Bienvenido Hernandez, dean at Village Prep HS in Mott Haven, tries to help students make wise decisions about sex.

Mott Haven’s rate is the highest in city, study finds

As the city has started to introduce a new sex education program for middle and high schools, Mott Haven has emerged as the neighborhood with the highest teen pregnancy rate in the five boroughs.

Even though the neighborhood rate has been going down for years, it hasn’t shrunk as fast as the rest of the city, according to a new report.

“The statistics are scary,” said Bienvenido Hernandez, dean at the Mott Haven Village Prep High School on St. Ann’s Avenue, adding there were seven or eight pregnant teens at the school last year. “We try everything we can to bring these numbers down.”

About one out of every seven women in Mott Haven who gave birth between 2007 and 2009 was a teenager, according to the study, released in November by New York University’s Silver School of Social Work. That was the highest rate in the city. Morrisania and Hunts Point both ranked fourth.

“They want somebody to love them,” said Deandra Plummer, 15, participant in the Changing the Odds program at the Morris Heights Health Center, where teens learn about community issues and sexual health. Right now, there are no program participants who are pregnant.

Dr. Vincent Guilamo-Ramos, who runs the NYU doctoral program and presented the new report at the Morris Heights Health Center after its release, said local young people have long needed a new health curriculum.

“Mott Haven needs an evidence-based and science-informed health education program,” he said.

In his fifth-floor office at Village Prep, Hernandez offers students information on sex, and provides condoms to those whose parents have not pulled them out of the program. He says the majority of kids who come to see him simply want to talk.

“Most of them don’t come to actually get condoms,” Hernandez said.

But family pressures often keep young people from seeking his advice. Seventeen names were on the opt-out list that hung next to Hernandez’ desk, out of the 62 students in the program.

On one of his office walls, Hernandez pinned a poster that informs visitors about sexually transmitted diseases. He said many parents are uninformed about the diseases their kids can get from unprotected sex.

About 70 percent of Hernandez’ students are from conservative, often Catholic families. The parents are hesitant to talk to their kids about sexual safety.

“It’s a taboo for certain folks,” said Hernandez.

Instead, parents rely on the media, he said.

But the media doesn’t do a good job either. In reality-TV-shows such as “Teen Mom”, teenage girls become protagonists and are shown in their daily lives with their babies, said Hernandez.

Almost twice as many teenage girls in the Bronx give birth as Manhattan or Queens girls, according to the NYU report. Brooklyn has the city’s second highest rate with about 30 percent, Staten Island the lowest with about 20 percent, according to the city’s Department of Health.

About one in ten girls between 15 and 19 in the Bronx is pregnant, down from 1.5 out of ten a decade ago.

Still, the rate is unacceptably high, said Dr. Guilamo-Ramos.

The NYU report named a lack of access to health care and mental health services in the Bronx as a key problem.

About 300 students are taking part in the Changing the Odds program, which has been implemented at 12 Bronx schools this year, according to program director Estelle Raboni. Raboni says building self-esteem is crucial for Bronx teenagers.

“Young people in the Bronx unfortunately see themselves not able to affect change,” she said.

Francine J. Rojas, a social worker at Village Prep, said longer hours during the school day give students less opportunity to engage in sexual activity. She said teens often use the window of time between leaving school and their parents’ return home from work to get sexually active.

For that reason, Rojas says, after-school programs could be a valuable support for teens.

School attendance is also a key element in lowering teenage pregnancy rates.

“A lot of girls are just cutting school and hanging out with their boyfriends,” Rojas said.

Photo by Flonia Telegrafi Friday morning at the Give Them to Eat Ministries food pantry.

Spanish Evangelical feeds growing numbers

Every Friday morning, a parade of people minding colorful shopping carts fills the sidewalk along Thurman Munson Way. At any time, someone strolling along the sidewalk can hear Spanish, English, French and Quechua being spoken.

Women, some with small children, and men, young people and the elderly start lining up at 8 a.m. and continue to arrive throughout the day. While most people come from nearby, some come from as far as Manhattan and Queens.

In single file, they push their carts into the parking lot of the Bronx Spanish Evangelical Church where they fill them with vegetables, fruits, bread and cereal.

