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Cricket helps the police forge ties in immigrant communities
With Every Whack of the Cricket Bat, a Bond
By SIMON AKAM
The Gateway Cricket Ground in Brooklyn is a spartan place — a grass oval tucked in by the Belt Parkway, in the shadows of the towers of Starrett City and beneath the flight path of Kennedy International Airport.
But on Tuesday morning it was crowded with players, some toting paddlelike bats, and filled with the sound of leather balls struck by wood.
The sport they were playing is as ancient as it is baffling to most Americans, yet the New York Police Department has chosen cricket as a way to foster relationships with newer immigrant communities.
The Police Department established a cricket competition for young men in the city last summer; the project was a success, and on Tuesday, play began for another season. Interest has expanded, with 10 teams and 170 players involved this year, compared with 6 teams last year.
“This is the most diverse city in the world,” said Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. “We don’t have uniform relationships with all communities. This opens the door, allows us to interact with them on the sport field.”
The police have long organized athletic programs as a way to keep teenagers out of mischief, especially in the summer, when schools are closed, days are long and it is easy to get into trouble.
Last year, a soccer competition aimed at immigrants in the city was popular with Eastern Europeans and some Latinos, but the police believed they needed to make inroads with other groups.
“The Muslim community is not a community we had great outreach to in the past,” said Deputy Inspector Amin Kosseim, who runs special projects for the department’s Community Affairs Bureau.
And so the police decided to experiment with cricket, a game with a huge following across the Caribbean and South Asia. The response has cut across community lines. Tuesday’s opening match pitted the SuperStars — made up largely of players from Guyana — against the KnightRiders, a predominantly Pakistani team.
At a recent training session in Baisley Pond Park in Springfield Gardens, Queens, some of the players expressed enthusiasm and gratitude for the chance to play cricket.
“It shows the police are interested in bringing the youths away from street life,” said Azurdeen Mohammed, 18, the SuperStars team captain. “My guys, when they see the cops, they know they help us out.”
On the season’s opening day last week, Khawar Abbas, 15, a KnightRiders player, also said that cricket had changed the way he thought about the police.
“They are more into community than I thought they were,” he said. “They actually care about different types of people.”
A cricket match can last as long as five days and still end in a tie. However, the Police Department has adopted a shorter form of the game, called Twenty20 — in this form, a match lasts around three hours. The shorter form encourages big, crowd-pleasing hitting.
Twenty20 cricket has a serious international following, but John L. Aaron, the executive secretary of the USA Cricket Association, believes this abbreviated form is particularly suited to the mind-set on this side of the Atlantic.
“The sports psyche of the average American is: get home from work, see a game and get the kids to school in the morning,” he said.
The police have also had to make other adaptations to cricket to fit New York conditions. For example, a strip of rolled and immaculately trimmed grass is normally used as the playing surface on which a ball bounces before it is struck by a batsman. But that strip is expensive and rare in this country. So the league’s matches, played at Spring Creek Park in Brooklyn and Kissena Park in Queens, use a substitute: a heavy, fibrous mat that is staked to the ground before a game.
At a SuperStars training session recently in Baisley Pond Park, youngsters on a neighboring basketball court looked on askance as the team carried the mat from a metal locker and used mallets to secure it to the damp earth. The bounce, according to the team’s coach, Ajaz Asgarally, was satisfactory.
It remains to be seen if the Police Department is able to nurture cricket talent in the way that other law enforcement agencies have. According to Keith A. P. Sandiford, a professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba who has written extensively on cricket, a police boys club established in Barbados to keep wayward boys off the streets once showcased the talents of a young Garfield Sobers.
Mr. Sobers later went on to become captain of the West Indies national team and is widely regarded as one of the game’s finest players.
Rain collection is now legal in Colorado
It’s Now Legal to Catch a Raindrop in Colorado
By KIRK JOHNSON
DURANGO, Colo. — For the first time since territorial days, rain will be free for the catching here, as more and more thirsty states part ways with one of the most entrenched codes of the West.
Precipitation, every last drop or flake, was assigned ownership from the moment it fell in many Western states, making scofflaws of people who scooped rainfall from their own gutters. In some instances, the rights to that water were assigned a century or more ago.
Now two new laws in Colorado will allow many people to collect rainwater legally. The laws are the latest crack in the rainwater edifice, as other states, driven by population growth, drought, or declining groundwater in their aquifers, have already opened the skies or begun actively encouraging people to collect.
“I was so willing to go to jail for catching water on my roof and watering my garden,” said Tom Bartels, a video producer here in southwestern Colorado, who has been illegally watering his vegetables and fruit trees from tanks attached to his gutters. “But now I’m not a criminal.”
Who owns the sky, anyway? In most of the country, that is a question for philosophy class or bad poetry. In the West, lawyers parse it with straight faces and serious intent. The result, especially stark here in the Four Corners area of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, is a crazy quilt of rules and regulations — and an entire subculture of people like Mr. Bartels who have been using the rain nature provided but laws forbade.
