More Than Just A Game part 2

by Ryan Vaillancourt
Published: Friday, October 16, 2009 4:30 PM PDT
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES - Second of a Three-Part Series. Read Part I here.

They stand hand-in-hand, heads bowed, eyes closed, in a circle at the center of the mint-green basketball court in Gladys Park. They are here to play ball. But first, a prayer.

“Dear Lord, thank you for this day, for this game,” says Sunshine, a 24-year-old cherry blonde and a recovering crack addict. She wears jeans, and a thin purple dress drapes over her swollen belly. She’s seven months pregnant.

“Thank you, Lord, for bringing us together,” she continues, her voice quieting to a whisper. “We need you.”

As Sunshine speaks, life in this normally busy park in the heart of Skid Row is suspended. The old men and women playing dominoes pause to respect the ritual. A stereo pounding rap music dies. Even a few children ambling around seem to recognize something serious is happening, and they stop too.

The prayer circle is made up of about 35 people, mostly men. Among them is Sunshine’s man, who goes by the name of Quik. Their almost 2-year-old son, Boogie, unaware of the little brother on the way, waddles around the court. He stops at Quik’s feet and tugs impatiently at his sagging mesh shorts. Boogie doesn’t know that Quik is not his biological father. Nor do many of Quik’s friends on the court. It doesn’t matter. Quik has raised him as a son. When Boogie looks up at Quik, he smiles and says “Papa.”

Read the full article here.

Fridays

More Than Just a Game

A good friend and also a regular part of Love LA- "OG".

by Ryan Vaillancourt
Published: Friday, October 9, 2009 4:21 PM PDT
Downtown LA News


Manuel Benito Compito is something between a grassroots community hero and a neighborhood father figure. He’s known as OG Man, or just OG, short for “Original Gangster.” It’s a term of endearment for elders, a synonym for “sir” in the hip-hop meets Skid Row vernacular.

Other men might get called “OG” from time to time by younger men, just for being middle aged. But in Skid Row, Compito is the OG.

Born to a black mother and a Filipino father, he has a dark caramel complexion. The brown inner circles of his slightly squinty eyes are encircled by a cloudy blue ring before fading to white. A salt and pepper moustache curls around his upper lip. For a 60-year-old, his shoulders and torso are broad and strong, but at about 5-foot-7 he’s not a big guy. He favors a backwards cap on his bald head. A laminated card emblazoned with the Skid Row 3-on-3 Streetball League logo usually dangles from his neck on a lanyard, like a badge.

It’s been a long road from his youth in South Los Angeles to Skid Row. Along the way, he earned the literal “gangster” part of his nickname. As a teenager, he traveled up and down the Hollywood Freeway with nothing but a pistol and a lust for taking.

“I robbed everything and everyone,” he recalls in his gravelly smoker’s voice. “The milkman, the Hostess cupcake truck, the bank. Everyone. I just wanted to get money. Don’t know why. Just did.”

Raised in Compton and other parts of South L.A., he got caught up in gangs and drugs and cycled in and out of jail. After multiple stints in juvenile hall, his first trip to the state penitentiary came at the age of 20, in 1969, for armed robbery. He already had two children.

He did five years, three of them in solitary confinement, punishment for fighting with corrections officers. He got released on out-of-state parole and, in pursuit of a woman, moved to Buffalo.

He bounced between honest jobs and crime. A community organizer or employment recruiter for one stretch, a pimp and drug dealer the next. Five hundred dollars invested in cocaine in Los Angeles turned into $1,500 in Buffalo, so for a while he shuttled between the cities. The profits went mostly to child support, but neither that nor the passage of years stopped him from falling into the arms and beds of different women, his Achilles heel. At 54, he had his sixth child.

He’s not shy about his mistakes. They’re not secrets. They’re lessons.

Read more about the Skid Row 3-on-3 Streetball League over here.

Food for Homeless People

By Jennifer LaRue Huget | October 6, 2009
Washington Post | The Checkup

What's better to bring to the homeless shelter, a bag of apples or a tray of lasagna?

Probably the apples. But the good-hearted, well-meaning folks who donate food to shelters often choose otherwise. So says Juliette Tahar, founder of the nonprofit organization Healthy Living, Inc. and the subject of this week's "Eat, Drink and Be Healthy" column.

Tahar tries to help people living in homeless shelters learn how to eat more healthfully. But, she says, her education efforts extend beyond the residents to include the volunteers who bring them food.

"It's an important issue in the shelter system," Tahar says. "A lot of volunteers bring a lot of comfort food. There's a perception that that's what [people in shelters] need. But how do you tell a volunteer who's prepared that tray of lasagna with love and caring that that's not what we want?"

Tahar encourages the people she counsels to build new relationships with food, to understand why they eat the things they do and to make more healthful choices when possible. She believes in their taking "baby steps" toward a more nutritious diet, substituting water for soda, for instance, and keeping an eye on portion size.

Read the full article here.

Feeding America
Another great resource site:
Homeless Shelter Directory