The Bronx Ink

A representative from Coalition for the Homeless surveys clients at the PATH center in the Bronx. (HAZEL SHEFFIELD/ Bronx Ink)

“The new Prevention Assistance and Temporary Housing (PATH) facility was designed to provide compassionate and efficient services that had not previously been offered by the City. The center we are standing in today reflects our commitment to tearing down an old system that was fragmented and slow.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg at the opening of the new PATH center at 151st Street and Walton Avenue in the Bronx, May 3, 2011.

“They need someone to come in here undercover!” yelled a petite, angry mother one Thursday morning to no one in particular. The 37-year-old Queens-born woman was leaving the new PATH building in the Bronx, which serves as the only administrative gateway for families into the city’s homeless shelter system.

“The kids are sleeping on benches! The food is horrible!” she added. A small group of women joined her trailing children and strollers. The mothers gathered outside, sharing stories of their struggles on the streets and inside and outside the center.

For Angela Marougkas, there was nowhere else to go. With her 9-year-old daughter Jasmine by her side, and her 19-year old daughter and baby grandson close by, Marougkas said she had quit her job in order to care for her dying mother earlier in the year, leaving her unable to pay the rent when her mother passed away. In May, pregnant with twins, and suddenly homeless, she arrived at Mayor Bloomberg’s new PATH center in desperation.

Marougkas’s family is one of nearly 1,500 new city families who seek homeless shelter every month. Their first stop is the new PATH center with its sleek, mirrored walls. It replaced its notoriously grim Power Street predecessor, which was plagued by long waits and poor conditions.

When Bloomberg cut the ribbon last May, he promised that processing times would be cut from 20 hours to seven or eight and that families would receive placements the same day they applied. But the experiences of many families applying for shelter do not reflect that pledge.

“They treat us like animals,” said Marougkas. “We wait here all day just to get placed in shelter for the next 10 days. And we hope and pray we’re found eligible.”

The majority of families – a staggering 67 percent in February 2011 – are found ineligible. To comply with Department of Homeless Services regulations, homeless families must have written proof that they have no other viable housing option. This creates a culture of suspicion, rather than compassion, said Lindsey Davis, director of homeless services at New York City’s Coalition for the Homeless, a national advocacy group. “The city’s focus is on investigating fraud and knowing whether or not someone has another place they can stay,” said Davis. “That’s to the detriment of knowing whether someone is safe in that place.”

The high number of rejections spell grave consequences for a growing number homeless families as winter approaches. Bloomberg’s 2004 promise to reduce the number of homeless by two-thirds in five years was undercut by the latest figures, which show that there are 45 percent more families on the streets today than when Bloomberg took office in 2002. The data, compiled by Coalition for the Homeless from city statistics, show that the number of homeless is at an all-time high of 41,000 as of October.

Homeless families say they become trapped in a damaging 10-day cycle. They are allowed to stay in a temporary shelter for little more than a week before they are called back for review. The caseworkers at PATH require families to sign in and out of each shelter, maintaining perfect records of each stay. If they do not have the right documents when they are called back, often at little more than a morning’s notice, they risk being turned away.

The system also requires every member of the family be present at PATH before being found eligible for shelter. This means parents often face a tough choice: take their children out school for a day or end up on the streets for a night.

Every Thursday, at the bottom of the long, concrete ramp up to the PATH center, three young women clutching clipboards addressed families as they leave. The women handed out flyers for the Coalition’s Crisis Intervention Program at Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan. “We are not allowed inside,” said Jessica Horner, a children’s advocate, “so we wait here to catch people on their way out.” The Coalition helps 3,500 families a day with job training, emergency food and gathering the all-important documents.

Rats, mice and roaches

Those lucky enough to be granted shelter may find themselves in worse conditions than they imagined. In November, Maxine Rice, a young black mother from Brooklyn, said the places she stayed in were so infested with cockroaches, that she stuffed her sons’ ears with cotton wool to stop the bugs from crawling in them as they sleep.

