New England Public Radio

Jill Kaufman

Not For The First Time, Mass. Governor Pushes To Run Federal Water Program

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker is again pushing an environmental bill that — if funded — would allow the state to take the reins of a federal water protection program.

Massachusetts is one of four states that leaves it to the federal government to administer a clean water permit program. New Hampshire is another.

Baker’s bill, which failed last session , would increase staff at the state Department of Environmental Protection, allowing sewage permits, for instance, to be more frequently reviewed, and water to be tested more often.

Environmental Groups Divided

While the Conservation Law Foundation said lawmakers should reject Baker’s proposal because it’s underfunded, the Connecticut River Watershed Council’s Andrew Fisk said his group supports the bill.

“The governor’s putting Massachusetts money forward which is great,” Fisk said. “He needs to put more money forward, that can’t be subject to political winds.”

The state effort is all the more important, Fisk said, because of proposed cuts at the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

Small Town Comes Together After House Fire Kills Mother And Four Children

The exact cause of an early Saturday morning fire that nearly wiped out an entire family in rural western Massachusetts is not yet confirmed. Investigators said the blaze in a single family home on a dirt road deep in Warwick could have started at a wood stove in the kitchen. It appears to be accidental.

On Sunday, residents turned out to mourn the loss of a mother who was active in town activities, and her four children.

While authorities have not identified the victims of the fire by name, everyone in this small town knows whose house burned down, and many know the family personally. The father — Scott Seago — survived the blaze, along with one child.

They were among the crowd at the elementary school in Warwick Sunday afternoon, along with at least 100 others — a large portion of this town of just 800 residents.

State Senate President Stan Rosenberg from Amherst was here, as was state Representative Susannah Whipps, who lives in nearby Athol. On her way out, Whipps said most of the towns in her district are small, like Warwick. And people really look out for each other.

“You have to when you live out here,” Whipps said. “I mean, we’re in a community with virtually no broadband service, [a] small school. It’s a beautiful place to live. It’s a quiet place to live. It’s a true village.”

Warwick is right at the New Hampshire border, one of several sparsely populated towns with a lot of land in what’s called the North Quabbin region. Fire departments from all around show up to help out, as they did Saturday. But the blaze had consumed the house by the time they arrived.

Whipps said a woman who was inside the school sold the Seagos their home a few years ago. She lives nearby, and she brought pictures over. This family has lost everything, Whipps said.

“Everybody comes together, and everybody’s hurting,” she said.

One Warwick resident who came out of the school said he worked with Scott Seago on the town’s broadband committee. Another was a substitute teacher at the elementary school, and knew the kids. But almost no one wanted to speak with the media.

David Young, the town coordinator in Warwick, would talk — a little. Standing outside the school, after almost everyone left, he said the event was helpful. For him, uplifting.

“A lot of people from the community turned out. We’re trying to figure out what to do next. I know the school is pretty well prepared for helping the kids through this [Monday],” Young said.

But Young on Sunday didn’t mention the family by name. He said he can’t, until the district attorney releases that information. But as an official, he said, he knew the family well. He described the mother, Lucinda Seago, whose name is on the town website, as business-like.

“Very much on top of things. Competent and smart, and a member of our Board of Health,” he said. And she had recently completed her degree to become a registered nurse.

Like their parents, Young said, the kids are incredibly bright. He said he he thinks they range from ages 6 to 15.

“I felt terrible for the surviving child who was here, in our midst,” Young said. “She held up well by all appearances, but I can’t imagine…I can’t imagine…” he trailed off.

Inside the school, after the politicians spoke, Young said people sat around talking to each other. A couple of residents who worked on the broadband committee left early to buy Scott Seago a new cellphone.

Where the house stood is now a mound of burned debris, with nearby cars licked by flames. There are no hydrants in Warwick, Young said. There are “fire ponds.” That’s part of rural life, he said.

