A look inside hospitals stretched thin during the holidays
MISSION HILLS, Calif. - Providence Holy Cross Hospital is the last place Humberto Perez wanted to be for Christmas. Says the 39-year-old construction worker, It’s sad because you re not with your family. You’re missing them and you obviously want to be with them.
Perez got COVID-19 at work. So did his wife and son recovering at home. Perez is still in a bed at Providence Holy Cross.
Usually, hospitals try to dress up for Christmas with tinsel, decorations and so forth, but not this year. Dr. Marwa Kilani who heads up the Palliative Care Department says, Usually this lobby area is bustling with families and little kids running around with lots of good spirit and lots of cheer. We have a piano over here. That isn’t being used. No songs like I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas on the piano, and no staff singing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.
December 20, 2020
Rock and roll was quickly associated with juvenile delinquency after arriving in Colombia as the music and Hollywood movies inspired youth in Bogota to join gangs.
Before US-born Jimmy Reisback really introduced Colombia’s capital to rock and roll music and the concept of a radio disk-jockey in 1957, American cinema set the scene.
Between 1953 and 1956, “The Wild One,” “The Blackboard Jungle” and “Rebel Without a Cause” introduced Colombia’s urban youth to youthful rebellion, a concept that didn’t exist.
In the United States, music icons like Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash were causing a cultural revolution around the time these movies made James Dean and Marlon Brando instant icons.
Awaiting their fate
The poor received huge welfare payments during the pandemic. These may soon dry up
I
N THE FINAL days of a tight mayoral race in November in São Gonçalo, an unglamorous city across the bay from Rio de Janeiro, one of the candidates, a retired police officer known as Capitão Nelson, made his way down a street lined with supporters. The mood was euphoric. A maskless man with a bottle of sanitiser on a string around his neck stomped his feet to funk music and squirted the gel into the air “to kill the germs” of the rival party. Humberto Perez, a handyman, likes the captain “because he cares about poor people, just like the president”, Jair Bolsonaro. After work dried up in March a monthly payment from the federal government kept him from going hungry. “And the campaign gave me a free lunch,” he said, with a toothy grin.