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Celebrating our hometown heroes
Volunteering
Editor’s note: Last week the nation celebrated National Volunteer Week. In honor of the volunteers who give countless hours of their time helping others, the South Bergenite met with some of our hometown heroes. The following is just a few of our hometown heroes who have opened their hearts to the many and who opened their homes to our reporters last week. They are an inspiration to us all.
Warming hearts
By Michael Lamendola
Managing Editor
Rutherford
When 19-year-old Rutherford resident Kate Baviello was diagnosed with kidney cancer as a 16-year-old high school student, it was a blow to her, her family and her friends. She can remember first feeling back pain, having been told that it was probably just a kidney stone, but then finding out the worst. Kate was able to battle her illness, having endured 18 agonizing weeks of treatment. She’s in remission and today she says she never felt healthier.
"When you go through chemotherapy, it drops your body temperature," said Kate. "No matter when you get it, if you’re getting it in the summer or winter."
Kate, however, said that when she underwent her treatment at Hackensack University Medical Center (HUMC), she was only kept warm during that time with "old hospital blankets"...not something comforting, something that could not only warm her body, but warm her heart and spirit.
What comes around goes around, however. Now Kate, with help from her mother Cathy and a community at large, is warming bodies and warming hearts. The two have attached themselves to a drive and started their own branch of it locally. Cathy, a program and volunteer coordinator at the Kip Center, learned about it last year when seniors there became involved in knitting blankets for the Tomorrows Children’s Fund at HUMC.
"I thought because Kate had been treated at Tomorrows Children’s, it could be something Kate and I could do," said Cathy.
So the word went out. Cathy hit the local schools through her affiliation with the parent teacher association. Debbie Rovito, a staff member at Rutherford High School, soon caught wind of it and disseminated a flyer to staff. 100 blankets were soon collected there. Kate’s honor society at Montclair State University, Sigma Alpha Lambda, took the reigns for her there, e-mailing and posting flyers at campus. Newspaper notices also sparked interest and the Baviello’s phone soon began ringing more than it used to.
By January, the two handed over their stock of collected blankets to the hospital. From the fall collection, they turned over approximately 700 in all. They’re all diverse, Disney faces on one, Pooh Bear on another, some hot pink and some baby blue. The one thing they all have in common, however, is each and every blanket will bring a little warmth to a cold soul and a little smile to a deserving face.
"When they are going in for chemo, it’s just an extra thing for them to have, it helps them," said Kate, who still visits the hospital for regulatory post-cancer checkups. "We have so many now, there’s a whole room filled. They’re fun for the kids, they’re good for them."
Opening books to blind
By Corey KLein
Staff Writer
North ARlington
Every child in the state of New Jersey is entitled to a free education and blind children are no different. Still, New Jersey schools depend on Red Cross volunteers like North Arlington resident Dolores Valente to transcribe textbooks to Braille so blind children can read.
In 2005, Valente saw an ad in a newspaper seeking volunteers to learn how to transcribe Braille. Having recently retired from a job in human resources, she decided to sign up for the course. Valente does not have any close relatives who are blind and never had any particular interest in writing Braille beforehand, but the program happened to interest her.
For seven months, she took weekly courses to learn how to manually transcribe Braille on an antique Braille-writing machine. At the end of the course, she submitted a 60-page transcription to the Library of Congress and became a certified Braille transcriber.
Today, she sits at a computer at her High Street home and translates a 400-page reading workbook into a language of dots. Once she completes the workbook, she will e-mail it to the Red Cross. In turn, the Red Cross puts the information on a disk and a machine creates raised dots on paper.
Come September, a blind child in New Jersey will use the Braille reading working book in class. "It’s a fascinating procedure. It really is," she said. "You’d be amazed that a person can actually read by going over the dots with their fingers."
Valente believes a child would have an easier time learning how to read Braille than an adult. At 70, she does not think she could learn how to read Braille by feeling a page, but she can sight-read Braille.
Looking for her own way of giving back, Valente chose to transcribe Braille because it was something she could do at home and on her own time. If she finds herself unable to sleep at 2 a.m., she might begin transcribing Braille. The Red Cross requires a commitment of 60 pages per month, which Valente regularly surpasses. Typically, she transcribes 30 pages per week.
