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Women’s fund grant will cover all costs for six people

By Melissa Flores, California Health Report

A new training program for medical interpreters is giving low-income women the skills needed for a hard-to-fill job – working as medical interpreters in indigenous languages.

Six medical interpreters will be taught to work with patients who speak indigenous languages from the Oaxacan region of Mexico, including the languages of Triqui, Mixteco and Zapotec, by the staff of the Natividad Medical Center in Salinas.

Linda Ford, the president and CEO of the Natividad Medical Foundation, said the group will try to recruit women who are trilingual in English, Spanish and an indigenous language.

“This has been a significant challenge here,” Ford said of the need for indigenous medical interpreters.

“The training trains interpreters to actually take cultural aspects into the medical care,” Ford said. “That is why it is so vital. We are not asking a family member, but someone who is trained with medical terminology.”

The Natividad Medical Foundation received a $25,000 grant through the Community Foundation for Monterey County’s Women’s Fund. The grant will cover stipends, transportation, books, and assistance with childcare for the participating women. The goal is that the women who complete training will be hired on a part-time or consultation basis to work with the hospital.

“We know that when women thrive, families thrive, and when families are healthy, communities flourish,” said Julie Drezner, the Community Foundation’s vice president of grants and programs. “These grants will help low-income women on the road to economic self-sufficiency by supporting post-secondary education, financial literacy and business development.”

The Women’s Fund gave out $225,000 total in grants to Natividad and other agencies that support women’s development in Monterey County.

The grant money will allow the women to complete a six-month internship at Natividad hospital, where Victor Sosa is the language access coordinator. He is certified to train new interpreters and has been working as a health care interpreter since the 1990s.

He said the hospital uses in-person interpreters as well as the Health Care Interpreter Network, which allows interpreters from 16 partner hospitals to talk with patients via live video feed. He said the main languages used are Spanish and sign language, but the network has interpreters who can speak up to 120 languages. He said with indigenous languages, people often speak different dialects so the staff has learned to ask a patient which town they come from in Mexico so that they can get the best interpreter.

“This developed to cut down on wait time, but also because it is more cost effective,” Sosa said, of the live video network. “We pay for the time we use it rather than searching for an interpreter and paying.”

Sosa said when Natividad’s interpreters work over the live video feed with other network hospitals, Natividad receives credit for when they need to use it. They also have a phone conference, which allows a doctor to talk to an interpreter over the phone who then relays information to a patient.

Sosa said that medical interpretation does more than just translate words from one language to another. His staff are trained to do what he calls a “speak back.”

“Many say yes because they are very compliant or meek when they are given instructions even if they don’t understand,” Sosa said of the indigenous population. “If they can’t articulate it back to the doctor, the staff has to repeat it or get language assistance.”

He said that in addition to knowing the language, interpreters have to develop their short-term memory and listening skills.

“They have to relay that information into the target language with accuracy,” he said.

The training class will also teach the interpreters about the ethics involved, such as patient confidentiality and limited advocacy. Sosa said the students are taught not to try to influence a patient or doctor’s decision unless they believe there is a life-threatening situation or the patient’s dignity would be affected.

“We want to support the women so they can get a skill and do everything they need to support people in our community,” Ford said. “We want to do what it takes to help us get the best possible, safest medical care (to patients.)”

Ford and Peter Chandler, a doctor on staff, said that it can be difficult to find someone who can translate the indigenous languages.

Chandler is the service director for women’s services at Natividad Medical Center, and a member of the board for the hospital’s foundation.

“It’s a huge deal for us,” Chandler said, of receiving the grant. “It will make a big impact for our community as well.”

He said there is a small pocket of indigenous residents who live around the King City and Greenfield area, who come to the Salinas hospital, especially for obstetrics/gynecology needs

“It is not a huge group of people, but it has a huge impact on our system when they come in,” Chandler said. “They don’t just speak a different language, but they have a different culture.”

He described the culture as very matriarchal, noting that sometimes the women will have an older female family member come in to the hospital with them.

“When they come in for labor, they are very suspicious of us to begin with,” he said. “If we end up having a problem with the baby, and we need to keep it on a monitor or they need a c-section, we need to be able to counsel them and give the risks and benefits.”

Chandler said that now they often try to explain what is going on with a husband or family member who might speak some Spanish.

“We want our patients to trust us and have confidence in what we are telling them,” Chandler said. “We want them to take a recommendation and explain what is going on with the baby…It is less traumatic in the clinic with any type of medical problem (with an interpreter.)”

Medical interpreters take into account cultural differences, grade level and communication differences.

