“It’s chicken blood,” Basil Seggos, Chief Investigator of the environmental Watchdog group Riverkeeper confirms, pointing to some stray chicken parts and feathers floating atop. The stream of blood in the water, presumably emitted by a nearby poultry factory, is but one of the many cases of illegal pollution Seggos and his team have noted since they started patrolling Newtown Creek and other waterways in the city. “We’ve been up Newtown Creek about 150 times, on a boat. Every day we go out, we see something new,” says Seggos. Riverkeeper’s most high profile case is their current lawsuit against Exxon Mobil in the case of an estimated 17 million gallon oil spill underneath Greenpoint. But even the smaller infractions, such as the chicken blood, or an occasional spill of soapy water from a liquor distributor, have contributed significantly to the Creek’s current reputation as one of the country’s most putrid waterways. “The Creek has died a death of a thousand cuts,” Seggos says.

The problems in Newtown Creek are not unique. Elsewhere, on Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, the Urban Divers, another environmental group, observed numerous acts of illegal pollution. Among them a neon green substance floating in the water, boiling hot wastewater running from an illegal pipe into the canal, and a factory that ran liquid cement wastewater untreated into the water, creating banks of sediment underwater.

Yet most pollution incidents are neither fined nor prosecuted, a report by the New York City Council found earlier this year. One of the central conundrums at two City Council hearings in the past year was: who is really in charge of enforcing the laws against illegal dumping and pollution on New York City waterways?

A complicated puzzle of federal, state and city agencies is failing to fully enforce the anti-pollution laws, allowing many polluters to walk away scot-free, according to the City Council.

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“Looking back on it now, if she’d woke up one day and became as violent as she is today, I would have walked out that day,” Woods, a 6 feet tall 230 pounds former bouncer and construction worker says.

But he didn’t. And once they had crossed that elusive threshold in their relationship, there was no going back.

In the early days he chalked his wife’s manipulative behavior down to stress from their recent move to California. In the mid-80s, years before Mr. Mom became a catchword, he stayed at home with their two daughters, while she worked shifts as a cardiac nurse. Woods found that he could tolerate verbal threats, the odd slap, usually laced in a reproach for the fact that he wasn’t working. His wife would seek out opportunities to embarrass him publicly and gradually Woods stopped going to parties, making excuses that he had a headache. But within just a few years their fights, mostly over financial matters, escalated regularly and their relationship disintegrated into a dance of violence: slaps had become punches and threats became reality. Trapped financially and emotionally, he had nowhere to go. Not after his wife lunged at him with a kitchen knife nearly cutting his throat on a rainy morning while his children looked on. Nor when she hit him in the groin using a technique that he had taught her, leaving him doubled up on the floor, wincing in pain. “I didn’t mean to do that,” she’d say. He tried to shield his children from the violence. During fights it became second nature for him to sweep the room to ensure their absence. But inevitably he would look up during a fight and see his daughter Meghan shrunk down in the corner or scurrying around the room trying to find a vantage point where she could crouch down and watch without being seen.

To the little girl these fights seemed like a tango, where every gesture has implications, where every movement has more depth or meaning to it than ostensibly visible. “It’s almost as if you see a car crash,” Woods offers. “You can see it in slow motion getting out of control, about to happen.”

And occasionally she’d threaten to leave him. “She was saying things like “If you don’t like living with me then go live under a bridge,” Woods recalls.

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An accomplished pianist from an early age, Mark Pampel suffers from a progressive condition that has steadily diminished his sight and hearing for the past thirty years to near total deaf-blindness.But he considers himself lucky to have been able to make his passion his profession. “When I play the piano, I’m no longer a deaf blind nobody. I am in a different world, I am a pianist, composer, an improviser, a communicator.” Mr. Pampel brings both raw emotion and masterful improvisation to his play. His music is infused with a passion he credits to the effects of the progressively devastating physical and emotional obstacles he has battled with since his illness stuck. Sitting at his piano his body sways as if one with the vibrations of his instrument. He seems engrossed, ecstatic even, his eyes closed behind his dark-orange glasses.

Mr. Pampel first realized that his sight was fading at 23 while playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata for his piano teacher. “I knew that something was awfully wrong,” he remembers. The notes on the sheet music were blurred, and he knew then what a medical diagnosis later confirmed: the future was going to be blindness. “I was shattered,” he recalls.

But he was determined not to give up. He would find a way to overcome the odds. “I knew it was going to be a struggle when I couldn’t read music anymore. I then turned my attention to playing by ear and improvising which I do a lot of at the moment.”

Then, in his late twenties his hearing started to fail. He has since lost about three quarters of his hearing and relies heavily on his powerful digital hearing aids to have conversations and play the piano. “When I sit and play the piano after the hearing aid has been fine tuned, the piano does sound very good. I am amazed.”

