In the final days of a year, we find ourselves looking both forward and back. Ahead is a fresh year, all promise and uncertainty; behind is that collection of things done and people met known as life.
Some of the people met have been encountered in these pages. But the encounters have been brief. Stories are told, lives are bared, souls are searched — and then it is time for another week’s stories.
The stories did not end when their newspaper stories did. So for everyone who has wondered what ever happened to the people and issues they have met in our pages, we offer these updates.
The people:
– Not playing around
A number of people featured in WomaNews have had impressive triumphs in their private crusades. None more so than Christy Sanderson, the North Carolina teenager whose appeals for toy donations have benefited children in a Virgin Islands hurricane, floods in North Dakotaand other disasters.
Because of the recent publicity in WomaNews Oct. 19 (and then syndication of the story in other newspapers), plus stories in People Magazine, Meredith Magazine, Carolina Woman and others, Christy’s Operation Toy Box has been averaging 10-15 boxes of donated toys every day for the past month.
The organization has heard from 30 states. Girl Scout councils, church youth groups, elementary and middle schools and businesses from across the country have called to express an interest in learning more about the organization with the idea of doing a toy collection.
Operation Toy Box has made several major strides since October. It has achieved tax-exempt status from the IRS, making all donations deductible. It received a commitment from Crofutt & Smith Moving and Storage, Inc., a National and International Atlas Van Lines agent, based in New Jersey to help with pick up and delivery of toys across the country. The American Red Cross has agreed to coordinate immediate disaster response with Operation Toy Box, which can offer displaced children a toy and personal message from another child. Fourth is a Web site at www.redcross.org/triangle/toybox that explains Christy’s vision and activities.
Christy has heard from the Sally Jessy Raphael Show and the Montel Williams Show about being on their program, but nothing has come of it yet. The Today Show also called and decided to cover the activities of Operation Toy Box during the next disaster.
– New baby, news job
Another woman in the public eye who has been through a big change is Susan Molinari. She was a new congresswoman when WomaNews ran a profile of her Aug. 11, 1996, shortly before she delivered the keynote speech at the Republican National Convention.
In August, Molinari left the House of Representatives to become co-anchor of CBS News Saturday Morning so she could spend more time with daughter Susan Ruby Paxon, 1. With Molinari and her husband, Rep. Bill Paxon, both in Congress, it was too difficult to schedule family time with Susan Ruby, Molinari said.
“When we had to work late, we both had to work late,” she explained. “There was no calling each other and saying, `Can you put Susan to sleep tonight?’ “
Molinari said she is “getting in the groove” after a rocky start in her debut as television journalist Sept. 13.
– A child’s work is never done
Another teenager, Craig Kielburger, 14, has taken on a tough and complex problem, the forced labor of children, and is making a difference. On Dec. 15, 1996, in a His say opinion piece, Kielburger challenged WomaNews readers to make responsible choices when shopping for holiday gifts.
“Poor children in many countries are employed in the textile, sporting-goods and toy industries, making products that may eventually end up on the shelves of North American stores,” he pointed out. “By buying these products, we may be contributing to the exploitation of children.”
This past year, Kielburger, a 10th grade student who lives in a Toronto suburb, has traveled extensively worldwide (including to Haiti, Morocco, Kenya, Switzerland, Italy, Hong Kong, Brazil and India), visiting child workers, speaking to youth groups, business leaders and human rights organizations, and lobbying governments on behalf of Free The Children, the non-profit youth organization he founded when he was 12.
Among his victories: government incentives in Brazil resulting in thousands of children enrolling in school instead of toiling in sugar cane fields and sisal plantations, and successful fundraising for the construction of a rehabilitation and education center for children in India.
Kielburger’s goal is to continue to galvanize young people and adults to fight for children’s rights abroad and in North America.
“I don’t have to go to Brazil to see poverty,” said Kielburger, who plans to become a doctor, “. . .it’s in our own back yard.”
Reach Free The Children at 12 E. 48th St., New York N.Y. 10017, 800-203-9091, www.freethechildren.org or freechild@clo.com.
– A bigger house
Another notable success story is that of A Place Called Home, a safe house for inner-city youth in Los Angeles featured in a profile Sept. 29, 1996, of its founder, Debrah Constance, who had been a successful real-estate agent before quitting to devote her life to troubled teens.
Founded in 1993 as a safe study center for students of Los Angeles’ Jefferson High School, A Place Called Home grew from 40 children to 1,500 in four years and in June 1997 relocated to a substantially larger building in the same South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood.
Constance said the program remains entirely funded by private donations. It now offers an accredited high school program, a library, computer training, art and dance programs and antigang programs and a recording studio.