“It takes a lot of time to have to run around and find interpreters,” Chandler said. “During the day we can usually find someone – it just takes time. But at night it can be really hard. There’s just not that many people around that are actually fluent and trilingual.”

One of the solutions the staff has used is to have an interpreter explain any possible side effects that might come up before hand in the clinic during the day. But the grant will allow the group to have interpreters who are available at any time.

“Excellent communication throughout the hospital is a priority,” Chandler said.

By Heather Gilligan, California Health Report

Twenty-year-old Sean Shavers sat, composed, in front of an overflowing auditorium at the Elihu Harris State Building in Oakland last week. To his right sat several members of the California Assembly, and to his left noted local leaders.

Today, Shavers is a multimedia producer for New American Media, but a few years ago, aged 17, he was a youth offender at Camp Sweeny, a juvenile facility in Alameda County. A program there helped him secure a high school diploma and a job when he was released. With help, Shavers said, he turned his life around in a big way.

Shavers was testifying at the Assembly Select Committee on the Status of Boys and Men of Color in California. The committee is holding meetings throughout the state like the Jan. 20 hearing in Oakland, to hear testimony about programs and policies that might help address the challenges faced by young men of color like Shavers.

The challenges are significant, according to fact sheets handed out at the meeting. African American males comprised 66 percent of homicide victims in Alameda County in 2010, and 73 percent of homicide victims were men of color. African American men are by far the likeliest to be incarcerated in California. The wealth and employment gap between white men and men of color is also large, with Latinos making $16,635 a year on average, for instance, compared to white men’s average earnings of $45,071 a year.

“This is a rescue mission,” said Assemblyman Sandre Swanson, chair of the assembly committee.

“Last year in the city of Oakland we lost 110 lives of young men and boys of color,” Larry Reid, Oakland’s city council president, told the committee. “We cannot lose any more young men, not just here in the city of Oakland, but throughout the state.”

“Your zip code changes your life,” said Dr. Anthony Iton, senior vice president at The California Endowment and former public health director for Alameda County.

Life expectancy in impoverished West Oakland, he noted, is fifteen years less than life expectancy in the wealthier, whiter Oakland hills area.

“How do you use public systems to interrupt that predictability?” asked Tony Smith, superintendent of the Oakland Unified School District.

Changing the circumstances that hurt boys and men of color means holding systems accountable, Smith and other speakers said. Smith, for instance, wants the OUSD to be the lead agency that cuts the youth incarceration rate in half in five years.

Speakers also emphasized the need to redirect existing resources to address the crisis facing young men and boys of color, particularly to match young people with jobs and keep jobs in disadvantaged communities.

About $23 million a year goes to a few Oakland neighborhoods where most of the city’s crime and violence is concentrated, Iton said.

The money, he added, funds nurses, probation officers, social workers and other service providers. Most of those people, Iton said, “go home to Concord at 4:30.”

Iton suggested redirecting that money to fund neighborhood residents to implement best practices in their own community.

Fifty percent of African American men in East Oakland are unemployed, noted Olis Simmons, president and CEO of Youth Uprising, a community center for teens in East Oakland.

Both Iton and Alex Briscoe, director of the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency, touted a program at Camp Sweeny that trained youth to work as Emergency Medical Technicians. Two cohorts of youth have trained as EMTs in the past year, and almost all were placed in jobs.

The most recent cohort of 22 students stood up, at Briscoe’s request, to thunderous applause from the packed auditorium.

“We did not operate from a deficit frame,” Briscoe said of the training’s success so far, noting that local emergency medical services needed more workers and more diversity in their workforce, and that the EMT program filled that need.

“There is no reason every county cannot have this program,” Briscoe said.

The human resources lost to poor education, high rates of unemployment and high rates of violence hurt the whole country, not just disadvantaged communities, Simmons of Youth Uprising said.

At the high school next door to Youth Uprising, Simmons said, 96.4 percent of kids are not proficient in math, yet future American jobs will be concentrated in technology – without enough skilled American workers to fill them.

Making sure that youth stay in school is more than just a way to keep economic engines churning – it is also one of the best ways of reducing violence and involvement in the criminal justice system, said Fania Davis, executive director of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth.

“Keeping kids in school is the strongest factor in violence prevention,” she noted. Suspensions increase the likelihood of dropping out, and dropping out in turn increases the risk of incarceration.

The promise of education as an equalizing force has been broken in recent decades in the U.S. by harsh discipline focused on punishment rather than problem solving, Davis said.

“My school looks like a prison,” said Roy Ramos, a 17-year-old senior at Fremont High School, just before Davis spoke.

“Education has become a machine of inequality because of the police presence,” Davis said.

Davis and others spoke of the traumatic impact of punitive policies and the effects of violence in poor communities. “We become a culture of harmed people,” Davis said.

