We Are Community a Community News of Activists Affordable Chic Fashion Show A Community Affair by Shawna Hammond Saturday, April 27, marks the twentieth year that the East End Community Thrift will hold its annual fashion show, Affordable Chic. Affordable Chic is the perfect example of what Thrifty is all about, volunteering and community involvement. The show has been held at the East Liberty Presbyterian Church for the past sixteen years. Thrifty’s volunteer staff, customers, and women of Sojourner’s
House contribute their time and energy by modeling and providing delicious salads and desserts.
The Silent Auction includes gift certificates from businesses in the Garfield community and gift baskets created by long time Thrifty supporter, Rose Evasovic. The Boutique table offers special low priced items that the volunteers spend all year collecting. Along with long time supporter, Sandra Talley, musicians David Boxley and Samuel McGinnis will be our musical
entertainment for the afternoon. So, come join us on Saturday, April 27th at ELPC from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm for a wonderful afternoon of fashion and fun. For ticket information contact: East End Community Thrift at 412-361-6010. Or look online at thomasmertoncenter.org Shawna Hammond is the Assistant Manager of the East End Community Thrift Store and serves on the Thomas Merton Center’s board of directors as Vice President.
The Fracking Poem —Philip Terman
Scarlet tanagers, thrushes, warblers, hawks, spotted salamanders, skunk and possum, all the invisible insects— the native shrubs, the wild flowers, all the trees cut down, the altered light patterns, the shifting forest canopy, all giving way for the gravel roads, the trucks and tankers and dust, hauling their chemical cocktails: the methanol, the isopropyl alcohol, the ethylene glycon, the crystalline silica, and all the other toxins, according to the Halliburton loophole, the industry refuses to disclose, the toxins that cause blurry vision, severe stomach cramps, burning noses, swollen tongues, headaches, hair loss, ear pressure, horses that won’t leave the barn— smell of sulphur, rotten egg, nail polish, water burning out of faucets— the heavy axles invading across our farms, compacting the topsoil, reducing plant growth, increasing the runoff, the erosion like a fully-loaded cement mixture hauling itself across a lawn after a heavy rainfall, all the way to our watersheds: the Ohio, the Susquehanna, the Delaware, the Erie, the Genesee, the Potomac— not to mention the 86, 000 miles of streams and rivers, the 161, 445 acres of lakes, the 403, 924 acres of wetlands— the drilling through aquifers, the potential for leakage, the uranium, the radioactive radon stored in that black rock that is almost 400 million years old— that shale that has survived from the Devonian age, that stone of shelled swimmers, like squids, of plant-like animals related to starfish called sea
lilies,
that earth, that earth that once we contaminate, we can never reclaim, that earth that when we frack, we frack ourselves. Philip Terman is a professor of English at Clarion University and co-director of the Chautauqua Writers' Festival. 14 - NEWPEOPLE
March 2013
Henrietta, our pig with flair, at a recent blockade to protect Pennsylvania farms from fracking. Photo courtesy of Wanda Guthrie.