Published in the Current
The state Department of Education should reverse its practice of preventing the media from accompanying public officials on tours of public school buildings being built with public money.
That practice was invoked Wednesday to bar reporters from a tour of Scarborough High School’s renovation and construction site, though the quality of the work done on the project has been under public scrutiny in recent weeks, and was the subject of the tour.
The closing of the tour means the public has one more reason to fear that there are real problems with the construction quality at the high school, and that the schools are trying to cover them up.
Dale Douglas of the department told us Wednesday that the practice is meant to allow state employees – public servants – to speak freely to each other, and said the department is concerned that its employees’ comments might be misconstrued by the media.
But thousands of other public officials in our towns and elsewhere, from town councils to state legislators, conduct their business in front of the media on a regular basis, without complaint or concern. They make their comments openly and conduct frank discussions, including asking hard questions, and their comments are fairly and accurately reported in our paper and hundreds of other media outlets.
The Department of Education doesn’t want to play by the same rules. And Superintendent William Michaud took their side, likening the event to an executive session or an internal investigation.
Michaud forgets that an executive session can only happen when a majority of officials in an elective body vote – in public – to close the door, and only after saying why state law allows them to do so. And the timing of this “internal investigation” – if that is what it is – is unusual, coming as it does after a full public airing of concerns about the construction project, and after the public release of the schools’ extensive rebuttal to the concerns.
It would have been a big help to everyone involved if the public – in the form of the press, the public’s representative – had been allowed on the tour. If there are real problems, we would have seen them and reported on them. If there are not problems, we would have told you that. And if there is not a way to tell without deeper investigation, we would have explained that.
Now, the school board and school officials must consider whether they think the town should spend $20,000 on an outside engineer.
But they have barred one of the few ways to keep the council from conducting what some of them have said is an unneeded outside review.
It’s true that the state officials will issue a report in a week’s time, and that report will be made public. But given the scrutiny and skepticism the report is certain to face, it would have helped all involved – and most of all you, the public – if you had been able to see the process of researching the report. How complete was the state’s review of the construction work? We may never know, and we should.
Michaud should have argued with the state officials that, in light of the public nature of this situation, having the press on the tour would help the schools make their case that everything is “fine,” to use the word of Board of Education Chairman David Beneman.
Unless, of course, there are real problems with the school, or unless there’s no way to tell without being a professional engineer.
In those cases, having the press along would not help the schools. But in those cases, it’s time to spend the money on an outside expert.
Thursday, April 7, 2005
Students learn about choice of new pope
Published in the Current
SOUTH PORTLAND (April 7, 2005): Holy Cross School Principal Deacon Steve Harnois took a group of students into the school's chapel Monday, with its frescos and murals on the walls, as millions around the world mourned the death of the pope.
SOUTH PORTLAND (April 7, 2005): Holy Cross School Principal Deacon Steve Harnois took a group of students into the school's chapel Monday, with its frescos and murals on the walls, as millions around the world mourned the death of the pope.
Harnois has been using the death of Pope John Paul II to teach students about the traditions surrounding the death of the pope and the process of choosing a new one.
Taking students into the school's chapel, "like the Sistine Chapel," is helping Harnois recreate for the students the experience of the cardinals, as they vote to choose the new leader of the Roman Catholic Church.
“We learned basically what’s going to be happening as the cardinals arrive in Rome,” Harnois said of the events at the pre-kindergarten through eighth-grade school on the corner of Broadway and Cottage Road.
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Wojtyla in Poland in 1920, died Saturday at age 84, after more than 26 years as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church.
The school is beginning each morning this week by praying the “‘Our Father,’ ‘Hail Mary’ and ‘Glory Be’ for the repose of his soul,” Harnois said.
Harnois gave teachers information on Pope John Paul II, and on the process of choosing a new pope, and are discussing the events with their students.
Harnois, who worked 29 years in public education before moving to the Catholic schools seven years ago, said death is not a problem topic at Holy Cross.
“It’s much easier to handle death here than in the public schools … because you can go into Christian beliefs,” he said.