“What we are talking about healing from are some deep race and class-based inequalities,” said OUSD Superintendent Tony Smith. Smith, who is white, along with other speakers, noted that the room was filled with talented people motivated to take on these daunting problems – and that almost everyone in the room was a person of color.

That history of inequality is in part what makes solving the problems of boys and men of color so difficult, despite the many solutions and resources discussed at the event, speakers said.

“This is a struggle for equity,” Iton said, “and that means it is a struggle for power.”

Heather Gilligan is a correspondent for the California Health Report at www.healthycal.org.

La Maestra Clinics director Zara Marselian and First Lady Michelle Obama.

By Marty Graham

Zara Marselian sits in the top-floor conference room of the recently completed La Maestra Clinics headquarters. One of the few tall buildings in the heart of City Heights, its windows look east to rooftops and mountains, fast food restaurants and the crowded streets of one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the nation.

A relentless advocate for immigrants and their impoverished neighbors, Marselian is already plotting the organization’s next steps to support the community she serves with great vigor and compassion. She hasn’t had much time to look out the windows – she sees her community at the street level.

“There is so much need here,” Marselian says. “We are here to learn how to make the services work for the people who need them most. This is our community and we serve it best by building our circle of care for the community.”

Dr. Dorothy Zirkle, director of health services for Price Charities said that for Marselian, everything begins and ends with the community.

“It started with her mother, who opened her doors and her heart to the less fortunate, and Zara brings her own intelligence and compassion to each and every decision,” Zirkle said.

La Maestra's City Heights clinic.

City Heights is one of the largest centers for refugee resettlement in the nation. Last year, more than five thousand refugees came to City Heights, more than any other neighborhood in the country. It has welcomed people from Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Somalia and Eritrea, the Sudan, and most recently, Burma.

Immigrants and refugees – many of the clinic’s clients are Latino, from Mexico and Central America – arrive with limited English, limited funds and opportunity limited by a multitude of obstacles to gaining work, education and control of their lives that include poor health.

“This work is a vocation,” Marselian said. “ It teaches you to be very strong on your instincts and to stay focused.”

Marselian, 51, is the executive director of La Maestra, a string of community-based clinics that began with a project to help immigrants pursue legalized status after Congress granted amnesty in 1986. She worked at getting legal status and citizenship for people, while discovering how limited their access to healthcare was.

That need inspired Marselian to build a network of medical clinics focused on improving the clients’ overall health – as well as treating illness, clinics in houses in the neighborhood where people lived. The clinics take innovative approaches to reach them within the bounds of their own culture.

“Her clinics have taken on the most challenging patients,” said Rene Santiago, Deputy Director of San Diego County Health and Human Services. “She brought a lot of very good, very effective ideas for working with pregnant moms and kids, to protect their health and their futures.”

La Maestra’s 34,000 square foot main clinic built to the highest standards of green, was constructed with $24 million in gifts and grants, including $1 million from the Kaiser Permanente Foundation. The clinic anchors four-block redevelopment project with the City of San Diego and Price Charities that includes hundreds of apartments and homes, retail and office space, an education center and community gathering spaces. The idea was to create a community hub, with access to bus lines and other community resources, including the San Diego Children’s Dental Clinic run by La Maestra across the street.

La Maestra also maintains medical and dental clinics in Lemon Grove, National City and Paradise Valley, and in El Cajon, where a growing Chaldean population has gathered. Marselian has formed partnerships with clinics ranging from Native American tribes to the San Ysidro Health Center at the border. The clinics strive to accommodate the patients, and use technology to do things like live video conferencing of specialists whose offices and practices are beyond the reach of their clients.

“A lot of our clients are here because of domestic violence, political persecution, substance abuse, and problems specific to their cultures,” she said. “They are here because they are survivors but they need to not be survivors to become able to do well here – they need to be thrivers to become part of this country.”

The lobby of the City Heights clinic is filled with Sudanese and Laotian families, sitting with Salvadoran and Mexican immigrants. The in-house pharmacy dispenses in no fewer than four languages, and Marselian says that 20 languages are spoken in the clinics every day..

“We need health care that’s culturally competent,” Marselian said. “Our employees are representative of the population we serve and we have medically trained cultural liaisons, people who understand the medicine and are culturally aware to help our clients understand the process.”

For example, trying to persuade a Burmese immigrant to undertake the challenges of fighting diabetes is a big task, since diabetes isn’t understood to be a disease by many Burmese.

“In certain cultures, the knowledge has to come through elders, or a religious-accepted medium,” Marselian said. “The message has to be respectful of people’s beliefs.”

