Baran didn’t grow up behind a white picket fence. His mother went through a series of divorces, and that brought a variety of characters into the house. These were the kind of men who Baran said “never sat with their backs to the door.” He saw drug deals go down, and he witnessed what he thought was mafia activity, but he never felt uncomfortable with any of it. He didn’t know until he went to college that what he’d been through wasn’t so “normal.”

This instability is at the heart of why Baran wants to have complete control over his environment and why he wants his work to affect the way people live.

He’s an architect who designs buildings and homes that might be able to give others what he never had himself.

“My intention was to find something that I could do without much interference,” Baran said. “Where I could do what I thought was right, both in terms of design and sustainability and construction.”

To escape this inner conflict as well as the “illicit activity” that he was regularly surrounded by in his hometown of Huntington Beach, Baran began to draw to establish a “stable medium.” “I was part of a social class that should have limited my success,” he said. “For most people that I know from then, it did.  Maybe drawing let me escape from that.”

Baran’s drawings eventually led him to a career in architecture. Throughout college at the University of Southern California, he struggled with history and theory but always excelled in design. USC, he says, is where everything changed.

“I went from thinking of architecture as this prefabricated, regurgitated, typologies of what you see walking down the street and to thinking it is much more exciting than that,” Baran said. “It’s more of an art form.”
Baran developed his own philosophy of architecture, modeled after the godfather of modern-day architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright. Rather than tearing buildings down and creating a new environment, Baran, like Wright, believed in contextualizing his designs, sustainably creating structures that build on the surrounding environment.

Baran came to the East Bay because of a job opportunity and found beauty in West Oakland. He was intrigued by the area’s mix of industry and housing. He admired the Victorians, the lines drawn by the freeways and the visual impact of the cranes hovering above. West Oakland, he says, had a character all its own.
“Things like the new urbanism and anti-sprawl movements tend to be very utopian,” Baran said. “They tend to try and sweep things under the rug and recreate from a blank slate. West Oakland green design is grittier than that… It’s not a utopian picture. It’s urban, it’s raw and it’s had years of turmoil.”

Baran, who says the hype around green design makes him nauseous, happened into the field when he made the connection that sustainable design was purely good design. West Oakland, he says, is the perfect location for good design, mainly because of the conditions caused by industry, the Port and the freeway. Some 2,500 trucks come through the Port, and West Oakland has one of the highest asthma rates in the region.

“Green design should be something you apply everywhere,” he said. “It’s more appropriate in West Oakland because the environment there is so problematic.

Baran started his career as a green architect by designing a truck stop prototype: a construction project that would both build on and improve the streets where the West Oakland Bart line and 880 intersect. These infrastructures have wiped out the streets below and turned them into what Baran refers to as “zero streets.”
These streets are “zeroed out” because properties on them have been deleted from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Geographic Information System database. The freeway literally cuts through urban West Oakland, erasing the properties that stand in its way. Baran, who wrote his thesis on the subject, defines Zero Streets as “conditions that represent the temporal and physical discontinuity of the urban fabric.”

The area surrounding West Oakland’s zero streets suffer side effects from  the intrusion of highways and industry. Urban conditions such as air pollution from the Port and trucking, ground contamination and debris. The zero streets under the West Oakland Bart stop are dark alleyways covered in trash and abandoned belongings. There is a fog of pollution and diesel emissions.

Baran’s design for the truck stop reflects his philosophy that architecture should be contextual. It builds on what already exists at the site and improves those conditions. Baran envisioned a prototype that would feature a bio-fuel station, a tank-cleaning station where truckers can dispose of waste, and an emissions-testing scale.

Rather than “adapting” to the existing urban conditions, says Baran, the truck stop “extracts” from them. While a truck stop may seem counterintuitive, Baran says the trucks aren’t going away, and the best way to address the issue is to admit the conditions and try to enhance the quality of life by building on the existing circumstances.

This is where the concepts of the truck stop prototype and the West Oakland house collide: the idea that architecture should build off of the environment in which it is being constructed, rather than tearing down and starting anew.
Two months ago, Baran broke ground on a single-family house at 3245 Helen Street on the border of Emeryville and West Oakland. The property sits next to a dilapidated house, which Baran says has been there since he purchased the property two years ago. In the background is a warehouse adorned with metal sculptures. The area is entrenched with industrialization, and Baran intends to integrate these qualities into his work, making the house look like an industrial space.

