First …

Text+pics by Rose T.

A little self-care this a.m:

☀️☀️☀️☀️

Thinking about our homeless …

This past Saturday: Worcester’s Canal District.

… Thinking that despite Dr. Hirsh, Mayor Petty and City Manager Ed Augustus’s Herculean Efforts to safeguard them from COVID 19, treat/test them, and quarantine them in a beautiful new space, Worcester’s homeless folks and the people who feed them, care for them, ♥️love them are contracting COVID 19 at an alarming rate.

Woo’s PATRON SAINT OF THE HOMELESS – BILLY RILEY – the Worcester guy who FOR YEARS has fed our homeless, the alone, the suffering, and the working poor at the St. John’s Church soup kitchen on Temple Street, even giving folks groceries for their week (every Sat. morn) HAS CONTRACTED the Coronavirus. Billy is at home now, praying and self-quarantining. DEPRESSED AS HELL, no doubt! BILLY LOVES HIS FULL-TIME VOLUTEER GIG. It is city-wide, it is doing a million good things with a million good folks. Jesus’s work. For the good of Worcester. … Good Luck with contact-tracing for Billy, Dr. Hirsh!

I learned this weekend that Father Richie – the other hub of help for the city’s homeless – has contracted COVID 19. Father Richie – the street pastor who for years HAS OVERSEEN St. John’s HOTEL GRACE, THE CITY’S EMERGENCY WINTER SHELTER – is out of commission, too. At home self-monitoring. Good luck, Dr. Hirsh, with contact-tracing in this case, too.

The homeless under the Green Street Bridge

Our pal Dorrie, another person who loves our homeless, says Abby’s Shelter for women has laid off most of its workers – except for our Dorrie! She is holding the fort there, and Abby’s is paying her for her community service at the “Seed.” DORRIE CONTINUES TO DO HOMELESS OUTREACH AT THE MUSTARD SEED soup kitchen in our Piedmont neighborhood. She is helping homeless people with bkankets, clothing, backpacks – and STILL GIVING THRM PET FOOD AND SUPPLIES FOR THEIR DOGS AND CATS! All the while wearing PPE – a face mask and latex surgical gloves. And practicing social distancing as best she can.

GORDON HARGROVE, right, OF THE FRIENDLY HOUSE IS COORDINATING CITY OF WORCESTER’S FREE HOT MEALS FOR ALL WOO KIDS program.

Saint Dorrie!!!! We pray for her and other social service workers’ safety!

Dorrie says she believes A THIRD OF WORCESTER’S HOMELESS POPULATION has contracted COVID 19.

She works in the middle of this plague and believes the global pandemic is a sign – a warning for us all to become more self-sufficient.

No one is to blame for COVID 19 attacking OUR HOMELESS COMMUNITY/WORKERS. Many homeless folks do not – cannot – have problems with sheltering in place, staying put – and safe. IT REQUIRES DISCIPLINE – IS A HARD THING TO DO if you are struggling with other issues.

SO … DO our homeless inadvertantly SPREAD COVID 19 …ol on downtown benches, door ways, stoops, stairs, WRTA hub shelters? THRU NO FAULT OF THEIR OWN!

BETO says WE MUST ALL LOVE AND CARE FOR EVERYBODY these days!

HOW DO WE STOP – OR SLOW – THIS SPREAD, city leaders? To save lives and reopen Worcester …

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

From🇫🇷 Chef Joey:

Joe Joe!🇫🇷🇫🇷😊

☀️Spanish Omelette!

Text+pics by Chef Joey

You don’t need a big meal to feed your family. How about a Spanish omelette for breakfast or lunch?

You need an onion …

☀️

2 cloves of garlic

1 large boiled potato, quartered and cut into slices.

♥️

Add a tablespoon of butter and some oil to a frying pan.

Add your onions, sauté until clear.

Add the potato, and as they brown with a cover, add the garlic.

Take 8 eggs and blend them and add to the mix.

Cover about 6 mins – until it sets and place a plate on top and flip over.

Cook another 6 mins or less on a low flame and slide on to a plate.

♥️

Make a salad and lunch is served!