The clinic’s innovative approach had led to looking for ways beyond medical treatment to help the impoverished immigrants find their way. The project grew into a food pantry, two dental clinics and providing social service towards self-reliance.

The challenge of reaching and effectively serving her clientele is what keeps her most interested in her work.

“The more I do know the more I don’t,” she said. “I don’t have answers but I’m going to find them in the community were I’ve always found them. I can’t step back and say that’s not my business, not my problem,” she added.

The mother of two grown children and an adopted five-year-old, Marselian grew up in a home with a Croatian immigrant mom who helped her immigrant neighbors. She doesn’t talk much about her childhood, but a story from it appears in her book,, that was published in October.

The challenge of reaching and effectively serving her clientele is what keeps her most interested in her work.

“The more I do know the more I don’t,” she said. “I don’t have answers but I’m going to find them in the community were I’ve always found them. I can’t step back and say that’s not my business, not my problem,” she added.
Instead, she looks to the future. Marselian’s latest vision is helping people with micro-loans and micro-businesses, the seed money to start community building in earnest.

“We need to create more jobs so we are looking at ways to use our resources, for example, we are looking at helping create a laundry business with our clients instead of contracting to have our laundry done outside City Heights,” she said. “If it works, they can build a business, get more accounts, hire in the community. You can spin it off.”

She’s very concerned about how hard the recession was on the communities she serves, and uses all her resources to help clients find sustainable work.

“We want to leverage on our services so they help and help and help,” she said. “When we enter into contracts, we ask our partners to hire our people and promise to send them our best people.”

Getting funding for projects takes time – something that takes some getting used to for someone who has as many good ideas as Marselian. Each project is an uphill battle for funding and staff, and to figure out how to make it work for clients.

“I get a lot of rejection. I can advocate until the cows come home because I know we are advocating for the uninsured, the unincluded, the uncertain,” she said.

A master at grant writing, Marselian has waited as long as seven years to start the first dental clinic – in a building rehabilitated by clients and friends.

“I’m very impatient but I will be patient for certain things, some programs are such good ideas you make yourself wait.” She said. “You can just taste it.”

Doctors prescribe vegetables to overweight patients

Photo: Salim Virji/flickr

By Rosa Ramirez, California Health Report

If the doctor ordered you to eat one additional serving of fruits and vegetables each day as a way to improve your health, would you do it? Recently a group of pediatricians, trying to get young children to swap unhealthy foods like fries and burgers for eggplant dishes and quinoa salads, began to take a new approach: they’re giving children a prescription for daily vegetables.

“I usually come up with plans with patients where we talk about what changes they can make,” said Danielle Nguyen, one of the pediatricians at Highland Hospital in Oakland who prescribes vegetables. “Things like drinking water instead of soda or juice and eating more fruits and vegetables.”

The fresh produce prescriptions are part of a six-month study at Highland Hospital where pediatricians “prescribe” produce such as organic collard greens, chard, potatoes, strawberries and oranges to 20 youngsters who have been identified as obese or at risk of becoming obese.

In the United States, childhood obesity rates have nearly tripled since the 1980s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 17 percent of children and adolescents between the ages of two and 19 are now obese. For Latino and black youths, those numbers are even higher.

While nutritionists and dieticians have always urged people to eat a balanced meal that includes vegetables and fruits, the “vegetable prescription” is catching on with hospitals and health clinics across the country. Such prescriptions allow doctors to make eating vegetables seem more like a required directive and less like a suggestion.

Erica Daniela Lopez was a patient in the veggie prescription program. Nearly every day, the 12-year-old would eat a bag of Takis, tiny corn chips rolled up like deep-fried Mexican taquitos. A 4-ounce bag of the red-colored chips has about 560 calories and nearly 76 percent of the recommended daily intake of salt.

Worried about the effects of such snack foods on the young woman’s health, Lopez’s doctors at Highland Hospital enrolled her in an experimental program to combat childhood obesity. To achieve that goal, the hospital gave Lopez and her family a “grub box” every week filled with locally harvested fruits and vegetables. The hospital also required Lopez and her family to attend classes on how to prepare and cook vegetables.

Some health professionals believe the medical directive will make a difference on people’s waistlines.

“If they actually wrote a prescription that said ‘I want you to eat two cups of veggies a day, two cups of fruit a day,’ and really encourage the patient to do that in repeat follow-up visits, I think it could have a tremendous impact,” said Jeannie Gazzaniga- Moloo, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association.

Physicians in Santa Rosa, Calif., Holyoke, Mass., and Skowhegan, Maine, are prescribing leafy greens, grapefruits, chard, artichokes, squash, eggplant and other produce to patients with high blood pressure, diabetes, and high cholesterol. Some clinics provide patients with coupons, vouchers or tokens to get their “prescriptions” at farmers’ markets.