The three-bedroom house will be 1,500 square feet (1,800 with the garden). Initially, Baran and his wife will live there, and then the rest is up to the market. Baran’s ultimate goal is to sell the house back to members of the community, but if the market remains tough for sellers, he may use it as a portfolio project to show off to potential investors.

The metal roof is the most expensive element of the house. To maintain sustainability and help the house fit into its community, Baran chose metal that allows minimal heat absorption and is a more sustainable product than an asphalt shingle. It will also hang over the side of the house, providing shade in the summer. For the winter months, Baran plans to paint the outer walls a dark color to absorb heat.

Baran plans to re-use 75 percent of the materials he tears down. The house also features radiant heat floors and cross-ventilation, which flows easily through the house because of the “open plan,” another one of Wrights trademarks. The roof, walls and floors are seamlessly interwoven so that air can flow freely through the rooms. Unlike usual floor plans, an open plan requires a large stretch of floor with very little interruption by walls or furniture.

Baran is working in collaboration with Kathy Kuhner, another green architect who’s developed approximately 60 other units in the area, from townhouses to warehouses. Kuhner is working on the front house, elevating the dilapidated original house and creating green space underneath.

While Baran admits that the sustainable qualities of the house are not exclusive to West Oakland, he believes the specifics of the location makes the area uniquely positioned to both adopt and adapt to green culture. The proximity to Silicon Valley provides access to innovation. Baran’s projects are inspired by the area’s long history of industry, with a port approaching it’s half-century anniversary, and the culture of resistance—referring to the Black Panthers in particular—that define West Oakland.

“I think we can fit it into a culture that isn’t necessarily the image that we have of ‘utopia’ or ‘sustainable design,’” Baran said. “Some people need to have lost a loved one or suffered a divorce to be able to appreciate a beauty that suggests an exception to the ugly world.  I think this might have been true for me as well.”

Down the long stretch of University Avenue from the freeway to campus, between sari shops, Pakistani restaurants, thrift stores, and gas stations, sits The Way Christian Center, a storefront Pentecostal church led by Pastor Mike McBride. In this city, whose granola reputation is dominated by the activism of the 1960s and whose city council will not say “under God” when reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, Pastor Mike is packing the church to praise the Lord.xanax xr be abused! Is Xanax Safe xanax and breast feeding
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“How many of you know God is everything?” he asks his willing congregation from the altar.

Like many church services, this one starts with a hymn—but in this case Pastor Mike is the lead singer. The altar seems more like a stage as he takes to the mike, with two backup singers behind him, and members of the congregation on drums and the organ. Every person in the sanctuary is standing and clapping out a beat as he sings the lines, and they repeat them.

“I’ve got a reason to life my voice. I’ve got a reason to rejoice,” he sings.

The 33-year-old has the energy and enthusiasm of a bubble gum pop star, and he needs it.
On this Sunday, he’s encouraging his parishioners to help provide Christmas gifts to children of incarcerated parents and to cook a meal on Christmas Eve to feed those who can’t afford to eat. Tomorrow, he will head back to his job as director of student services at Berkeley Technological Academy, a public continuation school for kids who have either been kicked out of Berkeley High, come out of juvenile hall, or chosen to leave the mainstream public school. As director of the UC Berkeley Black Christian Ministry, he will help mentor African-American students who make up a mere three percent of the University population.

McBride is working to help that other Berkeley, the one that knows the city is not just an uber-liberal mecca, the one where gang violence and drug abuse are genuine problems, and where not everyone can graduate from high school.

At B-Tech, some students start their senior year 90 credits short of graduation. Some have trouble reading. And some come straight from juvenile hall.

“The notion of the school internally, externally and with the city is that this is a dumping ground. We are trying to lift an entire program outside of its historical trajectory. This is not an easy thing,” said Principle Vincent Diaz.

The school environment often forces McBride to be tough and drop his jovial manner.
“My version of discipline is not suspension-driven. I know how to talk to the kids, so that they’re like, ‘I don’t want to talk to Pastor Mike.’“

On a recent day when McBride was sitting on a bench in the school courtyard, a boy stormed out of the classroom, flinging a string of expletives back at the door he had thrown open. McBride immediately dropped his conversation and called him to the table.
The boy looked away from McBride as he explained that another student wouldn’t let him reneg on an iPod/cell phone swap. Students are not permitted to use either in class.
“Give it to me. I’m not playing with you, boy,” he said, as he confiscated the iPod.