Things were looking up last November for Quanisha Henderson, a 21-year Brooklyn mother with painted, almond-shaped eyes.  She said she had become homeless two years earlier when she aged out of foster care. The agency placed her in a scatter-site apartment where she could live with her son. She’d found a job at nearby salon braiding hair. Then she was called back in after she failed the background check because she couldn’t provide documents showing her accommodation for the last two years.

Henderson’s eyes filled with tears as she talking about ending up back back in the shelters. She remembered that in the evenings, men stalk young women. “They think we’ll be desperate,” she said. “They think we’ll do anything for $10.”

For Angela Marougkas, bouncing from shelter to shelter  came to a head on a hot day last August. She was six-months pregnant with twins when the PATH center assigned her to a room on the fourth floor of a scatter site in Brooklyn. The next day the family traveled back to the PATH center, jumping the turnstiles in the subway, to ask for a new shelter without four flights of stairs.

Her family was immediately sent back to the fourth floor apartment to sign out with their caseworker. By the time the papers were signed, it was getting late. The family was sent to a shelter in Brooklyn, five of them crammed in a tiny room with one window. It was too hot to get any rest. Instead, they slept on trains between trips to the PATH center.

A month later, in September, nurses told Angela that her stress levels were dangerously high. She had an emergency C-section on October 7. One of her twins was stillborn.

In November, she found herself again standing outside the PATH center, worrying about her surviving son. “I’m supposed to be at the hospital,” said Marougkas. “He’s in critical care and I’m supposed to breastfeed him. I cannot be here all day.” She railed against the center, angry at her caseworker’s familiar news that she had to go to each shelter she’d stayed in and get the papers to prove each move.

Putting fraud investigations before people

Families often need help assembling documents correctly. “So we step in and try to help them create documentation of the problems that they’ve experienced,” said Lindsey Davis of Coalition for the Homeless.

At PATH, part of the caseworkers’ job is to do everything they can to keep people from entering the shelter system in the first place. Clerks will try to send the family back to any home they might have stayed in during their quest for shelter, even if the home is not safe, or they are not longer welcome.

Davis has worked with families who have been told to stay with people the barely. Sometimes the tenant will not let them in. Unless the family can prove that they cannot stay, they are deemed ineligible for shelter and forced onto the street.

“We have to try to figure out if there’s a way to document these things, so that they will be included in an investigation that the city is doing into their situation,” Davis said. Despite several calls and emails, the Department of Homeless Services refused to comment.

One weary mother recalled her struggles trying to get her paperwork together. Marie Searle lost the lease on her home in Maryland and brought her two sons, ages two and four, to live with family in New York in July. When her family put her out, she turned to PATH, which has rejected her bid for shelter twice because she failed to provide letters proving her situation.
To make things worse, her sons became sick after eating the city-provided food at the center. No food is allowed inside PATH.

“The same day we left here they ended up in the hospital with stomach viruses for four days,” said Searle. “Both my babies were hooked up on tubes and IVs. They’re giving kids spoiled food, old food, cold food and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

The end of Advantage

Despite his early promises, Mayor Bloomberg has significantly reduced the number of programs available to the homeless. In March, the state announced that it would cut all the funding for the city’s Advantage program, which provided rental subsidies to help the homeless transition from emergency shelters to self-sufficiency.

“There are no new people entering that program,” said Davis, “so that really means people staying in shelter for longer periods of time. It’s one reason why the number of people in shelter has increased.”

Sensing a coming crisis, lawyers from Legal Aid secured an injunction to prevent the city from cutting off Advantage payments to households whose contracts had not expired. But those contracts are NOW coming to an end, and there are no new programs to replace them. Department of Homeless Services data shows that, by January 2011, 40 percent of Advantage families had reapplied for shelter.

A 32-year-old mother of four with red hair scraped back from her freckled face found herself in a bedbug-infested shelter after losing her Advantage payments. “I just got evicted yesterday,” Tiffany Branigan said in a quiet voice, while her sons, between the ages of five and 14, slumped over suitcases behind her. “For non-payment of rent, because I used to have the Child Advantage but they stopped the payments.”