The two Colorado laws allow perhaps a quarter-million residents with private wells to begin rainwater harvesting, as well as the setting up of a pilot program for larger scale rain-catching.
Just 75 miles west of here, in Utah, collecting rainwater from the roof is still illegal unless the roof owner also owns water rights on the ground; the same rigid rules, with a few local exceptions, also apply in Washington State. Meanwhile, 20 miles south of here, in New Mexico, rainwater catchment, as the collecting is called, is mandatory for new dwellings in some places like Santa Fe.
And in Arizona, cities like Tucson are pioneering the practices of big-city rain capture. “All you need for a water harvesting system is rain, and a place to put it,” Tucson Water says on its Web site.
Here in Colorado, the old law created a kind of wink-and-nod shadow economy. Rain equipment could be legally sold, but retailers said they knew better than to ask what the buyer intended to do with the product.
“It’s like being able to sell things like smoking paraphernalia even though smoking pot is illegal,” said Laurie E. Dickson, who for years sold barrel-and-hose systems from a shop in downtown Durango.
State water officials acknowledged that they rarely enforced the old law. With the new laws, the state created a system of fines for rain catchers without a permit; previously the only option was to shut a collector down.
But Kevin Rein, Colorado’s assistant state engineer, said enforcement would focus on people who violated water rules on a large scale.
“It’s not going to be a situation where we’re sending out people to look in backyards,” Mr. Rein said.
Science has also stepped forward to underline how incorrect the old sweeping legal generalizations were.
A study in 2007 proved crucial to convincing Colorado lawmakers that rain catching would not rob water owners of their rights. It found that in an average year, 97 percent of the precipitation that fell in Douglas County, near Denver, never got anywhere near a stream. The water evaporated or was used by plants.
But the deeper questions about rain are what really gnawed at rain harvesters like Todd S. Anderson, a small-scale farmer just east of Durango. Mr. Anderson said catching rain was not just thrifty — he is so water conscious that he has not washed his truck in five years — but also morally correct because it used water that would otherwise be pumped from the ground.
Mr. Anderson, a former national park ranger who worked for years enforcing rules and laws, said: “I’m conflicted between what’s right and what’s legal. And I hate that.”
For the last year, Mr. Anderson has been catching rainwater that runs off his greenhouse but keeping the barrel hidden from view. When the new law passed, he put the barrel in plain sight, and he plans to set up a system for his house.
Dig a little deeper into the rain-catching world, and there are remnants of the 1970s back-to-land hippie culture, which went off the grid into aquatic self-sufficiency long ago.
“Our whole perspective on life is to try to use what is available, and to not be dependent on big systems,” said Janine Fitzgerald, whose parents bought land in southwest Colorado in 1970, miles from where the pavement ends.
Ms. Fitzgerald, an associate professor of sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, still lives the unwired life with her own family now, growing most of her own food and drinking and bathing in filtered rainwater.
Rain dependency has its ups and downs, Ms. Fitzgerald said. Her home is also completely solar-powered, which means that the pumps to push water from the rain tanks are solar-powered, too. A cloudy, rainy spring this year was good for tanks, bad for pumps.
The economy has turned on some early rainwater believers, too. Ms. Dickson’s company in Durango went out of business last December as the construction market faltered. The rain barrels she once sold will soon be perfectly legal, but the shop is shuttered.
“We were ahead of our time,” she said.
Children: Self-Control Presages Math Gains in Young
Children: Self-Control Presages Math Gains in Young
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
A simple five-minute behavioral test for children entering kindergarten can predict significant gains in mathematics skills over the course of the year, researchers have found.
Claire Cameron Ponitz, a research associate at the University of Virginia, led a group that tested 343 children with the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task, in which children perform the opposite of an oral command (for example, the correct response for “touch your toes” would be to touch your head). Higher scores, the researchers write in the May issue of Developmental Psychology, indicate a greater ability to control and direct one’s own behavior, an ability essential for success in the structured environment of a kindergarten class.
Those with higher scores on the fall test generally reached higher scores in all areas in the spring, but showed significant gains compared with other children only in mathematics, not in literacy or vocabulary.
What’s a parent to do? “We know that consistency and giving children opportunities to control their own behavior helps them develop self-regulation skills,” Dr. Ponitz said. “Playing games like red light, green light, or following through with consequences for violations of family rules — these are things that have been shown to be related to self-regulation in early childhood.”
Fragile Tanzanian Orphans Get Help After Mothers Die
Fragile Tanzanian Orphans Get Help After Mothers Die
By DENISE GRADY
BEREGA, Tanzania — The Berega Orphanage, a cluster of neat stucco cottages in this village of red dirt roads and maize plots, is a far cry from what the name suggests. The 20 infants and toddlers here are not put up for adoption, nor kept on indefinitely without hope of ever living with a family.
Most of their mothers died giving birth or soon after — something that, in poor countries, leaves newborns at great risk of dying, too. The children are here just temporarily, to get a start in life so they can return to their villages and their extended families when they are 2 or 3 years old, well past the fragile days of infancy and big enough to digest cow’s milk and eat regular food.