 

When Tornado Destroys Band’s Equipment, ‘Sound Guy’ Steps Up

No one was seriously injured last Saturday night, after a tornado touched down in the rural Western Massachusetts towns of Goshen and Conway. But buildings and personal belongings were destroyed. Friends — and strangers — have jumped in to help out.

At one fundraiser this week, someone anonymously dropped a cashier’s check for $50,000 into a collection can. Another notable donation was made, just by chance. It started with a phone call to a reporter.

“Hi Jill! This is John ‘Klondike’ Koehler, calling from Greenfield. I heard your report this morning about the band in Conway,” and he said he wanted to help. He had some equipment he could give them.

Koehler, who has spent a lifetime in the wings, running sound systems for clients like the New Orleans Jazz Festival and A Prairie Home Companion, has a history of helping out musicians.

When he heard the band Carinae couldn’t live in their house, that their studio and some gear was crushed, he said, “The story really reached me in a place that brought me back to 2005.”

In response to so much loss after Hurricane Katrina, Koehler and a few friends started the Katrina Piano Fund and raised enough money to get instruments to hundreds of musicians.

This week, he said, it was an easy decision to reach out to a band in Western Massachusetts, his own neck of the woods.

On Tuesday night, Mardi Gras, Koehler and five band members stood in a dark lot of an industrial park, talking about what they would need to get on the road for their scheduled tour.

Gabe Camarano, who lost his drum set, said he was home during the tornado, when a tree fell on the house. His mom was visiting from Mississippi.

“I was in the room, maybe a minute prior, and I got a really strange feeling,” he said.

Camarano said he grabbed his mother’s hand and they ran downstairs.

The studio, which doubled as Camarano ‘s bedroom, was demolished. Other instruments were also smashed and gear was water-logged from the storm. The house is unsafe to live in, for now.

Nina Kent, who plays bass, said it’s been a rough few days.

“Saturday night I kind of felt like, ‘Oh, wow. This one room, where we can all come together and make something happen, is destroyed,'” Kent said. But every day since, the situation seems to be getting better. “Today,” she said, “I’m like, ‘Oh, it is not all lost.'”

Koehler himself is a veteran of equipment mishaps, even with his own band. He described how one of the members dropped a mixer off the edge of a dock, and how once it was retrieved, they took it apart and brought it back to life. Using a blow-dryer.

He stood at the back of a storage trailer, next to a pair of giant speakers and a mix board — circa 1980s, Koehler said. He described its capabilities in detail, using the language of hardcore electronics expert. The decades-younger, digitally-raised musicians were impressed. And grateful.

Then Koehler offered to “fire up” the speakers. “Singasong,” the 1970s hit from Earth, Wind & Fire, blared into the night.

The band members lit up, spun off like tops and laughed into the darkness, coming back as Koehler brought down the fader.

He said he has one condition with these gifts. If possible, he told the band, as they packed up the car and got ready to leave (the tour to Maine, then Georgia was possible after all) they should eventually re-gift the equipment. And, he added, make sure to use it well.

“Remember — there’s a fine line between touring musicians and musical tourists,” Koehler said. “Keep working. Keep playing. Don’t just hang out all the time!”

They quickly agreed, and then they left, shouting goodbyes out the window, as if they had known Koehler for more than just an hour.

Poet Ocean Vuong On The Refugee Experience And Literature

It’s 1975. Saigon has fallen to the North Vietnamese. The end of the war is the beginning of a global humanitarian crisis.

Fifteen years later, the poet Ocean Vuong and his refugee family arrive in Hartford. He is two years old. The first place they stay is in a hotel.

“Then we ended up in a one bedroom apartment. Then a tenement on New Britain Avenue,” Vuong said. And then the family separated and started to live with other relatives.

Poet Ocean Vuong

The moving didn’t stop there. “We went to Glastonbury, East Hartford,” said Vuong, who is now 28 years old. “Anywhere someone could get a nice place, everyone would just go there.”