A county health clinic in Michigan was the first in the U.S. to prescribe produce in 2008. Jenna Bacolor, who runs the Prescription for Health program at the Washtenaw County Public Health Department, said they began with a small group of low-income residents in a racially-mixed community in southeast Michigan. As part of the veggie prescription program, residents received tokens to buy produce at farmers’ markets, which increased participants’ produce purchases by some 21 percent after one year.

Last year, the program received a $294,000 grant from the Kresge Foundation to expand the vegetable prescription program to include 400 participants and two dieticians who will help participants shop for produce at farmers’ markets.

“We’ll host cooking demos for the clinics that patients can be part of if they want to,” said Bacolor.

While the Michigan program was the first in the U.S., some doctors in England began prescribing vegetables to patients with cancer and coronary heart disease in 2005. The vegetable prescription model has quickly caught on with government agencies and non-profit organizations trying to turn the tide against rising obesity levels.

Since June, the non-profit Wholesome Wave has spent $200,000 on its Fruit and Veggie Prescription Program. About 250 people have participated in the prescription program since it started last year. The prescriptions are typically paired with exercise, nutrition and cooking classes.

“There isn’t one program that is going to solve the entire dilemma of the diabetes crisis,” said Juliette Storch, the former chief operating officer at Wholesome Wave, a national organization with partners in 25 states. For veggie prescription programs to work there must be “interaction and constant communication between the participants and the clinic. It’s not enough to write a prescription and say, ‘go exercise,’” she said.

Michele Bunker-Alberts, a nurse practitioner at Highland Hospital who was responsible for starting the program there with funds from the hospital, said it was easy to get support from the hospital’s pediatricians, many of whom are concerned about the increasing number of obese or borderline-obese patients. The hospital provided the initial funds to start the program.

Sometimes patient compliance is less than ideal, said Bunker-Alberts.

While the programs are primarily aimed at alleviating diet-related health problems, the vegetable prescription program also assists local farmers and food growers.

“We have a triple impact,” Storch said. “We help the underserved have healthy foods and vegetables, and help local farmers. It keeps money within the community.”

Sandra Guerra, 38, is a stay-at-home mom with three children. Two of them, Lesly, 12, and Jorge 17, were prescribed vegetables at Highland Hospital. The Mexican immigrant began fixing her traditional dishes with more vegetables when her children’s pediatrician told her that her son was at risk of developing diabetes because of his weight and family history.

Guerra swapped white sandwich bread for wheat. She bought the teens bran cereal Frosted Flakes. She serves her family smaller portions and sneaks collard greens into her caldo de res, a Mexican beef stew that typically calls for potatoes.

The “grub box” portion of the program at Highland Hospital concluded in November, Bunker-Alberts said. The hospital is now examining Lopez and other participants’ lab results after having gone through the produce prescription.

As for Erica Lopez, the Takis-eating 12-year-old, she still feels the pull of those fiery red corn chips covered in dehydrated limejuice and spicy chili powder. But she recognizes that her vegetable prescription does get her eating more greens and fewer fat-packed snacks.

“It’s going to help me not be sick,” Erica said. “I think it’s worth it right now, even though sometimes I get bored.”

Rosa Ramirez is a correspondent for the California Health Report at www.healthycal.org.

This story was updated on Jan. 27 to reflect the fact that Juliette Storch is the former chief operating officer of Wholesome Wave and that Wholesome Wave is a national organization.

Long Beach residents don aprons and listen to chefs' instructions.

By Jessica Portner, California Health Report

“Today we are going to do breakfast,” said Henry Perez to a group of a dozen Cambodian children and adults inside a mobile kitchen tucked onto the parking lot at Long Beach City College recently. “Why is it important for us to eat breakfast?” Answer: Energy for the day.

The brightly colored rig belongs to Jamie Oliver’s Food Foundation’s Big Rig Teaching Kitchen. The foundation is on a drive to spread healthy cooking skills and eating habits to communities like Long Beach. The British-born celebrity chef and popular TV host is on a mission to interject good nutrition habits into school systems and community health programs in an entertaining way.

A TED Prize winner, Oliver has partnered with the California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities Initiative in Long Beach. The California Endowment has already allocated $4.8 million to the city to promote community health efforts, including nutrition programs. The Big Rig Teaching Kitchen is a giant, 70-foot tractor-trailer laid out into 4 stations, each with four or five people to maximize personal attention. The cooking preparation and demonstration focus on three goals: Fighting obesity, promoting better dietary health through food education, and cooking skills.

