Paying it Forward After Beating the Odds - Inland Valley News

Marian Wright Edelman

Washington, DC? ?Something that I?ve learned from my mentor is always pay things forward, not necessarily with money, but with actions and deeds. You?re not alone. You?re not the only one out there in a bad situation. Beat the odds and you?ll succeed.?

Maggie Hobbins is just a senior in high school, but she already knows a lot about making it through a bad situation. She has struggled with a learning disability since first grade and spent years in special education classes. Other students bullied her because she couldn?t read well or afford brand name clothes. Challenges in school were hard, but challenges at home were even worse. Her alcoholic mother was emotionally absent for much of her childhood, and her father, a disabled Vietnam War veteran, had many health problems that often made it difficult for him to work. When her family became homeless after he lost his job, they moved into a camper on a friend?s property. What they hoped would be a temporary solution lasted two years.

When Maggie was nine years old, her parents finally found an affordable house to rent again, and things seemed as if they might be looking up at last. But just a few months later her father collapsed and died of a massive heart attack. For the next two years her mother sank into such a deep depression worsened by the drinking that she rarely got out of bed, and Maggie was essentially left to raise herself. She got herself to school on her own, took care of the house, and was the one to make sure her mother ate and bathed. She looks back at that period as the ?dark days? of her life. But even then Maggie showed an extraordinary resilience far beyond her years: ?You can?t just sit there and be like, ?Oh, poor me. My dad?s dead. My mom is depressed and she?s a drunk and she?s not there for me,? or, ?I?m dyslexic and I can?t read as well as other people . . .? So why not push myself further and change myself?because other people can?t change you; you have to change yourself.?

Maggie kept pushing herself?and her positive spirit and belief in herself paid off. After an intervention from Child Protective Services, Maggie?s mother finally got some of the help she needed and was able to keep custody of Maggie. When Maggie was in sixth grade, a caring landlord and mentor offered her $100 if she made the honor roll all four quarters of the school year. Maggie was already a determined and serious student despite her learning disabilities and troubles at home, and this generous promise gave her just the extra incentive she needed. She made the honor roll every quarter that year and every single quarter since.

As she kept on excelling in school, by the end of eighth grade she was moved into standard education classrooms. Today, Maggie takes Honors and AP classes and has a goal of studying criminal justice because she wants to help others. The same mentor who encouraged her to make the honor roll also sponsored her attendance at a Christian summer camp she fell in love with, and after returning as a camper for many years, she now serves as a junior counselor. She is already looking forward to what comes next: ?There?s college to go to. There?s graduate school. You?re never done learning . . . It?s just something I want in my heart. And I?m going to try my hardest to get it.?

Maggie?s inspiring story has made her one of this year?s Washington, D.C.-area winners of the Children?s Defense Fund?s Beat the Odds? scholarship awards, given each year to high school seniors in eight cities who have overcome tremendous adversity. For over 20 years, the Beat the Odds program has supported more than 700 students. This leadership development program provides each recipient a $10,000 scholarship, laptop computer, guidance through the college admission process, and an invitation to join CDF?s servant leadership training programs. It also allows young people like Maggie to serve as role models for others, and for Maggie, this is one way of paying her own success forward. As she says: ?I?m sure there?s kids going through everything I went through?maybe not as severe, maybe more severe?but for me to win and for other kids to see it, I think it will instill hope, because there?s nothing stronger than hope, other than love. And if I can beat the odds, why can?t they? They can see from my example that, ?Oh, I don?t have to be this way,? so they can make the choices and take the path that will benefit them?that will put them out of their situation and lead them to success.?

Right now there are millions of young people like Maggie still waiting for just one caring adult or mentor to step in to help them beat the odds too. If you have the chance to be that adult for a child in your community?grab it! Learn more about how you can support young people beating the odds across the country through the Beat the Odds scholarship program.

Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children?s Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind? mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information go to www.childrensdefense.org.