In religion classes, students have talked about John Paul II and what he did during his papacy, as well as the traditions surrounding the death of a pope and the election of a new one.
Some of the students asked about the practices of hitting the pope on the head with a silver mallet and calling out the pope's original name, Harnois said. He told them those measures were to ensure the pope was not stricken with the “sleeping sickness” in the 16th and 17th centuries, which made people appear dead when they were really still alive.
“We talked about all the different traditions that have evolved over the years,” Harnois said, including the prayers before each balloting, why the cardinals’ ballots are threaded by a needle onto a thread and why the ballots are burned after each vote.
Those practices were developed to prevent cardinals from casting more than one vote, which led to questions from students who wondered why holy men would try to cheat. Harnois has discussed with the students how some people throughout history have been more interested in the “power of the papacy rather than the goodness of it.”
And to explain why a newly chosen pope has to pick a new name, Harnois looks to the Bible. “It comes from Jesus changing Simon’s name to Peter,” he said, referring to an event in which Jesus renamed one of his disciples to reflect a new, reborn set of beliefs.
Harnois, who was in his late 20s when John Paul II became pope, is now 65. He has also addressed some of the larger issues the cardinals face when they meet to choose a pope.
“The needs of the church, the needs of the kingdom of God, should be discussed,” Harnois said. If there are specific people who meet those needs, their skills might be mentioned, but there is nothing like what Americans might call campaigning. Cardinals do not urge each other to vote for one or another person in particular, he said.Wednesday, April 6, 2005
Allen blasts Bush budget plan
Published in the Current and the American Journal
U.S. Rep. Tom Allen, D-Maine, sharply criticized the budget proposed by President George W. Bush last week, saying Bush’s spending plan “looks like a budget to reduce economic growth.”
Allen plans to run for reelection to the House in 2006 and is mulling challenging Republican incumbent Olympia Snowe for her Senate seat.
In an interview with an editor at Current Publishing, Allen said the president’s budget, as well as the spending resolutions adopted by the House and Senate – are “all disastrous for Maine” and the rest of the country, and could result in inflation.
Allen, a member of the House Budget Committee, blamed the problems on Bush’s desires to spend huge amounts of money on defense and homeland security, cut taxes on upper-class Americans, and reduce domestic spending.
“It’s so hard for the public to understand that their opportunities in life get affected by how the federal government spends their money,” Allen said.
One aspect that particularly hurts Maine is a proposal to “eliminate … the federal funding that supports agricultural research at land grant colleges,” to research forestry, blueberries and potatoes, among other topics. “No orchardist, no blueberry grower, no landowner can do that (research) on his own,” Allen said.
Spending vs. taxes
While Bush’s budget increases spending overall, it reduces spending on the Small Business Administration, environmental protection, adult education, job training, agricultural research and public housing, Allen said.
“Why? Why is because the president can’t reduce the upper-income tax cuts,” Allen said, characterizing those tax cuts as inefficient. “They gave us too little economic stimulation” and too many long-term problems, including “horrendous budget deficits” topping $400 billion.
“We have to have a stronger sense of fiscal responsibility,” Allen said.
He wants federal revenue to more closely match federal spending. Federal spending is now at about 20 percent of gross domestic product, roughly where it has always been, Allen said. But revenue is at 16.3 or 16.4 percent of GDP, the lowest since 1959 – before Medicare and Medicaid began, he said.
He is also angry about being misled about the cost of the war in Iraq.
“We’re spending over $1 billion a week in Iraq,” Allen said. “Speaking in terms of Bath Iron Works, that’s a destroyer every 10 days.”
But that’s not what former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress before the war.
Allen remembers being told that Iraq could pay for its own reconstruction. “The administration went in thinking it would cost very little money,” he said.
He proposed paying for increased domestic spending by getting rid of tax cuts for upper- and middle-income Americans.
“We ought to be investing in those things in particular that either enhance fairness in American society or contribute to economic growth,” he said.
Allen also voices support for federal funding of the Eastern Trail, an effort to create an off-road route from Kittery to South Portland and beyond. He has supported it in the past with earmarks of transportation money, and expects to continue to.
