again towards Tamba, where we spent the night on the same terrace of 2 days before. The next day we tried the roads near the Gambia, arriving in the Saloum and later Dakar.

Given that with rain we would have had to take too many detours, we resumed the trail towards Payar Yangyang and Ferlo, but backwards, and then again to Neguè instead of pulling north to Mbaye Aw and Rosso; we held the south bank of the Ferlo to Saint Louis to make the last stage of Paris Dakar on the beach of the Senegalese Grand Cote.

Again in Saint Louis, we got back to the same hotel of the first day, but this time sleeping for free, because at the end we realised the receptionist was a relative of my guide: the previous time - after paying the room - we met at auntie’s home and actually apologized, but “no problem” - we said – “let’s do it next time”; so next time it was! We ate grilled fish on the beach and in bed too. Next day we took the road towards the south from Langue de Barbarie, then we drove towards the beach after the village of Potou, hard beach that at a quiet pace takes you – including stops and detours to avoid pirogues and fishing nets - to Lac Rose in 4-5 hours. ,After a short stop at Lac Rose, we drive straight to Dakar, which now has the metropolitan area very near the lake. Dakar is a bit like Las Vegas, always open day and night: you can eat at any time anywhere in the city. Naturally, there are also dormitory areas but they are rare and uninteresting for any visitor.

[dianasuncmu]

1st Visit to Hazelwood Center of Life

1/23/17 NOTES & QUOTES

How do we lay things out? How do all the parts fit together?

Pull together something so that when someone walks into this room, with all of these things that we acquired (stories, artifacts, etc), they can say I get it, I know what this is all about.

(People in our class shared items they brought & what it means to them)

Tim connected with Jon over an item they both share: things they have that remind them of their fathers

Asking moms: What would you bring here today?

Kim: My brother’s shoes. Anybody who knew him would have seen him in them. They’re green and gray.

Name?: My son’s gold chain & gold bracelet. Coogi.

Name?: I had a son that was killed in 1994, and a daughter in 1996. He was shot 13 times cause he wanted to hang with the gang but didn’t want to do what they were doing. After he was killed, nobody came forward to say what they had seen or what happened. Then my daughter said “Mom, if I ever see anyone get killed, I’m gonna tell”, and she had moved to 2nd ave, on the 2nd floor right above a store. And a bus pulls up, a man gets out, and a car pulls up, and he shoots the guy. And she saw it. So me and my daughter went to the courthouse, and the day that we went, there were 6 guys in there, but they post-poned it. And the same night, we were sitting out back there with the neighbors, and she went out to get a pack of cigarettes. She went there and as she came out, they shot her in the face 2 times. They knew she was gonna tell. 3 days before she died she gave me this necklace. I’ve been wearing it everyday since 1996. I don’t know why I don’t take it off - she’s with me. I take it off when I go to sleep, but I put it right back on. I didn’t bring it - it was here with me. It’s something to keep in my mind that she’s still with me.

Sheila: I didn’t have a chance to have anything from my son. So I have this picture I have of him, he was little and laying on the floor - like just the innocence of him. And I got it right beside my bed. It’s devastating, and I’ll never have a grandchild. My son he was 17 for 3 weeks. God got a funny way of getting your attention, cause after that, I was trying to hold on to the rest of him so tight. The reality of it is they don’t need me anymore. (it’s okay to take care of me) Through all of that, and it’s been 8 years, nobody asked me how am I really doing / feeling. Nobody asked me any of those questions. I suck it up and stay strong because everyone is watching me and everyone’s leaning on me and I don’t have anyone to lean on.

Tim: I knew this young man in this neighborhood. His nickname was Booboo, and he was shot. If I was to bring something here as a remembrance of Booboo, it’d be a pair of pajama pants. He was an amazing basketball player, but he’d always play with his pajama pants. It just reminded me of him, of how smart he was, of how good he was at basketball, about how good he took care of his brothers and sisters. Those pajama pants were a joke between me and him.

At center of life, we recently acquired that building. That building was a hub for this community because so many people went there from k-12. There are so many memories for people walking down those halls, so we sat down with the community to ask them what they wanted to see in that building cause that’s important. I thought it was important for us to share things that we have that remind us of other people who mean a lot to us. It’s important as we talk about what this space could look like. Is it something we build from scratch? Is it gonna be movable?

For you all (cmu design) to hear the stories of the Hazelwood people is essential - for us to hear your stories is essential.. for our connection. Cause when we connect, that’s how we can have and effect way beyond our neighborhood. Cause if it goes well, it goes out into other neighborhoods and cities.

Hopefully when people walk in this door, they’ll feel something. That it will bring something to their minds and hearts. That people will have a better sense of how to connect and appreciate each other, like we need to do. It should have never gotten normal for me to bury kids decades younger than me.

Hazelwood includes: Glen Hazel (whole community up there), Glenwood, Riverside, Scotch Bottom, Technology center & Birmingham bridge (used to be hazelwood) to beginning of Glenwood bridge. Hazelwood used to be a large population.

