Some articles
Jul. 26th, 2009 11:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
An article on psychological problems faced by Chinese-American children coming "home" to their parents after being sent to live with their grandparents. Interestingly, it seems the worst of these problems are caused by what ought to be a good thing - due to the proliferation of preschool, parents are calling their kids home at younger ages than they used to, at 2 instead of 6. Of course, two year olds are less likely to understand that these strangers are their *families*, you know?
Chinese-American Children Sent to Live With Kin Abroad Face a Tough Return
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Gordon, 3, would not look his parents in the eyes, and refused to call them Mom and Dad. He erupted in tantrums and sometimes cried nonstop for half an hour.
“We did not know why,” said his mother, Winnie Liu, recalling the desperation that sent them to a neurologist to check Gordon for autism, and to a hospital that referred them to Butterflies, a mental health program for very young children on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Finally they learned the reason for their child’s distress — and the reason social service agencies that help families from China are facing a sharp rise in such developmental problems.
Like thousands of other Chinese immigrants responding to financial and cultural pressures, Ms. Liu and her husband, Tim Fang, had sent Gordon to live with his grandparents, thousands of miles away in Fujian Province, a few months after his birth in New York. Working long hours in the restaurant business, they had not brought him back to the United States until he was old enough to attend all-day public preschool.
And now he saw them as strangers who had stolen him away to a strange land.
“The children that have that experience come back with tremendous needs,” said Nina Piros, director of early childhood programs at University Settlement, a nonprofit agency that estimates that 400 of the 1,000 children served by its Butterflies program are returnees from China. “They come here and they’re totally traumatized.”
Some act out in frightening and confusing ways, she said, banging their heads on walls, refusing to speak, or wandering aimlessly in the classroom. These signs of extreme trauma have often been misunderstood as symptoms of autism. But they are the marks of the emotional dislocations these young children have endured.
Less severely affected youngsters are helped through supportive workshops for their teachers and parents. But about two dozen in the Butterflies program need the kind of intensive therapy that eventually helped Gordon and his parents bond, said Andrea D. Bennett, director of Butterflies, which was started three years ago with money from the City Council.
The phenomenon of American-born children who spend their infancy in China has been known for years to social workers, who say it is widespread and worrying. About 8,000 Chinese-born women gave birth in New York last year, so the number of children at risk is substantial, according to the Chinese-American Planning Council, a social service agency that hopes to get a grant to educate parents about the pitfalls of the practice and help them find alternatives.
But no one tracks the numbers, and the issue has only recently seized the attention of early-childhood researchers like Yvonne Bohr, a clinical psychologist at York University in Toronto, who calls such children “satellite babies.”
Their repeatedly disrupted attachments to family members “could potentially add up to a mental health crisis for some immigrant communities,” Dr. Bohr wrote in an article in May in The Infant Mental Health Journal. She cited classic research like the work of Anna Freud, who found that young children evacuated during the London blitz were so damaged by separation from their parents that they would have been better off at home, in danger of falling bombs.
Dr. Bohr, who is undertaking a longitudinal study of families with satellite babies, cautions that the older research was shaped by Western values and expectations. Chinese parents, including university-educated professionals she has studied, are often influenced by cultural traditions: an emphasis on self-sacrifice for the good of the family, a belief that grandparents are the best caretakers, and a desire to ground children in their heritage.
Sending babies back to grandparents is also done in some South Asian communities, she said.
But Amanda Peck, a spokeswoman for University Settlement, which has been serving newcomers to the Lower East Side since 1886, said that while family separations are a feature of migration in many ethnic groups, the satellite-baby phenomenon seems rare outside the Chinese community.
Some children are better able to adapt, whether because of natural resilience, more supportive parenting or the age at which disruptions occurred. Even in severe cases like Gordon’s, the Butterflies program has had success in overcoming the worst consequences of separation with therapeutic play and support for parent and child, said Victoria Chiu, its bilingual therapist.
But for many children, new separations are in store even after they return to the United States. In one typical case, parents migrated to work in a Chinese restaurant in South Carolina, taking a school-age child along, but leaving a baby in China and a 3-year-old with grandparents in New York.
“The 3-year-old, he wouldn’t even smile,” Ms. Chiu said. “When he sat in circle time, his whole little body was just slumped.”
Gordon, now 7, keeps up with his second-grade classmates and has learned to control his temper, said his parents, who own Wild Ginger, a restaurant on Broome Street. In imperfect but fluent English, his mother recounted the hard climb to that happy resolution, and revisited the scene of major turning points: a tiny playroom under the eaves of the old settlement house, where a dollhouse and a big plush dog played a role in healing her son.