When another student was sent to the office for misbehaving in class, McBride told the student to stop complaining. “This is not the world we live in. You are not the victim, man. That’s the problem. You got to suck it up,” he said.

So far, Diaz and McBride seem to be making big strides. In 2003, B-Tech’s dropout rate was 24 percent. By 2006 it had fallen by half to 12 percent. According to Diaz, about 70 percent of the class of 2008 received their diplomas, and they managed to send five or six students to college.

McBride’s philosophy of tough love stems from his own childhood in Hunters Point, one of San Francisco’s toughest neighborhoods. Some of the kids that he grew up with are in prison—one for life.

“I’ve been thankful for whatever reason God gave me a chance to be able to help—a lot of my friends didn’t make it out of the neighborhood,” he said.

And yet McBride is a married 33 year-old pastor who holds a BA from Bethany College in Scotts Valley, CA and an MA from the prestigious Duke University Divinity School.
He believes was able to succeed because he had strong male role models in his father, cousins, and two teachers who helped keep him out of street life.

“I honestly think that most kids want to know that you think that they’re important enough to take time to work with ‘em. A lot of the time people on the streets are willing to take time and teach them negative behavior.”

McBride has no tolerance for negative behavior, both because of the behavior itself, and because it perpetuates negative stereotypes about young men of color.

In 1999, McBride was pulled over by the San Jose Police Department and roughed up so badly that he had damage to ligaments in his shoulder and arm. When he stepped out of the car, the police officers grabbed him by the groin, and when he jumped they threw him against the car. They claimed that the 23 year-old youth pastor had been swerving in and out of his lane.

They held him for 30 minutes but didn’t arrest him. He says that they told him if they had been in the South, they would just have beaten him up and thrown him on a lawn somewhere.

Lawyers he met after the incident with told him that his best hope was to settle out of court: chances were he’d face an all-white jury. If he chose to settle, he wouldn’t be able to discuss the case publicly, but being able to talk about the case was really all that he was interested in. He didn’t care about the money.
Instead, he joined with state, local and national initiatives to fight racial profiling. The City of San Jose began voluntarily collecting data on racial profiling in 1999.

He tells the story with no trace of anger or irony, and says that he really isn’t mad anymore. He gave his anger up to God a long time ago. But it’s still a good lesson, both for his kids at B-tech, and for the students in the Black Christian Ministry he advises at Cal. Even accomplished students of color with no criminal record still face a criminal stereotype.

Felicia Nibungco, a Black Campus Ministry team leader, sees Pastor Mike as a vital role model “to young black men, who have a lot of pressure on them, especially at Cal.”

African American males make up about only 1 percent of the student population, and there are often more leadership positions than there are students to fill them, she said.
Students of both sexes see Pastor Mike as a role model.

“He’s really been the wise male figure for me since I’m far away from home, making sure I stay grounded, but letting me know it’s okay,” said Graves. “He’s a very cool pastor, but he knows we’re young. He’s always there giving me advice.”

Brittani Graves, a third-year student who has been involved with BCM leadership for two years, sees the forgiving side of Pastor Mike.

“If something goes wrong, I’ve never seen him down. It’s like, there’s a reason for that.
There’s a knowledge that everything happens for a reason,” she said.

Imari Childes describes him more succinctly: “He’s hip-hop’s answer to the Lord.”

McBride’s youth helps him relate to students. He looks far younger than his age, with a shaved head and a smile that takes over his face. He is a Lakers fan, has a profile on MySpace, and updated his Facebook status as soon as he found out his wife was pregnant. He is silly; he jokes around and openly says that he left UC Davis after his second year because he flunked out—because he played too many video games.

He shows affection for his students, and according to Diaz, he was “the first person at B-tech to use the word love. Now we say it to each other. Everyone says it to each other,” he said.

McBride uses the word love for his students at B-tech and Cal, as well as his parishioners. In his service, he has his church members tell each other “the Jesus in me loves the Jesus in you.”

“He is all about living with Christ in your life,” said his wife, Cherise, first lady of the church. “In this city, that’s hard to do. There’s a certain stigma around Christianity. It’s an inspiration to see him not change himself in different environments.”
McBride’s influence extends beyond his students and his parish—all the way to the City Council, one of the city’s most secular bodies. Several council members and at least one school board member sought his endorsement in the 2008 election.