“To understand the value of trails, all you have to do is look at urban and rural trails where they exist,” he said. “They are heavily, heavily used.”
Allen expressed concern that the budget might not get a proper hearing in the chambers of Congress, as members debate the president’s biggest item, the privatization of Social Security.
“The debate over Social Security over private accounts sucks out a lot of the air” Congress would use to discuss other matters, Allen said.
Education and energy
Two topics that need additional scrutiny are the federal education and energy policies, he said.
“No Child Left Behind has become another unfunded mandate,” that has never been given the money it needs to succeed, Allen said.
“There’s not enough money to pay for all the testing and the training that’s required,” he said. “Most educators in Maine would say that we’re spending so much time teaching to the test that we’ve lost the spontaneity” that is crucial to education.
He also wants to revamp the government’s approach to energy, particularly the use of fossil fuels.
“We’ve wasted over four years when we could have been doing an energy policy that could have reduced demand,” he said, blaming the Bush administration for stalling on energy-conservation measures while demanding support for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve in Alaska.
“They wanted to drill but not to save,” Allen said. But in a country that uses 25 percent of the world’s oil and has 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves, “ANWR doesn’t matter,” he said.
“We need to be investing in alternatives,” including cellulosic ethanol, which can be added to gasoline to conserve petroleum-based fuel
Health care
Allen wants to “make our health care system more efficient,” to reduce the cost burden businesses bear, and help cover an estimated 45 million Americans who do not have health insurance.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., floated one idea Allen likes during the 2004 presidential campaign. That idea would have the federal government pick up the cost of all health care cases that cost over $50,000, effectively creating a nationwide high-risk insurance pool.
But Allen doesn’t think that will be approved without some means of containing the costs of health care, which could be a long way off.
He deferred questions on what specific drugs or procedures should or should not be included in government-funded programs, but said medical decisions will become increasingly political because of the expense.
“They’ll have to be because the cost of health care is so high,” he said. “We’re not going to be able to escape this.”
The latest Medicare reform bill requires insurance companies to cover one drug in each class, Allen said, but does not specify which drug, leaving private insurers to decide on their own.
“These are the kinds of things that probably require some kind of public process,” to allow the people at large to prioritize health care spending, Allen said.
He also blasted federal involvement in the Terri Schiavo case, saying it was “a clear case” of a decision that should have stayed within the family. If the family disagreed, he said the courts should handle it.
“Congress had no business, in my view, injecting itself into a family matter,” he said, calling the law bringing the Schiavo case into federal court a political maneuver that ignored “the common sense attitude of a majority” of Americans.
“The silver lining to the Terri Schiavo case is more Americans will do living wills,” Allen said.
U.S. Rep. Tom Allen, D-Maine, sharply criticized the budget proposed by President George W. Bush last week, saying Bush’s spending plan “looks like a budget to reduce economic growth.”
Allen plans to run for reelection to the House in 2006 and is mulling challenging Republican incumbent Olympia Snowe for her Senate seat.
In an interview with an editor at Current Publishing, Allen said the president’s budget, as well as the spending resolutions adopted by the House and Senate – are “all disastrous for Maine” and the rest of the country, and could result in inflation.
Allen, a member of the House Budget Committee, blamed the problems on Bush’s desires to spend huge amounts of money on defense and homeland security, cut taxes on upper-class Americans, and reduce domestic spending.
“It’s so hard for the public to understand that their opportunities in life get affected by how the federal government spends their money,” Allen said.
One aspect that particularly hurts Maine is a proposal to “eliminate … the federal funding that supports agricultural research at land grant colleges,” to research forestry, blueberries and potatoes, among other topics. “No orchardist, no blueberry grower, no landowner can do that (research) on his own,” Allen said.
Spending vs. taxes
While Bush’s budget increases spending overall, it reduces spending on the Small Business Administration, environmental protection, adult education, job training, agricultural research and public housing, Allen said.
“Why? Why is because the president can’t reduce the upper-income tax cuts,” Allen said, characterizing those tax cuts as inefficient. “They gave us too little economic stimulation” and too many long-term problems, including “horrendous budget deficits” topping $400 billion.