But finding and keeping the right kind of hearing aid is proving difficult. Recently his hearing deteriorated further and the NHS issued him with a new brand of hearing aids. “Before I even took my coat off, I fled into the lounge, opened up the piano lid and started to play. It sounded odd. The top two octaves were distorted. When I played loud, I heard a booming sensation. It made me feel absolutely awful. I could feel the onset of some black cloud, depression, not being able to cope.”
“It’s taken me twenty years to acquire the right kind of piano for my hearing loss. And then suddenly for it all to be ripped apart because of the wrong hearing aids – it feels like suddenly the door slams closed.”

Mr. Pampel took the issue up with the NHS, but to little avail. Predictably, the majority of people needing hearing aids use them predominantly for speech, not to play piano. ”’Because you’re a minority we can’t really help you’ “ Pampel paraphrases the NHS’s response. “I felt my whole body sinking into a depressed low.” He since switched back to his previous hearing aids and is not losing faith. “Looking at the positive side, maybe the newer range of hearing aids will be far more sophisticated when it comes to my job, my livelihood, which is playing at the piano.”

In addition to setting up Pianos Plus, a group of pianists that meet every few weeks to spend an afternoon improvising on two pianos, he also uses his talents for the good of the community. He is an activist for the deaf-blind charity Sense and every Thursday he plays for Alzheimer patients at Camden’s Netherwoods Day Centre. “I go along there with my bowtie, communicating with them through voice, making gestures, making them laugh a bit and playing the piano, “ he says. “At the end they’re all on a high. And me too.”

At age 50, Mr. Pampel has learned to manage the setbacks in life his disability has made him endure. Though he was forced to retire early from his job as a civil servant, his former profession has afforded him with organizational skills that help him cope in his everyday life. He uses a tape recorder to record names, conversations and telephone numbers and to listen to articles from magazines recorded by the Royal National Institute of the Blind. Besides his wife of 30 years, Mr. Pampel has also had the help of numerous counselors, therapists and social workers. In addition, a personal reader has provided him with a lifeline to managing everyday tasks like such as dealing with his
correspondence.

Despite all his challenges, Mark Pampel works on staying optimistic by practicing meditation and yoga and keeping healthy by working out on his exercise bike. “I mix with people who are encouraging - it helps reduce the negativity of ones own thoughts. “

But most of all playing the piano it is the core of his strength. “I know that during the day if I have a bad moment, I can go and open up the piano and I can get something out.”
“I could talk about the piano forever. I’m a bit of an anorak for that,” he says with a grin.

At age 90, Marie Runyon has little left to prove. A tall, slender woman, she doesn’t look her age, a fact that is underlined by the long, short-sleeved dress she is wearing. Despite hear age, her commitment is in no way diminished. Her partial blindness certainly did not deter her from marching in this week’s protest action organized by the “Grandmothers against the Iraq War”. She joined 18 other grandmothers to try and enlist in the army at the Times Square recruitment center. “I was using my cane to try and get into the recruiting center, but it was locked,” she laughs. Along with the other grannies, she was arrested and taken to the 54th street precinct. “Actually the police were astonishingly friendly,” she says. “This was not always so. I have been arrested many times…I quit counting at number 59,” she adds with a hint of pride in her voice.

Growing up in the South, where she felt racism was pervasive, she became aware of the injustices in the world at a young age. Her time Berea College in Kentucky instilled the crucial values in her, values that were to become her lifelong guide: a keen sense of justice and a hard work ethic, combined with a strong faith in God.

Runyon’s true fighting spirit didn’t fully ignite until, in the early sixties, a personal plight became a matter of politics. Administrators at Columbia University’s College of Pharmacy, the owner of her apartment building, tried to evict all tenants in order to build a new campus building. Having gone through a divorce and living as a single mother rebuilding her life, the threat could not have come at a worse time. “I was as poor as a church mouse, and there was no way I was going to move out. Hell no! I finally had a home for my daughter. I wasn’t going to let these sons of bitches take it all away,” Runyon exclaims, her voice shaking. Her hands move swiftly through the air, underlining the raw emotion she still feels about the incident that sparked her efforts as a tenant’s activist. Others in the building ceded, among them a Holocaust survivor who was afraid of the consequences of bucking the system and a family that feared their welfare checks would stop coming if they didn’t move out. Runyon’s persistence paid off and she got to keep the apartment. “Columbia hated me”, she admits, reminiscing about her protracted struggle with the university’s administration. But that changed over time. In 2002 the building was renamed “Marie Runyon Court” by Columbia’s Board of Trustees. “ I was delighted. It was wonderful, very ironic,” she laughs.

Her most high profile engagement was the Harlem Restoration Project, which she funded in 1977. It was a non-profit community development organization, set up to help Harlem’s poor and ex-offenders get apartments and jobs. It became the centerpiece of her work for tenant’s rights. Her tenure at the organization ended in a public falling out with the Board of Directors over her management practices and she eventually resigned in the late 1990s.

