Pictures flash by. He is dead. He is dead too. A crushing family legacy of loss.
The picture of the street outside her door appears darkly fearsome. She worries, she says, as she goes out on the street.
But Amber Ellis’ message is that she is a survivor, a believer, a person with a foot on future’s up escalator.
Check her video, above. It’s a powerful story told with even greater strength when you appreciate the story-telling quality of this sophomore from Gary Comer College Prep.
She is one of dozens who’ve benefited in the last decade from the work of Free Spirit Media, a youth media development program that works with youngsters at five Chicago schools. http://www.freespiritmedia.org/
And they are one of 11 youth programs that belong to the Chicago Youth Voices Network, a unique and inspiring collection hard to find anywhere on this globe. http://cyvn.org/
The gift of Free Spirit Media, beyond its being there, is its belief, as founder Jeff McCarter explains, of helping youths to tell their stories in their own voices.
And Amber’s, as he says, is about loss and about maybe being the last one standing, but standing up nonetheless to live a life fulfilled.
This is a story that could easily fit into whatever you are writing about this summer in terms of teens and violence and the positive steps being taken to deal with this tragedy. If you need help connecting with any of the programs, or putting together a package of stories, I’d gladly help out.
So, too, if you have any you want to showcase or pass along, please do so. Steve@newstips.org
Is the swine flu affecting Latinos and blacks more? Here is a story from the L.A. Times which suggests that this has been the case.
But the ethnic composition of victims is changing somewhat, Lyn Finelli, head of flu surveillance at the CDC, said at a meeting Thursday. During the spring, Latinos had a disproportionately high number of infections, presumably because of contact with people returning from Mexico, where the virus is thought to have originated.
Chicago has witnessed a dramatic increase in African refugees. Some of what they have found here has been dismaying to them. This Chicago Tribune story talks about the young Africans caught in the midst of school violence. But there is a bigger question: how are they and their families adjusting and how are they changing the nature of Chicago’s African communities?
This fall, the proportion of Latinos affected has declined, and the number of African Americans infected has grown for reasons that are not clear.
There has been some concern that swine flu is especially severe among Native Americans, but so far the CDC has received reports of only two deaths among that group, Finelli said.
You are walking on a street. You know the man in the car repair store, and the two women in the bakery, and the old man in the grocery who smiles everyday to you, and who has been there for ever, and the shoe repair man who never has business but who is always happy, and you see one, no, two, no 10 people you know well from the neighborhood, and you see another 20 who you think you know and then you notice a few who must be new to the neighborhood and you study their faces and you wonder who they are and you keep staring and wondering as you walk on the street in your neighborhood that you know and that defines you and this is what a local newspaper, a radio station, a media connection does and can do when it talks to us in the places where we live – we look around us, as we walk in the crowd we know.
Read this small article in the New York Times and follow the video and I think you’ll get the message.
