Latinos For Progress sponsors heritage events

Latinos for Progress is sponsoring events for Hispanic Heritage Month, which began Sept. 15 and ends Oct. 15.

“Latinos are a wide-spectrum of races and religions and are in 22 countries,” said graduate student Sandra Gutierrez, member of the Multicultural Student Services Center and LFP.

The month will include seven events and an ongoing Latino Culture Exhibit in the MSSC building at 2127 G St. The exhibit is about breaking Latino stereotypes and features pictures of famous Latinos, a traditional Catholic alter, traditional clothing and food, Gutierrez said.

“Latinos have made many contributions to the United States and many of them are overlooked,” Gutierrez said.

Karen Jaime, a slam poet, will perform Oct. 3 at Mount Vernon from 8:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. as a part of the month’s activities.

Felipe Padilla will hold a book signing and talk about cultural awareness Oct. 12 as a part of Family Weekend. Padilla is a professor at Yale University and the author of five books on the Latino experience in the United States.

The month will end with “La Fiestasa” Oct. 19 in the Hippodrome. The party will feature free food and salsa lessons.

“(Hispanics) are the largest minority,” Gutierrez said. “Most of us are below the age of 21 now, but in the next 20 years we’ll have a more direct impact on the country.”

-Becky Guyon

Students stay during untraditional fall break

Some GW students were not scared off by anti-war protests or enticed by free bus rides this weekend, and stayed in D.C. to enjoy a few days out of class.

As the majority of the student body left town for home, to visit friends or vacation, many students said they stayed to witness protests, entertain out of town guests or catch up on schoolwork.

Sophomore Ben DiLiberto said he stayed to see the demonstrations Saturday and Sunday.

“This is why I came to GW, to experience the political process firsthand,” he said.

DiLiberto even invited friends from the University of Delaware to join him for the weekend. Sarah Laughinghouse and Sara Murphy made the trip from Delaware to visit their friend and see the District.

“Even though they originally expected the protests to be big this time, I was coming down no matter what,” Murphy said.

Junior Dan Fody said he now calls D.C. home and did not feel compelled to make the long trip back to his native state Colorado.

“I live a long ways away and didn’t have a reason to leave,” he said. “Most people think that they will only be here temporarily, for college, but not me, D.C. is my home now.”

Junior Mike Kaye would have liked to spend the weekend in his hometown, but his parents told him not to come back for the break. He lives in Manhattan and since the attacks on the World Trade Center, he said New York City is understandably not what it used to be.

“My father said it’s really depressing,” he said. “He said you can see the devastation in all the faces of every New Yorker. I guess they wanted to shield me from seeing what they have to see everyday.”

-Jennifer Drury

Company sends emergency information via e-mail

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, organizations like The Emergency E-mail Network are finding increases in their membership as the need for emergency information grows.

EEN is a private for-profit organization that provides people with information in disaster situations. Members register on the EEN Web site and receive updates from municipalities about the status of the county they are registered for, EEN President Skip Tamargo said.

EEN gets its updates from a variety of sources including the National Weather Service, U.S. Geological Service and the Red Cross, Tamargo said.

He said the service has a membership in the hundreds of thousands, but could not give an exact number because membership is always changing.

The organizations’ e-mail updates do not usually include national news information, but in the case of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks EEN sent members updates on the events and a list of Web sites that were not overcrowded, such as CNN.com, Tamargo said.

Before the attacks, the majority of EEN’s members were concentrated in Florida and California, regions that are known for natural disasters, Tamargo said. Since the terrorist acts, membership has increased by the thousands in places like New York, Tamargo said.

“The attacks have heightened everyone’s awareness,” Tamargo said.
To help with the relief effort, EEN is donating 25 cents for every person who registers on the network to the American Red Cross, Tamargo said.

EEN was founded in 1999 after one million people were mandated to leave their homes in northeast Florida because of the disaster caused by Hurricane Floyd, Tamargo said. After seeing the logistical problems of moving and informing such a large group of people Tamargo decided that people needed to be able to receive up to date information and e-mail was the best way to do this, Tamargo said.

-Becky Guyon