Story by Victoria Rossi

Filmed and Produced by Diya Chacko

Amid fried chicken, hamburger and pizza joints, Darada David runs a health food/live jazz/ internet cafe in the Bronx despite ambivalence from the community.

Methadone’s effect on addicts and communites

Eric Alamo shielded his eyes from the sun as he walked out of the Carmen Iris Capeles Treatment Clinic on Westchester Avenue.  It was an unusually hot and humid August day in Hunts Point. Alamo had walked three miles for a fifteen-minute appointment, his shirt drenched with sweat from his trek. It wasn’t much better inside—the air conditioner wasn’t working. Continue Reading

Care for seniors presents unique problems

By Frances McInnis
September 1, 2009

On a Friday afternoon in late August, fifty or so people sat at picnic tables and in folding chairs under the trees in Riverbank State Park. They ate fried chicken and arroz con gandules, a Puerto Rican rice dish. A few young girls jumped double-dutch, the rhythmic thwap of the ropes against the pavement punctuating the hip hop and salsa music emerging from a large boom-box. It was a day to relax for the clients and staff of Iris House, an AIDS Service Center with offices in East and Central Harlem. Continue Reading

Hypertension problematic in Harlem

By Lauren Kirchner
September 20, 2009

About a dozen senior citizens sat in a circle of chairs at a senior center in West Harlem, leaned back, and laughed for five minutes straight. This “laughter meditation,” as their yoga instructor Badra Om, calls it, usually starts with Om herself letting out a loud, high-pitched cackle. The huge sound coming from such a petite woman is surprising, and the laughter is infectious. Soon the whole class joins in: first tentatively, then with feeling.

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