ACTS-CNY

We demonstrated our common values powerfully through our personal stories-in a transforming way that changed people’s hearts. Some of our personal stories we shared:

• Kyle: a professional who as a young adult and recent college graduate decided to forego insurance-and woke up one morning in the hospital after one week in life-support. He went bankrupt due to healthcare costs that followed that put him thousands of dollars in debt.
• Gabriel and Lisa: two white professionals (including a retired state police veteran of 20 years!) who had been unjustly profiled and hurt in their attempt to rent, seek employment, or volunteer in the community-by the county sheriff’s policy of selling and distributing arrest records that are erroneous in that they do not include the actual court results or dismissals of the arrests.
• Aly: an African immigrant from Senegal referred, from his own experience of being stopped because he “fit the description,” to the infamous “violation” of “Driving While Black“-drawing agreement from a religiously and racially diverse assembly that such harassment needs to stop in Syracuse…

• Freddy: a young undocumented Honduran immigrant, who is in imminent danger of being deported because he was stopped for “Driving While Latino” and asked “are you illegal?” Freddy was on his way to pick up pizza for his US citizen children. This young husband and father of two described how he had walked from Honduras to the US with the aim of supporting his impoverished family and her mother who was ill. In the US he met Bambbi; they fell in love, got married and started their family in Syracuse. His voice broke when he described the shame and despair of a two-month imprisonment in a detention center that followed his arrest…
• Bambbi: a US citizen and native of Syracuse, she was eight months pregnant when her husband Freddy was arrested and did not know of his whereabouts for three days. Freddy is her only support system. She spoke about the terror and fear of living in the expectation that her own young family would be divided and fatherless because of her husband’s likely deportation-when she herself had grown up as an orphan due to the untimely death of her parents…
• Joel and Daniel: Freddy and Bambbi’s two toddlers then came running into their father’s arms from the side of the stage, and the family just stood there in front of a hushed and tearing audience-putting a human face on the madness of immigration. A standing ovation followed when Bambbi asked: “Will you stand by us and families like ours to stay together and raise our family in Syracuse, in the United States?”
• Mable: resident of the Southside, where there is currently no full-service grocery store and no access to fresh, nutritious and affordable food. All there is left are about 20 corner stores that are selling products at 300% its actual price, including food that is expired. Mable talked about cereal she’s bought that had mealworms in it, and the expired baby formula she’s seen being sold, and how that is poisoning our babies and making our communities sick.
• Rev. Nebraski Carter: Pastor of Living Water Church of God in Christ, described the community quilting gatherings of his childhood in Georgia, where everyone chipped in to create colorful quilted blankets against winter cold-this was a metaphor for ACTS as a community quilt of diverse patches woven together against the economic storm of the present.

(Video Coming Soon…)