Source: http://www.inlandvalleynews.com/2012/11/07/paying-it-forward-after-beating-the-odds/

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In New York's Rockaways, despair sets in as new storm hits

NEW YORK (Reuters) - At nighttime, high up in the apartment buildings that tower over New York's Rockaway Peninsula, it's so inky black inside that residents have to use their hands to feel their way along the concrete walls, inch by inch, to get up and down the stairs, over to their neighbors, or back to their front doors. The windowless passageways feel like a crypt, unnerving even the most hardened of residents.

For more than a week, ever since Superstorm Sandy turned their community into a beachfront dystopia, flattening cars, mangling the boardwalk, twisting their roads, and cutting off their power, these residents have made do. They've walked up stairs, some as many as 13 flights, to the top of housing complexes like the Dayton Towers in Rockaway Park. They've watched their flashlights die, their toilets clog up, and their neighbors kids bawl a lot. They've lived without cellphones, stores, or showers, eating vacuum-packed, government-supplied ready-made meals of rubbery chicken and paste-like potatoes.

Now, as another storm began hammering through on Wednesday, dropping temperatures to freezing, they see the new reality getting only grimmer as they shiver in the Stygian dark with no heat.

"All my neighbors are still living here, old people, too, and it's getting cold," said marble-installer Eddie Romanoff, 33. "But we have nowhere else to go."

Just a week after the worst storm in many years to slam the Eastern Seaboard trashed thousands of houses and left nearly 1 million people without electricity, local and federal government officials have said that tens of thousands of people in New York and New Jersey are likely to need temporary housing. Either their houses have been demolished or they are unfit to live in because of severe damage and the absence of power, heat and water.

And now they all need a place to live in a region with some of the lowest apartment vacancy rates, and most expensive hotel and rental rates, in the world.

HOTELS FULL

On Monday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it would provide vouchers for people to stay in hotels, paying as much as $295 a night as well as subsidizing longer-term rents. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration has hired a new housing czar, Brad Gair, to help find housing for those displaced.

But Wednesday's storm, named Athena after the Greek goddess, is making it painfully clear that for all the good intentions and multiple press conferences, local and federal government officials haven't kept pace with reality. While the so-called nor'easter isn't anything like as dangerous as Sandy, it will bring very strong winds, heavy rain and flooding to a region that isn't in a position to soak it up without further misery.

Up and down the Rockaways peninsula, in communities like Far Rockaway, Belle Harbor and Breezy Point, residents said they had no idea where to go or what to do, or how to stay warm. "This entire community is homeless," said Mary Beth Bevacqua, 40, who was cleaning out her mom's flooded house in Breezy Point on Tuesday as neighbors passed by in waders and wagons. "No one has any place to live."

The refrain, in a number of neighborhoods here, was the same: More help is desperately needed. "We've been forgotten," said Mary Anne Semon, 52, as she helped her mother navigate the misshapen street outside her bungalow in Breezy Point.

As the latest storm got closer, threatening even longer delays for power restoration due to forecast wind gusts of up to 60 mph, another complicating factor emerged. "It's the high season in New York for hotels," says Herve Houdre, regional director of operations for New York's InterContinental Hotel. "It's already the highest time of demand for the year."

Some hotels that accept the FEMA vouchers have long been booked. In Riverhead, Long Island, some guests traveled from as far away as upstate New York to get a room at places like Hotel Indigo and Holiday Inn Express. Both properties are accepting FEMA vouchers. "But we have no rooms," says the director of operations for both properties, Kristen Reyes, who has been getting texts all week from guests begging for rate reductions and time extensions. "We are 100 percent occupied this week and next week."

And as far as apartments go, the displaced say they are encountering the harsh realities of scrambling for rentals at a time when all of their neighbors are, too.

