Healers show the way to resist

Warren County Head Start heading for closure

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When she was 3 or 4, my daughter Tam had to get several shots during a single doctor’s visit, and because of her fear of needles, I had to hold her still for the nurses, which was much more difficult than you would expect.

She was suffused with tears afterward. She shuffled out of the exam room, and Kathleen Braico, our pediatrician, spotted her and said, “Oh, someone’s having a bad day. Would you like a hug?” and when Tam nodded, she enveloped her.

In recent years, Braico has been opening her arms to refugee families from overseas. She founded Adirondack Welcome Circle in 2021, recruiting her husband, also a pediatrician, and other people she knew to help her. The group has brought a Ukrainian and a Colombian family to the area and, most recently, a Rohingya mom and dad and their two small children, who had been living in the notorious Cox’s Bazar refugee camp in Bangladesh.

The Welcome Circle doesn’t just bring the families here; its members find housing for them and help the adults get jobs and the kids enroll in school and support them for months, until they can support themselves.

The Adirondack Regional Immigration Collaborative has a broader scope — promoting and supporting the immigration of not just refugees but other immigrants to the area. But both groups owe much to retired or partly retired doctors and nurses in leadership positions, such as Jim Fuchs, who practiced alongside the Braicos at Adirondack Pediatrics; Richard Leach, an internist who specialized in infectious diseases; nurse-practitioner Ruth Fish, who specialized in Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias; and nurse Diane Collins, who worked at Glens Falls Hospital as an RN case manager, helping patients make arrangements for their recovery when they went home.

“It’s service,” Collins said. “I think a lot of people in health care are drawn to doing something good.”

“That generation went into medicine because it was the humanitarian thing to do. We want to do something good in the world,” Fish said.

The urge to do something good has taken on a keen edge since Jan. 20, when Donald Trump became president of the country and immediately began revoking the right of immigrants here legally to remain in the United States and undermining the civil rights of all Americans.

The helpers do not restrict themselves to a single cause. Collins is also a cofounder of North Country Earth Action, an environmental advocacy group, and of North Country Light Brigade, which holds up lighted messages in prominent spots along local roadways.

Kathleen Braico was for 29 years the medical director of Double H Ranch, a camp in Lake Luzerne for seriously ill children; helped run the Amorak Youth program in Hudson Falls and Fort Edward until the Strand Theater took it over; and still participates with Glens Falls Medical Mission, which brings medical care and other services to a rural part of Guatemala.

“I don’t know how to play golf. I’m not one to go to a condo in Florida,” she said.

Fish spends an hour a day sending out emails on issues to people all over the country and calls the offices of Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski and Maine Senator Susan Collins almost every day and stays in touch with some of her patients, offering suggestions and guidance. She, too, has a limited tolerance for leisure.

“I can’t play pickleball and go to book clubs all day long. You want something to have meaning in your life,” she said.

But no matter how large their resolve, they can’t make up for every citizen who looks away from atrocities, like ICE agents grabbing innocent people off the sidewalk.

“I just don’t know why every single person — why isn’t everybody up in arms?” Fish said. “What’s happening to us is ridiculous. It’s not who we are. We need to stand up and do what we can.”

“I totally don’t understand where this country is going, or why we allow Elon Musk to run the country. It’s terrifying,” Braico said.

On March 25, Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old doctoral student at Tufts University, who was in the U.S. legally on a student visa and had broken no laws but had, with three other students, written an opinion piece last year for her college newspaper, was arrested.

A bystander’s video shows Ozturk on the sidewalk in Somerville, Massachusetts, being approached by a man in dark blue garb, a hoodie over his baseball cap, who steps in front of her, grabs her hands and twists her phone away. Within seconds, she is surrounded by six agents, most of them masked, who cuff her hands behind her back and lead her to a car parked across the street.

“I believe the world is a more beautiful and peaceful place when we listen to each other and allow different perspectives to be in the room,” Ozturk wrote from the detention center in Louisiana where she is being held, in a letter released by her lawyer.

“Efforts to target me because of my op-ed in the Tufts Daily calling for the equal dignity and humanity of all people will not deter me from my commitment to advocate for the rights of youth and children,” she wrote.

Despite the masks, I could tell the ICE agents were young — in their 20s and 30s. What do their parents think? I don’t know them, and I feel ashamed watching the video, because they are public servants, working for me. Only with our cooperation will these threats to our system of equal justice prevail.

Resisting oppression by helping the oppressed may come easily to those who have spent their lives fighting diseases. Others of us, disabled by doubt and fear, can draw courage from the response of our retired healers.

The North Country Light Brigade had a timely message on display at Centennial Circle in February.

The Trump Legacy

Donald Trump appears to be a man obsessed with building monuments to himself. As I cast about for explanations for his reckless behavior as president, I think of Shakespeare’s line from “Julius Caesar,” spoken by Marc Antony in his eulogy for Caesar: “The evil that men do lives after them;/ the good is oft interred with their bones.” Trump wants to be seen as someone who is accomplishing a lot, and it’s so much easier to wreck things than create them. He will soon have an enormous pile of wreckage to brag about.

Warren County Head Start endangered

Speaking of destruction, Warren County Head Start will be forced to close this spring, at least for a month or two, barring a last-minute delivery of the federal funds it needs to operate.

Each year, the program receives two checks — one in December, which it received ($1.7 million) and the other half sometime in the period from January to March. The second check has not arrived.

“It’s never gotten past March,” said Shari Marci, who has worked for Head Start for 27 years and has been the Warren County director for a decade, referring to the arrival of the second check.

The program won’t be able to run past April 18 without its funding, Marci said. On Friday, she sent out a letter to families, and by Saturday, she was talking to upset parents who said they were going to be left without child care.

Marci got the grants management officer for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on the phone, who said the money would come through in May or June. When she said Warren County would be forced to suspend its program without the funding, he responded, “We’re in a different climate now.”

Warren County Head Start has 78 full-time employees, operates five sites in the county and sends teachers into homes for those who request it. This year, 183 children from newborn to age 5 are enrolled, many of them from single-parent families and most from families that meet federal poverty guidelines.

Head Start provides comprehensive services that include physical and mental health, disabilities, education and family services. Pregnant mothers are eligible for services that prepare them for having a baby at home.

The program’s sessions run on weekdays, six hours a day, serving the children breakfast and lunch.

Nationwide, five regional Head Start offices, including one in New York, have been forced to close because of federal cuts to staff.

The irony of these cuts is that Head Start is an inexpensive program which, by catching problems early in children’s lives and intervening, saves the country far more money than it costs to fund it. It has drawn widespread bipartisan support for 60 years.

Marci said she was contacted Friday by Dan Stec, who said he was forwarding her letter to Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s office. Stefanik’s nomination as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was recently withdrawn. We shall see if she has any interest left for the people of her district.

Lovely bones

Cole’s Woods can appear like a cathedral of nature on lovely days like this past Friday, when everything was still and the spring sun was falling between the trees and birds were bringing the air to life with their songs.

Ringo urges us forward into the beauty of Cole’s Woods on Friday.

But the woods can also be grisly, offering reminders of the “red in tooth and claw” nature of nature. Also on Friday, I noticed a patch of gray at the base of a tree as we were walking on the trail, and looking closer, saw that it was a bundle of fur and small bones.

Some quick internet research informed me these are the leftovers from an owl’s meal of a small creature, like a mouse or, maybe, a squirrel. Apparently, owls swallow small prey whole, or close to it, and then, after digesting the good parts, regurgitate the fur and bones in a little pile like this.