The family was sent to a temporary shelter at 8 p.m. the night before, but the address they had been given didn’t exist, so they came back to PATH. When they finally got to the right shelter at 11 p.m., the mattresses were crawling with bedbugs and the children couldn’t sleep. Branigan collected some of the bugs in plastic wrapping and brought her children back to the center the next day to complain, but she was told by her caseworker that there was nothing she could do to get a transfer. “So I have to stay there and deal with it,” Branigan said. “She told me to wash our clothes in hot water, but it’s not us. It’s the beds.”

In mid-November, Angela Marougkas went to pick up her premature son from the hospital. But when she got to the shelter on East New York Ave and Junior, she was turned away at the door because the baby’s name was not yet added to their case file. “We wound up going all the way back to the Bronx with a premature baby, and he’s under special instructions he’s not supposed to be out in the cold,” said Marougkas. “And not only this: they wanted us to leave the next day because the capacity of our room was five people, and with the baby we made six.”

Eventually, Marougkas’s caseworker said the family could fit six of them in the room because the baby was so small.

Still, her struggle is not over.

“Today is the tenth day,” said Marougkas, on a cell phone in her temporary apartment. “But they didn’t contact us with a letter, yet. I don’t want to jinx things. I’m just hoping and praying that we can stay here, somewhere stable, until we find ourselves an apartment.”

It was a burning hot October afternoon in the Bronx when a little crowd of neighborhood kids gathered to watch a fallen tree airlifted into a truck by government workers. While the children stared, one local resident rushed forward to ask the workers if she could take woodchippings to fill the tree-pits and flowerbeds in the street.

“They said we can call whenever we need mulch!” said Nilka Martell, a mother of three. “That stuff costs hundreds of dollars to buy from the store.”

Martell would know. She has transformed Virginia Avenue in Parkchester since losing her paralegal job last December. After a long, cold winter unemployed and on benefits, Martell started volunteering for Department of Parks in April before gathering the courage to embark on a beatification project on her own street.

“You get so discouraged when you’re unemployed,” said Martell. “A friend and I got involved in volunteering so we don’t sit at home and go crazy, and at the same time we’re helping the neighborhood.”

Martell is one of an increasing number of New Yorkers keeping busy with volunteering as unemployment soars. Though New York falls far behind the national rate for volunteers, survey data compiled by government agency Volunteering In America shows that there was a climb in the number of people offering their time for free last year, from 16.4 percent in 2009 to 18.5 percent in 2010. That increase means an extra 300,000 people volunteering in New York, bringing the total number of volunteers to 2.8 million.

Statistics from Volunteering In America show that when unemployment hit 9.3 percent in 2010, 18.5 percent of the population took part in volunteer work. This is up from 2007, when the recession was officially declared. That year, 5.2 percent of New Yorkers were unemployed and only 14.7 percent volunteered.

Martell worked for a paralegal firm for 19 years before she lost her job. “I just figured I’d find another job quickly,” she said. “I’ve never had a problem finding a job.”  As a single mother with two teenage children at home, it was a stretch to care for her family on savings and benefits and Martell had plenty of time sitting around at home to worry about the bills. After sending out resumes all winter, she starting to look at other ways to fill her time.

Though Martell was originally looking for legal work to help her get back into employment, she kept stumbling on online ads asking for volunteers with Department of Parks. Eventually, she signed up.

Soon Martell and her children Isaias, 13, and Lia Lynn, 15, were volunteering in parks all over the Bronx every weekend. Martell started looking for something to do closer to home. “I’ve lived in Virginia Avenue for 36 years and it’s always been such an eyesore,” Martell said. “There have always been high weeds, garbage and dog waste.”

“I thought, why not do something right here?” Martell said. “That way if I get bored I don’t have to wait until there’s an event.” She asked the owners of the C-town supermarket across the street if she could start caring for the flower beds behind their parking lot. Without any public funding, Martell and her friends were extremely resourceful, buying cut-price plants, saving dead bulbs and improvising border fencing from bits of scrap wood.