"They're all taken, people were taking those apartments right after the storm, sight unseen," says Ed Power, a 53-year-old retired firefighter from West Islip, a hamlet on Long Island. He doesn't have power. And his father's house in Breezy Point has been knocked off its foundations and turned askew. He says he can bundle up in thermals to handle the cold, but he hasn't been able to find anyplace for his dad to stay. "When you're 93, you're freezing, even in summer."

The day after his red-brick Colonial in Belle Harbor got slammed by Sandy, Matthew LaSorsa started looking for a place for himself, his wife and their 14-year-old twins to stay. He even got his employees, at his wine shop, to do a search. But none of them could find his family any place to live. LaSorsa even lost the $4,400 a month two-bedroom in Brooklyn Heights he thought would come through. "The rental apartments don't seem to be available," says LaSorsa. "There's no emergency relief in terms of housing."

SMELL OF GAS

His relatively well-off neighborhood is marked by disintegration and decay. Front lawns are filled with people's moldy belongings. The air smells of gas. Sewage, sand and hills of dirt fill the streets.

At night, in the pitch black, LaSorsa says it feels like the science fiction movie "Bladerunner." "It's scary," he says.

Like people up and down the Rockaways, LaSorsa and his wife, Jane, say they registered with FEMA, hoping for help with housing, electricity, gas - anything. But they say they haven't heard a thing. They remarked at the irony: living in a world of information with no information. "We're in the dark with what's going on," says Jane. "We're in an echo chamber, there's no captain here."

Three weeks ago, Kelley D'Antonio, a nurse in a neonatal intensive care unit at Maimonides Hospital, bought her first house. The 34-year-old put 40 percent down on a $355,000 bungalow in Breezy Point ? two feet away from her parents' house next door. It was the place she had grown up in, remembering evenings when she was carted around in a wagon in her pajamas to eat ice cream and watch fireworks. She knew everybody up and down the sandy lane. Now the houses are twisted around or pushed into the street, have raw sewage coursing through them and red condemnation stickers on their doors. Her own home has lost part of its foundation.

Her housewarming party was supposed to be this weekend. Says her mom, Judy, "We were going to string party lights from our house to hers."

(Reporting by Michelle Conlin; Additional Reporting by Jennifer Merritt and Karen Freifeld; Editing by Martin Howell and Steve Orlofsky)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/yorks-rockaways-despair-sets-storm-hits-003512220--finance.html

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Xbox Gamers May Get a New 7-Inch Playing Surface

Microsoft is reportedly working on a 7-inch Xbox Surface gaming tablet. The 7-inch tablet has become a battleground of sorts lately, with Apple's iPad mini being the latest entrant. "We are seeing a shift in demand for 7-inch devices so it wouldn't be all that surprising," said Ryan Reith, program manager at IDC, adding that things are still at the rumor stage.

Source: http://ectnews.com.feedsportal.com/c/34520/f/632000/s/2554af68/l/0L0Stechnewsworld0N0Crsstory0C765640Bhtml/story01.htm

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Amid unrest, China bans travel to Tibet

? Jacky Chen / Reuters / REUTERS

Policemen take pictures of the unfolding of a giant thangka, a religious silk embroidery or painting unique to Tibet, during the Shoton Festival at Drepung Monastery on the outskirts of Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region August 29, 2011.

By Kari Huus, msnbc.com

Beijing has banned foreign tourists from traveling to Tibet, reports from the region said Thursday. The news comes amid growing unrest in the Chinese-ruled region, including?self-immolations by ethnic Tibetans.

Travel agents have been told that the Himalayan region is off-limits to foreign travelers, the Voice of America and other news services reported on Thursday. They said there was no word on when the ban might?be lifted.

The ban comes?at the start of the Saga Dawa festival celebrating the birth of Buddha, an event on the Tibetan calendar that traditionally prompts a large influx of Buddhist pilgrims and tourists to Tibet.

---

This year, foreigners are unable to obtain permits to travel there during the celebration, according to the reports.

"It was halted in late May. People said it was because of the ... festival," an employee at the Tibet China Travel Service told AFP.