Dressed as a superhero, Gordon would often rescue the dog from a pretend fire in the dollhouse, saving him from “the bad guys,” as Ms. Chiu and his mother played along.
“I was the bad lady,” Gordon’s mother, 31, recalled ruefully. “Then the play changed, and he tried to save Mom from the bad guy.”
The therapist explained: “He was trying to find mastery over things he had no control over. We started introducing scenarios to help him develop trust in his parents’ authority over his life.”
Ms. Liu, who was 17 when she immigrated to New York on a green card sponsored by her father, pressed a hand to her heart. “This wonderful therapist, this program, help us read the child’s mind,” she said. “Now he hug me, and he say ‘Mommy’ sometimes.”
Still, Gordon remains more withdrawn than typical 7-year-olds. Ms. Liu said she struggles with guilt and regret.
“I advise all Chinese families, do not send your kids away, no matter how hard, because that loss cannot be made up,” she said. “Money is not so important. Nothing can make up for the sensation of love between parents and children.”
The shuttling of babies first caught public attention in New York a decade ago, when women workers from Fujian Province, deep in debt to the “snakeheads” who had smuggled them into the country, had little choice but to send their infants back to their extended families.
Typically, such children returned at school age. Their tough adjustment to the change in language, customs and parental discipline was generally likened to the problems of other immigrant children, who must often cope with long-delayed reunions after being left behind for years.
Now, however, because of the expansion of free full-day preschool in recent years, satellite babies return and start classes as young as 2 years, 9 months.
Their parents, including many lawful permanent residents and citizens like Gordon’s mother, assume that the children will adjust more easily because they are so young. But early childhood is the crucial time for learning to form attachments and feel empathy, and serious disruptions carry lifelong consequences, psychologists say, including higher rates of depression and dysfunction.
Many families are unaware of the potential psychological damage, said Hong Shing Lee, chief operating officer of the Asian-American Federation of New York.
That was the case for the family of Alisa Chen, now 4. Alisa was 6 months old when her mother, Qiao Yuni Chen, a waitress unable to afford day care, took her to her grandmother in China. When Mrs. Chen returned more than a year later to visit — and to leave Alisa’s baby sister, Angie — she was heartbroken by Alisa’s rejection. Only in the last two weeks of a three-month stay was Alisa willing to sleep at her mother’s side.
Alisa started preschool at University Settlement in August, only a week after arriving in New York; two months later, teachers referred her to Butterflies.
“She seemed kind of lost, not picking up English, withdrawing from her peers,” Ms. Chiu recalled. “She seemed anxious that her mom wouldn’t pick her up.” Another problem was the mother’s expectations: The only toy in their home was a letter board more appropriate for a 6-year-old than for a child turning 4.
Mrs. Chen, whose husband is now in the Army in South Carolina, threw herself into becoming a more supportive parent, Ms. Chiu said. Though she spoke little English, she phonetically memorized songs like “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” At a 99-cent store, the therapist helped her pick playthings that would allow her daughter to express herself.
The payoff was obvious when the preschooler returned from a class trip to the Bronx Zoo one recent afternoon. Pigtails bouncing, her smile electric with joy, Alisa threw herself into her mother’s arms. Ms. Chiu beamed.
Next month, Alisa’s little sister arrives from China to begin Head Start.
An article on changing ways of life in the Amazon
An Amazon Culture Withers as Food Dries Up
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
XINGU NATIONAL PARK, Brazil — As the naked, painted young men of the Kamayurá tribe prepare for the ritualized war games of a festival, they end their haunting fireside chant with a blowing sound — “whoosh, whoosh” — a symbolic attempt to eliminate the scent of fish so they will not be detected by enemies. For centuries, fish from jungle lakes and rivers have been a staple of the Kamayurá diet, the tribe’s primary source of protein.
But fish smells are not a problem for the warriors anymore. Deforestation and, some scientists contend, global climate change are making the Amazon region drier and hotter, decimating fish stocks in this area and imperiling the Kamayurá’s very existence. Like other small indigenous cultures around the world with little money or capacity to move, they are struggling to adapt to the changes.
“Us old monkeys can take the hunger, but the little ones suffer — they’re always asking for fish,” said Kotok, the tribe’s chief, who stood in front of a hut containing the tribe’s sacred flutes on a recent evening. He wore a white T-shirt over the tribe’s traditional dress, which is basically nothing.
Chief Kotok, who like all of the Kamayurá people goes by only one name, said that men can now fish all night without a bite in streams where fish used to be abundant; they safely swim in lakes previously teeming with piranhas.
Responsible for 3 wives, 24 children and hundreds of other tribe members, he said his once-idyllic existence had turned into a kind of bad dream.
