Where Seattle Meets the World
It almost sounds too good to be true. In remote areas of Myanmar, a portable soy milk machine that runs without electricity, is cheap and delivers life-saving proteins and vitamins to malnourished orphans.
One family from Vancouver has made it their life’s work to keep the milk flowing.
30 Nov
Madhukar Chebrolum, of Redmond, swings at a pitch with his cricket bat during practice for the NW-iFusionIT team Thursday at Woodinville’s Northshore Sports Complex. (Photo by Colin Diltz/Seattle Times)
Behind a complex of warehouses in Woodinville, in a fluorescent-lit sports complex laid with AstroTurf and strung with netting, there’s a batsman stepping up to the pitch.
I’m at late-night cricket practice for The Moose, the traveling team of The Microsoft Cricket Club. It’s 9:00 on a work night but nobody’s going home anytime soon — they’ve got a national tournament in Florida to prepare for.
“Make sure you’re behind the net,” warns Vishwa Gaddamanugu, the gum-chewing coach. I’m standing alongside the automated pitching machine listening to the rhythm of pop, crack, thump as Gaddamanugu feeds ball after yellow dimpled ball into the machine to meet Vik Kothari’s long paddle-shaped bat.
I’m glad I heeded the warning a few moments later when a ball rings off the metal edge of the cage an inch right of my ear.
It is football season and I’ve made a promise to my Seahawks-loving husband to “really try and get into football” this year.
29 Nov
Joaquin Uy explains how Filipino activists were gunned down at this Seattle street corner in 1981. (Photo by Ansel Herz)
On Saturday, the Filipino activist group AnakBayan Seattle will celebrate its tenth anniversary as the first overseas chapter of the democratic youth organization, which is based in the Philippines.
But the history of Filipinos fighting for dignity and respect in Seattle reaches back further to over a century ago. This history isn’t taught in schools, and there are few, if any, public monuments to its impact.
On a rainy November afternoon, Joaquin Uy, one of the founding members of AnakBayan Seattle, showed how the struggles of Filipino writers, poets, workers, and community organizers are woven into this city’s brick and concrete. The past came alive as Uy guided us on a historical tour from the International District, to a dilapidated downtown street corner, to the steps of King County Courthouse, and finally to a hilltop Queen Anne cemetery after dark. To learn this history, watch this video of the tour below. More
29 Nov
Garcia (left) celebrates with fellow UW students Jessica Oscoy and Tania Santiago as Obama’s reelection is announced at a UW watch party. (Photo by Joshua Bessex/The University of Washington Daily)
Yuriana Garcia, 20, is an ambitious, soft-spoken Honors student majoring in Human Centered Design & Engineering at UW. She has a passion for bioengineering, and an impressive record working on research projects in genomics and microbiology.
She’s also an undocumented immigrant.
Until recently, her dreams of a PhD and a career using technological innovation to aid development in third world countries were tempered by the uncertain reality of life as an undocumented student.
President Obama’s re-election was met with jubilation by young undocumented immigrants like Garcia. It meant that his recently established Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was here to stay – for another four years, at least.
27 Nov
As a mixed race, Filipina, 2nd generation immigrant, Black, round, queer, 1st generation college student, daughter of farm workers from a military family, it was pretty hard to find my reflection in mainstream media growing up.
But I found another world of people who, just like me, did not “fit” with the mainstream, but were connected to each other online, talking and creating art about life on the margins.
I found other music and videos that, instead of re-traumatizing or reinforcing oppressions, empowered me with the belief that I had a place in the world.
The OuterSpaces Tour 2012: Power in the Margins coming to Seattle on Thursday night is a perfect example.
The tour unites Brooklyn spoken word duo Climbing PoeTree, Detroit based hip hop activist Invincible, and Cuban emcees Las Krudas into an “international, bilingual, pansexual, polyracial, multi-media, cross-genre collaboration of artists.”
by Janice Blackmore
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03 Dec
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