Tag Archives: neighbors

With songs, screams and recipes, Americans find emotional balm six feet apart

By Maria Caspani, Alessandra Rafferty and Daphne Psaledakis

NEW YORK (Reuters) – It’s more than 10 months until Christmas, but as the global coronavirus pandemic takes hold in the United States, Margaret Haskell put out a call on her community Facebook group in New Jersey for people to hang their outdoor holiday lights back up.

“We are all finding new ways to virtually connect but many of us can’t shake the feeling of isolation and loneliness,” Haskell, 37, from South Orange, told Reuters. “My thought was that this would be a way to let each other know that we are still here, that life is still going on inside our houses.”

More than 12,500 people across the United States have been diagnosed with the COVID-19 illness and over 200 have died, with Washington state and New York worst hit so far.

Americans are being told to stay home and practise social distancing in a bid to slow the spread of the virus, so people are coming up with creative ways to cope with isolation, lift each others spirits, and get to know their neighbors.

Viral videos of people in Italy and Spain singing or taking part in mass exercise classes from their balconies during coronavirus lockdowns have provided inspiration.

Residents of a neighborhood of Jersey City, New Jersey, have started coming out at 6 p.m. to play whatever instruments are on hand, from guitars and toy drums to egg shakers – but all at a safe distance from each other.

“We’re called the Lockdown Jam Band,” said Shanee Helfer. In Jersey City, residents have been asked to remain indoors after 8 p.m.

In Boston, a man appeared in his window to sing Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline,” an anthem long sung during breaks at Red Sox baseball games, a video widely circulated online showed.

“Hands, not touching hands,” he sang, tweaking the lyrics to follow public health guidance. “Reaching out, not touching me, not touching you.” A neighbor at a nearby window and passersby on the street joined in.

‘BREATHE DEEPLY. SCREAM’

New Yorkers are getting to know their neighbors – virtually, of course.

In the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, a support group on the messaging app Slack has quickly grown to more than 1,000 members since it was set up on March 12. People are sharing recipes to try while stuck at home, information about which businesses are still open, and who needs help with groceries or medications.

“I think it has been kind of an emotional balm for a lot of people,” said Benjamin Krusling, a 29-year-old writer and artist, and one of the group’s organizers. “What’s the most helpful for people I’ve talked to who have joined is just kind of knowing… we’re all going through this thing together.”

In Washington, more than 1,500 people on Facebook have said they want to participate in an event on Monday evening designed to allow people to express their frustration with the pandemic.

The instructions for the event – named DC Area Primal Scream – are simple: “Step outside if you can (six feet from your neighbor, please). Head to the roof or the balcony, or stick your head out a window. Breathe deeply. Scream.”

And social distancing does not mean no more happy hours. About a dozen neighbors in Portland, Oregon, drew circles on the ground six feet apart for each guest at their street party with a difference to stand in, said Leslie Garey, 51.

“Everyone visited and drank from their circles,” Garey said. “We plan to do it often.”

For working parents now stuck at home with their children, people are looking for ways to entertain them in the new era of social distancing.

In Jackson Heights, Queens, neighbors on a block are using shared Google docs to organize a home-schooling collective, asking work-from-home parents to teach classes in their area of expertise to kids of all ages. But some parents balked at including their kids in groups.

“People have gotten more nervous and cautious about even small social gatherings,” said Benjamin Tausig, a music professor and crossword constructor who offered classes in both subjects. “Any contact outside one’s family might depend a lot on levels of trust.”

More than 150 rainbows have popped up in windows of Brooklyn brownstones, high-rise apartment buildings, storefronts and in courtyards as a symbol of hope for children of all ages and inspired by similar efforts in Italy and Spain.

Marisa Migdal, 35, shared the idea in a Brooklyn parents Facebook group. “Everything feels so overwhelming and scary right now,” Migdal said. “It is nice to feel connected. It adds a reminder that everything is going to be okay.”

(Additional reporting by Scott Malone, Jessica Resnick-Ault, Nick Zieminski and Lauren Young; Writing by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Frank McGurty and Rosalba O’Brien)

To neighbors, suspect in French market killings seemed just a local boy

Members of French special police forces of Research and Intervention Brigade (BRI) attend a police operation the day after a shooting in Strasbourg, France, December 12, 2018. REUTERS/Vincent Kessler

By Gilbert Reilhac and John Irish

STRASBOURG, France (Reuters) – The fugitive Strasbourg man suspected of shooting and knifing people as he shouted “Allahu Akbar” at the French city’s Christmas market is a criminal who turned radical Islamist in jail, officials say.

Neighbors remember Cherif Chekatt as an ordinary local guy, but to security agencies the 29-year-old had represented a potential threat for some time, his beliefs hardened behind bars.

Chekatt grew up in the Cite du Hohberg, a large, tough housing estate built in the 1960s, where he lived at his parents’ apartment in the Rue Tite Live.

He has 27 criminal convictions for theft and violence, officials say and has spent time in French, German and Swiss prisons. Now police are seeking him as the suspect who killed at least two people on Tuesday night.

Neighbors said they believed Chekatt’s brother was a radicalized Muslim but had always seen Cherif as a typical young man who dressed in jogging pants and trainers, unlike his sibling who preferred a traditional robe.

“He had spent quite a bit of time in prison and since then we didn’t see him much. He had a radicalized big brother who was always in a djellaba, always at the mosque,” said a 20-year-old youth who has known Chekatt since he was young, withholding his name. “It’s frightening when you know he lived just next to you.”

Police were interrogating Chekatt’s father, mother and two brothers on Wednesday in custody.

France has long struggled to integrate western Europe’s largest Muslim population, for years mired in a virulent debate over national identity and the role of Islam in a country that holds fast to state secularism.

A wave of militant attacks since 2015, most of them commissioned or inspired by Islamic State, has killed about 240 people and exposed France’s difficulties in tackling homegrown militants and jihadists returning from wars abroad.

Strasbourg deputy mayor Robert Herrmann said about 400 people living in and around Strasbourg were on the security agencies’ “Fiche S” watchlist, including the suspect.

“We know this risk and we trust our services to put an end to these murders,” he said, before adding: “There will, though, always be a way through the net.”

WATCHLIST

Deputy Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said Chekatt had been radicalized in jail, becoming an apologist for terrorism, but there had been no signs he would turn violent.

“He encouraged a radical religious practice in prison but nothing indicated that he would carry out an attack,” Nunez said on France Inter radio.

Police said the attack followed a police search of Chekatt’s flat in Strasbourg in a homicide investigation on Tuesday morning. Chekatt was absent, but a .22 caliber Long Rifle and four knives were found.

A German security source said that following a conviction for “aggravated theft” Chekatt had been jailed in the southern German city of Constance from August 2016 to February 2017.

He was released before the end of his two-year, three-month prison sentence into the custody of German police so that he could be deported to France.

A second German security source said he had been banned from re-entering the country.

Several German officials and sources said Chekatt had not been identified as a security threat. It was not immediately clear if or how French officials had communicated their concerns to German authorities.

The rampage surprised neighbors. “It’s a shock. We ask ourselves questions when something like this happens, especially as it is a calm area,” said a teenage acquaintance of Chekatt.

Nunez said more than 20,000 people in France were designated as Fiche S and that a little over half of those were being monitored.

“We follow many individuals like him … Being labeled Fiche S does not forecast the level of threat they may pose,” the deputy minister said.

(Additional reporting by Geert De Clercq in Paris, Andrea Shalal and Sabine Siebold in Berlin and Tom Miles in Geneva; Writing by Geert De Clercq; Editing by Richard Lough and David Stamp)