And, in an innovative program designed to meet the infants’ emotional as well as physical needs, many have teenage girls from their extended families living with them at the orphanage.
Africa is full of at least 50 million orphans, the legacy of AIDS and other diseases, war and high rates of death in pregnancy and childbirth. With the numbers increasing every day, Africans are struggling to care for them, often in ways that differ strikingly from the traditional concept of an orphanage in the developed world.
Programs like the one in Berega are “the way to go” in Africa, said Dr. Peter Ngatia, the director of capacity building for Amref, the African Medical and Research Foundation, a nonprofit group based in Nairobi, Kenya.
He said similar programs for AIDS orphans had worked well in Uganda, looking after the children until age 5 and then sending them back to their families or volunteers in their communities.
“In less wealthy nations, people are being very creative,” said Kathryn Whetten, an expert on orphan care from Duke University. She had not seen the orphanage in Berega or encountered others like it. But that did not surprise her. Little is known about orphan care in Africa, she said, because little research has been done. On a recent trip to Moshi, a Tanzanian city of about 150,000, she said, local officials knew of three orphanages. She and her colleagues found 25 there, most with 10 to 25 children each.
The Berega Orphanage is of that size, one small, apparently successful attempt to cope with the aftermath of more than a quarter-million deaths of women each year in pregnancy or childbirth in Africa.
They die from bleeding, infection, high blood pressure, prolonged labor and botched abortions — problems that can be treated or prevented with basic obstetrical care. But in Tanzania, which has neither the worst nor best medical care in Africa, but is similar to many poor countries, everything is in short supply: doctors, nurses, drugs, equipment, ambulances and paved roads. By the time many women get to the 120-bed hospital here, it is too late to save them.
Their babies may be saved, but their survival hangs in the balance. Often, the father or other remaining relatives cannot take care of newborns. Without breast milk, infants here are in real trouble. Formula and baby food are not widely available, and cow’s milk is a poor substitute. Malnutrition and infection are constant threats. An orphanage can provide basic needs, but to thrive, babies need dedicated caregivers, and their extended families may live in distant villages.
The orphanage here, started in 1965 by United German Mission Aid, an evangelical Christian mission, began recruiting relatives to move in about five years ago. Ute Klatt, a German missionary and nurse who has been director of the orphanage for 10 years, said she learned about the practice from another orphanage in Tanzania. Now many of the children at the orphanage are cared for by a teenage girl from the extended family — a binti, in Swahili — often a sister, cousin or aunt, who lives with them and learns how to take care of them.
The young women come to love the children, and will look after them when they leave the orphanage, Ms. Klatt said. In addition, the bintis, some of whom have never been to school, gain some education. Ms. Klatt provides schoolbooks, she said, and the young women study and teach one another in the evenings. Many arrive illiterate and leave knowing how to read. She also teaches them the basics about health, and they learn sewing and batik, and share the cooking in an outdoor kitchen.
“Before we had this system, the families weren’t visiting, and it was hard to reintegrate the children,” Ms. Klatt said. “There were attachment disorders.”
With the bintis, Ms. Klatt said, life becomes less institutional and the children grow up more normally, as they might at home.
On a recent visit to Berega, the children seemed to be thriving. Dressed in shorts, T-shirts and sandals, they looked well fed and were bursting with energy as they chased one another around the patio and competed for attention from Ms. Klatt, whom they called Mama Ute. Shy at first with visitors, they were soon competing for laps to sit in and hands to hold.
Ms. Klatt said the infants were fed formula, and the older children ate food grown or raised nearby: bananas, mangoes, cereal made from maize, chicken, goat, and tomatoes, greens and other vegetables. They attend nursery school at a nearby church.
Late one afternoon on the patio, 10 bintis gathered with the children, and shyly told what had happened to their families. They spoke in Swahili, and Ms. Klatt translated.
One young woman, Lea, looked after her 2-year-old cousin Simoni, whose mother gave birth to twins and died on a bus on the way to the hospital. She had been in labor for “only a few days,” Lea said, and did not know she was carrying twins. It was her first pregnancy. Simoni’s twin died a few days after birth.
Another binti, named Happy, took care of twin cousins, Jacobo and Johanna, whose mother, Paulina, died after giving birth at home. Before that, two of Paulina’s other children had died, one at 5 months, one at 9 months. Others told similar stories, of mothers dying at home or in cars on the way to the hospital.
Ms. Klatt said it had been her dream since childhood to work as a missionary in Africa, though she had never imagined running an orphanage. She said one of her greatest rewards was when older children who had been in her care came back to visit, and were obviously healthy and happy, living with their families back in their home villages.
Political Shifts on Gay Rights Lag Behind Culture
Political Shifts on Gay Rights Lag Behind Culture
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
WASHINGTON — For 15 minutes in the Oval Office the other day, one of President Obama’s top campaign lieutenants, Steve Hildebrand, told the president about the “hurt, anxiety and anger” that he and other gay supporters felt over the slow pace of the White House’s engagement with gay issues.
