Listen to the conversation here.
On Thursday, the CDC announced something that many have been waiting for, permission for fully vaccinated people to take off their masks in most settings. It was presented as a significant step toward normalcy. But just before that announcement was made, Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock had this conversation with mental health professionals about the complicated feelings some of us have about getting back to normal. She spoke with Henry Meraz, owner and clinical director of Safe and Affirmative Counseling, Etisha Wilbon, vice president of Mental Health Systems Inc., and Leah Whitworth, behavioral health manager at Kaiser Permanente, Fresno.
A coalition of San Joaquin Valley leaders, legislators and farmers came together Friday to declare a regional drought emergency for Fresno, Madera, Kings and Tulare counties. They spoke at Harlan Ranch in Clovis. Behind the speakers, fallowed trees were heaped in piles of dried wood.
Sen. Andreas Borgeas led the coalition in urging the governor to take immediate action.
“There is no question, California is in a drought. Even the U.S. Ag Secretary has declared 50 California counties to be natural disaster zones because of drought,” he said.
It’s a Tuesday morning in March and Madeline Harris with the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability is knocking on doors in Fairmead, a small community in Madera County, to let residents know about a mobile vaccine clinic coming to the town that weekend.
“We’re just passing out flyers about a mobile vaccine clinic that we’re going to do on Sunday,” Harris says to resident Mary Ann Moor. Harris says residents can register at the clinic but they must prove they work in the food and agriculture industry.
StoryCorps
In this StoryCorps San Joaquin segment, 53-year-old Joan Yamate Taketa talks with her lifelong friend Celeste Johnston, 54, about what she has learned of her paternal family history. The two also talk about their decades-long close friendship. Joan calls Celeste the “repository of a lot of her memories” and shares a story about her father. When Joan’s father was a young boy in the United States, he travelled with his mother to Japan to retrieve his older sister, who had been going to school near Hiroshima. And then Pearl Harbor was bombed. Joan tells Celeste the rest of the story.
Listen to the conversation here.
Last summer’s reckoning over police brutality against Black people, led both Fresno and Bakersfield to establish commissions of community members, charged with making recommendations for reform. Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock checked in with some of the activists involved to see how the work is going, and to hear their response to the murder conviction of Derek Chauvin. She spoke with Bakersfield activists NaTesha Johnson and Arleana Waller, along with D’Aungillique Jackson, president of the Fresno State chapter of the NAACP, and Fresno-based anti-gun violence advocate Aaron Foster.
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