“I think that the best thing about A Place Called Home is the thing that has always been most valuable about it,” Constance said. “No matter how big we are, we still have unlimited and unconditional love for everyone who walks through the door.”
– Reclaiming lives
Norma Hotaling, a former homeless, heroin-addicted prostitute in San Francisco featured June 22, has continued to work tirelessly in her crusade against prostitution and drug addiction.
In July, Hotaling received enough grants and private donations to move her one-woman SAGE (Standing Against Global Exploitation) Project out of her home and into an office staffed by three part-time employees. The project helps prostitutes and drug addicts in prisons and on the streets reclaim their lives.
Hotaling, 46, is also the co-founder of the groundbreaking First Offenders Program, often referred to as the “traffic school for johns.” This eight-hour course, offered in cooperation with the San Francisco Police Department’s Vice Crimes unit, targets men arrested for soliciting prostitutes.
Through in-custody counseling, weekly support groups and outreach, Hotaling estimates, SAGE Project works with up to 165 women and girls a week, more than half of whom are rehabilitated and get legal jobs. These impressive figures have recently caught the attention of the police force in London, who have invited Hotaling to discuss how to implement similiar intervention programs in England.
Hotaling has also been featured in recent issues of George, Ms. and Hope magazines and will be the subject of a segment to air on the Arts and Entertainment cable television network this spring.
– More Bulgaria help
Another success story is that of Hospice Miloserdie, a soup kitchen featured Aug. 24 run by Donka Paprikova, an 83-year-old pensioner known as the Mother Teresa of Bulgaria.
“Last year our efforts provided people with two hot meals a week and that led us to wonder what they ate for the other five days,” said Paprikova. This winter Hospice Miloserdie will be providing packages of food supplies like flour, oil, rice, and sugar instead of hot meals. “This way people should have the basis for hot food throughout the week.”
On Dec. 1, Hospice Miloserdie opened Bulgaria’s first ever hospice center for the terminally ill. The center has beds for 10 patients.
“It’s small but we are very proud. Now the dying will know there is a place to go, were they will be cared for and allowed to die with a sense of dignity,” said Paprikova.
– `Life after children’
One woman featured in WomaNews has achieved a measure of personal success as well. Grethel Beyah, a divorced mother of nine from Chicago, was featured in March 1994 upon her graduation from DeVry Institute of Technology at the age of 54 after seeing seven of her children through college and two others well on their way before she received her degree.
She graduated in three years with a B average but said she often felt uncertain about her abilities among the younger, energetic coeds. Since graduating, however, Beyah has been invited to speak at churches, schools and groups to inspire others.
“I quickly overcame any fears I had when I was able to apply my learning and life experiences and help other people,” Beyah said.
She accepted a position as an associate analyst for a downtown firm and has been promoted twice to her current position as a project analyst. She moved from a nice apartment in Englewood to the more upscale Bronzeville neighborhood.
“There is life after children,” Beyah said jokingly.
– Grief endures
On March 9, 1997, we told the stories of parents who had lived through the unimaginable: They had lost a child to death.
After the story ran, grieving parents deluged the offices of Compassionate Friends, the Oak Brook-based international support organization that had been the parents’ lifeline, with phone calls.
“After we reached 300 calls in the first week, we couldn’t keep track anymore,” said Diana Cunningham, executive director of the group and one of the parents profiled.
With their emphasis on family gatherings, the holidays are grueling days for bereaved parents. For Cunningham, they also mark the tragic anniversary: Her 10-year-old son, Jimmy, was killed in a car accident on New Year’s Eve 20 years ago.
Every year on New Year’s Eve, she goes to the movies, watching one after another until the precise time of his accident and death have passed.
“People think I’m very strange,” said Cunningham, who lives in Downers Grove. “But I have learned after 20 years that it’s OK to put it aside once in a while.”
Ron and Teri Tossey, of St. Charles, whose 24-year-old son, Stephen, died of a heart attack 16 months ago, went away for the holidays, as they did last year.
“You can’t escape the grief,” Ron Tossey said. “But you would simply add to the grief if you were at home like you were with him.”
He is working on creating a charitable organization that would unite parents left alone by the death of an only child, as he and his wife were, with children left alone by the death of parents.
Katie and Donald Lalowski of Sycamore begin their Christmas Day every year with a visit to the cemetery where their son, Jeffrey, is buried. He was killed in a car accident in August 1993. He was 13.
Last year, Katie Lalowski put a Christmas tree at his gravesite. At 11:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve, she went out to the cemetery to turn on the battery-powered lights.
“I wanted him to have a tree,” she said.