But on Monday, 250 gay leaders are to join Mr. Obama in the East Room to commemorate publicly the 40th anniversary of the birth of the modern gay rights movement: a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York. By contrast, the first time gay leaders were invited to the White House, in March 1977, they met a midlevel aide on a Saturday when the press and President Jimmy Carter were nowhere in sight.
The conflicting signals from the White House about its commitment to gay issues reflect a broader paradox: even as cultural acceptance of homosexuality increases across the country, the politics of gay rights remains full of crosscurrents.
It is reflected in the surge of gay men and lesbians on television and in public office, and in polls measuring a steady rise in support for gay rights measures. Despite approval in California of a ballot measure banning same-sex marriage, it has been authorized in six states.
Yet if the culture is moving on, national politics is not, or at least not as rapidly. Mr. Obama has yet to fulfill a campaign promise to repeal the policy barring openly gay people from serving in the military. The prospects that Congress will ever send him a bill overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, appear dim. An effort to extend hate-crime legislation to include gay victims has produced a bitter backlash in some quarters: Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, sent a letter to clerics in his state arguing that it would be destructive to “faith, families and freedom.”
“America is changing more quickly than the government,” said Linda Ketner, a gay Democrat from South Carolina who came within four percentage points of winning a Congressional seat in November. “They are lagging behind the crowd. But if I remember my poli sci from college, isn’t that the way it always works?”
Some elected Democrats in Washington remain wary because they remember how conservatives used same-sex marriage and gay service in the military against them as political issues. The Obama White House in particular is reluctant to embrace gay rights issues now, officials there say, because they do not want to provide social conservatives a rallying cry while the president is trying to assemble legislative coalitions on health care and other initiatives.
Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, a group that opposes gay rights initiatives, said Mr. Obama’s reluctance to push more assertively for gay rights reflected public opinion.
“He’s given them a few minor concessions; they’re asking for more, such as ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ being repealed,” Mr. Perkins said. “The administration is not willing to go there, and I think there’s a reason for that, and that is because I think the American public isn’t there.”
Conservative Democrats have at best been unenthusiastic about efforts to push gay rights measures in Congress; 30 Democrats voted against a bill prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation that passed the House in 2007. (It died in the Senate.) And a half-dozen Democrats declined requests to discuss this issue, reflecting what aides called the complicated politics surrounding it.
Still, there are signs that the issue is not as pressing or toxic as it once was. “I don’t think it’s the political deal-breaker it once was,” said Dave Saunders, a southern Virginia Democratic consultant who has advised Democrats running for office in conservative rural areas. “Most people out here really don’t care because everybody has gay friends.”
Interviews with gay leaders suggest a consensus that there has been nothing short of a cultural transformation in the space of just a few years, even if it is reflected more in the evolving culture of the country than in the body of its laws.
“The diminution of the homophobia has been as important a phenomena as anything we’ve seen in the last 15 years,” said Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, who is gay.
Democrats now control the White House and both houses of Congress for the first time since 1994, increasing the chances of legislative action. Mr. Frank said that over the next two years, he expected Congress to overturn the ban on gay service in the military, pass legislation prohibiting discrimination against hiring gay workers, and extend the hate-crime bill to crimes involving gay couples.
There is also an emerging generational divide on gay issues — younger Americans tend to have more liberal positions — that has fueled what pollsters said was a measurable liberalization in views on gay rights over the past decade.
A New York Times/CBS News poll last spring found that 57 percent of people under 40 said they supported same-sex marriage, compared with 31 percent of respondents over 40. Andy Kohut, the president of the Pew Research Center, said the generational shift was reflected in his polling, in which the number of Americans opposing gay people serving openly in the military had dropped to 32 percent now from 45 percent in 1994.
David Axelrod, a senior Obama adviser, said, “You look at polling and attitudes among younger people on these issues are startlingly different than older people.”
“As generational change happens,” Mr. Axelrod added, “that’s going to be more and more true.”
In the view of many gay leaders, the shifts in public attitude are a validation of the central political goal set by the dozens of gay liberation groups that sprouted up in cities and on college campuses in the months after the Stonewall uprising: to have gay men and lesbians who had been living in secret go public as a way of dealing with societal fear and prejudice.
But there is considerable evidence that this is still an issue that stirs political concerns. Gay leaders have increasingly complained about what they call Mr. Obama’s slow pace in fulfilling promises he made during his campaign. Some boycotted a Democratic Party fund-raiser recently to show their distress.
“I have been really surprised how paralyzed they seem around this,” said Richard Socarides, who was an adviser to President Bill Clinton on gay issues.
Mr. Hildebrand did not respond to calls and e-mail messages asking about his encounter with Mr. Obama, which he described in a private e-mail forum for gay political leaders. (The meeting was confirmed by senior White House officials.)
Still, David Mixner, a longtime gay leader, said he was struck by how things had changed.
“Listen,” Mr. Mixner said, “in 1992, what we were begging Bill Clinton about — literally — about whether he was going to say the word ‘gay’ in his convention speech. Even say it. We had to threaten a walkout to get it in.”