“We have to have a stronger sense of fiscal responsibility,” Allen said.
He wants federal revenue to more closely match federal spending. Federal spending is now at about 20 percent of gross domestic product, roughly where it has always been, Allen said. But revenue is at 16.3 or 16.4 percent of GDP, the lowest since 1959 – before Medicare and Medicaid began, he said.
He is also angry about being misled about the cost of the war in Iraq.
“We’re spending over $1 billion a week in Iraq,” Allen said. “Speaking in terms of Bath Iron Works, that’s a destroyer every 10 days.”
But that’s not what former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress before the war.
Allen remembers being told that Iraq could pay for its own reconstruction. “The administration went in thinking it would cost very little money,” he said.
He proposed paying for increased domestic spending by getting rid of tax cuts for upper- and middle-income Americans.
“We ought to be investing in those things in particular that either enhance fairness in American society or contribute to economic growth,” he said.
Allen also voices support for federal funding of the Eastern Trail, an effort to create an off-road route from Kittery to South Portland and beyond. He has supported it in the past with earmarks of transportation money, and expects to continue to.
“To understand the value of trails, all you have to do is look at urban and rural trails where they exist,” he said. “They are heavily, heavily used.”
Allen expressed concern that the budget might not get a proper hearing in the chambers of Congress, as members debate the president’s biggest item, the privatization of Social Security.
“The debate over Social Security over private accounts sucks out a lot of the air” Congress would use to discuss other matters, Allen said.
Education and energy
Two topics that need additional scrutiny are the federal education and energy policies, he said.
“No Child Left Behind has become another unfunded mandate,” that has never been given the money it needs to succeed, Allen said.
“There’s not enough money to pay for all the testing and the training that’s required,” he said. “Most educators in Maine would say that we’re spending so much time teaching to the test that we’ve lost the spontaneity” that is crucial to education.
He also wants to revamp the government’s approach to energy, particularly the use of fossil fuels.
“We’ve wasted over four years when we could have been doing an energy policy that could have reduced demand,” he said, blaming the Bush administration for stalling on energy-conservation measures while demanding support for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve in Alaska.
“They wanted to drill but not to save,” Allen said. But in a country that uses 25 percent of the world’s oil and has 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves, “ANWR doesn’t matter,” he said.
“We need to be investing in alternatives,” including cellulosic ethanol, which can be added to gasoline to conserve petroleum-based fuel
Health care
Allen wants to “make our health care system more efficient,” to reduce the cost burden businesses bear, and help cover an estimated 45 million Americans who do not have health insurance.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., floated one idea Allen likes during the 2004 presidential campaign. That idea would have the federal government pick up the cost of all health care cases that cost over $50,000, effectively creating a nationwide high-risk insurance pool.
But Allen doesn’t think that will be approved without some means of containing the costs of health care, which could be a long way off.
He deferred questions on what specific drugs or procedures should or should not be included in government-funded programs, but said medical decisions will become increasingly political because of the expense.
“They’ll have to be because the cost of health care is so high,” he said. “We’re not going to be able to escape this.”
The latest Medicare reform bill requires insurance companies to cover one drug in each class, Allen said, but does not specify which drug, leaving private insurers to decide on their own.
“These are the kinds of things that probably require some kind of public process,” to allow the people at large to prioritize health care spending, Allen said.
He also blasted federal involvement in the Terri Schiavo case, saying it was “a clear case” of a decision that should have stayed within the family. If the family disagreed, he said the courts should handle it.
“Congress had no business, in my view, injecting itself into a family matter,” he said, calling the law bringing the Schiavo case into federal court a political maneuver that ignored “the common sense attitude of a majority” of Americans.
“The silver lining to the Terri Schiavo case is more Americans will do living wills,” Allen said.
Soldier’s widow murdered: Lavinia Gelineau’s body was found in her basement on Central Street Friday afternoon.
Published in the American Journal; co-written with Mike Higgins
The widow of a Maine soldier killed in Iraq last year was brutally murdered by her father last week in Westbrook.