Give Them to Eat Ministries Feeds Mott Haven Community from Mott Haven on Vimeo.

On a recent Friday, Rev. Jose Torres of the United Chaplains of New York came to the pantry to collect food for his elderly, homebound neighbors.

Patricia, a local resident who lost her job over a year ago, came because she relies on the produce she gets from the pantry and saves her food stamps to buy meat.

Ernesto, a resident of Manhattan who has been coming to the pantry for the past two years, came because he does not make enough money to afford groceries. (Neither gave a last name.)

This weekly tradition that draws hundreds of people began in 1994, when Danilo LaChapel, a member of Spanish Evangelical, founded Give Them to Eat Ministries, a program that runs a food pantry and soup kitchen, providing groceries and hot meals.

LaChapel, the director of the ministry, recalls how the church “exploded” with people when the pantry opened. By its second day, after word had spread about the program, 954 people showed up, he said.

For LaChapel, a longtime Mott Haven resident, the overwhelming response was a reminder of “the social decomposition plaguing the South Bronx during the early ‘90s, a period of serious drug addictions, alcoholism, high unemployment and poverty.”

Now, LaChapel says, renewed hard economic times have caused the number of people seeking food from the ministry to triple. He cites rising rents and higher food prices, leading more people to rely on the program to eat.

One such individual is Margie Lebron, 62, who has volunteered with the ministry for the past two years. Lebron works full-time at a local beer distribution center, despite her deteriorating eyesight. Every day she pushes herself to keep working because she does not want to end up homeless.

Her monthly take home pay is not enough to cover her $1,100 rent, utilities, transportation and groceries. Two years ago, with no food in her home, and in spite of her pride, she was forced to go to the soup kitchen. There she met Lachapel, who invited her to become a member of the church.

LaChapel relies on dedicated volunteers like Lebron to run the pantry and soup kitchen, as well as the ministry’s senior and youth programs. There are 40 volunteers in all, ranging in age from 35 to 65. The group is made up of local residents, and includes members of Spanish Evangelical and of other churches, as well as non-Christians.

For Ines Contreras, 53, who has volunteered with the ministry for over 14 years, her work has allowed her to serve her community while also serving God. Alma Montes came to Give Them to Eat Ministries because of her Christian faith, to work with people who are in need. Alfredo Carrion, who came to the ministry five months ago after losing his job as a superintendent, says that volunteering fulfills his “need to keep working and moving.”

Give Them to Eat Ministries receives food from numerous organizations, including the Food Bank for New York City, City Harvest, United Way and Food For Survival. Kim Keller, the director of member services at the Food Bank, which has been supplying the ministry since it opened its doors, confirms a “93 percent increase of first-time users among its member organizations” citywide.

The Food Bank’s “NYC Hunger Experience 2010” report found that 68 percent of people earning less than $25,000 would not be able to afford food within three months of losing their income, a figure that is up from 24 percent in 2009.

With the median household income in Mott Haven at $21,362, the report’s findings suggest a bleak outcome if the unemployment rate were to rise.

The Food Bank also faces drastic cuts to its food supply. In June, the U.S. House of Representatives cut funds for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) by $3 billion from last year’s levels. If the cuts remain in the final legislation, due for adoption in December, “10 million meals would be lost,” according to Keller. “Private donations would not be able to recoup the loss,” she says.

LaChapel worries about the future. Not only is demand growing, but at times it has been difficult for the church to keep the program going because it does not receive sufficient funds to run the heat and electricity needed to accommodate so many people.

“We as a church can only do so much,” LaChapel says. “The problem of the poor must be resolved by the government.”

St. Luke's congregants share the Sign of Peace

St. Luke’s School celebrates 100 years of service

St. Luke’s School is marking a past that stretches back a century by looking forward.  At its 100th birthday celebration on Oct. 2, the school announced a $2 million fund-raising campaign in an effort to salute the past by securing the future.

At a time when the Archdiocese of New York is closing Catholic schools, the parish school on East 139th Street in Mott Haven is determined to be around for many more anniversaries.

“While it’s always a leap of faith, we are cautiously optimistic,” said Dan P. Butler, chair of the school’s education foundation.