Vuong is now at a very different point in life. His poetry has received great recognition and awards; it’s been featured in The New Yorker and reviewed in The New York Times. He’s published several collections, the most recent is Night Sky With Exit Wounds.  

Vuong writes about dislocation and about the idea that without political violence, he wouldn’t be alive. His grandfather (his mother’s father) is an American who fought in Vietnam. This connection was an integral piece of growing up, Vuong said, particularly because of how the timeline of war was taught. He described history as slippery and wondered aloud, when does war truly end? Whether Vietnam, the Middle East and  — in particular, right now — Syria.

“It’s strange to me that we call it a crisis. Like, what do we expect?” Vuong said, noting a cease-fire does not end the trauma.

Historic Timelines Incomplete

In grade school, Vuong said the timeline on Vietnam was brief. Reading about it was like, something bad happened in an Asian country and then a couple of pages later, it was on to the Gulf war.

It was Vuong’s grandmother (who died in 2008), and his mother and her sisters who taught him about the war, and what life was like before the bloody conflict between North and South Vietnam. Vuong’s family came from a long line of rice farmers.

“They just worked on their fields [during the war],” he said. “A lot of the Vietnamese, even the soldiers who fought did not know know the politics behind what they were doing.”  

Vuong said his family and others went through utter chaos.

As he got older, Vuong began to write down lyrics from the songs his grandmother taught him and family stories about their fields lighting on fire during the war. He always wanted to know more, he said, but his elders resisted going too far. 

“So when I asked, ‘Why? Why?’ I would suddenly become the precious child in the family. It was all of a sudden like, ‘Stop! We don’t want to unravel pain,” Vuong said, because they had already survived.

Vuong’s younger brother was born in the U.S.  He described the 18-year-old as a typical American teenager who likes girls and has a job at the supermarket. He lived a safer, more stable American childhood than Vuong, who is relieved by that.

“It made me happy to see that ultimately one of us … lived without fear of displacement, without uncertainty, without navigating through not being able to speak. For a long time, my family was mute in society,” Vuong said.

And there was such shame in being an outsider.

“Before going to school every morning my mother would say, ‘Be careful — you’re already Vietnamese.’ And I always had this sense I was this perpetual trespasser, a guest,” Vuong said, and in a way he was.

Big Ideas

Despite the turmoil of coming to a new country, and the trauma they lived through in Vietnam, Vuong said most family members are “living very American lives, full of drama and hope.”  

For a brief time, Vuong thought his was to be in corporate America. He became a business major in college; it lasted about three weeks. Then, at Manchester Community College in suburban Hartford, an English professor introduced him and the rest of the class — several Bosnian refugees among them — to some serious literature and philosophy from Michel Foucault to Annie Dillard.

At Brooklyn College, the reading continued. At first he didn’t know he could major in English; he didn’t know he could become a poet. Vuong thought poets were appointed by the government. The more he read, Vuong said, the more he began to see the inheritance of war he owned in Greek literature, in Homer’s Odyssey. He saw it in the writings of poet Paul Celan, a holocaust survivor, whose work and life story has been a major influence, Vuong said.

But even before the big ideas, it was the simplest of books, among the first he was ever able to read. 

“This is so important,” he said,  standing up to get the book from a nearby shelf.

Thunder Cake 

Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco

Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco is his totem, Vuong said, and he keeps it close by when he writes.

The story, about a young girl and her Russian grandmother (who lived through World War II) making a cake with the coming of a storm, was so bizarre to Vuong, when he was a child, and yet he said it also made perfect sense. Because, what do you do when your life is in danger but make something that sustains life?

“Perhaps Patricia Polacco never dreamed that a Vietnamese boy in Hartford would read her book and see himself, and yet it happened,” Vuong said. “It reminds us that storytelling can make this happen, where we can recognize one another.”

