Allentown Square, located at 295 Maryland St. at West Avenue,
has postponed opening its doors this month. “The problem is funding. My guys
work hard but it’s a slow game when it comes to projects like these,” Robert Neagle,
construction manager of Allentown Square said. “The project is going up pretty
fast but the manpowerisn’t there.”
In order for the complex to open this month as scheduled, twice the manpower
would have been needed, according to Neagle. The 54-apartment, $7 million
project will now likely be ready in
March 2017. By Franklin Hagler and Matt Neidhart
The Community Music School of Buffalo, 415 Elmwood Ave., doesn’t
only teach music; it also uses music to heal as part of its music therapy
program. Music therapy is a unique mental health treatment where the
participants listen to and play music. The two music therapists on staff, Brianna
Miller and Sara Rogers, say they treat a wide variety of people from autistic
children to elderly dementia patients. However, Miller and Rogers said that
they often feel the profession is not treated seriously. “Music therapy is so
much more than just someone playing therapeutic music for someone,” Rogers said.
She added that practitioners must be board certified and prospective patients
must be evaluated before a treatment plan can be developed. Patients can either
be referred or can contact the music school directly to assess whether music
therapy can benefit them. For more information visit http://communitymusicbuffalo.org/home/programs/music-therapy/
By
Melissa Burrowes
The first time Kang
Kerubino Guot shot an AK-47, the recoil was so powerful that it knocked him on
his butt.
He had no choice but to
use the weapon when war broke out in his hometown in South Sudan. It was either
hide and get killed, or run and fight back.
It’s 1995 and Guot, a
skinny, wide-smiling boy with hopes of someday studying mathematics, has an
11-pound, military-style weapon draped over his shoulder. Gunshots ring through
his ears. Women are raped. Some children are abducted. When the mayhem finally
ends, dozens of boys like him lie dead in the street.
Guot, just 6 years old,
is trying to survive what would become one of the worst humanitarian disasters
in world history.
“I was a lucky one,”
Guot said. “I made it out alive to tell the story.”
Twenty-one years later,
the now 28-year-old Guot is a college graduate with a degree in economics from
SUNY Buffalo State.
He lives on the West
Side and works at Rich Marine Sales, but his life began in Sudan, the same year
a civil war broke out between Arab Muslims in the north, and black Christians
in the south. More than 2 million people died, a half a million fled to other
countries. Peace was finally restored in 2011.
Guot was one of an
estimated 20,000 boys, known as the Lost Boys of Sudan, who were separated from
their families and fled to the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya.
By the time the Lost
Boys arrived at the camp, their numbers were cut in half. Some died of starvation
along the walk, others died of dehydration. Lions and crocodiles killed others.
If Guot saw a lion, he said, he avoided eye contact at all costs.
The boys’ survival
tactics are unnerving to hear.
To avoid dehydration,
Guot drank his own urine. He and the other boys ate leaves, berries and dead
animals to avoid starvation.
“I had a lot of friends
die along the walk,” Guot said. “Others died when we got to the camp from
sickness.”
For those that made it
to the camp, a better life was just beginning. The camp was funded by
international aid organizations as well as the United Nations. It provided food
and clothes were donated by American churches.
In 1999, the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, working together with the State
Department, recommended roughly 3,600 of the Lost Boys for resettlement in the
U.S. Nearly 500 of the Lost Boys who were still under the age of 18, including
Guot, were supposed to emigrate to the U.S. by the end of 2001. But tragedy
struck America on Sept. 11, 2001.
“All of the flights to
the U.S. were blocked,” Guot said. “It took me three years longer to wait for a
flight to come. I was so excited to come, but it was taken away.”
Guot finally got on a
flight to America in 2004, and was ecstatic.
“I knew that I had to
make most of the opportunity,” Guot said. “I never thought I’d have the
chance.”
Guot was sent to
Syracuse and met Ann Mayes, a volunteer advisor at Onondaga County Catholic
Charities. Mayes helped Guot apply to Onondaga Community College and prepared
him to take the college placement test.
It took Guot eight
years just to earn his associate's degree from Onondaga Community College. He
jumped around from full-time job to full-time job in between taking classes.
“Even considering how
tough it’s been here, I’ve been given an opportunity here that many of friends
and family members could only dream of,” Guot said.
Like many other Lost
Boys, Guot faced an uphill battle to get immersed in American education.
“In Kenya, his education
was a small group learning under a tree,” Mayes said. “No paper, no pencils. He
never used a computer before coming to America.”
It took Guot more than
a year to figure out how a computer worked.
Unlike other refugees, Lost
Boys came by themselves. Guot’s father, an army officer, died in the war. His
mother and six siblings are all in Sudan.
“They have to provide
for themselves,” Mayes said. “They don’t have parents, they didn’t have wives.
Kang and many others struggled to balance working full-time and going to school
full-time. It was a big, big cultural change.”
Guot sometimes worked
third shift before going to morning classes.
“The Lost Boys required
a lot more maintenance than the normal refugee family that would come,” said
Stephen Redding, former director of the International Rescue Committee who
helped send the Lost Boys to the U.S. “Some of them had a very hard transition
to America. Just doing the basic things like finding a job, going to the
supermarket and laundromat were so foreign to them.”