Cricket helps the police forge ties in immigrant communities
With Every Whack of the Cricket Bat, a Bond
By SIMON AKAM
The Gateway Cricket Ground in Brooklyn is a spartan place — a grass oval tucked in by the Belt Parkway, in the shadows of the towers of Starrett City and beneath the flight path of Kennedy International Airport.
But on Tuesday morning it was crowded with players, some toting paddlelike bats, and filled with the sound of leather balls struck by wood.
The sport they were playing is as ancient as it is baffling to most Americans, yet the New York Police Department has chosen cricket as a way to foster relationships with newer immigrant communities.
The Police Department established a cricket competition for young men in the city last summer; the project was a success, and on Tuesday, play began for another season. Interest has expanded, with 10 teams and 170 players involved this year, compared with 6 teams last year.
“This is the most diverse city in the world,” said Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. “We don’t have uniform relationships with all communities. This opens the door, allows us to interact with them on the sport field.”
The police have long organized athletic programs as a way to keep teenagers out of mischief, especially in the summer, when schools are closed, days are long and it is easy to get into trouble.
Last year, a soccer competition aimed at immigrants in the city was popular with Eastern Europeans and some Latinos, but the police believed they needed to make inroads with other groups.
“The Muslim community is not a community we had great outreach to in the past,” said Deputy Inspector Amin Kosseim, who runs special projects for the department’s Community Affairs Bureau.
And so the police decided to experiment with cricket, a game with a huge following across the Caribbean and South Asia. The response has cut across community lines. Tuesday’s opening match pitted the SuperStars — made up largely of players from Guyana — against the KnightRiders, a predominantly Pakistani team.
At a recent training session in Baisley Pond Park in Springfield Gardens, Queens, some of the players expressed enthusiasm and gratitude for the chance to play cricket.
“It shows the police are interested in bringing the youths away from street life,” said Azurdeen Mohammed, 18, the SuperStars team captain. “My guys, when they see the cops, they know they help us out.”
On the season’s opening day last week, Khawar Abbas, 15, a KnightRiders player, also said that cricket had changed the way he thought about the police.
“They are more into community than I thought they were,” he said. “They actually care about different types of people.”
A cricket match can last as long as five days and still end in a tie. However, the Police Department has adopted a shorter form of the game, called Twenty20 — in this form, a match lasts around three hours. The shorter form encourages big, crowd-pleasing hitting.
Twenty20 cricket has a serious international following, but John L. Aaron, the executive secretary of the USA Cricket Association, believes this abbreviated form is particularly suited to the mind-set on this side of the Atlantic.
“The sports psyche of the average American is: get home from work, see a game and get the kids to school in the morning,” he said.
The police have also had to make other adaptations to cricket to fit New York conditions. For example, a strip of rolled and immaculately trimmed grass is normally used as the playing surface on which a ball bounces before it is struck by a batsman. But that strip is expensive and rare in this country. So the league’s matches, played at Spring Creek Park in Brooklyn and Kissena Park in Queens, use a substitute: a heavy, fibrous mat that is staked to the ground before a game.
At a SuperStars training session recently in Baisley Pond Park, youngsters on a neighboring basketball court looked on askance as the team carried the mat from a metal locker and used mallets to secure it to the damp earth. The bounce, according to the team’s coach, Ajaz Asgarally, was satisfactory.
It remains to be seen if the Police Department is able to nurture cricket talent in the way that other law enforcement agencies have. According to Keith A. P. Sandiford, a professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba who has written extensively on cricket, a police boys club established in Barbados to keep wayward boys off the streets once showcased the talents of a young Garfield Sobers.
Mr. Sobers later went on to become captain of the West Indies national team and is widely regarded as one of the game’s finest players.
Rain collection is now legal in Colorado
It’s Now Legal to Catch a Raindrop in Colorado
By KIRK JOHNSON
DURANGO, Colo. — For the first time since territorial days, rain will be free for the catching here, as more and more thirsty states part ways with one of the most entrenched codes of the West.
Precipitation, every last drop or flake, was assigned ownership from the moment it fell in many Western states, making scofflaws of people who scooped rainfall from their own gutters. In some instances, the rights to that water were assigned a century or more ago.
Now two new laws in Colorado will allow many people to collect rainwater legally. The laws are the latest crack in the rainwater edifice, as other states, driven by population growth, drought, or declining groundwater in their aquifers, have already opened the skies or begun actively encouraging people to collect.
“I was so willing to go to jail for catching water on my roof and watering my garden,” said Tom Bartels, a video producer here in southwestern Colorado, who has been illegally watering his vegetables and fruit trees from tanks attached to his gutters. “But now I’m not a criminal.”
Who owns the sky, anyway? In most of the country, that is a question for philosophy class or bad poetry. In the West, lawyers parse it with straight faces and serious intent. The result, especially stark here in the Four Corners area of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, is a crazy quilt of rules and regulations — and an entire subculture of people like Mr. Bartels who have been using the rain nature provided but laws forbade.