She usually buys a gift for someone the age Jeff would be — 18 this year — because it almost feels like buying a gift for him.
She writes a letter to her son and wedges it under an angel on his headstone. She puts up the red velvet bib-shaped Christmas stocking he made in elementary school.
And when Christmas is over, she breathes a sigh of relief.
“You feel bad,” she said. “But on the 26th, you wake up and think, Oh, thank God it’s over.”
For all three families, time is very slowly bringing small measures of peace.
“It’s not like you’re forgetting him,” Katie Lalowski put it. “It’s just not grinding on you 24 hours a day.”
On behalf of himself and his wife, Ron Tossey offered a grief-tinged version of optimism:
“I think,” he said, “that we are on the journey to lives that we will someday regard as OK.”
– Calmer waters
One young woman not only escaped a Middle Eastern prison and the glare of international attention, but has used her modest new income to attempt to find the normal life of a teenager that she has never known.
Sarah Balabagan, a young Filipina convicted of killing her employer in the United Arab Emirates, figured prominently in a WomaNews series in June and July of 1996 about the problems of foreign domestic workers, mostly from the Philippines and mostly working in the Middle East, Hong Kong and other parts of Asia.
International outrage and $41,000 “blood money” won Sarah’s release and her return to the Philippines. She received donations from around the world, and a movie was made about her ordeal.
“I never dreamed this kind of life, with a lot of opportunity,” Sarah said from the home of Ambassadar Roy Henares, who became like a father to her when she was imprisoned in the United Arab Emirates in 1993 for murdering her employer as he sexually and violently attacked the then-15-year-old, who had only a grade 5 education. “I never thought I had a chance to go to high school or even college.”
Her family made news early in the year when her father, who used to drink heavily and become abusive to his wife, tried to kill himself. Her family is well know, she claimed, and her father drinks “very little.”
Sarah used interest from donations to rent an apartment and work on her home study to finish high school. She is doing final year work now and after she finishes in May she expects to study business courses. When her lease expired on the apartment, she moved into Henares’ home, where, she said, she is treated like a daughter. The Chinese-Filipino businessman who paid her blood money continues to sponsor her schooling, including through college.
– Twin blessings
One profile subject got a double dose of good news mixed with some bad.
After Shelley Smith’s son Justin died of a rare genetic condition in 1989, just three days after he was born, she began to help other couples facing the problem of infertility, which she herself faced once she tried to get pregnant again. In 1991, the former actress and model founded the Surrogacy Program in Los Angeles to offer a number of services to infertile couples.
She also kept trying to get pregnant herself. At one point she and her husband, Nathan Reid, who has two children from a previous marriage, hired a surrogate, but that twin pregnancy ended in one fetus dying and another being aborted because of severe genetic defects. Smith was featured in WomaNews July 10, 1994.
Smith’s years of disappointment ended in 1995, when Smith gave birth to twins Nicholas and Miranda, using donor eggs because of Smith’s age,then 45. In part because Smith wanted a genetic link to the children, she used sperm donated by her brother.
Smith, a marriage and family counselor, continues to run her surrogacy program, which now attracts clients from around the world. She and Reid are in the process of getting divorced, in part because of the strain of trying to raise twins.
“But my children are utter bliss. I think they’re the one thing in my life that was better than I could have hoped for in even my wildest dreams,” she said.
– New and old contacts
And for another contributor, no news has been good news. Deborah Spector Siegel, who wrote about her personal battle with breast cancer in WomaNews Oct. 5, has continued in good health and is looking forward to her 14th year as a cancer survivor and fifth year of wellness since her bone-marrow transplant.
A number of people, some of whom were not even suffering from cancer but other painful life challenges, called or wrote to tell her that her article had lifted their spirits, made them feel strengthened and determined to move forward, less fearfully. The article has also brought some reunions with lost friends, with her cousin Andrea’s surviving siblings, and with beloved doctors and caregivers with whom she had lost contact.
She also saw two milestones: her son’s Bar Mitzvah and a publisher’s acceptance of her first novel.
– More survivor news
On June 1, WomaNews reported on a group of breast cancer survivors who spent a weekend at the McGaw YMCA’s Camp Echo in western Michigan challenging themselves with mazes and a course of cables and ropes strung 40 feet above the ground.
Christopher Hart and Todd Israelite, the staffers from the McGaw YMCA in Evanston who ran the program, were so struck by the women’s euphoria afterwards that they wanted to do more.
They have created a not-for-profit corporation, Wilderness Bay’s Wellness Foundation, that is designing and running other adventure experiences for cancer patients.
Working with them is Kathleen O’Connell, social worker at the Lynn Sage Breast Cancer Program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, which developed the Camp Echo weekend with the YMCA.
