MOLI View: Worthy Causes

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  • No Frog Prince


    Right away the kids hit on familiar themes: fights, robberies, drug deals, sex, and AIDS. Okay, sure, that's all important to talk about - but the puppet masters seemed to have a hard time disassociating the characters from themselves.

    "Uh, uh, I didn't do that," one would protest when a peer suggested a bit of action.

    "The character is not you," I kept interjecting, in vain.

    Thinking it might be a little easier to get some distance if we treated less immediate topics, I tried to inject a bit of fantasy.

    "What if, when these two guys fight, instead of just shooting at each other, something magical happens? What if the bullets turn into butterflies or one of the guys suddenly flies away?"

    Maybe not the best idea, but I was trying to get them to come up with something fantastic.

    One young man started to talk about some of the characters in his neighborhood.

    "There's this crackhead named Frog who hangs out behind Miss Betty's store," he said, eliciting cries of recognition from others who lived nearby.

    "And then there's Mike who plays the violin," someone else added. (I'm changing people's real names, but the nicknames are the same.)

    "Then there's a guy in my neighborhood, Stevie, who's always dancing," said another.

    "But he's not a crackhead," corrected the first young man. "People think he's a crackhead, cuz he's always dancing, but he's just dancing, just to dance."

    This seemed to me like the makings of something marvelous, a kind of Brementown Musicians fairy tale in Miami's Liberty City.

    "What if these guys had an adventure?" I asked.

    "Naw, they just crackheads," the group protested.

    "But what if they weren't crackheads?" I kept on. "What if Frog was really a big, magical frog. And Mike's violin had magical powers? And the dancer, well, what could the dancer do?"

    To humor me, the teens started to act out a play. They still found it difficult to disassociate actor from character, making the puppet masters holding Frog and Mike feel uncomfortable about being cast as crackheads.

    I tried to draw in one of the girls by inviting her to invite a little girl character, who wanders into this magical world.  Almost immediately she was assaulted, raped, sent to foster care, impregnated, and infected with HIV. A young man from a neighborhood far from Miss Betty's store, who had not participated in the earlier discussion about the violinist, the dancer, and the frog, jumped in, taking over the story to tell the tragic tale of two young, HIV-positive lovers and their many trips to the hospital trying to care for their infant.

    Try as I might, I could not conjure any magic for this tale.

    Celeste Fraser Delgado is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Worthy Causes. Her Do-Gooder blog appears Tuesdays and Thursdays.

  • Thick as Thieves


    I don't really care about the guy who snipped my bike lock. It was a cheap lock. The bike was on a deserted street in a business district on a Sunday afternoon. He looked to be in his 40s, wore a neatly pressed shirt, and showed no sign of distress when I ran out of the office and tried to stop him. He's been at this game a long time. From now on, I'll use a better lock and keep the bike inside.

    But I am worried about the kids in my neighborhood. If they're stealing bikes at 10 or 11 years old, it's a safe bet they'll be after bigger and more dangerous game soon enough. Maybe it was even the preteens, or their brothers or cousins, who broke into my house last weekend. And if it wasn't them, it was probably some other young men from around the way. Maybe friends of my 16-year-old son's friends or friends of their friends. It seems pretty clear that it was somebody who knew us well enough to know our stash and to know the house was empty.

    If they're lucky, these kids might end up at the youth crisis shelter where I volunteer on Monday nights. I've seen plenty of stick-up kids and gang-bangers there and they always seem just like my son: rambunctious, creative, eager for praise. I'm always worried about where they're headed next, if they don't turn around.

    Now it's clear there are kids heading for prison or an early death in my own neighborhood. There should be something I could do beyond installing alarms and making my house a fortress. Yes, I'll be contacting Neighborhood Watch to see if there's any way my neighbors and I can better take care of each other. But there must be a community approach to fighting crime that goes beyond the surveillance-and-snitch model -- a way for communities to watch out for the young people among us who are tempted to commit crimes.

    My big hope for the moment is in a national nonprofit called Fight Crime: Invest in Kids that provides research on how to keep young people out of trouble. I'll keep you posted on how my personal anti-crime crusade goes.

    Believe me, I'm not thrilled about shelling out a bunch of cash for new electronics and bikes. And for a professional writer, not having my tools for a few days really sucks. But I'm much more distressed to know that there's a group of young men regularly passing me by who are willing to throw their lives away, a few hundred bucks at a time.

    Celeste Fraser Delgado is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Worthy Causes. Her Do-Gooder blog appears Tuesdays and Thursdays.

  • Man Saves Drowning Bear

    Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission biologist Adam Warwick just couldn't let the bear drown, so he took off his shirt and dove in after it. The 375 lb black bear had been spotted in a residential area, obviously looking for food, and was shot with a tranquilizer dart. Unfortunately, before it went under, it jumped in the water of the Gulf of Mexico.

  • Send a Kid to Camp

    I don't know about you, but right about now I'm pining for summer vacation, for summer camp, for three-legged races and wrapping yarn around twigs to make God's eyes.

    Out in the woods...Out in the woods...
    I met a bear...I met a bear...

    Sorry, just a little reminiscing about the campfire.

    I can't go to camp this year because I have to blog. And teach. And write a book. I bet you have some kind of onerous job getting in the way of your summer fun too.

    So why not live vicariously. Why not donate a little bit of your hard-earned cash to send a kid who is sitting around with nothing to do (remember what that was like?) to summer camp.