“I’m stressed and anxious — this has all changed so quickly, and life has become very hard,” he said in Portuguese, speaking through an interpreter. “As a chief, I have to have vision and look down the road, but I don’t know what will happen to my children and grandchildren.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that up to 30 percent of animals and plants face an increased risk of extinction if global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in coming decades. But anthropologists also fear a wave of cultural extinction for dozens of small indigenous groups — the loss of their traditions, their arts, their languages.
“In some places, people will have to move to preserve their culture,” said Gonzalo Oviedo, a senior adviser on social policy at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland. “But some of those that are small and marginal will assimilate and disappear.”
To make do without fish, Kamayurá children are eating ants on their traditional spongy flatbread, made from tropical cassava flour. “There aren’t as many around because the kids have eaten them,” Chief Kotok said of the ants. Sometimes members of the tribe kill monkeys for their meat, but, the chief said, “You have to eat 30 monkeys to fill your stomach.”
Living deep in the forest with no transportation and little money, he noted, “We don’t have a way to go to the grocery store for rice and beans to supplement what is missing.”
Tacuma, the tribe’s wizened senior shaman, said that the only threat he could remember rivaling climate change was a measles virus that arrived deep in the Amazon in 1954, killing more than 90 percent of the Kamayurá.
Cultures threatened by climate change span the globe. They include rainforest residents like the Kamayurá who face dwindling food supplies; remote Arctic communities where the only roads were frozen rivers that are now flowing most of the year; and residents of low-lying islands whose land is threatened by rising seas.
Many indigenous people depend intimately on the cycles of nature and have had to adapt to climate variations — a season of drought, for example, or a hurricane that kills animals.
But worldwide, the change is large, rapid and inexorable, heading in only one direction: warmer. Eskimo settlements like Kivalina and Shishmaref in Alaska are “literally being washed away,” said Thomas Thornton, an anthropologist who studies the region, because the sea ice that long protected their shores is melting and the seas around are rising. Without that hard ice, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to hunt for seals, a mainstay of the traditional diet.
Some Eskimo groups are suing polluters and developed nations, demanding compensation and help with adapting.
“As they see it, they didn’t cause the problem, and their lifestyle is being threatened by pollution from industrial nations,” said Dr. Thornton, who is a researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. “The message is that this is about people, not just about polar bears and wildlife.”
At climate negotiations in December in Poznan, Poland, the United Nations created an “adaptation fund” through which rich nations could in theory help poor nations adjust to climate change. But some of the money was expected to come from voluntary contributions, and there have been none so far, said Yvo De Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “It would help if rich countries could make financial commitments,” he said.
Throughout history, the traditional final response for indigenous cultures threatened by untenable climate conditions or political strife was to move. But today, moving is often impossible. Land surrounding tribes is now usually occupied by an expanding global population, and once-nomadic groups have often settled down, building homes and schools and even declaring statehood.
The Kamayurá live in the middle of Xingu National Park, a vast territory that was once deep in the Amazon but is now surrounded by farms and ranches.
About 5,000 square miles of Amazon forest are being cut down annually in recent years, according to the Brazilian government. And with far less foliage, there is less moisture in the regional water cycle, lending unpredictability to seasonal rains and leaving the climate drier and hotter.
That has upended the cycles of nature that long regulated Kamayurá life. They wake with the sun and have no set meals, eating whenever they are hungry.
Fish stocks began to dwindle in the 1990s and “have just collapsed” since 2006, said Chief Kotok, who is considering the possibility of fish farming, in which fish would be fed in a penned area of a lake. With hotter temperatures as well as less rain and humidity in the region, water levels in rivers are extremely low. Fish cannot get to their spawning grounds.
Last year, for the first time, the beach on the lake that abuts the village was not covered by water in the rainy season, rendering useless the tribe’s method of catching turtles by putting food in holes that would fill up, luring the animals.
The tribe’s agriculture has suffered, too. For centuries, the Kamayurá planted their summer crops when a certain star appeared on the horizon. “When it appeared, everyone celebrated because it was the sign to start planting cassava since the rain and wind would come,” Chief Kotok recalled. But starting seven or eight seasons ago, the star’s appearance was no longer followed by rain, an ominous divergence, forcing the tribe to adjust its schedule.
It has been an ever-shifting game of trial and error since. Last year, families had to plant their cassava four times — it died in September, October and November because there was not enough moisture in the ground. It was not until December that the planting took. The corn also failed, said Mapulu, the chief’s sister. “It sprouted and withered away,” she said.
A specialist in medicinal plants, Ms. Mapulu said that a root she used to treat diarrhea and other ailments had become nearly impossible to find because the forest flora had changed. The grass they use to bound together the essential beams of their huts has also become difficult to find.
