Life & Times - Transcript

About Us \| Contact Us

Life & Times Transcript

12/28/06

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Is this any place for a child? You might be surprised at how kids on Skid Row answer that question.

Franklin Arburtha>> There's lot of family here. There's lots of friends. People we love, people we close to. It's a community, a big family.

Val Zavala>> And then, she's not even twenty and already she has a national title under her hat. Meet America's top teen chef.

These stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> Welcome to this special edition of Life and Times where we bring you the best of our coverage. Tonight, stories that deal with young people. Get ready to have your faith restored. We begin with a group of teenagers who are making the best of a very bad situation.

Val Zavala>> For most of us, Skid Row is a place to avoid at all costs. But for some children, it is their home, the community they grow up in. So what is it like to grow up on Skid Row? Well, now a thirteen year old boy has produced a remarkable documentary called "We're Not Bad Kids" and, as Toni Guinyard tells us, it all started when he witnessed a murder.

Franklin Arburtha>> You learn how to live down here. You learn how to block stuff out.

Toni Guinyard>> Franklin Arburtha has seen enough misery to last a lifetime. Poverty, addiction, homelessness, the kind of despair most children are shielded from, but Franklin can't escape it. He lives in the middle of it in Central City, Los Angeles, the area better known as Skid Row.

Franklin Arburtha>> The kids out here don't deserve to see most of the stuff they see. It just ain't right for kids to see this, a little baby seeing people getting killed.

Toni Guinyard>> During the summer of 2004 when Franklin was only thirteen years old, he saw something that would change the way he viewed the people around him. From the balcony of Skid Row's Ford Hotel where he lives with his mother, brother and sisters, Franklin watched his neighbor, Doris Moore, being chased down the street by a man.

Franklin Arburtha>> He swung the knife at her and we're just thinking that he's trying to hit her. Then my sister said, "No, he's got a knife." I seen the knife and my friend didn't see the knife. Then she fell down and he started stabbing her. We was kind of stuck. We was trying to run down there, but we was just stuck on the balcony because we wasn't believing that this was happening. Then he just started stabbing and stabbing her. Everyone just circled around her like it was a movie or something. No one tried to help. They was just watching.

Toni Guinyard>> He watched Moore, a mother of four, die.

Franklin Arburtha>> I had to do something. I just felt like doing something.

Toni Guinyard>> Franklin armed himself with a plan and a borrowed camera. He went to Moore's funeral and a street-side candlelight vigil held in her honor and then he started asking questions.

Franklin Arburtha>> "So how do you feel about the murder?"

Shaddai>> "Do I feel happy? No, I don't. I hope his ass burns in hell. I want to spit on his body and, as soon as he's buried, I want to dig him up and burn his ass again."

>> "What do you think of little kids going to the cemetery?"

Franklin Arburtha>> "I think it's normal."

>> "No, it's not because little kids are going to see somebody dead. Come on, now. Be real. Let's be real."

Toni Guinyard>> What started with one young man's idea to acknowledge the life and death of a neighborhood woman ended up being a much bigger project. Franklin and his friends spent two months interviewing youngsters on Skid Row. The result is a documentary giving us a very unique perspective of what it's like to live in this community from a kid's perspective.

Franklin Arburtha>> I wanted the film to endorse and then it just led on to other stuff. I started seeing stuff that didn't look right. I filmed it and it turned into the little movie. The reason I made this documentary is because some people think that everyone on Skid Row is bad and some people don't even know there's children on Skid Row, right?

Toni Guinyard>> An estimated six hundred to seven hundred children or more live in Skid Row. Franklin put them in the spotlight. With help from volunteers and the staff at the United Coalition Prevention Project, hours of videotape were edited into what Franklin calls "the little movie". It's a twenty-five minute long documentary called "We're Not Bad Kids" featuring young people who live in the neighborhood. It exposes us to what they're exposed to.

>> "You got to watch out for those crazy people because they're smoking crack everywhere."

Toni Guinyard>> Where they live.

>> "Look at the roaches coming out. Oh, God. See that? Oh, my goodness. They have a whole colony of roaches living up in the light socket up there, a light socket, and that ain't cool."

Toni Guinyard>> And what they think.

>> "You know, they should take all the drugs like no people or any kids in there. Only mothers with children, not like regular people."

Franklin Arburtha>> I want people to know what America, land of the free, all that beautiful stuff, it ain't like that down here. I mean, it can be though. There's lots of good people and smart people down here. You see bums or homeless people on the street. Lots of these people are smart. Lots of people. They just need help. All this community needs is a little help.