“It’s not just learning recipes,” said Perez one of four assistant chefs and a student at Le Cordon Bleu. “It’s learning knife cuts, kitchen etiquette, nutrition and how to cook with other people.” Perez: “We go city by city, county by county to teach people there’s a lot of different way we all can be eating.”

The recipes are Chef Oliver’s – simple and nutritious. The author of the wildly famous cookbook, “The Naked Chef” tries to prompt people to eat “naked” foods – like spinach, oranges or fresh pepper, as opposed to less-nutritious vitals that comes in a cardboard box.

The Cambodian community association’s leaders organized the outing to bring adults and children together to “apply healthy eating at home as well as healthy living.”

The class in the roomy rig begins with a primer on sugar. Perez held up boxes of cereal and asked the group of kids to guess how many cups of sugar were in each. After some simple math calculations they poured the amount of sugar into plastic cups. There was a collective gasp.

Then the teachers gave the group, from kindergarteners to the elderly, a lesson on cutting with sharp knifes that will protect their fingers so “you don’t hurt yourself or anyone else.” The group was instructed to put their knives in plastic buckets when done. Also, when using a grater on a cutting board, the teachers warned: Watch out for your knuckles!

Once the initial kitchen etiquette part of the instruction is complete, the groups each gather around their stations to make their dish: Mexican breakfast. It consists of these main ingredients: onion, garlic, red bell pepper, jalapeño, Serrano chile, dried red chili, bay leaves, salt, pepper, diced tomatoes, eggs, tortillas, and cheddar cheese. There’s also a fruit salad on the side.

The truck has eight cooking stations, six ovens, four sinks, and a dishwasher. Perez and the other teachers at each station exhort their class: “Let’s get cutting! Somebody pick an onion. Somebody pick a red pepper. And why don’t you do the fruit?” The burner is set to medium high. Students are warned that the oils are “super-hot.” Everyone at the station where Perez is teaching gets a whiff of the chile and coughs.

“This was really different. It’s very spicy. It goes through your nose,” said Lihour Hul, an 11th grader at Wilson High in Long Beach. He said his coach tells him not to go to McDonald’s.

“I ran cross country and I need energy and I want to learn how to eat healthy,” he adds. Healthy food you get more energy from than junk food.” Plus, he wants to learn how to make more than fried rice for his family.

Lihour’s 12-year-old sister is standing beside him, delicately chopping oranges for a fruit salad.

“I am happy to be here because I’m learning to make breakfast,” she said. “Usually I can’t make much because I’m still a child, but I love cooking.” She particularly likes to make a Cambodian fried rice dish with eggs and carrots and sausage.

Everyone in the rig is prepping, chopping, and laughing with their fellow cooks about the deliciousness of fresh ingredients.

Soon the pans at all four stations are loaded with the cheesy, tomatoes, chile concoction. But while the eggs poach on top, the students get a mini lesson on reading food labels. Don’t look at the advertising. For instance, it could say “healthy choice,” or “go lean” but the label doesn’t lie.

Lisa Fontanesi, the Program Manager for Jamie Oliver Food Foundation, said everyone benefits from label-reading exercises. Everyone in the class is sent home – both young and old – with the idea of getting four or five food groups into the meals. Students can be an example for parents and vice versa. Everyone can take away some tool to improve his or her eating habits, whether it’s just packing a healthy lunch. In Long Beach, 800 people have now taken the course and 1,000 people have been to the teaching kitchen

“Our belief is it’s easier and cheaper and not as time consuming as everyone thinks it is to cook your own meal,’’ said Fontanesi. “This is a good way to get families working together, which can make a difference.”

Jessica Portner is a correspondent for the California Health Report at www.healthycal.org.

USC puts pressure on housing market, advocates say

Longtime South LA resident Willie Hill turned to SAJE when his home was condemed.

By Robert Fulton, California Health Report

Outside of the house in South Los Angeles where retired veteran Willie Hill has lived for more than a year hangs a sign: “This Property Closed to the Public.”

Hill’s rented home, which he shares with three others on tree-lined Menlo Avenue, just north of the University of Southern California campus, has been condemned.

Yet Hill, 72, and his housemates refuse to leave despite poor living conditions such as no running water, heat or electricity. If they vacate, they risk losing their tenant rights. Plus, Hill doesn’t know where he would go.

Contrasting Hill’s situation is a sign hanging from another house across the street from where he lives. This one advertises a USC rental housing street fair at the end of January.

In Hill’s neighborhood, much of the housing is now occupied by students and others affiliated with USC. Property gets sold to a developer, who clears out the house, renovates, and rents it to Trojan students and faculty who can afford higher rents than those paid by working-class Angelenos. One way to force residents out is by making the domicile so unbearable, the tenants leave.