But perhaps the Kamayurá’s greatest fear are the new summer forest fires. Once too moist to ignite, the forest here is now flammable because of the drier weather. In 2007, Xingu National Park burned for the first time, and thousands of acres were destroyed.
“The whole Xingu was burning — it stung our lungs and our eyes,” Chief Kotok said. “We had nowhere to escape. We suffered along with the animals.”
An article on Sephardic Jews on the Jersey Shore
Sephardic Jews Developed Haven on the Jersey Shore
By KAREEM FAHIM
A century ago, Deal, a seaside resort carved from New Jersey farmland, was known as a playground for tycoons and magnates like Isidor Straus and Benjamin Guggenheim and celebrities who visited, including Mark Twain. At lavish “summer cottages,” garden parties raised money for the favorite charities of residents, predominantly Irish Catholics and Ashkenazic Jews who summered there.
By the 1940s, some of the shine had worn off, and the fabulously rich were replaced by the merely wealthy. In the late 1960s, Sephardic Jews who lived in Brooklyn and spent summers in nearby Bradley Beach began buying land in Deal; by 1973, more than 100 families had bought property in the town. By the mid-1990s, thousands of Sephardic Jews were flocking to the town during the summers, and today, local historians estimate, they make up 80 percent of the population.
That influx has led to occasional tensions with people outside their insular community. The Sephardim in Deal, many of whom call themselves Syrian Jews, include Solomon Dwek, the failed real estate mogul who is believed to have been the government informant who helped bring charges against New Jersey politicians and rabbis in a corruption and money laundering scandal this week. Before this case, Mr. Dwek was a central figure in a community built quickly and from scratch by the Syrian Jews in Deal and nearby towns.
Today, in a town of 1,000 people that swells to many times that size in the summer, there are synagogues and yeshivas, Jewish social service agencies and a main street lined with kosher delis and Syrian Jewish grocers.
Thirty-five years ago, those institutions and businesses hardly existed, said Poopa Dweck, a longtime resident and the author of a cookbook on Syrian Jewish cuisine. Ms. Dweck, who is not related to Mr. Dwek, was part of what she called a “pioneering group” that moved from Brooklyn to Deal not to summer, but to live.
“We loved the life here,” she said. “We were able to maintain our Orthodox Jewish religion and bring up our children. It was beautiful.”
Quickly, she and the other new arrivals started building the structures of their community. “We didn’t even wait,” she said, describing how she helped found the Sephardic Women’s Organization of the Jersey Shore. “We had the first meeting in my living room.”
Dr. Richard G. Fernicola, a physician and local historian, said the first Sephardic Jew in the area might well have been Benjamin N. Cardozo, the Supreme Court justice, who had a house in neighboring Allenhurst in the 1930s. The first Syrian Jewish family in Deal arrived in 1939, moving into a home that the singer Enrico Caruso had once regularly visited, said Jim Foley, the town’s historian.
Fifty years later, when Sephardic Jews started moving to Deal in large numbers, there were occasional fights for control. In the mid-1990s, a dispute over a plan to build a synagogue on the site of a house on Main Street underscored growing divisions between the Sephardim and other residents, including other Jews. Today, some of those strains persist: in interviews, some non-Jewish residents professed resentment of the Sephardim, largely because of the crowds that descend on Deal every summer.
Generally, however, residents interact peacefully, many mingling at the Deal Casino, a historic beach club that only recently started allowing out-of-towners to become members. Much of the Sephardic summer social scene takes place in huge houses set on gigantic lawns where Victorians and Queen Annes once stood.
A generation still speaks Arabic, though some of the earliest Sephardic settlers have moved away, tired of the commute back to Brooklyn.
Some of their children have been shaped by the town’s seaside charms. Henry Garfield, 19, a Syrian Jew who called himself “somewhat religious,” ate a slice of pizza Friday afternoon along Norwood Avenue and seemed not to notice the tension that has developed in Deal. This might as well have been Malibu.
“It’s a very laid-back atmosphere,” he said. “Everyone is chilled out. We surf all day.”
Chinese-American Children Sent to Live With Kin Abroad Face a Tough Return
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Gordon, 3, would not look his parents in the eyes, and refused to call them Mom and Dad. He erupted in tantrums and sometimes cried nonstop for half an hour.
“We did not know why,” said his mother, Winnie Liu, recalling the desperation that sent them to a neurologist to check Gordon for autism, and to a hospital that referred them to Butterflies, a mental health program for very young children on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Finally they learned the reason for their child’s distress — and the reason social service agencies that help families from China are facing a sharp rise in such developmental problems.
