Children in last year's obesity program at East Side House exercised their bodies as well as their minds.

As eight children sat around a table at East Side House waiting for snacks they played a game of call-and-response.

“Vegetables,” shouted Aaren Kokubun, the group leader.

“Go!” screamed the children.

“Cake,” Kokubun shouted. “Whoa!” came the answer.

The children are participating in a program designed to convince families who live in a community where fast food eateries outnumber playgrounds that they should eat their vegetables and should exercise every day.

Together with the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, the East Side House Settlement Head Start/Day Care launched the Early Childhood Obesity Prevention Program in February 2009.

“The group leaders always come up with wonderful events for the kids to do,” said Zaida Cotto, the mother of four-year-old Madison. “They manage to make it fun for everyone, myself included.”

On vegetable week the children traced Kokubun’s body on butcher paper and colored in cutouts of vegetables. Then Kokubun explained how avocados are good for their hair and carrots improve eyesight. Finally, the children taped the cutouts to the corresponding body part.

“I try to have fun, laugh and be silly,” said Kokubun, who is an educator at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, “because when the kids see me enjoying myself they want to mimic me.”

The program began with great fanfare when Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a national grant of $838,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and a $250,000 grant from the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund.

It teaches both children and parents about health, nutrition, and portion size, said Sunitha Menon, director of family services at East Side House Settlement Head Start/Day Care.

To get children comfortable with trying new things, East Side House serves them a variety of fruits, including blueberries, blackberries and kiwis.

“When we go shopping my kids bring healthy foods to the cart and tell me we can’t buy too many chips,” said Yolanda Wright, mother of four-year-old Haley and two-year-old Winfred, as she watched her children in the classroom. “I don’t think I’ve ever bought a kiwi before this. But after they tried it here, I have to buy it.”

Each week, the program focuses on a different topic. If it’s vegetable week they’ll have peppers, carrots, celery and broccoli. On the Family Meal week a chef demonstrates how to make soup–typically vegetable or minestrone.

Each week the parents and children review the lessons taught the week before. For example, to show that they understood the “Go, Slow, Whoa” game, the children colored in pictures of different foods then pasted them on a model traffic light.

One child colored a picture of a pancake with a red crayon, pasted it on the traffic light and announced, “Pancakes are a whoa food. Stop eating them.”

Children also participate in an art activity to introduce each day’s lesson and follow it with exercise. One week they built drums to mimic the beat of their hearts. Then they did sets of jumping jacks, listened to their hearts and compared the beat with the drum.
Story-time, too reinforces their lessons.

“I see my kids flipping through the pages of the books and making the connections on their own,” said Wright. “They beg me to read it to them. It’s great.”
The presence and participation of parents is essential, said Menon.

“Children can’t go out and grocery shop on their own,” she said. “By educating parents, they are able to assist their children in living a healthier lifestyle.”

The program was developed for children ages 2 to 5 on the theory that it’s easier to form good habits early in life than to change harmful ones later.

It meets once a week for 90 minutes, and runs for 11 weeks, serving a total of about 40 children at a time at the East Side House Settlement Head Start/Day Care program sites: Mott Haven Community Center, Mill Brook Community Center and Children’s Pride.

Because the government hopes the program will serve as model to be duplicated nationwide, before and after each 11-week session, workers at East Side House interview the families in an effort to learn whether the program has led them to change.

“We realize that there are people who can’t get all the resources they need,” said Kokubun. “It’s not their fault. We go to where the families live rather than have them come to us because everyone deserves an equal opportunity.”

The swamp is a fetid, four-block long stew of garbage and stagnant water

Mosquitoes swarming from a garbage-filled, four-block long stretch of stagnant water plague residents of nearby apartments all summer

By Lindsay Lazarski
lindsay.lazarski@motthavenherald.com

Gloria Hidalgo likes living in her quiet building on 142^nd Street. The rent is reasonable; her neighbors are hard-working people, her sister and two nieces live three floors below her and Hostos Community College, where she is studying to become an accountant, is just blocks away.

But a rotten smell, just five stories below her windows may force Hidalgo to move.

The foul odor rises from a river of murky sludge–three feet deep and littered with plastic bags, broken beer bottles, planks of decaying wood, and abandoned basketballs–oozes along four blocks from Southern Boulevard and 142^nd Street to the fields of St. Mary’s Park.

Residents have dubbed the filthy concoction of standing water and garbage the Bronx Swamp.

“It smells horrendous,” said Walter Nash, a community leader who organized a protest on March 27 to demand that the swamp be drained and cleaned of all garbage.

“There is all manner of bugs, rats, and dead animals down there, but the main thing we’re scared of are the mosquitoes. If there is West Nile virus we are going to be the first ones to get it. The bugs are feasting off of the dead animals down there,” Nash said.

“We need help,” pleaded Hidalgo as she pointed out a rat that scurried from a trash can outside of her building to the standing swamp. “I want to live in this area, but if it is like this, I plan to move somewhere else.”

Nash said it’s been seven years since the swamp was drained last and that the city needs to take responsibility for keeping the area clean.

“Had this been down on Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, or close to the mayor’s office this would have been gone day one,” he said.

The property is owned by a real estate company called Metropolitan 47 LLC, according to the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which sprayed insecticide because of the danger of mosquitoes last year. The firm has been issued several violations for standing water, but has failed to appear at any hearings, according to a health department spokeswoman, Celina De Leon.

Any time there is standing water there is the potential for it to become a breeding ground for insects and harmful bacteria, explained Jamie Stein, an environmental analyst from Sustainable South Bronx.

As for the mosquitoes, Stein said they are always a nuisance and can become a more serious problem. Mosquitoes that feast on dead birds can transmit West Nile Virus, a disease that has killed two dozen New Yorkers over the last 10 years, and cost the city millions in a controversial program of spraying insecticide from the air.

Amando Mendez, a father of three who has lived for 10 years in one of the many residential buildings that overlook the swamp, said the mosquitoes become unbearable in the summertime. He cannot enter the elevator and hallways of his building, or open the windows of his apartment without inviting a swarm of mosquitoes, accompanied by the rancid smell of the swamp.

Blisters and rashes from mosquito bites cover his daughters’ legs bellies and backs come summer, said Mendez.

Lots of young children live in her building, too, said Hidalgo. Her two nieces also get rashes and welts from mosquito bites, and often vomit and become sick with fevers, she said.

Walter Nash calls attention to the swamp and demands that it be cleaned and drained

Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum has called for immediate action to drain and clean the swamp.

In New York City, no one should have to live near something as filthy, and potentially dangerous, as this swamp,” said Gotbaum.

“In the past 10 years, 28 Bronx residents have tested positive for neuro-invasive disease due to West Nile Virus. This summer will bring swarms of mosquitoes–but we have received no assurances that this area will be safe and free of disease,” she said in a written statement.

Edwin Saltares, whose office is just feet away from the swamp said the area can be cleaned hundreds of times, but the problem will persist and become progressively worse with every rainfall as long as there is no permanent drainage system.

Stein agreed, “The real approach would be to remove the water and regrade the surface so as to not have a problem anymore.”

As for residents who will be plagued by mosquitoes until then, Mendez said he will continue to spray himself with mosquito repellent whether he’s inside his apartment or outside his building and will consider moving his family somewhere else.