IN A SUNLIT dance studio, a pianist plays a flurry of arpeggios. Men and women sitting on metal folding chairs slowly bend and stretch.
One man’s hands tremble; a woman’s legs remain rigidly bent. As one woman moves her hands, her feet involuntarily go along. These dance students have Parkinson’s disease.
Nov. 4–Pixieish, long-haired and gregarious, Isabel Bueso, 11, wants to be a dancer and has a ballerina’s extension to prove it.
Since she came to the United States from her native Guatemala, Isabel has tried horseback riding and ice skating. She names five best friends from her fifth-grade class at Lafayette Elementary School.
Filed under Children and youth, Health, Immigration
Some 30 people, mostly men, pack around a long table at the Private Industry Council in downtown Oakland.
The room looks something like a community college class: A span of ages, attentive, dressed neatly, but informally. But everyone in this class is either on probation or parole.
They are low-level offenders – those for whom prison Gov. Jerry Brown crafted prison realignment. They are here to find out what they need – and what they need to leave behind – to find work.
Filed under Health, Incarceration, Social issues