The American Dream

In college, Vuong read something else that stayed with him: a 1915 speech by President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson’s Philadelphia address to 3000 new American citizens made Vuong realize that the American Dream was actually malleable.

“If I have in any degree forgotten what America was intended for,” Wilson said, and Vuong read, “I will thank God if you will remind me. I was born in America. You dreamed dreams of what America was to be, and I hope you brought the dreams with you.”

Vuong found the tone surprising when he first read it. He had never heard a president of the United States empowering immigrants.

“Usually we always are asked to prove ourselves,” he said. “But here is the most powerful man in the country saying, ‘Here’s a blank slate, write on it what you want, add your dream.'”

Vuong’s American Dream, it seems, is in the possibility that he has agency, that he can make a life.

He recently bought a little house in Western Massachusetts. He’s coming back to the area because he said he realized, not only is he American, he’s a New Englander. It happened on a train ride, heading north out of New York. Looking out the window — seeing the fields, the marshes, the mist, rising over them — Vuong remembered saying to himself, “Wait a minute! I know that! I never saw that in New York And that mist was home for me.”

With his partner they will for now split their time between the house and Brooklyn, where Vuong continues to study and teach. He plans to someday, when she’s ready, have his mother live with them in the house. Then he can grant her American Dream, a garden. Ocean Vuong said he never imagined he could ever feel so at home.

This report is part of a series called “Facing Change.” It comes from the New England News Collaborative, eight public media companies coming together to tell the story of a changing region, with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

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You can hear Ocean Vuong read some of his poetry here.

He read the poem Telemachus on the PBS NewsHour in April 2016.

Like any good son, I pull my father out

of the water, drag him by his hair

through sand, his knuckles carving a trail

the waves rush in to erase. Because the city

beyond the shore is no longer

where he left it. Because the bombed

cathedral is now a cathedral

of trees. I kneel beside him to see how far

I might sink. Do you know who I am,

ba? But the answer never comes. The answer

is the bullet hole in his back, brimming

with seawater. He is so still I think

he could be anyone’s father, found

the way a green bottle might appear

at a boy’s feet containing a year

he has never touched. I touch

his ears. No use. The neck’s

bruising. I turn him over. To face

The cathedral in his sea-black eyes.

The face not mine but one I will wear

to kiss all my lovers goodnight:

the way I seal my father’s lips

with my own and begin

the faithful work of drowning.

With A Sigh Of Relief, Iranian Student Gets Back To His Lab At UMass

UMass Amherst student Mohsen Hosseini was among those from seven mostly Muslim countries unable to return to the U.S. after President Donald Trump signed an executive order on January 27th, restricting immigration. Hoseeini had an F1 Visa. He had a plane ticket. And in the days after the order was signed, he tried three times to get on a flight.

Finally, at the end of last week, he began a multi-part, no-guarantee journey toward Boston. Those waiting for him to return chartered his movements in emails and texts:

“He’s on his way to the airport in Tehran!”

“He got on the flight to Frankfurt!”

Then, no news for several hours. Then, this came through:

“He’s on the flight to Boston!”

And finally, in a voicemail:

“Hey there Jill, It’s Ken Reade calling.”

Reade works with students and faculty from overseas at UMass, and spent many long hours trying to get Hosseini, a PhD student in computer engineering,  back to campus.

“It’s a little bit before 4 0’clock on Saturday,” the message continued. “I just wanted to relay the good news, that everything went really well here at the airport. Mohsen got in on time [and] pretty much went through immigration in about a half an hour. It’s quite unbelievable.”

A similar scenario — people waiting for news, sitting at airports, being turned away — had been playing out around the world, at other schools in the United States and beyond the academic world.

Back To Work

On Monday morning, Hosseini was back in an unadorned lab that looked like it had been furnished decades ago with the most basic of metal desks, chairs and shelving. It’s located in the basement of one of UMass’ oldest science buildings on campus. Hosseini could not have been more pleased to be there.

