Religion
College Avenue Presbyterian Church, designed by the famed architect Julia Morgan, has a long history of helping people through personal and spirtual crises.
Romana was seven months pregnant, she told the congregation at Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church on Sunday, when she walked for six hours from Mexico to the United States -– mostly without water, sometimes without shoes. She crossed through brush where sticks ripped at her skin, she said. Her brother and grandmother dragged her when she felt too tired to walk. When Romana and her family arrived at a tunnel where they thought they could rest, she said, US immigration workers…
Volunteers from throughout the East Bay formed a prayer circle near a reedy lagoon called Lake Elizabeth in Fremont on Saturday morning as they gathered to undertake a grim task. The official goal of the search party—some 100 people strong—was to find the missing five-year-old Hassani Campbell, a Fremont resident who vanished sometime around August 10. Yet in their appeals to a higher power, they were already girding themselves for the chance of finishing empty-handed. “It is our prayer, Lord,…
At the River Nile Market in Oakland, which is slightly bigger than a city bus, the shelves are crammed with little bits of Yemen, Sudan, Egypt and Lebanon. Cans of fruit, meat and juice carry Arabic script as well as English lettering. Glass buckets hold spices – cumin, nutmeg, cinnamon and za’atar, a mixture of herbs and spices popular in the Middle East. Burlap bags of basmati rice spill into the aisles. Three water pipes, or hookahs, perch on the…
Produced by AYAKO MIE
Hawaiians struggle in their native islands against the forces of tourism and militarism, according to Ikaika Hussey, publisher of the Hawaii Independent, a Honolulu-based newspaper devoted to in-depth coverage of local issues. On Sunday, March 15, at the Eastside Cultural Center in downtown Oakland, Hussey, joined by Malia Connor, founder of the Malia Movement Company, presented “Hawaiian Native Lands: Seized, Not Ceded,” a combination dance performance and discussion focused on Native Hawaiian struggles.
Sunrise Bookshop, an oasis of crystals and sutras in troubled times.
By Huda Ahmed/Oakland North When I knocked on the door of an apartment building in East Oakland, a woman’s voice nervously asked who I was. The voice belonged to a 45-year-old woman who wishes to be identified only as S. Mohamad because she fears prosecution in her native Iraq; she is a former radiologist who came here as a refugee three months ago along with her husband and their three children. She hid behind the door because she was without…
by LINNEA EDMEIER Nov. 18 – On a grassy hillside in Oakland, overlooking the bay, survivors and loved ones gathered this morning to unveil memorial stones to honor the lives of more than 900 people who died in the Jonestown tragedy thirty years ago today. In 1978 the news from Guyana was unfathomable. A group of people had carved out what was supposed to be a utopian existence in a South American jungle community, and then died all at once,…