“Gentrification in this neighborhood remains extreme,” said Nancy Ibrahim, executive director at Esperanza Community Housing. “This is one of the hottest neighborhoods in the city.”

Hill’s experience is not unique. Three years ago, Gloria Serrano, who has lived in South LA for 40 years, and other families were evicted from a building on West 23rd Street, a few blocks north of USC. Now Serrano’s old building, like many around it, is decorated with for rent and for lease signs.

A website featuring her former home boasts of a “well-maintained, gated-building” with “perfectly appointed” kitchens and a five minute walk to USC.

Organizations such as Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE) have worked with Hill and Serrano in helping them understand their rights, while groups like Esperanza try to maintain affordable housing in the neighborhood.

“USC created this intense competition for housing in the area,” explained David Robinson, Political Director at SAJE and director of United Neighbors in Defense Against Displacement, or UNIDAD.

“The gentrification continues apace,” he added.

But the displacement and gentrification around USC isn’t a clear-cut case of a monolithic entity kicking folks out of their homes and onto the street to make way for expansion. Many of the cases such as Hill’s, Serrano’s and others are the result of private property owners not affiliated with USC taking advantage of the land’s proximity to the campus.

“When we talk about the displacement issue, the challenge is that the university did not come in and remove people from their homes,” said David Galaviz, Executive Director of Local Government Relations at USC. “It wasn’t the university doing that. It wasn’t anybody acting in an official capacity on behalf of the university.”

USC is currently ramping up a major redevelopment of its University Village, which calls for new on-campus housing, academic buildings and retail. According to the university, the project will be built on land already owned by USC.

A highlight of the plan is the construction of 5,200 new student beds, a net creation of 4,000 beds. Galaviz stresses that creating more on-campus housing will alleviate the demand for such housing away from campus.

“The specific plan in a lot of ways is the university’s reaction to the displacement issue,” Galaviz said. “It’s an opportunity to really relieve pressure on the surrounding residential community.” He added that the university is looking into a program that can reconvert housing that was converted from residential to student housing.

The new Village, which now includes a dated Denny’s, Starbucks and movie theater, will boast new retail, restaurants and at least one grocery store. Galaviz envisions something more akin to a town square that can be enjoyed by USC’s family and families in the community at large. Galaviz stressed that the university needs the greater community to compliment the transient student population.

“The last thing we want to do is have those folks have to leave the area,” he said. “That’s not the intention.”

Galaviz also cites the 12,000 jobs – 4,000 permanent, 8,000 construction-related – promised by the Village and other campus redevelopment areas. The university has established a local hiring program to assist in directing those jobs to zip codes impacted by USC.

Ibrahim wants the university to be more active in working with the community to avoid or assist with situations such as Hill’s and Serrano’s. For example, she would like to see the university contribute to a revolving loan fund to help affordable housing developers.

“One of the things that we’re very concerned with as we try to partner with the university is that they understand and take some kind of responsibility,” Ibrahim said.

And for all the talk of USC creating new jobs, transferring more students to on-campus housing and the promised economic activity and new retail the redevelopment will bring, it won’t do any good for those such as Serrano, Hill, and others displaced who can no longer afford to live in the neighborhood.

“It’s great they’re bringing things to the community, but not at the price of displacement, and families need to be able to stay here and benefit,” said Serrano, who has since moved in with her daughter on 120th Street, about nine miles to the south. She has also joined SAJE as an organizer.

Hill’s future is to be determined. He’s still in his condemned house, the one with a USC shuttle stop across the street.

“As long as they can make it affordable for everybody,” Hill said of development “I don’t think it should be a situation where it’s catering to people with money, a certain class. This is what the problem is.”

Robert Fulton is a correspondent for the California Health Report at www.healthycal.org.

Restaurant chef, daughter lead classes for kids

Gabriella Vasquez (second left) watches as Jahein Logan, 9, and Aaron Cleaver, 11, prepare a meal during a Cooking With Gabby session in December 2011 at Jim Gilliam Recreation Center in Los Angeles. Her dad, Steven Vasquez, is at right. Photo by Herbert A. Sample.

Parents trying to cook at home for finicky kids who are constantly exposed to Ronald McDonald, the Colonel and every sugary concoction imaginable are in for a struggle to start with. But cooking healthy?

As difficult as that may be, Los Angeles restaurateur Steven Vasquez and his family are on a mission to ease parents’ pain – by coaxing kids themselves to realize the delight in eating healthy, delicious meals that contain fresh ingredients.

With little fanfare, the Vasquez family for the last five years have been visiting Los Angeles-area recreation centers and other locations, holding exercise and cooking sessions for kids under the rubric “Cooking With Gabby” – Gabby being Vasquez’ daughter Gabriella.