But, frustrated with the problems that plague South and West Berkeley—the city’s lower-income areas—McBride decided to file papers to run for the City Council District Two seat against incumbent Darryl Moore only two hours before the deadline. He gathered 30 signatures, but only 18 of them qualified, and he needed 20 to be eligible to run. In the end, his quick decision to run proved complicated.

“That created some bad feelings,” he said. “They thought I had wanted to do something against Darryl, but that wasn’t it. I see a lot of issues and problems that go unaddressed, or not addressed with enough vigor.”

But the experience taught him a lesson, both about running for office, and about giving out endorsements—which some candidates sought out. From now on, McBride plans to stay neutral.

And with the church, BCM, B-tech, a new role as the executive director of Berkeley Organizing Churches for Action and a new baby girl due in March, McBride has plenty to keep him busy. He doesn’t need a City Council seat to be an agent of change; he’s got the pulpit.

“One of my mentors told me the freest space in America is the black pulpit—all supported and run by people with their backs against the wall,” he said.

One of his parishioners, Nancy Williams, was one of those people. The West Berkeley resident was a long-time drug addict who had lost her only son to gun violence in front of her house. She had been involved in religion before as a Baptist and a Jehovah’s Witness, but had never felt anything like the “abundance of peace and joy” she felt at The Way.
“People like me out there dealing with drug addiction, and gun violence, to experience that turned my life around. I turned it over to God. Here I am, Lord. Do what you want to do,” she said.

On May 1, Williams will have been clean for three years. She has also quit smoking cigarettes and drinking.

“It’s a tremendous blessing to be a member of this church. Pastor Mike, my hat’s off to him. I thank God for him,” she said.

With all of the responsibility McBride carries, it would not be surprising if he were exhausted. Instead, he is the most joyful person in the church—which is a hard contest to win.

“Folks believe, and I certainly believe that there is a sustainable power that we have from God when we are attempting to do what’s right.”

Choreographer and Oakland native Carla Service has performed with the likes of Madonna and taught the art of dance to hundreds, but success didn’t come easy.

During her youth, she danced away the pain of an abusive upbringing, leaving home at the age of 15.

By 17, she was dominating dance floors in San Francisco nightclubs, and quickly found her way to Hollywood fame and a well-deserved reputation as a “master of movement.”

But the untrained dancer realized she wanted more.

In 1994, at the age of 30, she returned to the Bay Area with a new purpose: to teach Oakland youth how to dance to the beat of life.

Meet Carla Service and the people whose lives she has rocked for more than a decade.

]]> http://eastbaywestonline.org/2008/12/10/dancer-trades-hollywood-fame-for-oakland-youth/feed/ 10 http://eastbaywestonline.org/2008/12/09/a-victim-talks-about-the-night-of-her-attack/ http://eastbaywestonline.org/2008/12/09/a-victim-talks-about-the-night-of-her-attack/#comments Tue, 09 Dec 2008 18:56:53 +0000 hahmed http://eastbaywestonline.org/?p=2405 By Huda Ahmed/ Oakland Crime happens to people everyday, but it’s the emotional toll on victims that is often overlooked. This is a story of a woman who was beaten and robbed over 20 years ago. The incident still haunts her despite the passage of time.

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Baran didn’t grow up behind a white picket fence. His mother went through a series of divorces, and that brought a variety of characters into the house. These were the kind of men who Baran said “never sat with their backs to the door.” He saw drug deals go down, and he witnessed what he thought was mafia activity, but he never felt uncomfortable with any of it. He didn’t know until he went to college that what he’d been through wasn’t so “normal.”

This instability is at the heart of why Baran wants to have complete control over his environment and why he wants his work to affect the way people live.

He’s an architect who designs buildings and homes that might be able to give others what he never had himself.

“My intention was to find something that I could do without much interference,” Baran said. “Where I could do what I thought was right, both in terms of design and sustainability and construction.”

To escape this inner conflict as well as the “illicit activity” that he was regularly surrounded by in his hometown of Huntington Beach, Baran began to draw to establish a “stable medium.” “I was part of a social class that should have limited my success,” he said. “For most people that I know from then, it did.  Maybe drawing let me escape from that.”