Charles Porter>> I think that the documentary is really a snapshot of what it's like to live in this community, to live in Skid Row, and I think that is a snapshot of what it's like to live in extreme poverty.

Toni Guinyard>> Charles Porter is prevention coordinator for Social Model Recovery Systems United Coalition East Prevention Project. The organization works with area residents to deal with community issues related to drug and alcohol use. When neighborhood children started showing up at United Coalition's office, they weren't turned away.

>> "I'm not Skid Row. This is just a place. It's just the environment. It's not me. Skid Row being a nasty, dirty place does not make you a nasty, dirty person."

Toni Guinyard>> This is where Franklin came to borrow the camera used to shoot the documentary.

Zelenne Cardenas>> I think it showed a glimpse of their reality and the video also that they are very resilient and showed humor in everything that they do. I felt sad that their environment was surrounded by such negative influences.

Toni Guinyard>> But you know this.

Zelenne Cardenas>> But not from a child's eye.

Franklin Arburtha>> Everybody in the building is like family basically. If we move, I ain't going to want to move. I like it there now. There's lot of family here. There's lots of friends. People we love, people we close to. It's a community, a big family.

Toni Guinyard>> It's a big family with big problems. A survey of children by children titled "Toxic Playground: Growing up in Skid Row" found that more than seventy percent of the children questioned have lived in the neighborhood for more than one year, some for more than seven years.

Charles Porter>> I think it's very challenging for young people to grow up in this community because there are a lack of resources and recreational opportunities and activities.

Zelenne Cardenas>> There's a park less than twenty-five feet from us, but the children are not allowed to go into the park. Basically what has happened is the children are locked out of the park and we've conceded the park to the hustlers and the drug addicts.

Toni Guinyard>> The city-owned park at Sixth Street and Gladys Avenue has become a haven for the homeless.

Anita Nelson>> It's not a healthy environment for children unless they're supervised and monitored. As it stands right now, we don't have a staff to monitor children who are going to be running in and out and adults that we know are mentally ill and many of them are sexual predators. That's not a combination you want to mix together. It's not healthy.

Toni Guinyard>> The park is operated by SRO Housing Corporation, a private, nonprofit organization that provides services to the homeless and very low-income residents and operates Skid Row area's single-room occupancy hotels. Anita Nelson is CEO.

Anita Nelson>> Ideally, I would love to, say, have them come here and everybody can live happily ever after, but we know the population that's living here and that's in this community. We know it's not safe.

Jan Perry>> Well, I don't think it's realistic to expect that a park in the middle of Skid Row will ever be safe enough for the kids.

Toni Guinyard>> The park is just outside Los Angeles City Council member Jan Perry's district, but she represents a major portion of Skid Row.

Jan Perry>> It's a difficult issue because, when you begin to create more facilities for children in the area, then that will encourage people to want to stay here for the children. I think the objective is not to have children in this area.

Toni Guinyard>> But they are here for now. The population of youngsters in the area has jumped fifteen percent from 1990 to the year 2000 and those children are finding their voice.

Franklin Arburtha>> I want to be heard.

Toni Guinyard>> And demanding we listen.

Franklin Arburtha>> Skid Row ain't really no place that families should be. There's lots of stuff that kids shouldn't see out here and I guess that's what I wanted to show everybody. I don't want to move out of here. I just want them to change this place. I ain't asking for nothing but to change this place.

Toni Guinyard>> A place where he sees hope even though others see nothing but despair. I'm Toni Guinyard for Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> If you'd like to learn more about what life is like for children on Skid Row, you can go to a survey called "Toxic Playground". You can find it online at socialmodel.com.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> How can an ambitious young person from a poor neighborhood escape poverty? Well, of course, there's always a college education if they can afford it and a record contract if they're so lucky. But some young people are discovering that a successful souffl� can be a ticket to success. Toni Guinyard met one very impressive young woman who's turned a talent in the kitchen into a scholarship at a culinary school.

Adreena Winnfield>> I started cooking when I was eleven and I've been doing it ever since then.

Toni Guinyard>> It doesn't take long to figure out that Adreena Winnfield's world is all about food.

Adreena Winnfield>> I would try to create stuff I've seen off the Food Network and it always didn't come so right and I would use my little sister as a tester. She would eat everything, but it all wasn't so good.

Toni Guinyard>> Adreena has come a long way since then. At seventeen years old, she entered the Art Institute's Best Teen Chef Competition of 2005.

Adreena Winnfield>> I filled out an entry form and I had to do an essay and set up a menu for the contest and that's how I got picked.