Long-simmering unrest among China's ethnic Tibetan population erupted into large-scale protests in Tibet in March 2008, and the government responded with a?crackdown. Tibet was closed to foreign tourists for more than a year, and security remains tight.

CCTV VIA APTN file

A video image from Llasa in March 2008, when Tibetan unrest erupted into the largest and most violent protests against Chinese rule of Tibet in nearly two decades. The protests were crushed by Chinese military forces, foreign travel to the region was banned for about a year and security has remained tight.

Since March of 2011, more than 30 people are known to have set themselves on fire in protest of Chinese rule, alleged human rights violations and massive immigration to Tibet by Han Chinese, according to the pro-independence advocacy group Free Tibet, which has documented?cases of self-immolation.

The group?said two people set themselves on fire in front of the iconic Jokhang Temple in Llasa in late May ? the first reported self-immolation cases?in Tibet?s capital city.

Increasingly, Tibetans have risked arrest to circulate videos of immolations and other protests for independence or greater self-determination, the group said.

Foreigners traveling to Tibet generally face more restrictions than when traveling?in China, and the Chinese government rarely issues permits for foreign journalists to visit the region.

More world news from msnbc.com and NBC News:

Follow us on Twitter: @msnbc_world

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Defense scores partial victory in WikiLeaks pretrial

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Call Recorders Maryland - Some Efficient Phone Systems for Your ...

by ds1communications
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Communication is the backbone of any business today. So is true about social networks. Information technology, especially internet, has revolutionized the way we used to communicate a few decades ago. Communication has become faster than ever and absolutely noise free. It will be ridiculous if you still present meagre pretexts such as miscommunication or loss of information in your business or personal relations. Let that never be with you. There are many efficient office phones systems available in Florida which can add accuracy and speed to your communications such as Nortel Norstar, Nortel Meridian, Avaya, Cisco, NEC, Samsung, BCM, VOIP Phones and more. Here are some things you should know about these phones systems:

Nortel -- Norstar by Nortel -- Avaya is one of the most sold phone system globally today. More than 9 million users have supported these phoning systems. Not because it is the cheapest one but because of its quality and reliability. That is what businesses, and even individuals are looking for today. Price comes second. These office phones are also known by other name Nortel Avaya Meridan are not only the most sold in Miami, Florida, but tops the list in more than 70 other countries globally.

Samsung Business Phone Systems -- Samsung is a globally reputed brand in communication systems. It offers multiple phoning systems that can make your workplace more efficient and productive. For example its new OfficeServ model number 7200-S is expandable with your growing business needs. Thus it can be adjusted to your size of business and budget anytime. You can enjoy more benefits if you could get these phone systems integrated with VoIP networks. BCM -- stands for Business Communications Manager. Developed by Nortel this is an advanced voice over telephone system with flexibility of 50 to 1000 connections. This system comes with many great features such as call centre management, unified messaging, auto attendant, music on-hold, VoIP and an inbuilt fax receiving system.

VoIP - Internet has certainly added speed to web-browsing, and has facilitated data exchange and video chatting too. Another benefit that small business can avail is VoIP i.e. Voice over Internet Protocol. It converts voice signals into digital signals and enables verbal conversations over internet. This enables business users cut their telephone bills considerably. This service is of much advantage for those who have to often make long distance calls and incur heavy amount. VoIP makes it all possible at negligible prices.

There are many more advanced telephone systems available today with their own infrastructure requirements. But you can only benefit from these systems if you could get them installed correctly by an expert service provider. You need to know how to choose a communication service provider. Certainly all these phoning systems are quite good and relied for their quality but you cannot extract their best benefits until you choose the best service provider for their installation and implementation. The service provider must have thorough knowledge and experience in designing, building and maintaining both copper and fibre optic cable network and infrastructure. You should also check if the service provider has ever installed phoning systems for your size of business.

For more information about ds1communications please visit Call Recorders Maryland and Call Monitoring Maryland.

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