The father, Nicolae Onitiu, 51, strangled Lavinia Gelineau, 25, with a clothesline in the basement of her home on Central Street. Shortly after killing his daughter, police said Onitiu, who was visiting from Romania, took his own life by hanging himself from a floor joist in the basement.
State Police Spokesman Steve McCausland said that before killing himself, Onitiu took the time to smoke a cigarette. Police found the lighter still clutched in his hand.
McCausland said police believe the murder took place sometime late Thursday night or early Friday morning.
Westbrook Police Chief Paul McCarthy said it was the first homicide in the city since Oct. 27, 2000, when 21-year-old Brandon Feyler of Portland was stabbed by Anthony Osborne during an altercation outside Osborne’s home on Seavey Street. McCarthy said Osborne was convicted in connection with Feyler’s death.
Police discovered the bodies of Gelineau and her father on Friday afternoon. Gelineau’s co-workers had called and asked them to check on her because she had failed to show up for work.
Gelineau had worked since August at STRIVE, a non-profit in South Portland supporting young adults with intellectual and emotional disabilities. "It was going to be her last day, and she didn’t come in for work,” said STRIVE Program Manager Peter Brown. “We got concerned about her.”
The staff had planned a party for her, because it was her last day of work, before she headed back to school to become a French teacher. They called and left messages for Gelineau, but never heard back. Not showing up was “very unlike her,” and “a couple of employees had a sense that something was wrong,” Brown said.
The STRIVE staff called police twice, the first time to ask them to check on Gelineau. They asked police to call back to say what they had found. The police said they couldn’t call, but could have Gelineau call to say everything was alright.
Later, having heard nothing, they called Westbrook police again. That time, they were asked to describe the make and model of her car and other information, Brown said.
“We were just putting the pieces together ourselves,” Brown said. And, it wasn’t a good picture.
“We knew it had been, first of all, a really horrible year. And we knew that her father had just come into town, and they had a difficult relationship,” Brown said.
Brown said police called the company around noon on Friday to inform them of Gelineau’s death. He said staff members were given crisis hotline numbers to call if they needed someone to talk with and councilors visited the office on Monday to help staff members deal with the loss.
To say Gelineau was having a difficult year is an understatement.
Last April 20, her husband Christopher Gelineau was killed in combat while serving in Iraq.
By all accounts, Gelineau was devastated by her husband’s death and was still mourning his loss.
Gelineau’s mother, Iuliana Onitiu, had come to live with her daughter shortly after the death of Gelineau’s husband. They had previously shared an apartment in Portland before moving to a house in Westbrook just a couple of weeks ago. Gelineau also has a brother who is still living in Romania.
Shortly before her estranged husband arrived from Romania, Iuliana Onitiu had left Westbrook to visit Christopher’s parents.
McCausland said Nicolae and Iuliana Onitiu had a history of domestic violence.
“She wanted no contact with him,” McCausland said.
While it appeared Gelineau was aware of the previous violence between her parents, McCausland said it did not appear that there had been any previous incidents of violence between her and her father. In fact, about six moths ago, Nicolae Onitiu attempted suicide in Romania, and Gelineau flew to that country to visit him.
Gelineau, however, was wary enough about his visit to speak to co-workers about it, especially about how it would affect her mother.
“She was concerned about her father and her mother being in the same place,” Brown said. But Gelineau was not concerned about herself.
“She thought her father’s concerns were with her mother,” Brown said. “She was confident she could handle her father.”
In the wake of her death, those that knew Gelineau remember her fondly, speaking of her love for her husband and the compassion that she showed to other soldier’s families who were suffering as she was. They remember a woman who worked hard to get her life back on track.
“She was just a great lady, and she was doing her best to help everyone out,” said Maj. Peter Rogers of the Maine National Guard.
Rogers said that after Christopher Gelineau’s death, Lavinia remained active in the Guard’s Family Assistance Program, and attended the funerals of other Maine soldiers who were killed in Iraq. “She was very strong for a lot of family members,” he said.