“It’s a great school.  It’s like a close family,” said Confessor Rosa, whose niece Sonia graduated from St. Luke’s and now attends Cornell University.

“I never would have gotten to where I am now had I not gone to St. Luke’s,” said Manuelo Gonzalez, an accountant who graduated in 1972 and now serves on the parish’s finance committee.

Alumni and their families returned to the parish to join the festivities commemorating the school’s centennial. Recent graduates Sasha Garcia and Dimitri Herranz gave tours of the school, showing some of the new additions, such as the new science and computer labs.  Every classroom at St. Luke’s is now equipped with Apple computers.

At the Mass, people gathered for the familiar sights and sounds of Catholic ceremony: baby’s cries, the smell of incense, the priest sprinkling the congregants with holy water, and choir music accompanied by tambourine players and nylon-stringed guitarists. So many were in attendance that the sound has to be piped to a nearby location.

“It has brought back wonderful memories,” said Sheila Catlin, who got married at St. Luke’s 52 years ago.

The school has left an impression even on those who weren’t students there.

“For 35 years I had to listen to stories about St. Luke’s,” said Nancy McConville, who drove her parents to mass on Saturday.

During her address to the congregation, Principal Tracey Coleman reminded those present that one thing linked St. Luke’s past to its present in the experience of most of those there. She wasn’t referring to the school itself, or the church, but to a man—Monsignor Gerald Ryan, who first came to St. Luke’s in 1966 and has remained there since, making him the longest serving pastor in the Archdiocese of New York.

Ryan marched with Martin Luther King in Selma.  He witnessed the decay and drug addiction that took hold in the South Bronx during the 1970s.  In 1972, he and other parishioners renovated the basement of the church, turning it into a community center.

The monsignor said he has made an effort to help single mothers trying to get their children enrolled at St. Luke’s and some of the local Catholic High Schools.  He visits the school regularly and sends home a monthly reminder asking children to attend a special “promise Mass” for peace before school on the first Friday of every month.

According to Principal Coleman, St. Luke’s graduated every one of its students last year. About half of St. Luke’s current students are on some type of financial assistance, Coleman said. In addition to serving the parishes Roman Catholics, the school offers admission to students of other faiths: about 10 percent of its students are not Catholic.

At the end of Mass, the monsignor spoke about the history of the school and the importance of community.

“You are the parish of St. Luke’s,” Ryan said.  “We don’t ever let you leave.”

A version of this story appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of the Mott Haven Herald.

The bloodbath continues. A 21-year-old man was shot and killed at 4 a.m. Friday in front of 285 East 156th Street, near the Andrew Jackson Houses. The victim, Delquan Alston, had two gunshots wounds to the head and two gun shot wounds to his body. According to the Daily News police say Alston was a drug dealer, and may have been murdered in a dispute over territory.

A devastating fire took the life of a young man when it raged through his apartment in the early morning of Aug. 23. It took 65 firefighters to extinguish the blaze on 149th Street, the Daily News reported.

A new charter school will open in Mott Haven on Wednesday. Bronx Success Academy 1, which will share quarters with PS 30 at 510 E. 141st Street, will start with a Kindergarten and first grade and add a grade each year. It will feature a longer school day, starting at 7:30 a.m. and ending at 4:30 p.m. The school is part of the Success Charter Network founded by a politician, former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz.

Photo by Juan De Jesus

A yellow Labrador helps teach children in an after-school program

One Saturday five years ago 28-year-old Andrew Mann drove his budget truck from Poplar Bluff, Missouri to Mott Haven. Ever since, the young minister has been overseeing the day-to-day activities at Graffiti “2” Ministries on Brook Avenue and East 141^st Street.

If you ask those who live in the area about him, many will just say “Who?” But everyone will recognize his constant companion, a five-year-old golden yellow Labrador named Proof.

“I have strangers who come up and greet Proof by name, and I have no idea who they are,” says Mann.

Proof plays an important role in Mann’s ministry. Her calm and friendly presence makes her a great recruiter.

What’s more important, though, is her relationship with children.

Proof serves as an incentive to get kids to read, as a mediator who cools hot tempers and as a source of unconditional love for the children in the ministry’s after-school program.