In just a few months, Mexican sunflowers started spilling into the street and bees appeared. Some residents even began clipping the big green leaves of the elephant ear plants to plant in their own gardens. Now, when Martell goes outside to work on the beds she is often joined by children from around block. Some of the kids are still learning English after moving from the Dominican Republic, but they are all keen to help water the flowers and plant new bulbs.

“This is a neighborhood where there are so many different cultures, but because of this project these kids have come together,” Martell said.

Though Martell is still sending out her resume for work, she’s now considering taking her beautification project elsewhere in the Bronx, helping other local residents transform their streets and invest in their communities.

“I didn’t think this was going to become this big,” she said with a smile. “If I hadn’t been laid off at this point in my life, there is no way I would be doing volunteer work.”

”]
On a brilliant fall day, 25 students on a social justice field trip from Bowling Green, Ohio, visited the South Bronx, but not for the zoo or the Botanical Gardens.

Led by Julian Terrell of the Bronx faith-based group Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, the students made their way to the graffiti Wall of Fame stretching between East 174th Street and West Farms Road. They watched as Long Island-born graffiti giant Phetus, balanced on a ladder, put the final touches to his new mural.

This artistic history, which has existed for decades, is slated to be demolished to make way for a multi-billon dollar housing project by developers Signature Urban Properties. It will be the biggest project of its kind since Co-op City was built in Baychester in the sixties and is expected to provide 1325 units, half of which will be built as subsidized, affordable housing. Building work will begin next year and is planned for completion in seven years.

“This is literally where the Bronx was burning in the seventies,” said Signature principal Robert Frost. “Our goal is to turn around a non-functioning industrial zone by developing affordable workforce housing.”

The project, which allocates land for a new elementary school, children’s playground and two open public spaces, has the support of locally elected official Joel Rivera.

“Affordable housing is one of the biggest issues faced within our community,” said Rivera. “We are excited that this project will help to address this need.” With poverty rates in the Bronx hitting 12 percent and the fear of foreclosure growing as families get priced out of their own homes, the need for affordable housing is growing.

The Bronx borough president said he is pleased that the apartments will provide jobs and housing for a balanced, mixed income community.

But not everyone welcomed the news. “In trying to provide affordable housing, they’re smacking people in the face and stealing their culture,” Julian Terrell told the visiting students. “We call this a shrine, people come here from all over the world.”

The East Tremont and West Farms area has long languished with derelict manufacturing warehouses and graffiti culture. But some locals fear this housing project may be too pricey and will serve to push out the longtime low-income residents.

Terrell believes that the area became attractive to developers because groups like Youth Ministries worked hard to make it that way. On the other side of the Sheridan Expressway, the locally designed Starlight Park is nestled on an old industrial site by the Bronx River.

The 10 high-rise buildings proposed by Signature Urban Properties on a five-acre area could block local residents’ view of the park and the river. The development company, headed by former City Council member Gifford Miller, also promises to provide over 400 jobs in 46,000 square feet of retail space.

David Frost, a principal of Signature Urban Properties, said this location was chosen from a portfolio of possible options that had the necessary open space, transportation links and “ease of assemblage” – or buildings and land that could be bought easily from current tenants. “There are no jobs there; there’s no business there,” said Frost. “Our land is vacant.”

While Frost insists that the developers have support from the local community, some residents think otherwise. Cerita Parker, a retired Board of Education worker who lives on Longfellow Avenue, is worried that the community will be destroyed by the new plans.

“Throughout the Bronx we have seen a rebirth of communities with new building going up and lots of them are not affordable,” Parker said. “When you start building housing that’s out the price rage of local residents, these residents get kicked out.”

At the department for city planning, which is currently receiving funding to research ways to decommission or modify the nearby Sheridan Expressway, the new development is big news. “The way we think of this whole area is different because of this project,” said Ryan Singer from the Bronx office. “We asked Signature if they were worried about the Sheridan and they said they were prepared regardless.”