Maine National Guard State Family Program Director Sgt. 1st Class Barbara Claudel said Gelineau had a great effect on the lives of soldiers and their families even after losing her husband. She said Gelineau kept in constant contact with many soldiers through e-mail and also shipped care packages overseas to them. “A lot of families had a deep connection to her because of the type of person that she was,” she said.
Like Rogers, Claudel also remembers Gelineau being at the funeral for every Maine soldier killed in action. Claudel remembers Gelineau offering comfort to grieving families by a kind word, a hug or just her presence. Claudel said he was amazed that Gelineau had the capacity for such compassion even in the face of her own tragic loss.
“I don’t know how she had that kind of strength," she said. “I don’t think she ever stopped giving, even though she was grieving.”
Gelineau also took the time to continue pursuing her dreams. She and Christopher met at the University of Southern Maine. Last May, she received her diploma and a diploma posthumously awarded to her husband to a standing ovation from the audience in attendance at the Cumberland County Civic Center.
“A real tragic end,” said Rogers. “Things were just starting to look bright for her.”
Brown said the staff at STRIVE will be feeling Gelineau’s loss for quite some time. “She was a really nice person who had really suffered a lot,” Brown said. “She was very well liked by our clients and our staff alike.”
Claudel said she would remember Gelineau’s compassion to others in the wake of her own tragedy.
“She was a very special person, and she affected every one of us,” she said. “People don’t do that anymore. They don’t reach out, and she just did. She was very special to a lot of people.”
Looking for a bright spot, Claudel said that at least now the pain that Gelineau was feeling for the loss of her beloved husband was finally over. “She grieved and she grieved a long time because she had an undying love for this man,” Claudel said. “She had a love that most of us don’t see, and now she’s with Chris.”
The widow of a Maine soldier killed in Iraq last year was brutally murdered by her father last week in Westbrook.
The father, Nicolae Onitiu, 51, strangled Lavinia Gelineau, 25, with a clothesline in the basement of her home on Central Street. Shortly after killing his daughter, police said Onitiu, who was visiting from Romania, took his own life by hanging himself from a floor joist in the basement.
State Police Spokesman Steve McCausland said that before killing himself, Onitiu took the time to smoke a cigarette. Police found the lighter still clutched in his hand.
McCausland said police believe the murder took place sometime late Thursday night or early Friday morning.
Westbrook Police Chief Paul McCarthy said it was the first homicide in the city since Oct. 27, 2000, when 21-year-old Brandon Feyler of Portland was stabbed by Anthony Osborne during an altercation outside Osborne’s home on Seavey Street. McCarthy said Osborne was convicted in connection with Feyler’s death.
Police discovered the bodies of Gelineau and her father on Friday afternoon. Gelineau’s co-workers had called and asked them to check on her because she had failed to show up for work.
Gelineau had worked since August at STRIVE, a non-profit in South Portland supporting young adults with intellectual and emotional disabilities. "It was going to be her last day, and she didn’t come in for work,” said STRIVE Program Manager Peter Brown. “We got concerned about her.”
The staff had planned a party for her, because it was her last day of work, before she headed back to school to become a French teacher. They called and left messages for Gelineau, but never heard back. Not showing up was “very unlike her,” and “a couple of employees had a sense that something was wrong,” Brown said.
The STRIVE staff called police twice, the first time to ask them to check on Gelineau. They asked police to call back to say what they had found. The police said they couldn’t call, but could have Gelineau call to say everything was alright.
Later, having heard nothing, they called Westbrook police again. That time, they were asked to describe the make and model of her car and other information, Brown said.
“We were just putting the pieces together ourselves,” Brown said. And, it wasn’t a good picture.
“We knew it had been, first of all, a really horrible year. And we knew that her father had just come into town, and they had a difficult relationship,” Brown said.
Brown said police called the company around noon on Friday to inform them of Gelineau’s death. He said staff members were given crisis hotline numbers to call if they needed someone to talk with and councilors visited the office on Monday to help staff members deal with the loss.
To say Gelineau was having a difficult year is an understatement.
Last April 20, her husband Christopher Gelineau was killed in combat while serving in Iraq.