She uses a free downloadable MS-DOS computer program to transcribe textbooks, but other certified Braille transcribers purchase programs themselves.
United together
By Michael Lamendola
Managing Editor
Carlstadt
East Rutherford resident Liz Bucceri felt the lonesomeness, grief and constant uneasiness of having a loved one in the military. Her husband Matt, a member of the Marines since 2002, had by 2006 been deployed for four tours of active duty. One was in the Philippines, one in Haiti, but two were in the horrid war zone of Iraq. Those same feelings had mounted to the breaking point. She needed comfort.
"For both tours in Iraq, we were married and I could have easily lived on a base, but we knew that North Carolina would not be our permanent home, so I stayed in New Jersey," said Bucceri. "On a base, you could throw a stone and probably hit a military wife, but here, there was no one in my situation, no outlets to find other military families to talk to."
Liz, a production artist for Page Six at the New York Post, immediately knew she had to start a military family support group because she knew there were plenty of other wives, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters enduring the same pain she was.
"I said to myself I have to start one, but I decided to wait until he [Matt] came back from the Corp.," said Bucceri. "I felt I could give my time and efforts to anyone else that needed it without having something in the back of my mind...that my husband’s still over there."
So after posting some newspaper and Web notices along with having generously been granted space at the First Presbyterian Church in Carlstadt by Reverend Donald Pitches, the families started coming in last March. There were mothers, fathers and wives just like her. At peak, she said she’s seen about 45 family members attend the weekly meetings.
"My advice is we usually have the same thing in common, they think they’re crazy that they check e-mails so many times a day, always take your cell phone around waiting for a call or send care packages that are bigger than life. We’re all on common ground though," said Bucceri. "I say whatever is going on in your imagination is probably 10 times worse than what it actually is."
There can be five at a time, six, eight...some just come once and she will never see them again. They just need someone in their situation to talk to, according to Bucceri. Sometimes she wonders if she helps, but remembers the times when Matt was away and all she needed was someone to turn to.
"I’ve heard, ‘it’s okay, your husband’s home, you don’t need to do this’. I say ‘yes I do, because when I was in it, there was nobody there’," she said. "Every military arm, the Army, Navy, Air Force, they all have a creed, they are brothers. As families, we should be the same. Our motto is we will meet every Tuesday and never be demolished until they all come home."
Saving history
By Daniel O’Keefe
Staff Writer
Lyndhurst
Sylvia Kleff hated history when she was in school.
"It was all names and dates," she said. "Every year for 12 years you learned that Columbus discovered America in 1492."
But today she’s saving local history. Kleff runs the Lyndhurst Historical Society, is an active volunteer at the Meadowlands Museum and the Lyndhurst Historical Commission and a former member of the Bergen County Preservation Board. She also volunteers her time with the Passaic River Coalition and with the Girl Scouts, an organization she’s been a member of since she was a child.
A Lyndhurst native, Kleff estimates that the first time she really started to get interested in history was later in life when she rediscovered the town’s Little Red Schoolhouse. She grew up on the North Arlington side of town and as a girl never really noticed the building. It was only years later after she’d gotten married and moved to Morris County with her husband and son that she spotted the building while back in town visiting.
"I said, ‘My God, what a color!’" The school had recently been repainted a mustard color, according to Kleff. She had never taken an interest in it before and started to learn about it. "All these years I hadn’t known it was there," she said.
Kleff and several others (some who had been taught in the schoolhouse as children) formed the Lyndhurst Historical Society specifically in order to restore the schoolhouse and make it a museum. The third of three schoolhouses that had taken up that same spot since 1803, the schoolhouse in its current form was built in 1893. Over two centuries the building had housed students from Lyndhurst, Rutherford, East Rutherford, Belleville and North Arlington.
In the early 80s, the schoolhouse was owned by the Board of Education and hadn’t been used for a few years. The newly-formed group raised about $100,000 through fundraisers and donations to fix the extensive damage from termites and carpenter ants. The group currently has a 10-year lease from the town for one dollar.
"I just enjoy [volunteering]," said Kleff. "Once I retired I just couldn’t sit around the house. There’s a limit to how much house work you can do before it drives you crazy." Between all her groups, Kleff does about a full time job’s worth of volunteering each week, helping to preserve and organize documents and set up exhibits at the Meadowlands Museum, sitting on the Lyndhurst Historical Commission and leading Girl Scout troupes in badge work and birding. As a member of the Passaic River Coalition, she helps serves as the organization’s eyes and ears in Lyndhurst, monitoring new construction.