Paul Yarmoluk>> We look at their organizational skills and what they submit, their recipes, their pictures, the time they put into that simple little book that they gave us. You can see it. You can read and see the intensity that they may have in that book, so I look for that.

Anne Mack>> And they also have to do a two-course original menu. They don't actually have to cook it, but they have to present an original recipe.

Adreena Winnfield>> For the menu, I remember Cream of Mushroom Chicken with roasted potatoes and vegetables, with asparagus and a garlic and zucchini spread.

Toni Guinyard>> That recipe got her into the national cook-off where she dazzled the judges and beat out about three hundred other high school seniors. Her prize? A forty thousand dollar full scholarship to study culinary arts at the Art Institute California, Orange County.

Anne Mack>> It really signifies her talent and her promise as a future chef.

Adreena Winnfield>> I've always wanted to cook. I always said I was going to be a chef. But when I entered the competition, that's when I realized this is really what I want to do.

Anne Mack>> Every local winner we've ever had, every national winner we've ever had in this program, has said, "I never thought I would win."

Toni Guinyard>> But they are winning. Ryan Jackson and Anthony Ortega placed first and second in the 2006 regional competition. We caught up with them training for the national event, in some ways, following in Adreena's footsteps.

Adreena Winnfield>> Well, it's like a social gathering to talk over. It brings people together. You need it to survive on an everyday basis. There's someone that's always looking to try something new and that's what I want to offer. Something new, something interesting, something good, something that you'll remember.

[Film Clip]

Toni Guinyard>> When we met Adreena, she was less than one year into the program and a world away from her past. This journey has taken her from her hometown of the Bayview Hunter's Point community of San Francisco to the Art Institute in Santa Ana.

Adreena Winnfield>> I mean, it's like a different world. Well, where I live, you know, we have a lot of violence and there's just a lot going on. It is a kind of rough community, so it's got me out of that and it opened a lot of doors to succeed for me and it's just a blessing. It really is.

Paul Yarmoluk>> We see kids who come up from various socio-economic situations. We see that spark in their eyes. We capitalize on it.

Toni Guinyard>> Paul Yarmoluk is an industry veteran with forty years' experience. As academic director of the Art Institute, Santa Ana Campus, he's guided a lot of would-be chefs to appreciate the craft of what it is they dream of doing. As for Adreena --

Paul Yarmoluk>> She is respectable. She gives great respect to the faculty, to all the chefs.

[Film Clip]

Paul Yarmoluk>> She shows up happy. She has a great disposition which winds up being, oh, it just communicates to the chefs immediately. So when we find somebody happy, we like it even that much more. We don't look upon this as a kind of easy way out where you come and you book-learn. The first day you get here, you'll be mopping floors or picking up fifty gallon buckets of water ready to go to be boiled for stock. So immediately that glamour almost disappears.

[Film Clip]

Paul Yarmoluk>> It's a very tough job. It kind of likens itself to the Netherworld, somewhere between heaven and hell.

Toni Guinyard>> For Adreena, being in this culinary limbo puts her closer to what she wants to do for a living, but far away from the two people who inspire her most: her mother --

Adreena Winnfield>> One thing that she tells us is clean as you go. Always clean as you go. Be a clean cook. Wash my dishes. I make so many dishes and I don't like washing dishes.

Toni Guinyard>> A little messy in the kitchen, huh?

Adreena Winnfield>> Yes.

Toni Guinyard>> And what did grandma teach you?

Adreena Winnfield>> My grandma taught me, no matter what you do, it could be the worst job or the best job, always do your best.

Toni Guinyard>> This is all part of a brand new world for Adreena. She and many of the other participants in the Teen Chef Competition had never set foot in a professional skills kitchen before the cook-off and, once they got there, they realized there was a lot they didn't know.

Adreena Winnfield>> "I asked them what is a demi-glass. I don't know what that is. I went to find the sauce in the store, and you have to make it yourself (laughter)."

Toni Guinyard>> She can laugh now, but she wasn't laughing then. Before rushing off to class --

[Film Clip]

Toni Guinyard>> Adreena had lunch at 50 Forks, a restaurant on the Art Institute's Santa Ana campus that is open to the public. The chefs in the kitchen and the wait staff out front are all culinary art students. This is one of the classes required before graduation, a class Adreena will eventually have to take.

Adreena Winnfield>> I want to cater to the stars.

Toni Guinyard>> To the stars?

Adreena Winnfield>> Yes.

Toni Guinyard>> Why the stars?

Adreena Winnfield>> That's where the big bucks are (laughter). My own catering business. Anything you want, we can do it. Starting price about four hundred thousand.