The gatherings, usually held in Latino and African-American neighborhoods, can be small, sometimes just a couple handfuls of children between the ages of 9 and 12. And they can occasionally be unruly, given kids’ penchant to fidget and dismiss anything that doesn’t come with buttons and a screen.

But oftentimes, their faces light up when they taste the dish they just helped prepare with guidance from Vasquez, his wife Lisa, Gabriella and sons Steve Jr. and Anthony. Such was the case at one recent session at the Jim Gilliam Recreation Center in Baldwin Hills, where several kids readied a beet salad with green beans and fresh cranberry pear sauce.

“I learned how to cook,” said 11-year-old Walter Bolden, who helped peel the beets. “It was kinda cool,”

That counts as a small but not trivial victory in neighborhoods where fast food still reigns supreme and unhealthy home cooking habits from generations ago have yet to fully disappear. And that’s the central aim of Cooking With Gabby: Teach children about food and how eating healthy can be tasty, fun and beneficial – and that knowledge will lead to healthier communities.

“The parents and the kids actually take the recipes home and they cook together,” said Gabriella, 21, adding that it’s priceless to watch the faces of kids light up when they realize how good vegetables can be, “that eating healthy could be better than McDonald’s.”

The Vasquezes make a point of explaining the history of each major ingredient of dishes they present, such as fresh cranberry pear sauce, fruit smoothies, spinach dip with tofu instead of sour cream, healthy beans and rice, and vegetable pizzas, complete with whole wheat crust.

“The history of food and where it comes from is very important because, I think, once kids realize how long these fruits and vegetables have been around, they really get excited,” said the older Vasquez, 51, a former chef, caterer and now the general manager of Kate Mantilini restaurant in Beverly Hills. “It gives them a little more interest.”

Before preparing the ingredients for a fresh fruit salad, for example, Vasquez explains that watermelon originated in Africa, pineapple in Mexico and papayas in tropical islands. “It lets our kids – either black, brown, Chinese, Caucasian – know that fruits come from all over the place, so it’s like there’s a common thread there with food.”

“We’re all interconnected by the foods we eat,” added Steve Jr., 25.

As are the Vasquezes. The elder Vasquez grew up an Air Force brat, spending four years in Germany during which his family traveled around Europe. “I used to love eating, and my dad would love to eat, so we would always taste the food….I love different foods,” he said.

Steve Jr., who lived in Korea for a couple of years, recalled how his father during visits would stop at most every food stand to taste the fare. “We did a lot of sampling of different kinds of kimchi,” Steve Jr. said.

The non-profit Cooking With Gabby was inspired a decade ago by the inquisitiveness of a young Gabriella, who would pepper her dad with questions about ingredients and tastes as she watched him prepare food in his catering kitchen. “I was talking to my wife about it,” Vasquez remembered, “and I said, ‘We need to do something about teaching kids how to cook because there’s such a prevalence of fast food, and parents and kids not having dinner at home.’”

In addition to some culinary instruction, the Cooking With Gabby sessions also try to promote physical fitness. To this end, the Vasquezes often invite professional dancers, known as the “GoodLife With Gabby Dance Krew,” to teach the kids some moves, or invites a retired professional basketball player to host a brief clinic, before the cooking begins.

“There’s all types of things we have to teach our children in this community,” said Lucius Allen, 42, a former UCLA and Milwaukee Bucks star, and president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Basketball Retired Players Association, who has led some of the clinics.

“This organization has stepped up to the plate to tackle the issues with children that actually can be impressed, “ he added. “When they go to McDonald’s, instead of ordering the hamburger and fries, let’s order the salad. We know you’re going to go to McDonald’s. Let’s order the good stuff.”

The impact of poor diets on children is well documented, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and cholesterol and breathing disorders such as asthma –all of which can be exacerbated by a lack of exercise. According to some estimates, one in three U.S. kids are now considered overweight or obese.

Cooking With Gabby began its cooking sessions as part of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s Summer Night Lights anti-gang program. On its own, it also has held gatherings at parks or community centers, local churches, the offices of health-related groups such as the American Diabetes Association, and at a half-dozen Los Angeles City schools. Top school administrators were involved in an imbroglio last spring over attempts by British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who advocates healthier school meals, to tape his reality television show at district schools.

But there’s been no controversy over the Vasquez’ efforts, which are supported by grants from Toyota, Wells Fargo, and the offices of area politicians, including Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas and L.A. Councilmen Herb Wesson and Bernard Parks.

Herbert A. Sample is a freelance writer in Los Angeles, CA. He can be reached at hasample@mac.com.