The two Colorado laws allow perhaps a quarter-million residents with private wells to begin rainwater harvesting, as well as the setting up of a pilot program for larger scale rain-catching.
Just 75 miles west of here, in Utah, collecting rainwater from the roof is still illegal unless the roof owner also owns water rights on the ground; the same rigid rules, with a few local exceptions, also apply in Washington State. Meanwhile, 20 miles south of here, in New Mexico, rainwater catchment, as the collecting is called, is mandatory for new dwellings in some places like Santa Fe.
And in Arizona, cities like Tucson are pioneering the practices of big-city rain capture. “All you need for a water harvesting system is rain, and a place to put it,” Tucson Water says on its Web site.
Here in Colorado, the old law created a kind of wink-and-nod shadow economy. Rain equipment could be legally sold, but retailers said they knew better than to ask what the buyer intended to do with the product.
“It’s like being able to sell things like smoking paraphernalia even though smoking pot is illegal,” said Laurie E. Dickson, who for years sold barrel-and-hose systems from a shop in downtown Durango.
State water officials acknowledged that they rarely enforced the old law. With the new laws, the state created a system of fines for rain catchers without a permit; previously the only option was to shut a collector down.
But Kevin Rein, Colorado’s assistant state engineer, said enforcement would focus on people who violated water rules on a large scale.
“It’s not going to be a situation where we’re sending out people to look in backyards,” Mr. Rein said.
Science has also stepped forward to underline how incorrect the old sweeping legal generalizations were.
A study in 2007 proved crucial to convincing Colorado lawmakers that rain catching would not rob water owners of their rights. It found that in an average year, 97 percent of the precipitation that fell in Douglas County, near Denver, never got anywhere near a stream. The water evaporated or was used by plants.
But the deeper questions about rain are what really gnawed at rain harvesters like Todd S. Anderson, a small-scale farmer just east of Durango. Mr. Anderson said catching rain was not just thrifty — he is so water conscious that he has not washed his truck in five years — but also morally correct because it used water that would otherwise be pumped from the ground.
Mr. Anderson, a former national park ranger who worked for years enforcing rules and laws, said: “I’m conflicted between what’s right and what’s legal. And I hate that.”
For the last year, Mr. Anderson has been catching rainwater that runs off his greenhouse but keeping the barrel hidden from view. When the new law passed, he put the barrel in plain sight, and he plans to set up a system for his house.
Dig a little deeper into the rain-catching world, and there are remnants of the 1970s back-to-land hippie culture, which went off the grid into aquatic self-sufficiency long ago.
“Our whole perspective on life is to try to use what is available, and to not be dependent on big systems,” said Janine Fitzgerald, whose parents bought land in southwest Colorado in 1970, miles from where the pavement ends.
Ms. Fitzgerald, an associate professor of sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, still lives the unwired life with her own family now, growing most of her own food and drinking and bathing in filtered rainwater.
Rain dependency has its ups and downs, Ms. Fitzgerald said. Her home is also completely solar-powered, which means that the pumps to push water from the rain tanks are solar-powered, too. A cloudy, rainy spring this year was good for tanks, bad for pumps.
The economy has turned on some early rainwater believers, too. Ms. Dickson’s company in Durango went out of business last December as the construction market faltered. The rain barrels she once sold will soon be perfectly legal, but the shop is shuttered.
“We were ahead of our time,” she said.
Children: Self-Control Presages Math Gains in Young
Children: Self-Control Presages Math Gains in Young
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
A simple five-minute behavioral test for children entering kindergarten can predict significant gains in mathematics skills over the course of the year, researchers have found.
Claire Cameron Ponitz, a research associate at the University of Virginia, led a group that tested 343 children with the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task, in which children perform the opposite of an oral command (for example, the correct response for “touch your toes” would be to touch your head). Higher scores, the researchers write in the May issue of Developmental Psychology, indicate a greater ability to control and direct one’s own behavior, an ability essential for success in the structured environment of a kindergarten class.
Those with higher scores on the fall test generally reached higher scores in all areas in the spring, but showed significant gains compared with other children only in mathematics, not in literacy or vocabulary.
What’s a parent to do? “We know that consistency and giving children opportunities to control their own behavior helps them develop self-regulation skills,” Dr. Ponitz said. “Playing games like red light, green light, or following through with consequences for violations of family rules — these are things that have been shown to be related to self-regulation in early childhood.”
Fragile Tanzanian Orphans Get Help After Mothers Die
Fragile Tanzanian Orphans Get Help After Mothers Die
By DENISE GRADY
BEREGA, Tanzania — The Berega Orphanage, a cluster of neat stucco cottages in this village of red dirt roads and maize plots, is a far cry from what the name suggests. The 20 infants and toddlers here are not put up for adoption, nor kept on indefinitely without hope of ever living with a family.
Most of their mothers died giving birth or soon after — something that, in poor countries, leaves newborns at great risk of dying, too. The children are here just temporarily, to get a start in life so they can return to their villages and their extended families when they are 2 or 3 years old, well past the fragile days of infancy and big enough to digest cow’s milk and eat regular food.