“For kids who struggle to read, it’s good for them to read out loud,” explains Mann. So he sometimes has students read to Proof because they gain a level of comfort that reading aloud to an adult could never offer.

“Proof doesn’t judge. She doesn’t know the mistakes they are making while reading, and kids like that,” says Mann.

Mann also uses Proof’s presence as a way to comfort students who are angry or distraught. He often lets those students take care of the yellow Labrador.

“She has a very calming effect,” says Ashley Emmert, a native of San Antonio who works with the ministry. “It’s almost magical.”

Proof’s journey to Mott Haven is as long as her owner’s.  Mann moved to New York to attend New York University as a music major. While honing his skills he worked with the East Seventh Baptist Church on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

There he met pastor Taylor Field, who headed the Graffiti Community Ministries. Field’s mentoring led Mann to change paths and study to become a minister. When he returned to New York from Wheaton College in Chicago, Field tapped Mann to start the next branch of the church’s Graffiti ministry program in Mott Haven.

“He caught me off guard,” says Mann.  “I came up here one day and did a walk and prayed for the neighborhood. It was hot, all the fire hydrants were open and kids were playing in the spraying water.”

The large number of children in Mott Haven offered the possibility of developing a young strong ministry, Mann said. He organized a weeklong basketball camp, then formed an after-school program.

Proof’s role began as the brainchild of Mann’s sister, a school counselor in Missouri, who was considering bringing a therapy dog into her school. When Mann heard her idea he asked himself, “If they can have them in school, why not in an after-school program?”

He found a Kansas company called Cares Incorporated that trains service dogs with the help of inmates in a Colorado prison. It put him on a waiting list. Finally, in 2006 Mann flew to Kansas to take part in a weeklong training course to help the owner with his new dog.

When he describes his first meeting with Proof, Mann chokes up slightly. “I remember waiting and seeing the dogs come out one by one,” he said.  “I would look and hope to see if the next dog was mine. Then when she came out–I know this is clichéd–but I knew it, I knew she was mine.”

Proof and the rest of her litter had been named using newspaper terms. Her siblings include “Ink” and “Lead,” Mann said.

She quickly proved her worth. Both Mann and Emmert describe Proof’s ability to evaluate a problem and find a solution.

“One time a child was screaming at the top of his lungs, interrupting the rest of the program and making it difficult for the other kids,” says Mann.

“With no cue from me, Proof got up and walked toward us. She walked right up to the kid and started licking his hands. Like a light switch being flipped off, he stopped screaming and started petting Proof. He was calm the rest of the day.”

“We call her the first missionary dog,” said Mann, smiling proudly, “For the kids, there’s few better examples in our natural world of God’s unconditional love than what comes through the presence of Proof.”

A version of this story appeared in the Summer 2010 issues of the Mott Haven Herald.

Rev. Martha Overall shows Archbishop Rowan Williams around.Photo by Lynette Wilson/Episcopal Life Online

Rev. Martha Overall, the pastor of the Mott Haven church, showed Archbishop Rowan Williams the church’s Wednesday food pantry.

She told the archbishop, who is the symbolic head of the Anglican Church worldwide, “We are really the poorest of the poor. Since we are open all the time, we are the community church,” according to the Diocese news site.

The archbishop was in New York for a theological conference. During his visit he met with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Teens and young adults gathered in the basement of St. Crispin's Friary to commit their lives to chastity before marriage.

A growing number of South Bronx teens heed abstinence message

About a hundred young Latino men and women sang hymns, feasted on empanadas and promised to abstain from sex on a Sunday afternoon in October at St. Crispin’s Friary on East 156^th street in Melrose.

The pledge is part of the Corazón Puro (Pure Heart) program, a year-old initiative of the Catholic Church.  The pledge aims to encourage abstinence and reduce teen pregnancy, a problem in the South Bronx, which has the highest teen pregnancy rate in New York, and one that has hit the city’s Latino communities particularly hard.

The Latino population’s teen pregnancy rate is nearly double the national average, a May 2009 report from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found.  Only 48 percent of Latinos in high school abstain from sex, compared to 56 percent of their Caucasian counterparts, according to data from Child Trends, a nonpartisan research center.