Baran’s drawings eventually led him to a career in architecture. Throughout college at the University of Southern California, he struggled with history and theory but always excelled in design. USC, he says, is where everything changed.

“I went from thinking of architecture as this prefabricated, regurgitated, typologies of what you see walking down the street and to thinking it is much more exciting than that,” Baran said. “It’s more of an art form.”

Baran developed his own philosophy of architecture, modeled after the godfather of modern-day architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright. Rather than tearing buildings down and creating a new environment, Baran, like Wright, believed in contextualizing his designs, sustainably creating structures that build on the surrounding environment.

Baran came to the East Bay because of a job opportunity and found beauty in West Oakland. He was intrigued by the area’s mix of industry and housing. He admired the Victorians, the lines drawn by the freeways and the visual impact of the cranes hovering above. West Oakland, he says, had a character all its own.

“Things like the new urbanism and anti-sprawl movements tend to be very utopian,” Baran said. “They tend to try and sweep things under the rug and recreate from a blank slate. West Oakland green design is grittier than that… It’s not a utopian picture. It’s urban, it’s raw and it’s had years of turmoil.”

Baran, who says the hype around green design makes him nauseous, happened into the field when he made the connection that sustainable design was purely good design. West Oakland, he says, is the perfect location for good design, mainly because of the conditions caused by industry, the Port and the freeway. Some 2,500 trucks come through the Port, and West Oakland has one of the highest asthma rates in the region.

“Green design should be something you apply everywhere,” he said. “It’s more appropriate in West Oakland because the environment there is so problematic.”

Baran started his career as a green architect by designing a truck stop prototype: a construction project that would both build on and improve the streets where the West Oakland Bart line and 880 intersect. These infrastructures have wiped out the streets below and turned them into what Baran refers to as “zero streets.”

These streets are “zeroed out” because properties on them have been deleted from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Geographic Information System database. The freeway literally cuts through urban West Oakland, erasing the properties that stand in its way. Baran, who wrote his thesis on the subject, defines Zero Streets as “conditions that represent the temporal and physical discontinuity of the urban fabric.”

The area surrounding West Oakland’s zero streets suffer side effects from  the intrusion of highways and industry. Urban conditions such as air pollution from the Port and trucking, ground contamination and debris. The zero streets under the West Oakland Bart stop are dark alleyways covered in trash and abandoned belongings. There is a fog of pollution and diesel emissions.

Baran’s design for the truck stop reflects his philosophy that architecture should be contextual. It builds on what already exists at the site and improves those conditions. Baran envisioned a prototype that would feature a bio-fuel station, a tank-cleaning station where truckers can dispose of waste, and an emissions-testing scale.

Rather than “adapting” to the existing urban conditions, says Baran, the truck stop “extracts” from them. While a truck stop may seem counterintuitive, Baran says the trucks aren’t going away, and the best way to address the issue is to admit the conditions and try to enhance the quality of life by building on the existing circumstances.

This is where the concepts of the truck stop prototype and the West Oakland house collide: the idea that architecture should build off of the environment in which it is being constructed, rather than tearing down and starting anew.

Two months ago, Baran broke ground on a single-family house at 3245 Helen Street on the border of Emeryville and West Oakland. The property sits next to a dilapidated house, which Baran says has been there since he purchased the property two years ago. In the background is a warehouse adorned with metal sculptures. The area is entrenched with industrialization, and Baran intends to integrate these qualities into his work, making the house look like an industrial space.

The three-bedroom house will be 1,500 square feet (1,800 with the garden). Initially, Baran and his wife will live there, and then the rest is up to the market. Baran’s ultimate goal is to sell the house back to members of the community, but if the market remains tough for sellers, he may use it as a portfolio project to show off to potential investors.

The metal roof is the most expensive element of the house. To maintain sustainability and help the house fit into its community, Baran chose metal that allows minimal heat absorption and is a more sustainable product than an asphalt shingle. The dark color of the exterior walls will absorb heat in the winter, and in the summer it will in the shadow of the roof.

The back house is all new construction but Baran says he will recycle 70 to 75 percent of the construction waste. The house also features radiant heat floors and cross-ventilation, which flows easily through the house because of the “open plan,” another one of Wrights trademarks. The roof, walls and floors are seamlessly interwoven so that air can flow freely through the rooms. Unlike usual floor plans, an open plan requires a large stretch of floor with very little interruption by walls or furniture.