Kleff has helped organize, classify and arrange historic documents, putting together numerous exhibits for the Meadowlands Museum and the Little Red Schoolhouse. An exhibit she helped put together on rocks from the Paterson area is regularly loaned out by the Museum to different towns; it’s currently on display in the Lyndhurst Library. Recently she’s taken several students under her tutelage, working with them to number and digitalize old photos of Lyndhurst.
Pillar of Islam
BY D.R. foster
Staff Writer
Lyndhurst
For Muslims, charity—or Zakah—is obligatory. As one of the central "Pillars of Islam", Zakah requires the faithful to donate a fixed portion of their income toward helping the needy. But a second word, Sadaqah, refers to acts of charity above and beyond what faith requires, acts done from generosity and compassion alone.
Amal Abdallah has done her share of both.
Born to Palestinian parents in Jordan and raised in Lyndhurst, Abdallah is involved in a variety of charitable groups in the area.
She is an active member of the Islamic Education Center of North Hudson, an organization that provides spiritual, civic and educational resources (including free Arabic classes) to anyone curious about Islam.
Abdallah has also served as an adviser to the Young American Muslims group and volunteers for Islamic Relief USA, a global network of groups dedicated to alleviating poverty, illiteracy and hunger and providing disaster relief to peoples all over the world, regardless of creed. Last year Islamic Relief USA was given a four-star rating by Charity Navigator, the country’s largest charity evaluator.
After college and a career in banking, Abdallah and her husband started a family in Lyndhurst before moving to North Bergen. Now, in addition to raising her three children, Abdallah spends most of her free time helping others.
Nor has her work gone unnoticed. In 2006, Abdallah received a Russ Berrie Award for Making a Difference from Governor Corzine, for her part in bringing 10 Muslim girls and 10 Jewish girls together to raise money for a homeless shelter. That effort spawned the North Bergen-based Youth for Charity, which was notable as much for breaking down cultural barriers as for its philanthropy.
"I don’t really think I need an award for what I’m doing, but it’s a great feeling to be recognized," she said of the honor. "If we could change 20 people at a time, that’s a huge success for me, because I know those 20 kids could change another 20, and they could change another 20 kids."
How you can help out
Blankets
To donate a blanket to Tomorrows Children’s Fund at Hackensack University Medical Center, contact Cathy or Kate Baviello at 201-935-3971 or e-mail cbaviello@comcast.net. Blankets must be new due to the deficient immune systems of the young patients.
Military families
If you would like to attend the Military Family Support Group of Carlstadt, open meetings are held weekly at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesdays at the Community Hall, 500 Third St., Carlstadt (next door to the First Presbyterian Church of Division Street). For further details, e-mail Military-Family-Support@googlegroups.com
Braille
The Red Cross of Northern New Jersey offers a 20-week course every September in Braille transcribing of printed textbook material for New Jersey’s visually impaired students. The course prepares volunteers for certification at no cost and provides all materials. Weekly course work involves two hours of class work and 12 hours of homework. Prior Braille knowledge is not required to volunteer in the bindery. For further information on becoming a Braille transcriber or volunteer in the bindery, please contact Assistant Braille Director, Sharon Van Hook at 973-797-3337.
History
The Little Red Schoolhouse is located at 400 Riverside Avenue, Lyndhurst . For more information call 201-804-2513 or write to the Lyndhurst Historical Society at PO Box 135, Lyndhurst, NJ 07071. The Meadowlands Museum is located at 91 Crane Avenue, Rutherford. Call 201-935-1175. Both museums offer volunteer opportunities.
Islamic Relief
Islamic Relief USA is part of a charitable network that provides aid to people of all races and creeds worldwide. They sponsor projects to improve water and sanitation, health and nutrition, orphan sponsorship, and education. They are also active in providing emergency relief to the victims of natural disasters. To get involved contact Islamic Relief’s Northeast office at 265A Route 46, Suite 3A, Totowa, NJ 07512. Tel: 1 (973) 200-4060; Fax: 1 (973) 200-4061; E-mail: natasha@irw.org.
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