Toni Guinyard>> Four hundred thousand?

Adreena Winnfield>> Yep.

Toni Guinyard>> To cater what?

Adreena Winnfield>> Events, parties, weddings, birthdays, anything you want.

Paul Yarmoluk>> If she drives her business skills combined with a direction that she wants to go to, absolutely. She has that inner strength that we can see in her, so it's doable. I don't know about the four hundred grand (laughter). You know, that's all relative.

Anne Mack>> I can see her owning her own business and doing her own thing, if not a professional chef celebrity somehow, perhaps on a food show or a food channel, because she's got an amazing presence in front of the camera. I think what everyone would say about Adreena that sets her apart is that she has this natural talent that just was different.

Toni Guinyard>> So don't be surprised if one day you turn on the television or walk into a restaurant and be treated to the culinary talents of the one-time Best Teen Chef of 2005. Ten years from now, what am I going to read about you?

Adreena Winnfield>> Catering some big event and it was a blast. It was perfect.

Toni Guinyard>> For now, she'll stick to being a student. I'm Toni Guinyard for Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> If you'd like to find out more about the cooking contest, you can go to their website at artinstitute.edu/btc for Best Teen Chef.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> We're always reading about the problems in our schools, but now there's an antidote to all that bad news. Just make one visit to the Los Angeles County Science Fair and get ready to be impressed, charmed and entertained, as Cris Franco was.

Cris Franco>> What's got a big pencil and a stopwatch and a tube and a ruler and a place?

>> A catalyst reaction rays meter.

Cris Franco>> But, of course, you knew that. Well, you would have if you'd been at today's Los Angeles County Science Fair where the Southland's best middle and high school scientific minds bring their brightest ideas to life. This yearly science palooza draws over a thousand local public and private school students in a competition for awards and scholarships in categories ranging from biology to zoology. I had the pleasure of meeting just a few of these dynamic participants whose entries pose some rather important questions.

Swati Yanamadala>> Well, what I was doing was looking at the bacterial levels in aquatic ecosystems and seeing if that affects our coastal beach water quality. What I found was that humans contribute a lot to the fecal contamination going into our beaches. So basically, when we use the restroom, our feces are going into the water and then going into our beaches and we're swimming in it.

Cris Franco>> Contamination's up. Now what school do you go to?

Alex Nescovic>> I go to John Muir Middle School, Burbank.

Cris Franco>> Oh, I'm from the Valley too. Valley boys, for sure, for sure. Okay, for sure, tell me about your experiment here.

Alex Nescovic>> Well, I tested the five-second rule.

Cris Franco>> Oh, like five seconds if you drop a potato chip and you go, five-second rule, and then you pick it up and then it's not dirty?

Alex Nescovic>> Yes.

Cris Franco>> Every bachelor knows that. You're a bachelor, right?

Alex Nescovic>> Yes, of course.

Cris Franco>> Alex arrived at his conclusion by checking for contamination using a wand and a Petrie dish.

Alex Nescovic>> This is a Petrie dish.

Cris Franco>> If it falls on the floor, it has acquired enough of the bacteria. It doesn't matter how long it's there. One second or five seconds --

Alex Nescovic>> -- you might get sick, exactly.

Cris Franco>> Speaking of getting sick --

Erica Kepski>> Which antacid will neutralize gastric acid the best?

[Film Clip]

Cris Franco>> Erica's thorough explanation kind of gave me a tummy ache.

[Film Clip]

Cris Franco>> How do people get gastric acid? Because I have that problem. I have a lot of stomach acid.

Erica Kepski>> Get some Milk of Magnesia.

Cris Franco>> Where do you go to school?

Krishna Choudhary>> Nobel Middle School in Northridge.

Cris Franco>> Another Valley boy.

Krishna Choudhary>> How I got the atmosphere effective turbulence is I used these stoves to create different speeds of air. Then I used a laser so that the laser would quiver through like a graph paper and I would measure how much it would quiver.

Cris Franco>> Now where did you get a laser? Not every kid has a laser at home. Did you just happen to have one at home?

Krishna Choudhary>> Yeah, I just happened to have one at home.

Cris Franco>> Can you get our suits there? Very good, right? We look like an ad at Sears. Tell me a little bit about your hovercraft engineering display.

Robert Hollar>> Well, the purpose of my project was to build a hovercraft that could lift twenty-five pounds. Some of the materials we used were these PVC plastic sheets here for the frame of the hovercraft. We used a model aircraft engine. The distance in centimeters between the two liquids times the density of the liquid divided by the weight that you want it to carry equals the diameter in centimeters.