Baran is working in collaboration with Kathy Kuhner, another local developer who’s worked on approximately 60 other units in the area, from townhouses to warehouses. Kuhner is working on the front house, elevating the dilapidated original house and creating green space underneath.

While Baran admits that the sustainable qualities of the house are not exclusive to West Oakland, he believes the specifics of the location makes the area uniquely positioned to both adopt and adapt to green culture. The proximity to Silicon Valley provides access to innovation. Baran’s projects are inspired by the area’s long history of industry, with a port approaching it’s half-century anniversary, and the culture of resistance—referring to the Black Panthers in particular—that define West Oakland.

“I think we can fit it into a culture that isn’t necessarily the image that we have of ‘utopia’ or ‘sustainable design,’” Baran said. “Some people need to have lost a loved one or suffered a divorce to be able to appreciate a beauty that suggests an exception to the ugly world.  I think this might have been true for me as well.”

By Huda Ahmed/Oakland Zemzem Mahmoud stands behind the meat counter of a grocery store barking orders at male employees. She tells them to clean the floors, throw away rotten fruit boxes and where to place incoming deliveries. At 5 foot 2, with light skin and wide black eyes, the Eritarian mother of three knows how to run a smooth operation. With her husband, she owns and operates a Halal market and butcher shop in East Oakland, where they sell meat that has been killed in Islamic manner.

Her daily uniform consists of a beige long sleeved-shirt, cloth pants, a gray apron, a headscarf and a piece of gum that never leaves her mouth. But her responsibilities in the store aren’t about keeping things clean or operating the cash register. Instead, she wields a meat cleaver with a surgeon’s accuracy, and for the last eight years, she has worked as a butcher. But a woman in a Halal butcher shop is a rare sight, and some customers aren’t quite used to the idea.

“We are Muslims and she is a lady,” says Muslih Dabashi, a customer who agreed to talk only outside the store. “The woman should stay at home and the man works. She can work only when it is necessary. If the husband has money, then he can hire someone else.”

The Oakland Halal market is located on the corner of 31st street and Telegraph Avenue. It stands next to another Halal deli store, an Islamic bookstore, an Ethiopian restaurant, a health clinic, and a number retail stores and vacant apartments and office spaces. The area around the store is a heavily Muslim community. Some women dress in loose conservative clothes and some are covered from head to toe. Men wear western clothes or traditional Arab gowns and kuffiya or head cap.

The couple opened the store eight years ago. Inside, there is a long glass cooler counter with trays of fruit and vegetables on both sides. Meat slicers sit in front of a wall covered with posters of Islamic holy places side by side with portraits of president-elect Obama. Red bags of garlic gloves hang from the ceiling. The place is crowded with customers from all over the area who are there to buy Halal (permissible) meat.

Mahmoud goes inside the big freezer, comes out hauling a whole carcass over her shoulder and smiles as she lays it under the electric cutting machine. She cuts the meat very quickly into the precise sizes the customers want.

Mahmoud started working in the store when her husband could not keep up with all the customers. She wanted to be more than just a cashier. “I asked my husband to show me how to cut meat because I wanted to know everything about our business, and he did,” she said. “I began to practice every day, and now I’m a professional butcher for eight years.”

It was a big step for a woman from a Muslim background. Most of the rules that keep women at home caring for the children are more related to culture and tradition than to religion. There is no evidence in Islamic Sharia or Quran that forbids woman from work or study, instead, the Holy Book and Noble Hadeeths (prophet’s sayings) describe both God and his Prophet Muhammad urging women to work beside their husbands in tasks that fit them physically.

She laughs when female customers cringe when they see blood on her gloves as she cuts meat, and they wonder why she does it. “They ask me all the time why I accept this hard work and why I do not let my own husband do it,” she said in her broken English. “I tell them that I like what I’m doing. It is like any other job.”

While some people believe it is an unusual job for a woman, not everyone has a problem with it. Farook Mayet, a Pakistani cab driver, says, “It does not bother me, man and woman are equal. It is okay.”
Employees follow her orders without argument and respect her strength. “She is very strong; she picks up the whole meat herself. I do not see that often,” said Hewlett Broderick, a part-time employee. “She teaches me how to cut meat. She is a great teacher.”