Like thousands of other Chinese immigrants responding to financial and cultural pressures, Ms. Liu and her husband, Tim Fang, had sent Gordon to live with his grandparents, thousands of miles away in Fujian Province, a few months after his birth in New York. Working long hours in the restaurant business, they had not brought him back to the United States until he was old enough to attend all-day public preschool.
And now he saw them as strangers who had stolen him away to a strange land.
“The children that have that experience come back with tremendous needs,” said Nina Piros, director of early childhood programs at University Settlement, a nonprofit agency that estimates that 400 of the 1,000 children served by its Butterflies program are returnees from China. “They come here and they’re totally traumatized.”
Some act out in frightening and confusing ways, she said, banging their heads on walls, refusing to speak, or wandering aimlessly in the classroom. These signs of extreme trauma have often been misunderstood as symptoms of autism. But they are the marks of the emotional dislocations these young children have endured.
Less severely affected youngsters are helped through supportive workshops for their teachers and parents. But about two dozen in the Butterflies program need the kind of intensive therapy that eventually helped Gordon and his parents bond, said Andrea D. Bennett, director of Butterflies, which was started three years ago with money from the City Council.
The phenomenon of American-born children who spend their infancy in China has been known for years to social workers, who say it is widespread and worrying. About 8,000 Chinese-born women gave birth in New York last year, so the number of children at risk is substantial, according to the Chinese-American Planning Council, a social service agency that hopes to get a grant to educate parents about the pitfalls of the practice and help them find alternatives.
But no one tracks the numbers, and the issue has only recently seized the attention of early-childhood researchers like Yvonne Bohr, a clinical psychologist at York University in Toronto, who calls such children “satellite babies.”
Their repeatedly disrupted attachments to family members “could potentially add up to a mental health crisis for some immigrant communities,” Dr. Bohr wrote in an article in May in The Infant Mental Health Journal. She cited classic research like the work of Anna Freud, who found that young children evacuated during the London blitz were so damaged by separation from their parents that they would have been better off at home, in danger of falling bombs.
Dr. Bohr, who is undertaking a longitudinal study of families with satellite babies, cautions that the older research was shaped by Western values and expectations. Chinese parents, including university-educated professionals she has studied, are often influenced by cultural traditions: an emphasis on self-sacrifice for the good of the family, a belief that grandparents are the best caretakers, and a desire to ground children in their heritage.
Sending babies back to grandparents is also done in some South Asian communities, she said.
But Amanda Peck, a spokeswoman for University Settlement, which has been serving newcomers to the Lower East Side since 1886, said that while family separations are a feature of migration in many ethnic groups, the satellite-baby phenomenon seems rare outside the Chinese community.
Some children are better able to adapt, whether because of natural resilience, more supportive parenting or the age at which disruptions occurred. Even in severe cases like Gordon’s, the Butterflies program has had success in overcoming the worst consequences of separation with therapeutic play and support for parent and child, said Victoria Chiu, its bilingual therapist.
But for many children, new separations are in store even after they return to the United States. In one typical case, parents migrated to work in a Chinese restaurant in South Carolina, taking a school-age child along, but leaving a baby in China and a 3-year-old with grandparents in New York.
“The 3-year-old, he wouldn’t even smile,” Ms. Chiu said. “When he sat in circle time, his whole little body was just slumped.”
Gordon, now 7, keeps up with his second-grade classmates and has learned to control his temper, said his parents, who own Wild Ginger, a restaurant on Broome Street. In imperfect but fluent English, his mother recounted the hard climb to that happy resolution, and revisited the scene of major turning points: a tiny playroom under the eaves of the old settlement house, where a dollhouse and a big plush dog played a role in healing her son.
Dressed as a superhero, Gordon would often rescue the dog from a pretend fire in the dollhouse, saving him from “the bad guys,” as Ms. Chiu and his mother played along.
“I was the bad lady,” Gordon’s mother, 31, recalled ruefully. “Then the play changed, and he tried to save Mom from the bad guy.”
The therapist explained: “He was trying to find mastery over things he had no control over. We started introducing scenarios to help him develop trust in his parents’ authority over his life.”
Ms. Liu, who was 17 when she immigrated to New York on a green card sponsored by her father, pressed a hand to her heart. “This wonderful therapist, this program, help us read the child’s mind,” she said. “Now he hug me, and he say ‘Mommy’ sometimes.”
Still, Gordon remains more withdrawn than typical 7-year-olds. Ms. Liu said she struggles with guilt and regret.
“I advise all Chinese families, do not send your kids away, no matter how hard, because that loss cannot be made up,” she said. “Money is not so important. Nothing can make up for the sensation of love between parents and children.”
The shuttling of babies first caught public attention in New York a decade ago, when women workers from Fujian Province, deep in debt to the “snakeheads” who had smuggled them into the country, had little choice but to send their infants back to their extended families.
Typically, such children returned at school age. Their tough adjustment to the change in language, customs and parental discipline was generally likened to the problems of other immigrant children, who must often cope with long-delayed reunions after being left behind for years.
Now, however, because of the expansion of free full-day preschool in recent years, satellite babies return and start classes as young as 2 years, 9 months.
Their parents, including many lawful permanent residents and citizens like Gordon’s mother, assume that the children will adjust more easily because they are so young. But early childhood is the crucial time for learning to form attachments and feel empathy, and serious disruptions carry lifelong consequences, psychologists say, including higher rates of depression and dysfunction.
Many families are unaware of the potential psychological damage, said Hong Shing Lee, chief operating officer of the Asian-American Federation of New York.
That was the case for the family of Alisa Chen, now 4. Alisa was 6 months old when her mother, Qiao Yuni Chen, a waitress unable to afford day care, took her to her grandmother in China. When Mrs. Chen returned more than a year later to visit — and to leave Alisa’s baby sister, Angie — she was heartbroken by Alisa’s rejection. Only in the last two weeks of a three-month stay was Alisa willing to sleep at her mother’s side.
Alisa started preschool at University Settlement in August, only a week after arriving in New York; two months later, teachers referred her to Butterflies.
“She seemed kind of lost, not picking up English, withdrawing from her peers,” Ms. Chiu recalled. “She seemed anxious that her mom wouldn’t pick her up.” Another problem was the mother’s expectations: The only toy in their home was a letter board more appropriate for a 6-year-old than for a child turning 4.
Mrs. Chen, whose husband is now in the Army in South Carolina, threw herself into becoming a more supportive parent, Ms. Chiu said. Though she spoke little English, she phonetically memorized songs like “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” At a 99-cent store, the therapist helped her pick playthings that would allow her daughter to express herself.
The payoff was obvious when the preschooler returned from a class trip to the Bronx Zoo one recent afternoon. Pigtails bouncing, her smile electric with joy, Alisa threw herself into her mother’s arms. Ms. Chiu beamed.
Next month, Alisa’s little sister arrives from China to begin Head Start.
An article on changing ways of life in the Amazon
An Amazon Culture Withers as Food Dries Up
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
XINGU NATIONAL PARK, Brazil — As the naked, painted young men of the Kamayurá tribe prepare for the ritualized war games of a festival, they end their haunting fireside chant with a blowing sound — “whoosh, whoosh” — a symbolic attempt to eliminate the scent of fish so they will not be detected by enemies. For centuries, fish from jungle lakes and rivers have been a staple of the Kamayurá diet, the tribe’s primary source of protein.
But fish smells are not a problem for the warriors anymore. Deforestation and, some scientists contend, global climate change are making the Amazon region drier and hotter, decimating fish stocks in this area and imperiling the Kamayurá’s very existence. Like other small indigenous cultures around the world with little money or capacity to move, they are struggling to adapt to the changes.
“Us old monkeys can take the hunger, but the little ones suffer — they’re always asking for fish,” said Kotok, the tribe’s chief, who stood in front of a hut containing the tribe’s sacred flutes on a recent evening. He wore a white T-shirt over the tribe’s traditional dress, which is basically nothing.
Chief Kotok, who like all of the Kamayurá people goes by only one name, said that men can now fish all night without a bite in streams where fish used to be abundant; they safely swim in lakes previously teeming with piranhas.
Responsible for 3 wives, 24 children and hundreds of other tribe members, he said his once-idyllic existence had turned into a kind of bad dream.
“I’m stressed and anxious — this has all changed so quickly, and life has become very hard,” he said in Portuguese, speaking through an interpreter. “As a chief, I have to have vision and look down the road, but I don’t know what will happen to my children and grandchildren.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that up to 30 percent of animals and plants face an increased risk of extinction if global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in coming decades. But anthropologists also fear a wave of cultural extinction for dozens of small indigenous groups — the loss of their traditions, their arts, their languages.
“In some places, people will have to move to preserve their culture,” said Gonzalo Oviedo, a senior adviser on social policy at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland. “But some of those that are small and marginal will assimilate and disappear.”
To make do without fish, Kamayurá children are eating ants on their traditional spongy flatbread, made from tropical cassava flour. “There aren’t as many around because the kids have eaten them,” Chief Kotok said of the ants. Sometimes members of the tribe kill monkeys for their meat, but, the chief said, “You have to eat 30 monkeys to fill your stomach.”
Living deep in the forest with no transportation and little money, he noted, “We don’t have a way to go to the grocery store for rice and beans to supplement what is missing.”
Tacuma, the tribe’s wizened senior shaman, said that the only threat he could remember rivaling climate change was a measles virus that arrived deep in the Amazon in 1954, killing more than 90 percent of the Kamayurá.
Cultures threatened by climate change span the globe. They include rainforest residents like the Kamayurá who face dwindling food supplies; remote Arctic communities where the only roads were frozen rivers that are now flowing most of the year; and residents of low-lying islands whose land is threatened by rising seas.
Many indigenous people depend intimately on the cycles of nature and have had to adapt to climate variations — a season of drought, for example, or a hurricane that kills animals.
But worldwide, the change is large, rapid and inexorable, heading in only one direction: warmer. Eskimo settlements like Kivalina and Shishmaref in Alaska are “literally being washed away,” said Thomas Thornton, an anthropologist who studies the region, because the sea ice that long protected their shores is melting and the seas around are rising. Without that hard ice, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to hunt for seals, a mainstay of the traditional diet.
Some Eskimo groups are suing polluters and developed nations, demanding compensation and help with adapting.
“As they see it, they didn’t cause the problem, and their lifestyle is being threatened by pollution from industrial nations,” said Dr. Thornton, who is a researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. “The message is that this is about people, not just about polar bears and wildlife.”
At climate negotiations in December in Poznan, Poland, the United Nations created an “adaptation fund” through which rich nations could in theory help poor nations adjust to climate change. But some of the money was expected to come from voluntary contributions, and there have been none so far, said Yvo De Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “It would help if rich countries could make financial commitments,” he said.
Throughout history, the traditional final response for indigenous cultures threatened by untenable climate conditions or political strife was to move. But today, moving is often impossible. Land surrounding tribes is now usually occupied by an expanding global population, and once-nomadic groups have often settled down, building homes and schools and even declaring statehood.
The Kamayurá live in the middle of Xingu National Park, a vast territory that was once deep in the Amazon but is now surrounded by farms and ranches.
About 5,000 square miles of Amazon forest are being cut down annually in recent years, according to the Brazilian government. And with far less foliage, there is less moisture in the regional water cycle, lending unpredictability to seasonal rains and leaving the climate drier and hotter.
That has upended the cycles of nature that long regulated Kamayurá life. They wake with the sun and have no set meals, eating whenever they are hungry.
Fish stocks began to dwindle in the 1990s and “have just collapsed” since 2006, said Chief Kotok, who is considering the possibility of fish farming, in which fish would be fed in a penned area of a lake. With hotter temperatures as well as less rain and humidity in the region, water levels in rivers are extremely low. Fish cannot get to their spawning grounds.
Last year, for the first time, the beach on the lake that abuts the village was not covered by water in the rainy season, rendering useless the tribe’s method of catching turtles by putting food in holes that would fill up, luring the animals.
The tribe’s agriculture has suffered, too. For centuries, the Kamayurá planted their summer crops when a certain star appeared on the horizon. “When it appeared, everyone celebrated because it was the sign to start planting cassava since the rain and wind would come,” Chief Kotok recalled. But starting seven or eight seasons ago, the star’s appearance was no longer followed by rain, an ominous divergence, forcing the tribe to adjust its schedule.
It has been an ever-shifting game of trial and error since. Last year, families had to plant their cassava four times — it died in September, October and November because there was not enough moisture in the ground. It was not until December that the planting took. The corn also failed, said Mapulu, the chief’s sister. “It sprouted and withered away,” she said.
A specialist in medicinal plants, Ms. Mapulu said that a root she used to treat diarrhea and other ailments had become nearly impossible to find because the forest flora had changed. The grass they use to bound together the essential beams of their huts has also become difficult to find.
But perhaps the Kamayurá’s greatest fear are the new summer forest fires. Once too moist to ignite, the forest here is now flammable because of the drier weather. In 2007, Xingu National Park burned for the first time, and thousands of acres were destroyed.
“The whole Xingu was burning — it stung our lungs and our eyes,” Chief Kotok said. “We had nowhere to escape. We suffered along with the animals.”
An article on Sephardic Jews on the Jersey Shore
Sephardic Jews Developed Haven on the Jersey Shore
By KAREEM FAHIM
A century ago, Deal, a seaside resort carved from New Jersey farmland, was known as a playground for tycoons and magnates like Isidor Straus and Benjamin Guggenheim and celebrities who visited, including Mark Twain. At lavish “summer cottages,” garden parties raised money for the favorite charities of residents, predominantly Irish Catholics and Ashkenazic Jews who summered there.
By the 1940s, some of the shine had worn off, and the fabulously rich were replaced by the merely wealthy. In the late 1960s, Sephardic Jews who lived in Brooklyn and spent summers in nearby Bradley Beach began buying land in Deal; by 1973, more than 100 families had bought property in the town. By the mid-1990s, thousands of Sephardic Jews were flocking to the town during the summers, and today, local historians estimate, they make up 80 percent of the population.
That influx has led to occasional tensions with people outside their insular community. The Sephardim in Deal, many of whom call themselves Syrian Jews, include Solomon Dwek, the failed real estate mogul who is believed to have been the government informant who helped bring charges against New Jersey politicians and rabbis in a corruption and money laundering scandal this week. Before this case, Mr. Dwek was a central figure in a community built quickly and from scratch by the Syrian Jews in Deal and nearby towns.
Today, in a town of 1,000 people that swells to many times that size in the summer, there are synagogues and yeshivas, Jewish social service agencies and a main street lined with kosher delis and Syrian Jewish grocers.
Thirty-five years ago, those institutions and businesses hardly existed, said Poopa Dweck, a longtime resident and the author of a cookbook on Syrian Jewish cuisine. Ms. Dweck, who is not related to Mr. Dwek, was part of what she called a “pioneering group” that moved from Brooklyn to Deal not to summer, but to live.
“We loved the life here,” she said. “We were able to maintain our Orthodox Jewish religion and bring up our children. It was beautiful.”
Quickly, she and the other new arrivals started building the structures of their community. “We didn’t even wait,” she said, describing how she helped found the Sephardic Women’s Organization of the Jersey Shore. “We had the first meeting in my living room.”
Dr. Richard G. Fernicola, a physician and local historian, said the first Sephardic Jew in the area might well have been Benjamin N. Cardozo, the Supreme Court justice, who had a house in neighboring Allenhurst in the 1930s. The first Syrian Jewish family in Deal arrived in 1939, moving into a home that the singer Enrico Caruso had once regularly visited, said Jim Foley, the town’s historian.
Fifty years later, when Sephardic Jews started moving to Deal in large numbers, there were occasional fights for control. In the mid-1990s, a dispute over a plan to build a synagogue on the site of a house on Main Street underscored growing divisions between the Sephardim and other residents, including other Jews. Today, some of those strains persist: in interviews, some non-Jewish residents professed resentment of the Sephardim, largely because of the crowds that descend on Deal every summer.
Generally, however, residents interact peacefully, many mingling at the Deal Casino, a historic beach club that only recently started allowing out-of-towners to become members. Much of the Sephardic summer social scene takes place in huge houses set on gigantic lawns where Victorians and Queen Annes once stood.
A generation still speaks Arabic, though some of the earliest Sephardic settlers have moved away, tired of the commute back to Brooklyn.
Some of their children have been shaped by the town’s seaside charms. Henry Garfield, 19, a Syrian Jew who called himself “somewhat religious,” ate a slice of pizza Friday afternoon along Norwood Avenue and seemed not to notice the tension that has developed in Deal. This might as well have been Malibu.
“It’s a very laid-back atmosphere,” he said. “Everyone is chilled out. We surf all day.”
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no subject
Date: 2009-07-26 12:03 am (UTC)They don't mention how the transition is done. It seems like if it is at all possible the best way would be to have one or both of the grandparents go with the child for an extended visit. Have the grandparent stay with the parents for at least a month and then leave. Then you have some time for the kid to get used to the parents and see the grandparents interacting positively with them and not viewing them as child-eating monsters.
As to the second article, the ones who want to sue are completely right. They didn't cause the problem and they are being hurt. It's a shame that there really is no adequate compensation. We can't fix the lands we are destroying. But we can try to help the people.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-26 12:58 am (UTC)If anybody in the family had the money or time for extended visits, they probably would never have sent the child away in the first place. Frequent short visits would work as well - but one of the women mentioned didn't even get to see her baby sent back home at six months for over a year.
I don't think anybody would willingly do that unless they really didn't want their kids in the first place, in which case they'd probably let them stay in China until they entered school-school or later, wouldn't they?
no subject
Date: 2009-07-26 01:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-04 05:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-04 06:11 am (UTC)See, my family, we all read books. And we all largely read the same books. Even when we were kids, my parents read our books. Not to "share our interests", not to look out to censor us (please), not to be prepared in case we came across something disturbing, and certainly not to set a good example.
No, my parents read kidlit and YA books because they genuinely enjoyed them... and they more or less expected us to enjoy their fiction as well, or at least they didn't prevent it.
Which meant that if you dared put a book down on the kitchen table for long enough to go to the bathroom, you risked coming back and finding it GONE. And finding your mother later claiming she couldn't POSSIBLY give it back NOW because she was at the GOOD part. And not getting it back for ages.
I learned to read at a decent pace for pure self defense, I tells ya!
no subject
Date: 2009-08-05 08:57 pm (UTC)