The Rev. Agostino Torres, 33, a priest at St. Crispin’s who co-founded and leads the Corazón Puro there, said Latino teens in New York lack education about their choices.  His program provides information and a supportive environment for them to learn about abstinence, he said.

“The more they know, the easier it will be,” Torres said of the teens who attend Corazón Puro’s events.  “I was so surprised, when I first started giving talks, how many people came up to me and said, ‘I’ve never heard this before.’”

That’s how it was for Romina Castro, 19, of Yonkers. Castro said she did not realize abstinence would be at the heart of the lessons until she arrived at her first seminar. During a seminar that lasted for hours, Torres gave a lesson on the “theology of the body,” pulling in Bible teachings and stories from his own life. Castro stayed because she said the topics appealed to her.

Castro’s life did not always incorporate these religious beliefs. “I didn’t like Church for nothing,” Castro said. “I used to go to parties, smoke, drink, all that kind of stuff.”

After a confrontation with the law–her second–when she was 18, she decided to change her life, said Castro.  She started attending a church youth group, where she learned about Corazon Puro.

The seminars include lectures with titles like “Dating and Waiting: How to Protect Your Heart.” But the friary doesn’t just lecture the young people while they sit and listen. The sessions are punctuated by song.

“I love the music,” said Ericka Nelson, 23, of New Rochelle.  “It just brings you in step with the Lord.”

Corazón Puro is one of many church-based abstinence groups, part of a national movement that grew mostly significantly during the 1990s, said Jennifer Manlove, Director of Health Research at Child Trends. In 1991, 46 percent of the nation’s school-aged teens were abstaining from sex, according to the Child Trends data bank and surveys from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By 2004, the percentage had grown to 54 percent before leveling off, Manlove said.

But Corazón Puro continues to grow, said Torres, at least in his bailiwick.  Seminar numbers ranged from 15 to 70 during the group’s first year.  This year, the first seminar attracted over 100 people, he said.

“Nationally, the abstinence movement is losing power, but on a local level it is still going strong,” said Jessica Valenti, author of The Purity Myth and founder and editor of the Web site Feministing.

Although Valenti says abstinence makes sense, particularly in a culture that encourages young people to begin having sex early-on, she criticizes the way the abstinence message focuses on women, saying it reinforces old stereotypes of a double standard.

The vast majority of Corazón Puro’s participants during its first year were, in fact, young women. At one retreat Castro recalled, there were 28 females and four males.  But the seminars have been redesigned to reach both sexes, said co-founder Odet Bisono, 48, of Queens.

Corazón Puro’s female members themselves are responsible for the shift, they say; they believe both men and women should abstain from sex before marriage.  Castro, for example, brought four young men with her in October.

And these young men were there for the same reasons as their female counterparts.  Alexis Torres, 18, said he did not like the direction his life was going, so he started going to church. The Yonkers resident will be starting classes at St. John’s University in January.

“I was about to quit high school completely, and I just started praying and putting my life together,” he said.   “It just started to happen.  Abstinence, this is stuff I’m praying about.  To see it happen, to see it become true, it was just amazing.”

A version of this story appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of the Mott Haven Herald.

Brothers Ali and Habib Trawaly founded Masjid Ebun Abass a year ago.

A green awning outside the storefront announces Mott Haven’s newest outpost of Islam, the Masjid Ebun Abass on the quiet corner of Alexander Avenue and 141st Street, buffered from the traffic of Third Avenue by a Greenstreet triangle.

A symbol of the Bronx’s newest immigrant group, the mosque “is one of the biggest, and it’s in Mott Haven,” said Mamadou Kamara. Kamara is an assistant imam, the Muslim term for a spiritual leader.

Before the congregation leased its quarters, Kamara would travel to a mosque in Harlem to worship, and sometimes found himself praying in unlikely places. “When I do it on the street, I don’t care who cares,” said Kamara. “I once prayed in the Times Square Church.”

Most of the members of the congregation are West African. Their place of worship is a simple affair. A stepped podium for sermons, a bookshelf, and a poster of the Sacred Mosque in Mecca are the only physical signs of Islam in the mosque’s interior. Painted parallel lines on the carpet indicate the direction of Islam’s holiest city.