Runyon admits that she has made many enemies during her life. A few years ago, under the Freedom of Information Act she requested her file from the FBI. She knew that she had come to the attention of authorities during the time she worked to raise money for the Black Panther’s legal defense fund. The file, “the size of a Manhattan telephone directory” astonished even her. And pages she received didn’t even include the over 200 pages that remain classified. True to her spirit and sense of humor, she sent out invitations for an “Instant Party: Courtesy FBI” so her friends could witness her opening the package. “Most of it was blacked out,” Runyon says. But they had a great party anyway.

Adversity has never deterred her. Not when her husband walked out on her and her little daughter. Not when she felt that Harlem politician Carl McCall tried to sabotage her endeavor to set up the Harlem Restoration project, nor when she failed to be reelected for State Assembly for a second term in1976. Her most important lesson in life is to never give up. “You can’t give up because you loose a little fight. You gotta keep on keeping on,” she advises. “You gotta do things for other people. Do onto others as you would have them do onto you,” she quotes. “And that works. I don’t have much, but I am happy as a clam on high tide.”

Chesa is one of an estimated ten million children in the United States affected by the incarceration of a parent at some point in their lives. In a country where the incarceration rate is the highest in the Western world, and where taxpayers spend around twenty thousand dollars per year to imprison one person whether he or she has committed murder or written bad checks, there is an ever-increasing pool of children that are forced to deal with their parent’s imprisonment. Statistics show that children of incarcerated parents are 5 times more likely than other children to be imprisoned during their lifetime, suggesting that unless they are offered targeted help and support, they too will succumb to the cycle of incarceration. These children are the hidden victims of crime and punishment in the United States, in a system that is on the verge of creating a quicksand ready to swallow ever-increasing segments of the population.

A highly articulate and exceptionally intelligent young man, Chesa considers himself lucky. When his parents were arrested when he was fourteen months old, he was taken in by family friends and raised as their own. He has had the financial means to receive a private education, and got the emotional support from his foster family and over the years he was able to develop and maintain a tight, nurturing relationship with both his birth parents. As Chesa pinpointed in a recent panel discussion about the effects on incarceration of parents on children, the latter was the most crucial step that helped him turn from a troubled child into a functioning, successful adult. Pained by a feeling of guilt for not having been able to prevent his parents from taking their fatal, misguided step that would ultimately separate them for years to come, Chesa suffered from developmental problems, and did not start to read until he reached third grade. It wasn’t until his teenage years, that he learned to contain his temper. Whilst Chesa’s mother was granted parole recently, after having served 22 years of a twenty years to life sentence, his father, who is serving a minimum sentence of 75 years, is unlikely to ever be released.

Chesa is indeed lucky in that he has managed, with the help of his support network, overcome his adversity and ripen into a poster child for other children of incarcerated parents. In addition to his graduation from Yale, he was also awarded the prestigious Rhodes scholarship this summer. Most children however are not so fortunate and often, the elementary support that Chesa received, is not available to the majority of children with an incarcerated parent. While Chesa was brought up in a middle class home with foster parents who encouraged his education, according to the Bureau of Federal Justice Statistics, significantly more than half of state inmates did not finish high school, and the majority of them were living at or below the poverty line at the time of their arrest.

While Father Nugent complied with the wishes of his superiors, Sister Jeannine refused, basing her decision on the little known Catholic concept of the primacy of conscience. “I refuse to collaborate in my own oppression”, she explained at the time and even though the Vatican has issued a decree for her religious superiors to silence her, Sister Jeannine continues to speak out about the issues she feels she has been called to by God.

Meeting Dominic, a gay student in 1970 changed Sister Jeanine’s life and set her on the path as an activist for lesbian and gay rights within the Catholic Church. “I was a good little nun until I met Dominic”, Sister Jeannine explains, adding that when Dominic asked her what the Catholic Church was really doing for lesbian and gay believers, she was at a loss for an answer. This prompted her and Father Nugent to celebrate masses for Dominic and his gay peers and subsequently to establish – with the support of her religious order, the School Sisters of Notre Dame - the New Ways Ministry. Even though fellow Catholics attacked Sister Jeanine, accusing her of misleading gay Catholics about the Catholic Church’s views on homosexuality, she contends that she has always been straightforward with her congregation. According to the official doctrine, being homosexual per se is not sinful. However,  homosexual behavior is. In other words to act on the homosexual desire is sinful. During her speeches and retreats that the New Ways Ministry holds for both gay Catholics and their parents, Sister Jeannine indeed stresses the official teachings of the church. However, she takes an impassioned stance in voicing her opinion that homosexuals should be allowed to participate in loving relationships and live their love in both an emotional and a physical way, as long as the relationship is a loving one.