    There's still time to give a kid a memory to treasure forever.

    Here's a few places you can make your donation in one quick click:


    Celeste Fraser Delgado is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Worthy Causes. Her Do-Gooder blog, which highlights great ways to be a positive influence in your community or draws attention to exceptional individuals, appears Tuesdays and Thursdays. 

  • Beggar Children

    mzungus meandering around downtown, fingers pointing, and heads on swivels.  With stomachs full of matooke and rice, we took our time digesting as we strolled along the broken sidewalk.  Shopkeepers called out, hoping that their wares could draw our attention.  Boda-boda drivers offered us rides on their bicycles or mopeds.  A third group called us too.  Three small children, around five or seven years old, quietly implored, "Sirs, 100?"  They were asking for a meager 100 shillings, and we had just spent 8,000 on lunch.  Surely we could spare the equivalent of 6 American cents.

    Before we could respond, our program director shooed them away in their native language.  Many of the interns were heartbroken.  I know I was.  Here is a little kid, malnourished and poorly clothed, and all he wanted was a nickel.  That's not too much to ask.  I could have tossed him the coin and moved on.




  • Bio-Power

    I'm an active person. I go walking, biking, dancing, and practice yoga. Then I come home and collapse on the couch and read. If I'm really tired, I lie around watching television. But it's not like I'm not expending any energy. I have to work hard sitting at my computer to earn the money to pay my electrical bill.

    So let's get this straight: I work out, expending energy that goes nowhere. And then I work, expending more energy so I can pay for the electrical company to pump in enough energy to power my computer while I work and my television when I rest.

    Seems like a vicious cycle. What if the energy I expended working out provided the energy I needed to work? What if I could use my own bio-power to run my entertainment so I could spend less -- and work less?

    I've been fantasizing about this for the past several years, ever since I heard a story on NPR about an Iraqi grad student living in Los Angeles who powered his television with a stationary bicycle. Could I do that? Could I power my computer?

    Today's story in TreeHugger about harnessing the energy of heaving breasts while running to charge an iPod got me fantasizing again. How much power could we unleash with our body parts (I mean, besides fueling the porn industry)?

    Here are a couple answers from around the web:

    • HowStuffWorks takes on the notion of bio-power for television and computers, with this great news: "A single 60-calorie chocolate-chip cookie could power a laptop for four hours!"

    • This amazing site offers instructions to DIY BYO Pedal Power Bicycle Generator (pix on this site show bikers powering televisions on Ellen, so I guess my fantasy is pretty widespread). This do-it-yourself bike generator can power a blender, charge a cellphone, or run a small television.

    I smell a summer project coming on. I'm going to go wake up my teenage son now to see if we can harness some of that energy he's sleeping away in the day to power the video games he fritters his energy away with at night.

    I wonder how much power walking the dogs could produce ...

    Celeste Fraser Delgado is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Worthy Causes. Her Do-Gooder blog appears Tuesdays and Thursdays.

  • Chest Charger

    Slate:

    As a woman who loves sports, I've always found the concept of breasts bothersome. If all goes according to plan, they will fulfill their intended function for about three of the 70 years that I have them. The rest of the time, they alternate between getting in my way and embarrassing me.

    Thank you to Adrienne So for asking the question: Can we harness breast energy and put it to better use? TreeHugger and Instructables teamed up to make a working chest charger which relies only on the rise and fall of the chest during breathing. So the question seems viable.

  • Safe Pet

    The last thing we needed was another dog. The three little shih tzus I inherited when my dad passed away should be more than enough for any household. But when Star, the middle dog, got lost for a while last February, we stopped by the Humane Society looking for her.

    She wasn't there (a pizza delivery guy picked her up and later returned her), but the most beautiful dog I've ever seen was. She looked like a cross between a tiger and a wolf, or one of the Cape dogs from South Africa I've seen at the zoo. Her name was Sasha, and it turns out she is part German shepherd and part -- who knows, maybe tiger.

    But she was not up for adoption. She was at the shelter as part of the Safe Pet program, sometimes called the Safe Haven for Animals program, a special arrangement many animal shelters have with domestic violence shelters to take in pets temporarily while survivors of domestic abuse get back on their feet. A woman working at the animal shelter told us that a woman and her daughters hoped they could retrieve Sasha whenever they moved into a new, safe home.

    That was in February. A few weeks ago, I returned to the animal shelter with my son who was attending an orientation to become a volunteer. Sasha was still there -- only now the card near her pen said she was available for adoption. Seems her previous owner never came to pick her up -- and when the shelter tried to reach her, none of her contact numbers were any good anymore.

    That's a sad story. The best ending would have been for the family to reunite with their beautiful dog. I know by her sweet disposition that the girls and their mother must have loved her very much. For whatever reason, they could not retrieve their dog. But the Safe Pet program will make sure that other families like them will have a chance to keep their pets during times of trouble.

    And in that sad story, there's a happy ending for us. We brought Sasha home. The shih tzus are not thrilled about this yet. But my son loves having a big dog he can train to play Frisbee and catch. And Sasha looks ecstatic in our big backyard, racing from corner to corner, or just standing nobly, like a fantastic beast from a Russian fairy tale.

    Celeste Fraser Delgado is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Worthy Causes. Her Do-Gooder blog appears Tuesdays and Thursdays.