Brothers Ali and Habib Trawaly, who are respectively its imam and president, founded Ebun Abass a year ago.

“It was a considerable effort to bring about the mosque,” said Ali Trawaly. At the time, the only other mosque in Mott Haven was at 369 E. 145th Street, an anonymous century-old townhouse, where the only outward sign of Islam is a heavily barred green and white metal fence.

Starting a new congregation “was all about the kids,” said assistant imam Abdurahman Juwara. “They did not fit into the other masjid,” he said, using the Arabic term for mosque.

“We have over 160 kids here,” said Banusi Maha, 45, another of the founding members of the mosque. “We teach them to respect people.”

If it weren’t for the mosque, Maha fears, the children would instead be watching television and learning nothing.  Instead, behind a makeshift curtain, children work on their school assignments and study the Quran.

Maha works an early morning shift as a cook at the Jekyll and Hyde Club, a theme restaurant in Midtown. Having worked as a chef in his homeland, he simply walked into the restaurant and asked for the job.

Like Maha, most members of the congregation hold blue-collar jobs, working long hours for little pay.

“Financially, it is difficult,” said Juwara, who emigrated from Gambia and has lived in the Bronx for 15 years.  “We have a basement, but we don’t have the money to develop it,” said Kamara.

In contrast to the imposing, domed Islamic Cultural Center on the Upper East Side, which was largely financed by Kuwait, Masjid Ebun Abass did not receive funding from any foreign government. “If we had that kind of money, we’d buy the building,” Juwara said.

“This is us: we work in car washes, factories, and drive taxis,” said Degumeh Sillah, 60, an African art dealer.  A Bronx resident since 1972, Sillah expressed pride at the religious transformation of the area. “The mosque on 166th Street,” he said, “that’s a former nightclub.”

Still, his mosque struggles to pay its $5,500 monthly rent. “With electricity, water, and teacher’s salary, that comes to $8,000,” said Sillah.

But the leaders of the congregation remain confident and determined.

“We are looking for a place to buy,” says Omar Trawaly, a cousin of the imam whose  three sons attend classes at the mosque. He said that the landlord has given the mosque two months to consider buying the space. “For sure, we don’t want to be renting,” Trawaly said.

Local Africans often speak of making money and returning to their homelands, but months turn to years. Where it was once acceptable to pray anywhere, there is now a growing need for permanent institutions, including mosques.

“Before, we didn’t think of establishing masjids,” said Soulemane Konate, secretary general of the Council of African Imams. “It’s not easy for Africans to survive in this country, but we’re not leaving.”

A version of this article appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of the Mott Haven Herald.

“They first asked people to accept that there is no god except Allah,” said Djounedou Titikpina, founder of the African People Alliance. “It was very flexible, and little by little, they upgraded their Islam.” Titikpina immigrated from Togo, a country where Christians, Muslims, and adherents of native faiths, generally maintain peaceful relations.

Islam acts as a uniting force for a variety of ethnic groups in West Africa, where everyone prays in Arabic and observes the same fasts, viewing themselves as a single ummah, or community.

To promote local Muslim unity, Soulemane Konate, secretary general of the Council of African Imams founded the Harlem Shura, a council that acts as a bridge between African immigrants and African American Muslims.

The theme of Muslim unity is reflected at Masjid Ebun Abass. Among its non-African members is Adbul Rauf, a Puerto Rican convert who works at the nearby Lincoln Hospital. “Everything you see here is created by Allah,” Rauf said, adding that in his heart, “I was always a Muslim.”

An Islamic lifestyle is a far cry from the Latino cuisine he grew up with, in which pork is abundant and alcohol is permitted.  Habib Trawaly praised the few converts. “When they enter Islam, their hearts are pure,” he says.

The mosque’s attitude towards converts hearkens back to the gradual spread of Islam in West Africa.

This attitude is also evident in the rejection by the local congregation of terrorism. “Islam does not teach force,” said Musa Pokum, a decorative painter. “We know in Africa; we teach to respect people.”

A version of this article appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of the Mott Haven Herald.