Mahmoud believes women are strong. “Women can do anything they want if they have interest and if their husbands allow them.” According to the Muslims’ Holy Book, men are in charge of women. “If we go back to Ethiopia, I will work there too, but only if my husband lets me. I can not argue with him because we live together.”

While she helps out at the shop, she doesn’t neglect her duties at home. The 34 year-old wife and mother gets up at 6:30 a.m. to make breakfast for the family before dropping off her three children at school. She then goes back to her house in East Oakland to finish housework before heading to her work at the grocery store around noon. She finishes her work around six or seven o’clock and returns home to prepare dinner for her family and prepares for the next day.

She turns around looking at her daughters while they are studying in a rear room of the store and dreams that they may have a better life and education in U.S. than she did when she was in Ethiopia. When asked if she wants her children to learn her profession, she says “I do not mind if they want to help me, only if they are happy to do it. I do not want my children to do the same thing. I want them to succeed, finish college and get the highest degrees. Butchering is a hard work, and I want the best for them.”

San Francisco lost Mayor George Mascone and Supervisor Harvey Milk on November 27, 1978.  On the thirtieth anniversary of their assassination, families, friends and supporters of the two men gathered in front of City Hall.  Then they marched down to the Castro to hold a rally in front of the store that was once Milk’s camera shop.  Many marchers remembered the legacy of the two men who changed San Francisco politics forever.

Michael Sturtz, founder of the Crucible in West Oakland

The brick warehouse on the corner of 7th and Union radiates heat, beckoning the curious to enter the shop on a chilly December afternoon. You walk through the doors into a small office, but that gives you a misleading first impression. Founder Michael Sturtz, a relaxed character adorned in all black, opens the next door to reveal a 56,000 square feet maze of industrial art studios. The hum of a furnace echoes through the halls. The bang of a hammer on metal booms from the blacksmith’s studio. A creative energy fills up the massive space.

The Crucible teaches people how to weld, how to work with metal and how to work with fire. It started in 1999 when Sturtz opened up shop in West Berkeley. After years of dissatisfaction with traditional arts training, Sturtz was looking for a way to counteract the competitive, non-collaborative environment he experienced at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

“School was frustrating and I felt I could do a better job,” Sturtz said. “I wanted a more hands-on and community-based experienced.”

Six months after leaving Chicago, Sturtz set up shop in West Berkeley. With a $1,750 grant and $20,000 of personal investment he rented a 6,000 square foot shop that became the Crucible.

Wood working is gaining traction amongst artists who come into the Crucible

The Crucible has exploded in popularity. It went from renting the small shop in West Berkeley to owning the 56,000 square feet in West Oakland.  The Crucible’s budget skyrocketed from $50,000 to over $3 million, due to its programmatic growth. Sturtz attributes this to widespread viral exposure.

“There’s a creative buzz or vibe that is contagious, so word of mouth really helped our growth,” he said.

The Crucible also holds special events now and then to do a little bit of showing off In the first week of January, the shop will put on its 10th annual fire ballet fundraising event, where various artists—from aerialists to dancers to designers—put on an elaborate performance of fire and dance. Past performances include Romeo and Juliet and Stravinsky’s Fire Bird. This year’s performance is Dracul Prince of Fire, the legend of Dracula’s father.

The props for the show are all made in-house, and some are even made on stage during the production. Actors pour molten glass and metal into molds as sparks and neon yellows shock audiences.

Students use torches to weld and create everything from sculptures to bicycles.

But the Crucible remains primarily an educational institution. Sturtz and his crew run approximately 180 classes a session, which are attended by 5,000 adults every year and anywhere between 3,000 and 4,000 kids. Welding, glass and jewelry making have always been popular, but more recently the woodworking and new kinetics classes, such as a robotics class for kids, are hot these days.

The word “crucible,” a vessel used for melting metal and glass at high temperatures, also connotes a trial or test of belief and a place where concentrated forces come together to cause change and development.  The shop, Sturtz says, embodies all these meanings of the word.

For more information on the Crucible and special upcoming events visit TheCrucible.org.

Growing up, Virada Chatikul was a shy girl. She was too embarrassed to speak in front of her classmates in school.  But that all changed one day when she was 15 and was attending the traditional dance performance at the Berkeley Thai Temple Sunday Food Offering.