And, in an innovative program designed to meet the infants’ emotional as well as physical needs, many have teenage girls from their extended families living with them at the orphanage.
Africa is full of at least 50 million orphans, the legacy of AIDS and other diseases, war and high rates of death in pregnancy and childbirth. With the numbers increasing every day, Africans are struggling to care for them, often in ways that differ strikingly from the traditional concept of an orphanage in the developed world.
Programs like the one in Berega are “the way to go” in Africa, said Dr. Peter Ngatia, the director of capacity building for Amref, the African Medical and Research Foundation, a nonprofit group based in Nairobi, Kenya.
He said similar programs for AIDS orphans had worked well in Uganda, looking after the children until age 5 and then sending them back to their families or volunteers in their communities.
“In less wealthy nations, people are being very creative,” said Kathryn Whetten, an expert on orphan care from Duke University. She had not seen the orphanage in Berega or encountered others like it. But that did not surprise her. Little is known about orphan care in Africa, she said, because little research has been done. On a recent trip to Moshi, a Tanzanian city of about 150,000, she said, local officials knew of three orphanages. She and her colleagues found 25 there, most with 10 to 25 children each.
The Berega Orphanage is of that size, one small, apparently successful attempt to cope with the aftermath of more than a quarter-million deaths of women each year in pregnancy or childbirth in Africa.
They die from bleeding, infection, high blood pressure, prolonged labor and botched abortions — problems that can be treated or prevented with basic obstetrical care. But in Tanzania, which has neither the worst nor best medical care in Africa, but is similar to many poor countries, everything is in short supply: doctors, nurses, drugs, equipment, ambulances and paved roads. By the time many women get to the 120-bed hospital here, it is too late to save them.
Their babies may be saved, but their survival hangs in the balance. Often, the father or other remaining relatives cannot take care of newborns. Without breast milk, infants here are in real trouble. Formula and baby food are not widely available, and cow’s milk is a poor substitute. Malnutrition and infection are constant threats. An orphanage can provide basic needs, but to thrive, babies need dedicated caregivers, and their extended families may live in distant villages.
The orphanage here, started in 1965 by United German Mission Aid, an evangelical Christian mission, began recruiting relatives to move in about five years ago. Ute Klatt, a German missionary and nurse who has been director of the orphanage for 10 years, said she learned about the practice from another orphanage in Tanzania. Now many of the children at the orphanage are cared for by a teenage girl from the extended family — a binti, in Swahili — often a sister, cousin or aunt, who lives with them and learns how to take care of them.
The young women come to love the children, and will look after them when they leave the orphanage, Ms. Klatt said. In addition, the bintis, some of whom have never been to school, gain some education. Ms. Klatt provides schoolbooks, she said, and the young women study and teach one another in the evenings. Many arrive illiterate and leave knowing how to read. She also teaches them the basics about health, and they learn sewing and batik, and share the cooking in an outdoor kitchen.
“Before we had this system, the families weren’t visiting, and it was hard to reintegrate the children,” Ms. Klatt said. “There were attachment disorders.”
With the bintis, Ms. Klatt said, life becomes less institutional and the children grow up more normally, as they might at home.
On a recent visit to Berega, the children seemed to be thriving. Dressed in shorts, T-shirts and sandals, they looked well fed and were bursting with energy as they chased one another around the patio and competed for attention from Ms. Klatt, whom they called Mama Ute. Shy at first with visitors, they were soon competing for laps to sit in and hands to hold.
Ms. Klatt said the infants were fed formula, and the older children ate food grown or raised nearby: bananas, mangoes, cereal made from maize, chicken, goat, and tomatoes, greens and other vegetables. They attend nursery school at a nearby church.
Late one afternoon on the patio, 10 bintis gathered with the children, and shyly told what had happened to their families. They spoke in Swahili, and Ms. Klatt translated.
One young woman, Lea, looked after her 2-year-old cousin Simoni, whose mother gave birth to twins and died on a bus on the way to the hospital. She had been in labor for “only a few days,” Lea said, and did not know she was carrying twins. It was her first pregnancy. Simoni’s twin died a few days after birth.
Another binti, named Happy, took care of twin cousins, Jacobo and Johanna, whose mother, Paulina, died after giving birth at home. Before that, two of Paulina’s other children had died, one at 5 months, one at 9 months. Others told similar stories, of mothers dying at home or in cars on the way to the hospital.
Ms. Klatt said it had been her dream since childhood to work as a missionary in Africa, though she had never imagined running an orphanage. She said one of her greatest rewards was when older children who had been in her care came back to visit, and were obviously healthy and happy, living with their families back in their home villages.
Political Shifts on Gay Rights Lag Behind Culture
Political Shifts on Gay Rights Lag Behind Culture
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
WASHINGTON — For 15 minutes in the Oval Office the other day, one of President Obama’s top campaign lieutenants, Steve Hildebrand, told the president about the “hurt, anxiety and anger” that he and other gay supporters felt over the slow pace of the White House’s engagement with gay issues.