Terry Shields has an org called JADA house. It does work with women & girls.

Glen Hazel tin council (?)

Kim has a “community store” / soul wood - good fish sandwich

Hazelwood felt like a unit. Like it was a community that felt safe. It wasn’t always like this. Everyone knew everyone else. Everyone was kind to one another. Then Hazelwood absorbed you. The people are nice for the most part - Hazelwood is home.

Terry: We used to have Giant Eagle, clothing store, furniture store, etc. I been here 50 years & I feel safe here since everyone knows me.

Tim’s Boss: As a lifer in Hazelwood (53 yrs old), what you see on the news is not all of Hazelwood, it’s just a small group of people that make the whole community look bad. Hazelwood is a community, a family, once you get to know everyone. Nowhere else is like us. We’re a peculiar people. Everyone is connected to everyone else somehow. We’re either related by blood or marriage. I lived in Glenwood, there were stores everywhere - churches, cleaners, everything. I was 12 yrs old before coming to Hazelwood. Even today, except a few people who migrated here, everyone’s connected to someone else. If there’s any bad blood between anyone, it needs to be worked out because we’re connected.

“We’re family”

This community used to be a steel mill (mono site?) 170 acres. Uber has taken about 10 acres of space. There were (in the teens) a&p, barber shops, movie theater, dance hall, etc on 2nd ave. Over the years, jobs were taken out of the community, and businesses began to leave, & the city wasn’t investing in the community. After a while we didn’t have any schools. There used to be a Hazelwood school. Saint Steven, etc. We had a lot of schools and then no schools. So kids here ended up going 7 diff ways: Mifflin, Mendell, Brashear, Lincoln Place, U Prep, etc. They used kids in our community to fill spaces in other schools to keep them open - that’s wrong. But then our schools were closing, and we had enough kids in our community.

The school district was all about the money - we couldn’t afford to keep that school open because there are not enough kids. Then when you close more schools, more kids have to go to other places, and it perpetuates. People also moved their kids to other places to get exposure to technology.

For a while kids just went to the school in the neighborhood. But then they got sent elsewhere before they learned to nurture relationships with other people, so they started ganging up. It caused bad relations.

It’s just like rivalries, like football. The team closest to you is probably your big rival.

Any neighbor, teacher, could discipline you. It wasn’t abused, it was out of love.

Homer Craig - you have to talk to him, retired police officer. Wife, Ursula, is from Germany.

The younger kids now don’t really have discipline. There’s not really a larger system - the communities are broken. Back in Homer’s day, your mom knew your friend’s mom, and everyone from that same block. If you got in trouble at your friends house, your friend’s mom would beat you, and then when you got home your mom would beat you. There’s none of that connectedness anymore.

We need to keep our children in our community. On my street there are 12 kids and they go to all different schools. They live here, so if they went to school here, they could do things together. Instead of this one goes on a bus there, that one goes somewhere else & it’s divided. That’s why they can’t do anything together. Even the older ones - just “hi how you doin?” that’s it. We used to sit out together, have gardens together, etc. That bonding isn’t there anymore. So they can communicate and play together. (kids also bring parents together)

We have to make sure people can afford to stay here as the market shifts. Mixed income community is great. Diverse - good. So gotta figure out how to stay here in diff situations. The kind of housing we live in now are not fit to deal with what’s happening to our earth. We need to build green. We need to be able to harness and prepare for the storm waters that come down. We need replenishing utilities, green/solar roofs. If you pay a lot of utilities, and gotta still pay mortgage it’s too much. Passive houses: great models up in kravits. It’s warm in there, the walls are thick, the house sits on a foam-like material, not directly on the ground.

We’re helping people become more financially leery, working with corporations/foundations to get more wealth in this community. It’s all about generational wealth. People will be able to move into this community, into a 0 net energy house. We have to protect from the situation when the 60k house gets a 500k house next to it. Then there’s a market storm. The taxes go up, & they can’t stay there anymore, even if their grandparents bought the house etc. We want to build mixed income housing up there, so that people can rent and accumulate some wealth. We’re building relationships with corporations to hope they hire from this community, so we have workforce development and a database of people’s credentials (resumes), so if they’re looking for positions, we can send it out. It’s important for companies that profit from this community also invest in it. It means investing in the people and giving them a good job.

We spend $5 million outside this community (money leaving) just because we don’t have a place to grocery shop here.

Most of people are still here but nothing is here

Used to have a lot of things for the kids: YMCA, YWCA, Hazelwood Recreation Center, Ice skating, etc. Now kids go downtown or somewhere else - divided. 

1700 kids in this community

When do a lot of people get together: Summer program, once a year “One night revival (3 nights)” where churches come out to it - play sing perform community church service, Hazelwood light up night 1st week December put lights up & horse comes around & gives kids rides, National night out - all businesses are open with food music etc. We used to do 5k run but stopped early 2000 because couldn’t get enough ppl to come to Hazelwood to do it.