His lab mate, Ajay Subramanian — also a computer engineering PhD student, said that he actually felt a little responsible for Hosseini’s situation. He was the one one who drove him to Logan when Hosseini left for Iran.

“Once I heard about all this nonsense going on,” Subramanian said, “I felt really bad! Like, ‘Oh jeez. I just sent this guy off to a quagmire!'”

Before Hosseini left for winter break, he said his PhD advisor was concerned he was leaving the country and wouldn’t return until after Trump had been inaugurated. Hosseini asked staff at the school’s Office of International Programs if they anticipated any problems with his travel.

“They said, ‘[Trump] can’t void your visa, and if he wants [to], he can’t do it very quickly, because when you want to return to U.S., it’s about just seven days that Trump started [as president],'” Hosseini recalled.

Trump did the very thing Hosseini and others were worried about, about seven days to the day after he became president.

Between January 28th and January 31st, Hosseini was turned away twice at the airport in Tehran.

On the third try, February 3rd, he said goodbye to his family, but warned them that they might see him again in a few hours.

“When I left them, I said to them that I’m not sure that [I] can arrive to the United States! ‘Maybe I’ll be deported and see you again,'” Hosseini now joked.

But thanks to a temporary court order covering Logan Airport, and Lufthansa Airlines’ lenient reading of the rules, he made it to Germany, then Boston. By the the time he landed at Logan, a federal judge in Seattle issued an even broader injunction on Trump’s immigration policy.

At Logan, At Last

At Logan on Saturday, Hosseini was met by Ken Reade, his advisor Joe Barden and Barden’s four-year-old son. Two of his Iranian colleagues from the lab also came. They drove back to Amherst together, celebrated his return and then talked long into the night about what could be ahead.

“This problem is not just my problem,” Hosseini said. “There are a lot of Iranian people that worry what will happen in the next months, the next days. We discussed, ‘What can we do about this visa problem?'”

They can’t do much. So Hosseini said he will just focus on his his work. He has about 2-and-a-half years left in his research on computer circuit boards.

Big Life Moments

Being at an American graduate school is one of two big accomplishments for Hosseini over the past couple of years. The reason he was back in Iran over winter break was to get married.

When asked the date, he paused.

“Uh, exactly?” he paused. “I think 17 January!”

Hosseini didn’t forget. The date was just, momentarily, lost in translation.

Hosseini’s wife, who remains in Tehran for now, works in a biology lab.

“She has her master’s degree,” Hosseini said proudly.

She was planning to join him in the U.S., but her visa interview was canceled the same day Trump signed his immigration order. Hosseini’s visa is good until sometime in 2018. but he says he actually doesn’t trust that it’s valid — not given what happened over the past week.

UMass Amherst Student From Iran Among Those With Revoked Visa, Unbeknownst To Him And Attorneys

Over the last several days, a UMass Amherst student from Iran has been denied access to a flight out of Tehran, where he traveled over winter break to get married.

Mohsen Hosseini, who is working on a PhD in computer engineering, would have flown into Boston, which was believed possible even after President Trump signed an immigration order last Friday. The order bans entry into the U.S. for people from Iran and six other countries, but on Saturday, a federal judge in Boston issued a temporary injunction.

What Hosseini and immigration lawyers didn’t know until this week was the U.S. had also revoked almost all immigrant and non-immigrant visas from those seven countries.

Hosseini said he’s been in touch on social media with three dozen other Iranian students who are also trying to return to school in the U.S.

“Some of these students have problems similar to me, and then we find each other,” Hosseini said.

The situation for students and non-students from the seven countries has been in constant flux. Kenneth Reade, Director of International Student and Scholars Services at UMass Amherst, has been watching all of it up close. He said getting this new piece of information changes the game.

In the short term, he said, “it’s kind of a checkmate.”

Hosseini is among the plaintiffs the ACLU and other attorneys will represent Friday in Boston federal court.