Plans to decommission the 1.2 miles of the Sheridan Expressway, which links the Bruckner with the Cross Bronx Expressway, reached a stalemate last year when the state cited a study that showed local traffic would worsen if it were removed. Frost, of Signature Urban Properties, refused to speak out against the Sheridan but did say: “Depending on how the Sheridan was decommissioned, it could be something we could get behind.”

The volunteers at Youth Ministries have been lobbying for the removal of the highway for over a decade. “We don’t want their support,” said Terrell at the suggestion that Signature might be able to help.

As for the graffiti, Frost said Signature is thinking of finding a small space in the new plans to designate a canvas. “That’s one of the coolest things up there,” he said.

When the squat manufacturing warehouses, which currently include towing merchants and a hog dog vendor, have been removed, it may be too late to save the graffiti culture here. At Da Bakery, a world-renown graffiti shop on the corner of the site, artists had no idea of what was planned.

Parker said that’s because the developers have not tried hard enough to reach the local community. “The only people that Signature has courted is the community board and the assemblymen,” she said. “They haven’t consulted the community whatsoever. It’s another example of money talking and everyone else following.”

”]A stranger found the body of Anil Sankar on the boat launch at Concrete Plant Park around 6 a.m. on Sept. 12.

The 18-year-old’s face was torn open at the temple and bruised around his mouth. His nose was smashed in and his hands were scratched. One plastic sandal had been discarded on the bank and another floated in the shallow water, not far from where he lay.

On a grassy patch, a packet of Newport cigarettes, soggy with dew, had been ripped in half and thrown aside.

“They say he hit his head and drowned,” said his father, Teakaram Sankar, as the Sankar family, who moved to the Bronx from Guyana 17 years ago, gathered in their small Boynton Avenue living room for a vigil to remember Anil. Police have dismissed his son’s death as accidental. “But I figure that’s impossible.”
As they sat together, the Sankar family passed phone records and emails between them and tried to piece together what happened the night that Anil disappeared. His sister-in-law, Natasha Sankar, held up a phone log showing that hours before he died, Anil made an 80-minute call to the mother of his girlfriend. The young couple had fallen out, said his mother, Mohaine. She remembered telling Anil to pray at the family shrine that Sunday morning, while he worked on the music he made on their home computer. The whole family agreed that Anil was not apt to hang around the park alone at night.

The Sankars may never know the truth of what happened that Sunday evening. The detective assigned to the case said it is closed. But the surrounding community has rallied around their grief nonetheless – to share their sadness, to protest the lack of safety in Concrete Park, and to highlight growing violence among their youth.

“I hope all the young people in the community can look at this and see that violence is not the answer,” said Natasha as she addressed the assembled mourners in the park four weeks after his death.

Over a hundred concerned residents and friends of Anil walked from the Sankar home to Concrete Plant Park on Oct. 16, to show their support for the family and their concern for rising levels of violence among young people in the Bronx. Felony assaults are up 10 percent in the district from last year, an increase of 33 incidents. A local resident confirmed that since Anil’s death, another young boy has been mugged at gunpoint in broad daylight in the park.

As the vigil progressed, residents passed by an unsecured hydraulic pole that is supposed to stop vehicles from entering the park and through a gate that stays open all night. The path runs by the river on one side and open fences onto the Metro North lines on the other. Two expressways, an elevated train line and a residential road surround the area.

“It’s the perfect place to prey on women or children if you’re an opportunist,” said Ephrain Cruz of the community group Bronx For Change. “We need to highlight that this park is not secure.”

Concrete Plant Park opened on an old industrial site in 2009, after a 10-year funding battle to restore the land and return it to the community by faith-based community group Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice.

“That park was developed as a safe space for young people,” said Julian Terrell from Youth Ministries. “Putting up gates to prevent people from getting in sets the wrong precedent.”

On Sunday evening, as the trains rattled by, the Sankar family laid candles and incense above the jetty where Anil Sankar’s body was found. His sister Anita lit one of his favorite Newport cigarettes and tucked it behind a purple bottle of pina colada flavored drink. The crowd gathered with candles to hear stories about Sankar’s life from his friends. His family stood quietly, unable to speak.

Towards the end of the vigil, Bronx Assemblyman Marcus Crespo stood forward to talk about ending violence among young people in the Bronx.

“The answers don’t lie somewhere else,” Crespo said. “They lie right here with all of us. It’s about our respect for one another.”

When the meeting was over and the crowds dispersed, Ephrain Cruz said: “Crespo says the answers lie with us. But this park does not belong to us. It is looked after by the state.”

Back at the Sankars’ two-bedroom apartment, young children ran between a gilded Hindu shrine and display cabinets stuffed with family photos. Mohaine Sankar clutched at a tissue, holding it against the white t-shirt printed with a photo of her son.

Mohaine knew Anil had broken up with his girlfriend the day before he died. The Sunday he disappeared, she checked on him in the peach-coloured bedroom he shared with his twin sister, Kumarie, and their 15-year-old brother, Robin.

“He laid back on the bed with his arm above his head,” said Mohaine. “He was really worried about something.”

“The police don’t want us to call people and ask what happened,” said Anil’s sister-in-law Natasha. “They say for us to wait, but they’re not doing anything. We need to know.”
http://vimeo.com/31182589

Nilka Martell has transformed her street since she lost her job last December. [HAZEL SHEFFIELD/The Bronx Ink]

It was a burning hot October afternoon in the Bronx when a small crowd of neighborhood kids gathered to watch a fallen tree airlifted into a truck by government workers. While the children stared, one local resident rushed forward to ask the workers if she could take wood chips to fill the tree pits and flowerbeds in the street.

“They said we can call whenever we need mulch!” said Nilka Martell, a mother of three. “That stuff costs hundreds of dollars to buy from the store.”

Martell would know. She has transformed Virginia Avenue in Parkchester since losing her paralegal job last December. After a long, cold winter unemployed and on benefits, Martell started volunteering for Department of Parks in April before gathering the courage to embark on a beautification project on her own street.

“You get so discouraged when you’re unemployed,” said Martell. “A friend and I got involved in volunteering so we don’t sit at home and go crazy, and at the same time we’re helping the neighborhood.”

Martell is one of an increasing number of New Yorkers keeping busy with volunteering as unemployment continues to stay high. Though New York falls far behind the national rate for volunteers, survey data compiled by government agency Volunteering In America shows that there was a climb in the number of people offering their time for free last year, from 16.4 percent in 2009 to 18.5 percent in 2010. That increase means an extra 300,000 people volunteering in New York, bringing the total number of volunteers to 2.8 million.

Statistics from Volunteering In America show that when unemployment hit 9.3 percent in 2010, 18.5 percent of the population took part in volunteer work. This is up from 2007, when the recession was officially declared. That year, 5.2 percent of New Yorkers were unemployed and only 14.7 percent volunteered.

Martell worked for a paralegal firm for 19 years before she lost her job. “I just figured I’d find another job quickly,” she said. “I’ve never had a problem finding a job.” As a single mother with two teenage children at home, it was a stretch to care for her family on savings and benefits and Martell had plenty of time sitting around at home to worry about the bills. After sending out resumes all winter, she starting to look at other ways to fill her time.

Though Martell was originally looking for legal work to help her get back into employment, she kept stumbling on online ads asking for volunteers with Department of Parks. Eventually, she signed up.

Soon Martell and her children Isaias, 13, and Lia Lynn, 15, were volunteering in parks all over the Bronx every weekend. Martell started looking for something to do closer to home. “I’ve lived in Virginia Avenue for 36 years and it’s always been such an eyesore,” Martell said. “There have always been high weeds, garbage and dog waste.”

“I thought, why not do something right here?” Martell said. “That way if I get bored I don’t have to wait until there’s an event.” She asked the owners of the C-town supermarket across the street if she could start caring for the flower beds behind their parking lot. Without any public funding, Martell and her friends were extremely resourceful, buying cut-price plants, saving dead bulbs and improvising border fencing from bits of scrap wood.

In just a few months, Mexican sunflowers started spilling into the street and bees appeared. Some residents even began clipping the big green leaves of the elephant ear plants to plant in their own gardens. Now, when Martell goes outside to work on the beds she is often joined by children from around block. Some of the kids are still learning English after moving from the Dominican Republic, but they are all keen to help water the flowers and plant new bulbs.

“This is a neighborhood where there are so many different cultures, but because of this project these kids have come together,” Martell said.

Though Martell is still sending out her resume for work, she’s now considering taking her beautification project elsewhere in the Bronx, helping other local residents transform their streets and invest in their communities.

“I didn’t think this was going to become this big,” she said with a smile. “If I hadn’t been laid off at this point in my life, there is no way I would be doing volunteer work.”

http://vimeo.com/30708266

Barbara Jones remembers her first heart attack like it was yesterday.

“Being overweight, I thought it was just asthma,” she says of the day in October, 2001 when she felt so drowsy on her way home from an evening job at Dunkin Donuts that she fell asleep on the bus and missed her stop. Her son found her walking back from Parkchester. The last thing Jones remembers is hearing him tell an operator: “Blood is coming out of my mother’s mouth.”

Jones’s heart attack was so severe that she was in intensive care for 20 days, and had a breathing tube for seven. When she emerged from hospital, she had lost two-thirds of her heart’s capacity. She was too weak to return to work at Dunkin’ Donuts and the Bronx Family Courthouse, where she had been an office manager for 21 years.

Jones describes a daily diet of ice cream, hotdogs and soda that saw her weight shoot above the 350-pound limit on the scales at the Soundview Health Center. She knew things had to change after the death of her husband in 2003 from a stroke brought on by alcohol and medication abuse, and the death of her sister from diabetes the following year.

“My GYN doctor, told me, ‘You’re heavy and you’re going to die. You must want to die! I tell you not to eat, you continue to eat,’” Jones said.

“He said if I want to live I have to come and see Renata.”

Renata Shiloah runs the Soundview nutrition clinic. In 2007, Jones decided to follow her doctor’s advice.

With help from Shiloah and the support groups at the clinic, Jones began to lose weight. The clinic provides group sessions on food and healthy eating as well as cooking and exercise classes.

Since 2008, Jones has lost 200 pounds. At 63, she now volunteers at the clinic twice a week, calling patients to remind them of their appointments and acting as captain in some of the classes.

“On Thursday it’s the heavy-set people and on Tuesday it’s the senior citizens,” Jones says. “I can relate to both!”

Barbara Jones with her grandson in 2001, before her first heart attack.

Now, Soundview Health Center is threatened with closure, a move that could rob local residents of the kind of local, clinical care that saved her life.

In August, the Department of Health and the Inspector General for Medicaid took separate measures to impose sanctions upon the clinic that would stop their participation in Medicaid for the next three years, after they discovered that Soundview lacks a Medicaid compliance program. The state also took issue with the continued involvement of the clinic’s founder and president, Pedro Espada, after he remained involved in operations despite an indictment for embezzling half a million dollars of Medicaid money.

As the majority of patients at Soundview rely on Medicaid to afford healthcare, the decision would force the center to close.

“Soundview is the only major health clinic in the neighborhood,” said Francisco Gonzales, district manager for Community Board 9.

“We need more health facilities here, not less,” Gonzales said.

With Soundview under threat of closure, the future of Jones’s health care is uncertain. If the center closes, there is no guarantee that Jones will find the same level of personal support and community spirit elsewhere.

Residents in the South Bronx face an estimated 85 percent higher risk of obesity than people in Manhattan. And it can take more than a few appointments at a clinic to break the habits of a lifetime. Shiloah’s constant encouragement and support has been vital to Jones. When she had a reaction to the flu vaccination in December 2008 resulted in congestive heart failure, Shiloah was by her side at the hospital.

“I was on deathbed watch, I was on a breathing tube,” said Jones. “But I heard Renata. I heard my friend who used to come to the clinic with me. I heard all the grandkids and I was trying to take the tube out to let them know I could hear them. They had to tie me down,” she said.

When the doctors let Jones leave the hospital, she went to stay with a friend in upstate Woodstock and ate hot dogs, her favorite food.