By all accounts, Gelineau was devastated by her husband’s death and was still mourning his loss.
Gelineau’s mother, Iuliana Onitiu, had come to live with her daughter shortly after the death of Gelineau’s husband. They had previously shared an apartment in Portland before moving to a house in Westbrook just a couple of weeks ago. Gelineau also has a brother who is still living in Romania.
Shortly before her estranged husband arrived from Romania, Iuliana Onitiu had left Westbrook to visit Christopher’s parents.
McCausland said Nicolae and Iuliana Onitiu had a history of domestic violence.
“She wanted no contact with him,” McCausland said.
While it appeared Gelineau was aware of the previous violence between her parents, McCausland said it did not appear that there had been any previous incidents of violence between her and her father. In fact, about six moths ago, Nicolae Onitiu attempted suicide in Romania, and Gelineau flew to that country to visit him.
Gelineau, however, was wary enough about his visit to speak to co-workers about it, especially about how it would affect her mother.
“She was concerned about her father and her mother being in the same place,” Brown said. But Gelineau was not concerned about herself.
“She thought her father’s concerns were with her mother,” Brown said. “She was confident she could handle her father.”
In the wake of her death, those that knew Gelineau remember her fondly, speaking of her love for her husband and the compassion that she showed to other soldier’s families who were suffering as she was. They remember a woman who worked hard to get her life back on track.
“She was just a great lady, and she was doing her best to help everyone out,” said Maj. Peter Rogers of the Maine National Guard.
Rogers said that after Christopher Gelineau’s death, Lavinia remained active in the Guard’s Family Assistance Program, and attended the funerals of other Maine soldiers who were killed in Iraq. “She was very strong for a lot of family members,” he said.
Maine National Guard State Family Program Director Sgt. 1st Class Barbara Claudel said Gelineau had a great effect on the lives of soldiers and their families even after losing her husband. She said Gelineau kept in constant contact with many soldiers through e-mail and also shipped care packages overseas to them. “A lot of families had a deep connection to her because of the type of person that she was,” she said.
Like Rogers, Claudel also remembers Gelineau being at the funeral for every Maine soldier killed in action. Claudel remembers Gelineau offering comfort to grieving families by a kind word, a hug or just her presence. Claudel said he was amazed that Gelineau had the capacity for such compassion even in the face of her own tragic loss.
“I don’t know how she had that kind of strength," she said. “I don’t think she ever stopped giving, even though she was grieving.”
Gelineau also took the time to continue pursuing her dreams. She and Christopher met at the University of Southern Maine. Last May, she received her diploma and a diploma posthumously awarded to her husband to a standing ovation from the audience in attendance at the Cumberland County Civic Center.
“A real tragic end,” said Rogers. “Things were just starting to look bright for her.”
Brown said the staff at STRIVE will be feeling Gelineau’s loss for quite some time. “She was a really nice person who had really suffered a lot,” Brown said. “She was very well liked by our clients and our staff alike.”
Claudel said she would remember Gelineau’s compassion to others in the wake of her own tragedy.
“She was a very special person, and she affected every one of us,” she said. “People don’t do that anymore. They don’t reach out, and she just did. She was very special to a lot of people.”
Looking for a bright spot, Claudel said that at least now the pain that Gelineau was feeling for the loss of her beloved husband was finally over. “She grieved and she grieved a long time because she had an undying love for this man,” Claudel said. “She had a love that most of us don’t see, and now she’s with Chris.”
Friday, April 1, 2005
Cape woman helps Vietnamese neighbors
Published in the Current
CAPE ELIZABETH (April 1, 2005): Three decades after she left Vietnam, Lilly Pyle of Cape Elizabeth is leading an effort to help those still living in her native village.
CAPE ELIZABETH (April 1, 2005): Three decades after she left Vietnam, Lilly Pyle of Cape Elizabeth is leading an effort to help those still living in her native village.
Pyle was born and grew up in the village of Dong Ha in central Vietnam, just inland from Da Nang, in the territory that became known during the Vietnam War as the DMZ, the demilitarized zone.