“That weekend changed our lives,” she said.
It did the same for the participants, one of whom, Nancy Amicangelo, is serving as a consultant to the new venture.
“It’s something you can draw on when you’re in a situation when you’re feeling vulnerable,” she said. “You can say, you did this; you had all these fears, and you did it.”
Avis Weisman already has. Six weeks after a hip replacement because of an arthritic fracture, she was standing atop an exercise surface four feet off the ground, trying to do a sliding exercise — and feeling as frightened of the height as she had in Michigan.
The therapist told her it might be too soon after surgery to try it.
“But I said, `You know what? I want to try it,’ ” Weisman said. She did. And she did it.
– Life is a cream cake
“Probably when you finish reading this, you will have classed me as a complete nutter,” Gwen Kelly wrote in a November 1996 letter to WomaNews.
Instead, Kelly, 63, so charmed us with her lament of the dearth of fashion options for a plus-size woman in her tiny town of Fipe, Scotland, and her longing for some stylish, budget-friendly choices to suit her figure, that instead of merely sending her a list of stores to visit during an impending trip to Chicago (and her first to the United States), we supplied her with a personal shopper.
Later that month fashion stylist Barri Leiner took Kelly, a retired civil servant, on a whirlwind tour of Michigan Avenue venues. Kelly left thrilled with her first ever pair of blue jeans (in a trendy wide-leg style) and denim shirt, as well as a brown wool skirted suit.
A year later, Kelly admits that her suit has regrettably been consigned to her closet, due to her “fondness for cream cakes.”
But she reports that she continues to wear her favorite jeans “everywhere and anywhere” and will likely take them along on a trip to Nepal in February and perhaps even on a return to Chicago planned for September.
– Democracy award
For some women profiled in WomaNews, the intervening time has brought bad news.
Hong Kong activist Emily Lau, 45, profiled Dec. 29, 1996, lost her seat on Hong Kong’s Legislative Council when China took over the former British colony on July 1. But she hasn’t lost her determination to bring full democracy to Hong Kong. Interviewed by phone Dec. 9, Lau was fresh from a demonstration protesting the selection of the 36 Hong Kong delegates to China’s National Congress by a committee she described as “hand-picked” by the Chinese government.
Lau is gearing up to run for the legislative council in next May’s elections, raising funds and preparing to surrender her British citizenship, as required by the Chinese authorities. Next month, she will travel to Vienna to accept a human rights award from the Dr. Bruno Kreisky Foundation.
“I don’t look forward to going there in the depths of winter,” she said with a laugh. “But I am very grateful for the support that the Austrian people are giving to the Hong Kong people.”
– Two steps back
When WomaNews reported on Aug. 25, 1996 on Jill Hanson, a 20-year-old mother on welfare, she was not expecting to be on welfare for long.
Her baby was 7 months old. She had applied for a job with a grocery chain, and her boyfriend, with whom she was living in a North Side apartment, was working full-time at a recyling center.
Her boyfriend lost his job shortly after the article appeared.
But Hanson did get off welfare, in December 1996, after she got a job in the snack shop of a discount store.
However, she quit her job after three months.
“They really overworked me,” Hanson said. “They had me working over 40 hours a week. The last day I worked, I came in at 12 and didn’t get off till after 9. And they didn’t even give me a lunch.”
Mostly, she said, she was unhappy because she had too little time with her daughter.
Her boyfriend worked briefly at a department store over last year’s holidays but has not found work since. The couple lost their apartment and had to live separately, each moving in with relatives.
Hanson stayed off welfare for nine months, though she did get food stamps.
But in June, she discovered that she was pregnant, a possibility she and her boyfriend had not tried to prevent. She went back on welfare, primarily, she said, to get a Medicaid card that would entitle her to free prenatal care.
In fact, her low income would have made her eligible for a Medicaid card without being on public aid. But she said that her $278 monthly check from welfare will sustain her and Destiny, who turns 2 on Tuesday, until she starts looking for work after the baby is born.
– Had a gobbler
But saddest of all is the story of Ruth Williams Walker of Uniontown, Pa. For 11 years, she gave away hundreds of turkeys to needy people as a way to give thanks to God.
But it turned out her last giveaway was in November 1994, the month she was featured in WomaNews.
When contacted recently, Walker said she didn’t want to comment on the reason she stopped her distributions after 1994. But she told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in November 1995, that she decided to stop after being approached on a street corner by a man who apparently didn’t recognize her and tried to sell her the turkey he received from her.
For now, Walker keeps herself busy with the boarding home she operates for mentally retarded adults.
