UT Students Volunteer at Immigrant Shelter

By Katrina Tollin, Daily Texan Staff
Published: Monday, February 7, 2011

Lawrence Peart | Daily Texan Staff

Finance junior Seokbae Yoon organizes donated clothes at Casa Marianella, on Saturday. Casa Marianella serves as a refuge for asylum-seekers and immigrants, assists around 35 adults at a time.

Anju Dhital fled to Austin almost one year ago after a bloody civil war in Nepal tore apart her country and her family.
A former teacher, she was forced to leave her country when members of the communist Maoist party threatened her for selling newspapers that criticized the uprising. They told her to leave or be killed, she said.

“I didn’t have anywhere to go,” Dhital said.

The revolutionaries hit her husband on the head so badly that he is now brain damaged, she said. Her mother fled to India, where she is now caring for Dhital’s 8- and 14-year-old sons.

She had a very difficult journey getting here, paying smugglers high prices while they threatened her life along the way. All of her possessions were stolen, and she arrived with absolutely nothing, she said.

After being held in an immigration detention facility for two months, she was referred to Casa Marianella — an East Austin shelter for asylum-seekers and homeless immigrants — and has been living there off and on for a total of four months.

Dhital is one of about 25 immigrants who UT students helped at Casa Marianella on Saturday. Student volunteers from campus group Hunger and Homelessness Outreach sorted clothes and toiletries and hauled trash at Casa Marianella, while another group of students went to Posada Esperanza, a smaller house for single mothers and their children, and made Valentine’s Day cards with the children.

Volunteers from the group gather every Saturday to work at shelters, soup kitchens and food and clothing banks in the Austin community.

“Everyone does a small part and that contributes to the bigger picture,” said Mandara Gabriel, economics sophomore and first-time volunteer.

About half of Casa Marianella’s residents are asylum-seekers, the other half are recently arrived immigrants, most from Mexico or Central America, who may be ineligible for asylum or who left their home country for a better life in the United States.

Many of the residents at the shelter came from detention facilities, where immigrants and asylum-seekers often stay many months or years at a time in a prison-like setting before being called in for court dates, deported, or referred to a “casa de migrante,” a migrant house like Casa Marianella or Posada Esperanza.

“The majority of our residents have presented themselves at the U.S. border and are fleeing from their home countries based on persecution of race, religion, ethnicity or belonging to a social or political group,” said Pamela Larson, Casa Marianella operations coordinator.

These asylum seekers stay at the shelter often up to a year, while they receive help through the legal process.
“The laws are so complex, it’s hard for anyone to work their way through,” said Melissa Buhrt, Casa Marianella assistant director.

At the East Austin shelters, immigrants and asylum-seekers take advantage of ESL classes, job locating services, lawyer referrals, food and shelter while they await their court dates.

“We offer case management helping them to get medical care for the long journey they’ve undergone, to counseling, because many of our individuals have been victims of human trafficking or abuse in their home nation, and so we are trying to help them recover as holistically as possible,” Larson said.

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You can view the same story on The Daily Texan Website here.

"Government security"

The unsaid word in my last article on transparency in government was, of course, "wikileaks." Which is, to be sure, a different kind of transparency than the state-issued version.

I read an excellent post, "Leaking for Democracy," by Mike Gravel, a former U.S. senator for Alaska from 1969-81, an early contender for the 2008 presidency and a long-time supporter of transparency in government. He was also, notably, responsible for leaking the Pentagon Papers, which brought to light some of the atrocities of our government in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam during the Nixon administration.
Gravel writes:

"The purpose of the 'secret' classification was to deny knowledge to the American people for fear they would react adversely to the covert and illegal activities of the Nixon Administration's prosecution of the war."

"more than fifty percent of what is held secret does not merit that classification. The system is used primarily for personal aggrandizement or to avoid accountability for errors in judgment by people responsible for government policies."

He goes on to say, "What the [Wikileaks] reports do demonstrate is how our military leaders manipulated the data to create a positive view of our military operations in Afghanistan."

These are some highlights of Gravel's article, which I highly recommend. Reflecting on such information from our country's past can offer some clarification on what we may be dealing with now.

Students call for increased government accessibility

By Katrina Tollin, Daily Texan Staff
Published: Monday, January 31, 2011

Advocacy groups are calling for governments to be more transparent by making broad categories of information more accessible to the public online.

Student research groups in the LBJ School hosted TXGov 2.0, a conference at the Austin Community College Eastview campus over the weekend to highlight issues of transparency in government agencies. The event brought together government officials, advocacy groups, academia and the media.

“Before action can happen, there has to be knowledge,” said Evan Smith, CEO and editor-in-chief of the Texas Tribune and keynote speaker at the event.

The event was an opportunity for professionals who have a stake in the accessibility of information to collaborate and share what has worked for them.

“We took [organizing the event] from the perspective: If we have transparency, how can we get people to use it? How can it be most useful to journalists? How can it be most useful to people in government agencies?” said Meredith Whipple, UT public affairs graduate student.

Information could include campaign finance contributions, government agency agendas and meeting minutes, prison inmate information and statistics, and government employee
income information.

“We want to get all of that information and make it publicly available, which means that it has to be online and in a format that people, reporters, or citizens or activists of whatever stripes can use,” said Nicole Aro, organizing director for the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit open-government advocacy group.

The first Gov 2.0 summit, which was held in Washington, D.C. in March 2009, inspired more events around the country as a result of a trend toward collaboration on techniques for making online government information accessible.

“The open government movement has reached a critical mass, is very important and it’s worldwide,” said Gregory Foster, web developer for Consumers Union and an organizer for the event.

The Open Government Initiative, issued by President Barack Obama on his first day in office in 2009, created legislation that would require information be made available online and for agencies to set goals and reflect on their progress.

Interested citizens have been able to request specific information from government agencies as a result of the Freedom of Information Act of 1966, but filing such requests is costly, time-consuming and limited.

“If that information is, in theory, public, then why not just publish all of it?” Aro said. “When you have all of this data free and available, it’s much easier to see where the problems are, and it’s much more efficient to be able to fix them that way.”

Another goal of transparency advocacy groups is to make data accessible. An agency can put information online, but if it is in a PDF format, it isn’t searchable. Advocacy groups and the Texas Department of Information Resources work to bridge the information gap on how agencies can improve their online resources.

The website for the city of Manor, Texas, has become a local model of open government by engaging the community with new programs that allow citizens to interface cell phones with needed city repairs or to capture a barcode at a historical site to receive a guided tour.

“Everything is in a continuous state of improvement,” said Dustin Haisler, chief information officer of Manor and director of government innovation at Spigit, the management software company that redesigned the now award-winning online platform for the city.

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You can view the same story on The Daily Texan website here.

NPR Series on Sunni/Shiite Difference

In addendum to my last post, I've been trying to catch up on the last 14 centuries of Muslim history in an excellent five-part series NPR did a few years ago on the historical division between Shia and Sunni Islam.

If you've ever been confused by what's going on, join the club, and then listen to this. After the first segment, the links for the next four are halfway down on the left.