“It used to be a little village” and even now has only between 3,000 and 5,000 residents – she has been told not to ask for exact numbers for fear the Communist government will think she's a spy.
When she was growing up, an American military base was built nearby. “As children, we went out to the fence to see them,” she said. “I sell bananas and Cokes and stuff” to the servicemen.
In 1972, the Americans pulled back and the Viet Cong took the village after a devastating rocket attack that split up her family for days.
Heading to America
Pyle was in Da Nang then, learning to be a seamstress, and the family ended up in a refugee camp. Pyle quit school to earn money by doing laundry for an American serviceman from Maine, whom she later married and, even later, divorced.
A friend of Pyle’s from the village ended up working for another American, who shared living quarters with Pyle’s future husband.
That village friend married the serviceman she was working for and moved to Maryland. She sent Pyle letters asking her to come to America.
“She sent me pictures of apples and horses,” Pyle said. The serviceman she had worked for, now back in the U.S., promised to support her if she came over.
But still Pyle worried about whether her father, a police officer, would be punished if she left for America.
“He said he owed me my life anywhere that’s safe at the time,” so she left. After a brief trip to Maryland, Pyle went to Maine, where she got married and had two children.
She lost touch with her girlfriend in Maryland, and began life entirely anew in Maine.
Years down the road, Pyle left what had become a very bad relationship.
“If I escaped from that war, I escape again,” she said. She learned to drive, and to read and write English, and left, for the sake of her children, who have both now graduated from college.
Homecoming
In the mid-1990s, in response to a wish from her dying father, Pyle returned to Vietnam for the first time since she had left.
“Imagine you come home 30 years later,” she said. The villagers were poor and hungry.
Government rules required them to build on land they owned, or the government would take the land for someone else. So the villagers built homes, wall by wall, as they could afford the materials.
Others were able to finish a house, but had no other money. “They live in a nice house and (have) no food because they feel the house is going to be (there for) generations,” Pyle said.
“I have always wanted to do something to help,” she said, and so she resolved to raise money to help the villagers – her former neighbors, who remember her as a member of a good family, one of the oldest in the village.
While she was home, she also got bad news: “The children were getting kidnapped and sold to another country for prostitution.”
Many of the people have no jobs, but still have to pay taxes. They also have to pay for their children to attend school.
With Pyle’s money, families are better able to provide for themselves. Some of her money also goes to help the community at large. The first $4,000 she raises this year, for example, will pay for fences and playgrounds at local schools. After that, “I’ll try to see if I can have some form of a day care.”
Seeking donations
Pyle has set up a non-profit organization, the Vietnamese Hope Foundation, to allow donors to deduct contributions from their income taxes. People can find out more about the foundation at its Web site, www.VietnameseHopeFoundation.org, and can send donations to Pyle at PO Box 2752, South Portland, ME 04116.
All of the money goes to the people in the village – she covers the travel expenses herself.
She has returned twice since her father’s death, once with her children and once on her own. Each time she has brought donations to help women and children in Dong Ha.
Many of the women she gives money to are widowed mothers. A lot of the men in the village are dying of cancer – “none of them are over 40” – and the women need the help.
“I can’t save everybody, but I can do a little bit at a time,” Pyle said. “I’ve helped a lot of families.”
But with the American money comes questions from the Vietnamese government, including requests for bribes.
One official demanded she give all the money to him, promising to buy rice to give to everyone in the village. She refused, citing the Biblical proverb “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.”
“I want these people to become independent like me,” she said.
Pyle wants to be sure of where her money is going and personally interviews families that are possible recipients.
“These people never had anything,” she said. “It’s so hard. Everybody the same situation. … I just help one at a time.”
Pyle wants to broaden her foundation’s donor base, who are mostly now friends and customers at her Old Port hair salon. She is trying to get other Vietnamese-Americans around the U.S. to raise money too, to support their villages.
She believes she has found her purpose in life, and has been given the means to carry it out.
“I believe that God has chosen me” to face the challenges of war, emigration, abuse and poverty. Without those experiences, Pyle said, “How would I know how to get out of the gutter? Then I wouldn’t know how to help these people.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)