Guot dropped four of
his classes halfway through his first semester because the workload was far too
tough. The only class he kept was math, because it required just paper and
pencil.
After graduating from
community college in 2012, he moved on to SUNY Buffalo State, where he earned
his four-year degree in economics. Now, he’s working on obtaining a second bachelor’s
degree in international relations.
“It’s been a long
journey,” Guot said. “I’m just so happy to be here and have to chance to get an
education and better myself. Back home, others weren’t that lucky.”
Many know the
excitement of Allentown, but not the history.
On Dec. 11, visitors will step
inside the private homes of Allentown’s National Historic District for the
Secrets of Allentown Holiday Tour of Homes. The self-guided tour will bring
visitors into homes from the 1800s that are fully decorated for Christmas.
Allentown Association President
Jonathan White said this is the first time in several years the tour is being
held.
“We thought that it would be a perfect
way to integrate the Allentown community and the Western New York community for
that shared common bond that people have around their love of family and their
love of things for the holiday,” White said.
White said guests will receive a
special booklet with the locations of each home. Without the booklet, guests
will not know which houses are part of the tour.
“The tour booklet will include the
wonderful artwork, which is a line drawing of each property, that we’ve
specially commissioned for the booklet and then a description of each house,”
White said. “You learn a little bit about the house and the home owner before
you get there.”
The tour’s starting point is the
Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site, 641 Delaware Ave., where a
Victorian holiday event will be taking place. Guests can tour the first floor,
including the library where Roosevelt was sworn into office.
The tour will run from noon to 4
p.m., with start times at noon and 2 p.m. Tickets are $35 for the general
public and can be purchased at allentown.org.
By Patrick Koster and Dave DeLuca
Every child deserves to feel the magical moment of opening a
present early Christmas morning. With the help of Buffalo Dream Center, many
children can experience that pure happiness.
The Buffalo
Dream Center’s Boxes of Love project helps out families in need with a wrapped
Christmas gift for each child and a bag of nonperishable food. Distribution
this year will be on Dec. 10, said Eric Johns, Dream Center pastor.
Buffalo
Dream Center, an outreach Christian ministry in the inner city, is signing up volunteers
to wrap gifts at its 318 Breckenridge St. headquarters. More than 1,000
volunteers have signed up in recent years.
“The week after Thanksgiving, volunteers start
to come in and help wrap the gifts for the community,” Johns said.
Pastor Johns spends the week of Thanksgiving
living with the homeless using the opportunity to spread the word among the
streets.
ItsBoxes of Love project began in 1999 assisting a few
families with Christmas toys and bag of groceries but over the years has assisted
3,000 families and 5,000 children. By
Tiera Daughtry and Vincent Nguyen
More than 29 million people in America have diabetes,
including the new immigrants who might not know they have the disease or how to
treat it.
Special
attention is being payed to diabetes in November because it marks American
Diabetes Month.
Jericho
Road Community Health Center, 184 Barton St., is one place immigrants can get
help.
Registered
dietitian Christine Fleming, who works for Jericho Road, says many people are
unaware that they have the disease before coming to this country.
“Sometimes
people will think they’re becoming sick with a new diagnosis,” she said.
“Sometimes when finding out they have it, they’ll realize they’ve been having
these symptoms for a long time and they just didn’t know their meaning.”
Fleming said there
are two types of diabetes. Type 1 affects younger people and occurs when the
body stops making insulin. They stop getting energy from the food they eat and
their blood sugar spikes.
Type 2
diabetes is linked with people’s diets. Two things can happen Fleming said. The
body can stop responding to insulin or could stop making as much insulin. It
can be treated with lifestyle changes such as dieting and exercise.
Many
immigrants come to America with different cultural foods that may not be
healthy for them and can heighten their risk of diabetes
“What I try
to do is teach them foods in their own culture and their own diet that they’ll
be able to eat to help them have a balanced diet,” Fleming said. By Tony Callens and Benjamin Joe
Joe Petri, owner of Westside
Stories Used Books, 205 Grant St., opened up his store five years ago during the
rise of e-readers despite decreasing sales of hardcover books nationwide. He remains
optimistic for lovers of traditional books. “I have so many hardcover books I
can make furniture out of them,” says Petri. In the mid-2000s the rise of
e-books shocked the world of printed books leading to the slow decrease sales
of traditional print materials. According
to the Association of American Publishers, throughout 2015 hardcover book sales
dropped almost 19 percent. However, sales are on the rise for paperback and
hardcover books for the first time this year in four years. The sales of
paperback books rose 7.2 percent and hardcover books rose 17.4 percent. Petri
continues to believe there is room for print books in the book industry. “I
have a physical copy of Leonard Cohen’s original poetry, that can be considered
a piece of art, something that can’t be considered a collectable if it was an
e-book,” said Petri. “I don’t think digital books are bad. They certainly have
a place, especially for a college student. I just can’t imagine something other
than a physical book.” By Tiera Daughtry
and Vincent Nguyen