Cris Franco>> This last part flew over my head like a hovercraft. Joshua Anderson was a little easier to follow. Tell me about your experiment which asks which valley has clean water.

Joshua Anderson>> I was testing to see which valley had cleaner water, either the Conejo Valley or the San Fernando Valley. The water temperature is fourteen degrees Celsius and I tested the nitrate level which was three ppm which means parts per million, the dissolved oxygen level which was three ppm, parts per million, and I did that for all the streams in both valleys.

Cris Franco>> And the winner is?

Joshua Anderson>> The San Fernando Valley had cleaner water.

Cris Franco>> Valley boys.

Lyndsey Aponik>> Well, I did "Global Warming: Myth or Reality?" I wanted to find out if global warming was true or false.

Cris Franco>> And the answer is?

Lyndsey Aponik>> True.

Cris Franco>> True.

Lyndsey Aponik>> And what I did is, I got two jars. One I filled with the room air and the other I filled with carbon dioxide. I got two heat lamps and I turned them on and I found that the jar with the carbon dioxide air was hotter.

Alexandra De La Torre>> Eisenia Foetida was the earthworm that was used. What I did was, I put them in separate containers and then I put soil over them and I gave them food scraps. There was inorganic fertilizers which was slow release and instant release and there was an organic fertilizer used.

Cris Franco>> And is this what the worms look like?

Alexandra De La Torre>> This isn't really what the worms looked like.

[Film Clip]

Alexandra De La Torre>> Inorganic fertilizer should not be used. Organic fertilizer should be used instead.

Cris Franco>> Because what happens?

Alexandra De La Torre>> Because then the earthworms die.

Cris Franco>> And that's bad because?

Alexandra De La Torre>> Because the long-term value of the soil isn't good anymore. Those worms maintain it.

Cris Franco>> These future Einsteins and Edisons are out to change their world and often how they found their inspiration is as unique as their discoveries themselves.

Calvin Huang>> The title of my experiment is "Will You Be The Next Millionaire?"

Cris Franco>> And how did you come up with that idea?

Calvin Huang>> I came up with this idea because every once in a while, I see my parents playing the lottery and I wondered if I could help them out because they're usually not winning much money. My conclusion is that the lottery numbers are not predictable, so you're just really wasting your money.

Cris Franco>> What gave you the idea?

Robert Hollar>> Just thinking about all the stuff my dad builds like oil pipes under water, all the crazy stuff he makes around the house to make cleaning and stuff easier. Well, I want to build something crazy too. I mean, every kid wants to be like his dad, so I just decided to build the hovercraft.

Lyndsey Aponik>> I was actually watching an Oprah show with my mom and Leonardo DiCaprio was on. He was talking about global warming and I thought that was really interesting, so I decided to do more research about it.

Cris Franco>> He saved Kate Winslet in "Titanic". Now he's going to save our planet. Meeting these young scientists made me feel optimistic about our world's future and theirs.

>> I want to go to MIT and then work at NASA or JPL.

Cris Franco>> Those are good places. I think they have good insurance plans, right?

>> I have no clue about the insurance.

Cris Franco>> Tell me, what do you think when people say that young people that are into science are nerds?

Krishna Choudhary>> Well, don't call them nerds because, when you grow up, you're going to end up working for them and they're going to be your boss.

Robert Hollar>> It has huge benefits in life. It can get you a very well high-paying job. It can get you into good schools and it can just do a lot for you. So I find it sad that a lot of today's young people don't appreciate science and math as much as they should.

Cris Franco>> These young Americans have a true passion for science, math and engineering, and there's a practical reason to encourage them all to understand the stars above us and the molecules around us because discovery leads to innovation, innovation leads to production, which is just another word for jobs. Any everybody understands what that is. Even I do. Lyndsey, what's going to happen to the polar bear if people don't pay attention to your experiment?

Lyndsey Aponik>> The polar bears are going to lose their ice and die.

Cris Franco>> The polar bears are going to die. You have to stop them.

Lyndsey Aponik>> Okay (laughter).

Val Zavala>> The Los Angeles County Science Fair is always looking for judges and sponsors. If you're interested, contact Gilbert Dean at (562) 922-6896 or email him at gilbert_dean@lacoe.edu. And for all the English majors at Life and Times, I'm Val Zavala. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sponsored in part by:


Home \| Features \| Arts \| Health/Science \| OC Edition \| L&T Blog \| Archives \| About Us \| Contact Us \| Privacy Policy \| Terms of Use © 2007 COMMUNITY TELEVISION OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA