'Man did eat angels' food'

Jesus Christ was stabbing me in the throat again last night.
I always take it as a sign from God that I’m headed in the wrong direction when He gouges me with my crucifix while I’m sleeping.
I believe God speaks to us in subtle ways. We just have to be aware.
I always know I’ve really messed up when I go to communion and Jesus’ body gets stuck in my teeth instead of delicately dissolving in my mouth and filling me with the Holy Spirit.
It’s time for a toothpick, some quiet contemplation and a trip to the confessional.
But while He may be great at sending signs, His son will be the first to tell you that God isn’t as forthcoming with His advice. He’s quick to tell you you’re doing wrong. He’s reticent to tell you what you should do to fix it.
That’s when I turn to my Bible: God’s words, flipping through the pages for enlightenment.
That’s just what I did last night after turning on the light and readjusting the pesky crucifix. I wasn’t quite sure where I had erred in God’s eyes but I was certain there was something God needed to tell me.
There, in the Book of Psalms, I stumbled upon the words, “Man did eat angels’ food.”
I had enjoyed a heavenly evening at the Angels Among Us Auction and Dinner for St. Stephen Catholic Church and School the night before. We dined on rare roast beef, mahi mahi, a variety of pastas, chocolate and carrot cake, and sipped fine wines.
It was truly a meal fit for angels. Instead of relishing the opportunity to enjoy an evening of good food and good friends, I was lamenting the fact that I had no money to bid on the variety of goodies being auctioned due to my recent layoff. I found myself wishing I had the freedom to bid thousands of dollars without a qualm like some of the auction-goers around me.
God was sternly reminding me to count my blessings. I had the chance to attend the event, watch the excitement, taste the foods and chat with friends. There were many, many people who could not even afford a ticket to attend the event. In fact, it was partly to help supplement their children’s religious education that the dinner and auction was held.
OK, God. I got the message. You can quit making your son jab me in the neck. It was a glorious evening and I was fortunate to take part in it as a volunteer and participant. Dena Craig, Mel Williams, Jean Weber and the other members of the Angels committee did an extraordinary job putting the event together and raising funds in one of the worst economies we’ve seen in our lifetimes.
If You are willing, my fortunes may change. If they don’t, I count myself fortunate anyway.

My own fairy princess

There are no accidents.
God brings certain people into your lives at certain times for very specific reasons.
I’d been having a crummy year. There were massive layoffs and shakeups at work. My dog died after I fed her contaminated dog food. My father was slowly dying from cancer. I figured it was just more of the same bad luck when we received the call from a doctor at a hospital in Burbank, Calif., on that August day in 2007.
In a solemn voice, the doctor told us that my sister-in-law, Mara, was in the hospital. It happened to be the same day my father-in-law was scheduled for major surgery at Brandon Regional Hospital. We’d just been informed that this normally independent, vibrant 83-year-old man was going to have to come live with us while he recuperated.
Now this doctor in Burbank was delivering a second blow. In a shaky voice, she told us that Mara had advanced non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Stage IV.
There was no hope, the doctor said. She thought the best thing was for us to come to California and bring Mara back to Florida so she could die surrounded by her family.
I never gave it a second thought. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t a matter up for consideration. There was only one thing to do.
I turned to my husband, Michael, and said, “I’ll take care of your dad. You go get Mara.” It was the first time in our 25 years of marriage that I saw my husband cry. His father was facing major surgery that could end his life. His sister had been given a death sentence. And all I could be certain of is that God, for whatever reason, had placed the care of these family members in my hands.
I desperately needed a fairy godmother.
Instead, God brought me a fairy princess complete with her own supply of fairy dust.
If you don’t believe me, take a close look inside my house. Mara has been gone nearly nine months now and my vacuum cleaner and duster are still picking up the fairy dust she left in her wake.
You see, my sister-in-law was a real-life fairy princess. The majority of the time, she was Snow White, though she would transform into Tinkerbelle, Cinderella and Princess Anastasia at various times. Frankly, after seeing her in the role, I, for one, truly believed she embodied the spirit of Snow White with her creamy white skin, long, wavy black hair and sweet, high-pitched voice.
One of Mara’s favorite sayings was, “Believe in miracles – expect magic.” I saw no reason why she couldn’t be the character she portrayed for children’s birthday parties.
She loved children and children loved her. I think one of the reasons she related so well to children is because they accepted her. They didn’t judge her. And they never took advantage of her generosity.
So creating a business as a children’s entertainer was ideal. Mara loved dressing up as storybook characters. She loved singing, dancing and performing magic tricks for children. She loved throwing parties for kids. And she loved being the center of attention.
I worried how she would cope when she became sick and had to leave all that behind.
Up until then, her appointment calendar had been filled with activities.
“Jan. 6 – party for Riley, age 3, Sleeping Beauty, $150 check, lovely thank you,” read her diary.
“Jan. 16 – Snow White party – Anna Sophia, 6, gave me a blush pink rose. It made me so happy.”
“Jan. 29 – mermaid party – Jessica gave me the mermaid from her cake.”
“March 4 – three doll cakes. So cute. Pink tablecloths. White chandelier with little pink birds.”
“April 17 – Jasmine party – macaroons, lily of the valley, hyacinth, pink, magenta, soft blue.”
She took as much delight in every party as the little girls who were honored.
But, once here, Mara seemed content to give up her party life and simply appreciate each moment she had left on earth “before God makes me his angel.”
“I always knew I’d die young,” she told me. “I’m the eternal woman-child. I never wanted to grow up. Now I’ll never have to.”
She loved to fill the bird feeders in our back yard with seed and watch the birds come and go or pick flowers from my garden and put them in vases all over my house. When my plumeria bush bloomed for the first time, she was convinced it bloomed just for her. She spent hours just staring at that white plumeria bloom, marveling at its beauty. I’ve never met anyone who was so appreciative and aware of the beauty around her.
Nor have I ever met anyone so appreciative of any kindness shown toward her. She was always making handmade thank-you cards and gifts for people in gratitude of the smallest expression of thoughtfulness.
I think her acceptance of her death lay in her enormous spirituality. She never married but wrote in her journal, “God is my prince.” She would note people she wanted to pray for on certain days and would pepper her appointment calendar with Bible verses like, “Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God,” “Children are the greatest in the kingdom of heaven,” “Trust God; delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart,” “God will take care of those who serve Him and sincerely endeavor to do His will,” and “There shall be showers of blessings sent by God above.”
The toll on her physical appearance was the only indication of her illness’ progression. I never once heard her complain about pain or feel sorry for herself. I marveled at the way she kept going when most people would have been bedridden.
Apparently God thought I needed a reminder of how wonderful life is. So he sent me a fairy princess, a fairy princess who relished every moment of life until her death.

Blogging with a purpose: Who cares what I have to say?

What do I have to say? And, most importantly, why should you read anything I write?
I had the same questions. As a full-time journalist for more than 25 years, I’m accustomed to interviewing people, covering government meetings and making phone calls so I can regurgitate facts accompanied by carefully quoted opinion about how those facts are going to affect readers.
Stay neutral, remain unbiased, avoid any semblance of favoritism. That’s always been the journalist’s mantra -- until recently.
Suddenly, journalists not only allowed to have opinions, but are encouraged to express them publicly.
It’s like opening the floodgates, tearing down the Berlin Wall, ripping through that miasma of objectivity that’s prevented us from telling all that we really know in the guise of fairness.
I’m not timid about expressing my opinion. My journalistic integrity, however, has kept me on a short leash in the public realm.
But now there’s this thing called a blog, an abbreviation for Web log, representative of random thoughts about sundry topics designed to evoke equally random responses from Web surfers.
Eleven years ago, there were about 50 blogs on the Internet. Today there are more than 10 million blogs. The blogosphere is inundated with everything from political commentary attracting half a million visitors a day and having untold influence on American public opinion to inexpert opines that appear to be more self-promoting than elucidating.
That’s just one of the reasons for the decline of newspapers and the high unemployment rate of journalists.
They’ve been replaced by citizen journalists and user-generated content providers who can do the job for free.
Well … they COULD do the job. Except most don’t want to make the effort to sit through boring meetings, wade through reams of boring documents, makes tons of phone calls and interview tons of people to get both sides of the story and then go out of their way to make sure the story is well-written, interesting, factual and, most importantly, credible.
As a result, the public is subjected to endless streams of blogs posted by self-professed authorities on various subjects. We find fiction presented as fact, propaganda passing for information and self-serving punditry qualifying as legitimate truth.
People aren’t sure where to turn for fair, unbiased information in this digital age. The public doesn’t have any guarantee that it’s getting facts or even half truths from the Internet. After all, who is holding the blogger accountable?
In this era when we’re bombarded with information from computers, cell phones and iPods, a generation of self-proclaimed experts have established themselves as bloggers and twits with forums that provide them with legitimacy despite the fact that they have no credentials.
Frankly, I don’t care to read the uninformed opinion of some stranger who managed to save up $800 to buy a computer. If I must blog, I’m either going to provide thought-provoking commentary or I'm going to stick to the principles of journalism and provide information that will allow readers to form their own opinions.
OK, I might take a stab at being entertaining as well.

Clinic proof of need for health-care reform

Caller ID indicated that my doctor’s office was phoning.
My heart skipped a beat. Were they calling to tell me I had some horrible, painful, disabling disease?
My panic was allayed by the nurse who explained that they had received my request for a prescription refill from my pharmacy and wanted me to see the doctor for a routine checkup.
My doctor was asking to see me. In fact, he had some openings right away.
Hmm. In the past, I had to wait weeks to get an appointment. And rarely had my doctor’s office called to invite me for a visit.
Things became clearer when I arrived at my primary physician’s office the next day. Rather than walking into a crowded waiting room where I had to wait an interminable period of time to see the doctor, I arrived to find the room empty. I was ushered into an exam room five minutes later. I’d barely cracked open a 2-month-old copy of Time magazine when my doctor walked in.
He apologized for keeping me waiting. I told him he hadn’t kept me. In fact, I’d just become engrossed in an interesting article and he’d disturbed me.
It occurred to me that I was witnessing one of the many consequences of the economic crisis in Tampa Bay. With an 11 percent unemployment rate, residents no longer have access to health insurance, and bustling medical practices are going bust.
By contrast, hospital emergency rooms are inundated with patients who have neglected health concerns, permitting perfectly treatable ailments to turn into life-threatening emergencies.
And free clinics like the Brandon Outreach Clinic in Brandon and the Judeo Christian Health Clinic in Tampa have more patients than they can possibly accommodate.
Drs. Stephen Parks and Pat Jeansonne started the nonprofit Brandon Outreach Clinic 20 years ago to help those people who fall between the cracks – the working poor who don’t make enough money to afford health insurance but make too much money to qualify for Medicaid.
Parks was able to get help for one man with a painful, disfiguring chest tumor. He’d been denied treatment because he had no insurance. In desperation, he sought help at Parks’ clinic. He told Parks he was prepared to excise his own tumor with a razor blade if necessary.
A pregnant woman with no insurance walked into the clinic one evening. However, the nurses quickly discovered she wasn’t pregnant. She had an ovarian cyst the size of an eight-month-old fetus.
Last year, Parks and other volunteer doctors treated 1,735 people. Already this year the clinic is seeing a 30 percent increase in the number of patients needing help.
Last week, politicians got together to kick off a free mobile dental health clinic for children at the Tom Lee Community Health Care Center in Dover to provide dental care to the county’s 141,000 children living below the federal poverty line. Workers at the clinic noted that many children they see, some 13 and 14 years old, have never even had a dental exam.
And, yet, we still have Americans questioning the need for health-care reform. Unbelievable.

Economy to blame for upsurge in crime against women, children

It’s the stupid economy.
Apparently the dour economy is to blame for the revolting headlines inviting readers to delve into the details of men killing babies, beating and raping women and murdering their families.
David Braughton, chief executive officer of the Crisis Center of Tampa Bay, says rape, child abuse and domestic violence in Tampa Bay has shot up as the economy has taken a downturn.
And he believes there is a direct correlation between crimes against women and children and financial woes.
He said child abuse, rape and domestic violence is most often committed by men who feel inadequate and need to be in charge. It’s a panacea against feelings of helplessness and frustration.
Upon losing his job and the ability to control his financial security, an already-mentally unstable man may seek other ways to regain a sense of control including attacking those who are less powerful.
With Tampa Bay’s unemployment rate reaching 11.1 percent last month, Braughton’s theory explains a lot of the insanity we’ve seen in recent months including the horrific May 3 shootings of a Lakeland mother and her two children by her husband followed two days later by the death of an infant thrown from a car window along Interstate 75 in Tampa.
Braughton said rape is one of the most underreported crimes in the county. Eighty percent of the time, it’s committed by someone the victim knows, and she’s too ashamed to report it.
Despite rape victims’ reluctance to report the crime, the crisis center has experienced a 10 percent increase in the number of calls for sexual assault exams over the past year.
“We’re now seeing a victim a day,” said Braughton. “It’s all about power and control, people venting their frustrations on others. As unemployment and other stresses go up, we see more victims.”
Last year his office did a record 340 sexual assault exams, prompting the nonprofit to add a full-time rape advocate.
“The demands for our services are skyrocketing,” he said. “Calls to our 24-hour 2-1-1 crisis hotline have gone up 50 percent and requests for financial help have more than doubled. We’re admitting 20 to 30 new cases each month to our specialized counseling program for sexually abused children.”
While we focus on the homeless, the hungry and the unemployed, these faceless women and children may very well be the most tragic victims of the recession.

Kids Take The Fun Out Of Halloween

I looked over the inventory of Halloween costumes at the store and was temporarily stupefied. Then I examined the price tags and was momentarily petrified.
When I was growing up, there were basically two choices of Halloween costumes: you bought a Collegeville costume consisting of a chintzy plastic mask and vinyl suit bearing the likeness of a cartoon character or a witch, or you made your own costume
In my house, it usually came down to the latter, and the latter meant making something as easy as possible. I’m talking a white sheet with eyeholes cut out.
I have a photo of myself and my brother dressed up for Halloween one year. My long hair is in ponytails; I’ve painted freckles on my face; and I’m wearing a baby doll dress. I think I was supposed to be Pippi Longstocking.
My brother has a piece of burlap over his head and tied around his neck. God only knows what he’s supposed to be.
When my son was born, I wasn’t about to resort to a store-bought costume. Weeks before Halloween, I’d begin making the cutest, most creative costume I could come up with, keeping in mind my limited crafting and sewing skills.
That first year I kept it simple since my son was only 10 weeks old: a pumpkin.
I’d just come off maternity leave and brought my baby with me to a staff meeting where most of my co-workers were seeing him for the first time -- an adorable cherub-cheeked infant dressed as a fat, orange pumpkin. Unfortunately, my son was having some stomach discomfort that day and, just as my boss began to speak; he let loose, forever becoming known as the smelly little pumpkin.
I thought my idea to make him one of the new blue M&Ms the following year was a stroke of genius. I found a royal blue, long-sleeved jumper. I then enlarged an M&M package on the copy machine and used it to cut out a white felt M&M logo to attach to the front. I put a royal blue baseball cap on him with the same logo. I then stuffed the inside of the jumper with foam to ensure he’d be nice and round like the candy-coated chocolate.
It was adorable. Unfortunately, having just learned to walk, my son didn’t quite have his balance yet. And all that foam didn’t help. He looked like a Weeble, only this one did fall down -- about every two steps.
My coup de grace, though, had to have been the turtle. That took a lot of wire hangers and every piece of green felt Michaels craft store had, but it was worth all the envious looks from the other mothers at the Center Place Halloween Horribles parade that year. My son the turtle even made the cover of the Hillsborough County recycling newsletter. What a compliment. Cute and environmentally aware.
The only problem was the size of the costume. In his enthusiasm to get to the next treat station at the Halloween Horribles parable, he kept inadvertently knocking all of the other kids off the path with his massive shell. You could hear screams and cries in his wake.
Those days were over way too soon. I watched in dismay as parents proudly paraded their toddlers in whimsical costumes that I could have created if my son had just given me a few more years to experiment with him.
But, apparently, there comes a day when mom-made costumes are deemed uncool and anything that even hints of cute is unworthy.
So goodbye to 10-cent sheets of felt and hello to $39.99 Freddy Krueger masks.
I don’t even get to prance around the neighborhood in my witch’s hat anymore with my best friend, Rita, ushering our children from house to house anymore. They’re now too old to trick or treat with mom.
Instead, I sit in my house; sipping wine and answering the door, listening to Rita lament the fact that she didn’t realize her youngest son, Jimmy, wasn’t wearing shoes until she had already driven to our house. Now he has to trick or treat in his socks.
Meanwhile, I’m bewailing the fact that I underestimated the number of children that would be knocking on my door begging for goodies. After spending all that money on my son’s store-bought mask, I’d gotten stingy with the candy.
After giving out all this year’s candy as well as last year’s leftover candy and some dime store toys I scrounged from my son’s bedroom, Rita and I desperately begin combing through my kitchen cabinets.
“Here we go,” said Rita, spotting a cache of soy sauce packets from a local Chinese restaurant in my refrigerator. “The kids just want to get something. Their parents can weed out the inappropriate stuff later.”
Suddenly I understood why my son would return from trick or treating with an occasional ketchup packet or keychain with the logo of some bank on it.
“That’ll do,” I said, pouring us another glass of wine.

Putting together the pieces of the Asaba puzzle

TAMPA, Fla. (Oct 12, 2009) They were unprepared for the flood of emotions that engulfed them when survivors of the 1967 massacre in Asaba, Nigeria, solemnly stood at the podium and told their stories.

Without tissues on hand, tears streamed down the faces of the men, soaking the collars of both Western suitcoats and traditional Nigerian bubas.

For some in the audience, this was the first chance in 42 years to learn the fate of their loved ones.

“This is the first time in my life that I’ve been told the story of what happened, and my own father was killed in that war,” said Michael Nwanze, a political science professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C. “I buried my father but I was never able to mourn him because I didn’t know the truth.”

The survivors of the Oct. 7, 1967, massacre in Asaba, Nigeria, had been waiting more than four decades to shed light on the nightmare that haunts them still and to tally and honor the dead – estimated by some accounts to be from 500 to 2,000 men and boys. The massacre occurred during Nigeria’s bitter civil war, and those targeted were of Igbo ethnicity.

Helping the Nigerian people piece together the puzzle of the long-buried tragedy is anthropology professor Elizabeth Bird, assistant anthropology professor Erin Kimmerle and Fraser Ottanelli, chairman of the department of history, who are working with the USF Libraries Holocaust & Genocide Studies Center and a Tampa Police Homicide Det. Charles Massucci.

The researchers are gathering documents, recording oral histories and this spring will travel to Nigeria to examine mass graves in the hopes of creating a memorial to the decades-old slayings.

The Oct. 9-10 Asaba Memorial Project symposium at USF kicked off the effort that included launching the Asaba Memorial Project website. The site will serve as an international record of the massacre, including archive images, oral histories, official records, newspaper articles and other materials the USF team gathers.

It will be no small task. Memories of the massacre are hazy and details conflict. Nevertheless, Ottanelli said it’s the oral histories - the voices of the people - that will make the events of Asaba come alive.

“It humanizes what we’ve been reading,” he said. “It takes an event so far away and puts a human face to it. The testimony is very powerful. We’re honored and humbled by this awesome responsibility.”

For the survivors, a public acknowledgement of the deaths and a permanent memorial to their lost loved ones will bring a measure of justice that has been elusive for more than four decades.

“We can forgive but we should never, ever forget,” said Chinelo Egwuatu, 53, a 15-year Tampa resident who survived the Biafra-Nigerian civil war and post-war famine, although two of her siblings perished. “This is a good thing USF is doing. There is no way you can bring the people back, but you can at least acknowledge that it happened.”

Up until now, little has been recorded about the Asaba massacre. Details were hidden from the international press. Nigerian government officials refused to comment publicly. And an international observer team was accused of conducting a hasty, haphazard investigation in which it concluded no genocide had occurred.

This left survivors, particularly eyewitnesses to the event, with no sense of closure.

Asaba, a key Nigerian town populated by civilian government employees, doctors, lawyers, engineers, athletes and scholars of the influential Igbo ethnic community, was loyal to the Nigerian federal government. Nevertheless, the town was targeted by a faction of that same military government for annihilation.

No one is sure who gave the orders or why. Nor is anyone certain how many lives were lost when soldiers opened fire on the men and boys in town.

For Egwuatu, the war is embodied in the face of a little boy who was once her playmate. She was only 11-years-old in 1967 and, although she wasn’t a witness to the Asaba massacre, she remembers seeing body parts strewn on the village streets. She also recalls coming across the body of her friend.

“I’ll never forget the look in his eyes,” she said, rifling through her handbag for something to staunch the flow of tears. She pulled out a Little Caesars pizza napkin and dabbed her face.

“It was terrible. This was barbaric. You never expected human beings to behave like that. It was evil.”

“Evil” also is the word Ifeanyi Uraih used to describe what he witnessed that day.
He was living in Asaba with his parents and nine siblings when the federal troops came to town.

“They ordered everyone to come out to the town square. (Col. Ibrahim) Taiwo said it was time to dance around town and join our brethren, and he warned that everyone should come along,” he recalled.

The people did as they were told, thinking they were being invited to a victory party. They didn’t realize it was a ruse to coax all the men out of hiding. Suddenly, the celebratory atmosphere evaporated. Taiwo’s troops began separating the men from the women.

“They were honest with us,” said Uraih. “They told us they were going to kill us. They took us to the mounted machine guns. Then it dawned on us that it was true.”

Uraih estimates that 2,000 men stood in the killing field that day.

“I was standing with my older brother at the edge of the crowd. He was holding my hand. He had always taken care of me. We shared the same bed. He was the first to be dragged away by the soldiers. He let go of my hand and pushed me into the crowd. He was shot in the back. I could see the blood gushing from his back. He was the first victim of the massacre. Then all hell let loose.”

Uraih survived because he was buffered by bodies that were shot and fell on top of him.

“I lost count of time,” he said. “To this day, I live with the smell of the blood of my brethren that night. Even the heavens wept for the victims of this holocaust. Finally the bullets stopped.

Decades later, Uraih was in the reception room of a doctor’s office in London when Gen. Yakubu Gowon, head of the Nigerian military government at the time of the massacre, happened to walk in for an appointment.

“We talked and he said he sincerely regretted what occurred that day, that it was one of his greatest regrets,” said Uraih, adding that he believed Gowon. “I cannot tell this story without tears in my eyes, but I have no bitterness in my heart.”

Chief Philip Asiodu, who hailed from Asaba and was a member of Gowon’s cabinet at the time of the genocide, said he too has no room for bitterness despite the fact that his brother, Sydney Asiodu, a promising Olympic hurdler, long jumper and runner, was a victim of the massacre.

Asiodu, who later became chief economic adviser to the Nigerian president and minister for petroleum, said Asaba should have been the last village targeted by federal troops because it was populated by current and former Igbo civil servants loyal to the federal government.

It’s been reported that Taiwo had a master list containing the names of prominent citizens and civil servants targeted for death. Some believe that Gen. Murtala Mohammed, commander of the Second Division of the federal troops and Taiwo’s superior, wanted to rid himself of opposition so he could launch a coup. Mohammed later toppled Gowon to become head of state.

Like fellow Nigerians assembled at USF for the symposium, Asiodu said he’s supporting the Asaba Memorial Project because he believes the people need to know what happened.

“Once we do, I still have faith we can change the ethics of our current government and become the vanguard for African progress,” he said.

The truth may be a long time coming, however. Like those killed in the Asaba genocide, documents have long been buried or unavailable. “There will always be debate,” said Elizabeth Bird, USF professor of anthropology. “The official records are woefully inadequate.”

Bird pointed to the importance of the book Blood on the Niger as the first publication that drew attention to the massacre. Its author, Emma Okocha, himself a survivor, was crucial to the project – initially contacting Kimmerle, and bringing together the network of scholars, activists, and community members who attended the symposium.

Last year, Kimmerle and a research team traveled to Lagos, Nigeria where they investigated methods for human identification in collaboration with John Obafunwa, provost of the College of Medicine at Lagos State University. Kimmerle has done human rights work throughout the Balkans, Peru and Nigeria and her research team is working on new methods of identification, research for investigations of “cold cases” and forensic science education.

Kimmerle and her team also traveled to Asaba to meet with community leaders and began interviewing witnesses to the massacre. The work will involve more fieldwork over the next few years and is part of an effort to develop new methods and technologies to solve cold cases both in the United States and abroad. The project is supported financially by the National Institute of Justice.

The USF team hopes to launch the third phase of the project this spring when they travel to Asaba to begin the excavation and collect further information.

Once the project is completed, the people of Asaba can consider what type of memorial they would like to erect “so our children and our children’s children never forget what happened and so it will never happen again,” said Nwanze. “I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure this program succeeds. If you don’t honor the dead, what becomes of the path of the living?”

Story by D’Ann Lawrence White
A journalist for more than 25 years, White is a freelance writer reporting on behalf of USF.