“I had to have hotdogs with chili and cheese – no salad – and my daughter had to rush me back because of the water build up,” she says.

With lots of support from the clinic, Jones began to change her ways. She stopped eating hot dogs and switched from fruit juice to real fruit. Jones is a avid cook, and has learned to cut out butter and oil in her recipes and swap bleached white for whole wheat flour. She feeds her grandchildren, three of whom are in her care, gluten-free lasagna.

“Now I can run with the grandkids, beat them up the stairs, play ball,” Jones said.

“I used to hear Barbara’s breathing when she was coming,” Shiloah said. “She used to take 22 pills!”

Shiloah and Jones have become close. Shiloah checks Jones is taking her heart medication, which is down to five pills a day, and gives her asthma inhalers so she doesn’t have to buy them at the pharmacy.

“You become family,” said Shiloah. “It’s more than just a patient visit, especially in my area because we meet every week and we talk about personal things.”

“I rely on doctors like Renata,” Jones said. “They were the ones who helped.”

Lia Lynn Vega, 15, hauling sacks of litter from the Soundview shoreline.

“I’ve found another needle!” shouted 13-year-old Isaias Vega from a jetty along the Bronx Greenway.

His 15-year-old sister noted the needle on her data sheet and it was added to the pile collecting on the bank.

Around them, a handful of volunteers worked to free all manner of plastics from the shoreline as part of a coastal clean up led by environment agency the Bronx River Alliance.

Who cleans the Bronx Greenway, a new stretch of coastline pathways in Soundview? No one, according to the state department for parks. That job falls to volunteers who, after tropical storm Irene, are finding the task a little too much to handle.

The Greenway was opened in 2008 and has been in a state of disorder since Hurricane Irene, which kicked up storm surges between seven and 15 feet, submerging large chunks of the coastline. The surges dumped plastic packaging from Hunts Point Terminal Market in the backyards of Soundview residents and the paths surrounding Soundview Park.

According to the state Parks department, the Greenway is the responsibility of local park rangers who in reality have little time to dedicate to clean-ups. Without volunteers like the Vegas family, the contaminated coastline would be left to fester.

The local community often has other priorities, too. “Last year Friends of Soundview Park organized clean ups every Sunday, but this year that time has been given over to cultural activities,” said Carlos Martinez of the government’s Partnership for Parks.

When volunteers do come, they are shocked by what they see. On Saturday Sept. 24, the Bronx River Alliance gathered help from various charities including faith-based youth group YMPJ, education charity Build On and Friends Of Soundview Park.

“Normally we see litter, but this year there were a lot of things washed up,” said Alliance ecology director Robin Kriesberg. Volunteers worked for three hours to disentangle needles, six pack rings, tampons and styrofoam from the banks of the river.

Ocean Conservancy, the not-for-profit behind the annual event, provided volunteers with standardized data cards to record every single item of debris in categories ranging from bottle tops to shotgun shells. The cards are sent in and logged for an annual report on global marine debris.

“We’re also teaching kids about packaging and littering,” said Martinez. “So next time they have junk food they think twice about throwing the packaging on the floor.”

Nilka Martell, has been volunteering with Partnership for Parks since she lost her job as a paralegal secretary last December. She thinks the clean up is good for her children Isaias and Lia Lynn. “It keeps them off the streets, the TV and the internet,” Martell said.

Many volunteers were dismayed at the state of the coastline. “We have to do clean ups all the time, one weekend is not enough,” said Ashley Quiles, volunteer co-ordinator from the Bronx Alliance, as she gathered everyone for a debrief at noon. Along the jetties, a thick covering of colored plastics remained mashed into the mud.

Two Catholic schools in Castle Hill have adopted a pilot program that teaches maths through a digital curriculum, New York Daily News reports.

Holy Family School and Archdiocese Of New York have adopted the programs, which include netbooks and interactive activities allowing each child to learn at their own pace while a teacher observes from a master computer.

The changes to the curriculum come a time of wider change for Catholic schools in the Bronx after six closed down in spring.