But on Monday, 250 gay leaders are to join Mr. Obama in the East Room to commemorate publicly the 40th anniversary of the birth of the modern gay rights movement: a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York. By contrast, the first time gay leaders were invited to the White House, in March 1977, they met a midlevel aide on a Saturday when the press and President Jimmy Carter were nowhere in sight.
The conflicting signals from the White House about its commitment to gay issues reflect a broader paradox: even as cultural acceptance of homosexuality increases across the country, the politics of gay rights remains full of crosscurrents.
It is reflected in the surge of gay men and lesbians on television and in public office, and in polls measuring a steady rise in support for gay rights measures. Despite approval in California of a ballot measure banning same-sex marriage, it has been authorized in six states.
Yet if the culture is moving on, national politics is not, or at least not as rapidly. Mr. Obama has yet to fulfill a campaign promise to repeal the policy barring openly gay people from serving in the military. The prospects that Congress will ever send him a bill overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, appear dim. An effort to extend hate-crime legislation to include gay victims has produced a bitter backlash in some quarters: Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, sent a letter to clerics in his state arguing that it would be destructive to “faith, families and freedom.”
“America is changing more quickly than the government,” said Linda Ketner, a gay Democrat from South Carolina who came within four percentage points of winning a Congressional seat in November. “They are lagging behind the crowd. But if I remember my poli sci from college, isn’t that the way it always works?”
Some elected Democrats in Washington remain wary because they remember how conservatives used same-sex marriage and gay service in the military against them as political issues. The Obama White House in particular is reluctant to embrace gay rights issues now, officials there say, because they do not want to provide social conservatives a rallying cry while the president is trying to assemble legislative coalitions on health care and other initiatives.
Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, a group that opposes gay rights initiatives, said Mr. Obama’s reluctance to push more assertively for gay rights reflected public opinion.
“He’s given them a few minor concessions; they’re asking for more, such as ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ being repealed,” Mr. Perkins said. “The administration is not willing to go there, and I think there’s a reason for that, and that is because I think the American public isn’t there.”
Conservative Democrats have at best been unenthusiastic about efforts to push gay rights measures in Congress; 30 Democrats voted against a bill prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation that passed the House in 2007. (It died in the Senate.) And a half-dozen Democrats declined requests to discuss this issue, reflecting what aides called the complicated politics surrounding it.
Still, there are signs that the issue is not as pressing or toxic as it once was. “I don’t think it’s the political deal-breaker it once was,” said Dave Saunders, a southern Virginia Democratic consultant who has advised Democrats running for office in conservative rural areas. “Most people out here really don’t care because everybody has gay friends.”
Interviews with gay leaders suggest a consensus that there has been nothing short of a cultural transformation in the space of just a few years, even if it is reflected more in the evolving culture of the country than in the body of its laws.
“The diminution of the homophobia has been as important a phenomena as anything we’ve seen in the last 15 years,” said Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, who is gay.
Democrats now control the White House and both houses of Congress for the first time since 1994, increasing the chances of legislative action. Mr. Frank said that over the next two years, he expected Congress to overturn the ban on gay service in the military, pass legislation prohibiting discrimination against hiring gay workers, and extend the hate-crime bill to crimes involving gay couples.
There is also an emerging generational divide on gay issues — younger Americans tend to have more liberal positions — that has fueled what pollsters said was a measurable liberalization in views on gay rights over the past decade.
A New York Times/CBS News poll last spring found that 57 percent of people under 40 said they supported same-sex marriage, compared with 31 percent of respondents over 40. Andy Kohut, the president of the Pew Research Center, said the generational shift was reflected in his polling, in which the number of Americans opposing gay people serving openly in the military had dropped to 32 percent now from 45 percent in 1994.
David Axelrod, a senior Obama adviser, said, “You look at polling and attitudes among younger people on these issues are startlingly different than older people.”
“As generational change happens,” Mr. Axelrod added, “that’s going to be more and more true.”
In the view of many gay leaders, the shifts in public attitude are a validation of the central political goal set by the dozens of gay liberation groups that sprouted up in cities and on college campuses in the months after the Stonewall uprising: to have gay men and lesbians who had been living in secret go public as a way of dealing with societal fear and prejudice.
But there is considerable evidence that this is still an issue that stirs political concerns. Gay leaders have increasingly complained about what they call Mr. Obama’s slow pace in fulfilling promises he made during his campaign. Some boycotted a Democratic Party fund-raiser recently to show their distress.
“I have been really surprised how paralyzed they seem around this,” said Richard Socarides, who was an adviser to President Bill Clinton on gay issues.
Mr. Hildebrand did not respond to calls and e-mail messages asking about his encounter with Mr. Obama, which he described in a private e-mail forum for gay political leaders. (The meeting was confirmed by senior White House officials.)
Still, David Mixner, a longtime gay leader, said he was struck by how things had changed.
“Listen,” Mr. Mixner said, “in 1992, what we were begging Bill Clinton about — literally — about whether he was going to say the word ‘gay’ in his convention speech. Even say it. We had to threaten a walkout to get it in.”
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