“I really wanted to be part of a group that I could really identify with myself as a Thai American growing up in San Francisco,” said Chatikul, a second-generation Thai American. “I really cannot imagine what trajectory my life would have taken if I had not been part of this program.”

Sunday brunch at the Berkeley Thai Temple

But the program might be coming to an end. Even though the temple has been offering brunch for more than 15 years, they’ll have to stop unless the Berkeley Zoning Adjustment Board grants a new permit,   A meeting on the permit is scheduled for January.

 The problem emerged when the temple applied for a permit to expand its sanctuary in April. The city found that the Thai temple had been violating their original permit, obtained in 1992, which allowed the religious institution to hold food-offering services only three times a year.

The Sunday brunch, which started as a small social gathering for Thai Americans, has over the years expanded by word of mouth, sometimes attracting more than 600 people every week, including non-Thai American or Buddhists who love Thai food.

Berkeley Zoning Adjustment Board hearing on Sep. 26th ( courtesy of the Berkeley Thai Temple)

The temple immediately reapplied for a new permit to match the weekly food-offering tradition.  However, 19 neighbors charged the temple for illegally running a restaurant business. They claimed the Sunday brunch was creating noise, unpleasant smells and unwanted parking, and asked the city not to grant a new permit.

“The temple did not anticipate the future activity of growth,” said Debora Sheen, a staff attorney for the Asian Law Caucus, a civil rights organization which supports the Thai temple. “You do not really know that you are not in compliance because you had so much support from community.”

Center: Virada Chatikul

After holding three mediations with the neighbors, the temple made concessions — it secured parking spaces for the Sunday brunch-goers and organized a group to pick up trash, even trash not from the Sunday brunch.

“If the Sunday brunch closes down, virtually, the temple closes down,” said Christina Jirachachavalwong, a Thai temple volunteer, who has been a member of the temple for more than 10 years.

The Sunday Food Offering is a crucial part of merit making — the Thai Buddhist religious practice in which monks earn merit by providing religious guidance and food.

Seventy-five percent of the temple’s income comes from the brunch and finances cultural activities the temple offers, such as free language classes, Thai dance and music classes, maintenance of the facility, and sustaining the eight residing and visiting monks. Jirachachavalwong said the temple is already suffering financially — their monthly income went down by half since August, as a result of cutting the food-serving hours. They used to serve the food from 8:30am to 2:30pm. But in response to the neighbor’s request, they now serve from 10 am to 1 pm.

The Thai temple, which has been at the spot for 27 years,  has served as a second home for Thai Americans, and the service offered by the temple is essential for younger generations’ sense of identity.

“I used to hate coming here,” said Neon Kulavitaya, a senior student volunteer from Daly City, whose parents sent him to Sunday language class when he was little. “Now I feel the Temple makes me feel more unique about myself.”

Christina Jirachachavalwong and her daughter, Navi Emiliano

“I come here to pass it on to my daughter so that she knows who she is and can become tri-cultural,” said Jirachachavalwong, whose four-year old daughter is half Thai, half Mexican. “I think it is more important for her to realize who she is and know the language and tradition.”

However, some neighbors say that the city is being too lenient with the temple, and has turned a blind eye on the temple’s outright violation of the use permit.

“This is a restaurant. It is in the Zagat,” said John Taylor, referring to a local resturaunt guide. Taylor has been living right behind the temple for more than 20 years. He said that he enjoyed the Sunday brunch many times, and admitted that the temple has made improvements in cleaning up the streets. However, he advocated that the temple should find an alternative place for the brunch. “The temple should separate commercial and spiritual,” he said.

The majority of the neighbors are sympathetic to the temple. The temple has collected 2,200 petitions, of which 118 petitions come from neighbors who live within three blocks.

“The temple is a symbol of diversity in Berkeley,” said Helge Osterhold, a neighbor originally from Germany.

“Food is amazing, and people are genuinely sweet and nice,” said Jeff White, a neighbor who lives across the street. “I think it is horrible the city of Berkeley deny a permit based on the complaints of the few ignorant neighbors.”

The temple is getting ready for the city’s final decision in January. It will submit the noise inspection results, which found the noise level around the food serving area to be 66 decibels, which is within federal standards for residential areas.

However, Chatikul is uneasy about the future of her beloved second home. “I do not even know what to say, if it were to disappear. I think it would be a huge loss,” she said. “ Speaking out for the temple is my way of merit making to give back to the temple for what I got from them.”