🐶🐶🐶🐶🐶🐶🐶🐶🐶

Animal shelters must not wash their hands of responsibility during this pandemic

By Teresa Chagrin

Rose’s Jett and Lilac were shelter rescues♥️

While we race to stop the COVID-19 pandemic, we are in danger of forgetting what started it: our own species’ blatant disrespect and disregard for the other species who try to share our world but often aren’t permitted to. The novel coronavirus originated in one of the world’s many live-animal markets — violent, filthy places where animals, terrified and trembling, are crammed into cages stacked on top of each other. Excrement, pus and blood from animals in the top tiers drip down onto the animals below, spreading disease, until it is time for them to be butchered in full view of the others.

Now, in the midst of this human-created crisis, other animals who depend on humans for almost everything, from drinking water to their very lives, are also being treated as expendable: Many animal shelters are closing their doors, refusing to accept dogs and cats from people who sometimes have no other recourse. As a result, animals are being abandoned on the streets and essential, lifesaving services like spaying and neutering, which prevent the births of more homeless animals, have ground to a halt. This is inhumane and irresponsible and will cause more animals to suffer and die. It needs to be rethought.

Animal sheltering services are more essential and critical now than ever before, and that’s saying a lot. Millions of people are out of work and scrambling to pay their bills, putting animals at risk of going without necessary food and veterinary care. Animals whose owners are hospitalized can be left with no one to care for them. What do those people do?

Shelters are the last resort for many, and when even taxpayer-funded facilities won’t help, some people take matters into their own hands. For example, a Pennsylvania man admitted to strangling his own ailing dog to death after being turned away from his local shelter. In Virginia, a Georgia woman, who testified that she had contacted two shelters and was refused help by both, admitted to shooting and killing a litter of puppies and dumping their bodies over an embankment.

Horrifying cases like these are reported nearly constantly in communities across the country where shelters have made it difficult or impossible for people to surrender animals. Others who are refused help by shelters simply dump animals in the woods or on the streets to die of starvation, be hit by a car or succumb to the elements.

So while debates continue over what constitutes “essential” work during the pandemic, there is no question that lifesaving animal sterilization surgeries should continue. Every sterilization saves countless lives, by preventing millions more unwanted dogs and cats from being born into a world with too few acceptable homes, a world in which many will suffer and die on the streets or at the hands of cruel or neglectful people or end up being euthanized in shelters that must make room for an endless flood of animals in need.

Suspending spay/neuter clinics’ vital services will exacerbate a crisis that was raging long before anyone had heard of COVID-19 and set back the progress that the humane community has painstakingly made to reduce animal overpopulation. Not only will it result in more homeless animals, it’s also likely to cause a spike in cruelty cases and in diseases contagious to humans, including rabies.

Humans have created the dog and cat homelessness crisis by domesticating animals and then failing to take responsibility for them. Animals depend on shelters to stand strong and do what is right. That means keeping their doors and clinics open when animals need them the most.

😸😸😸😸:

I♥️NY:

Will any Worcester Coffee Shops / Coffee Roasting companies step up? Step up for our hero docs, nurses, EMTs and hundreds of Worcester County health worker-angels who ARE KILLING THEMSELVES TO SAVE LIVES HERE IN WORCESTER?

– Rose♥️

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Meat markets breed killer diseases: Are we just going to ignore them?

By Heather Moore

COVID-19. Swine flu. Bird flu. SARS. MERS. Ebola. Creutzfeldt-Jakob (mad cow) disease. Hoof-and-mouth disease. The number of emerging dangerous infectious diseases has increased significantly in recent decades.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that approximately 75% of new infectious diseases affecting humans originated in animals. But animals aren’t to blame for outbreaks of animal-borne, or “zoonotic,” diseases — humans are. Many animal-borne diseases exist largely because humans don’t leave animals in peace. Instead, we crowd them together on filthy factory farms — breeding grounds for pathogens — in order to satisfy our voracious meat habit.

Unless we find the status quo satisfactory, we can’t continue to ignore what we are allowing to happen and the link between meat and outbreaks of zoonotic diseases. Health experts report that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese “wet market” that sold fish, live poultry and exotic animals, like the gentle pangolin, for human consumption. Cages at these markets are typically stacked on top of each other, and animals at the bottom are invariably soaked with excrement, pus and blood, providing ideal conditions for viruses to spread from one animal to another — and to humans who touch them or step in the ooze.

While it’s easy to point the finger at China, there are disease-ridden animal factories here in the U.S. that officials have warned, time and again, also pose major health risks. They are like volcanos that could erupt at any time. More than 80 live-animal markets and slaughterhouses operate in New York City alone, and San Francisco and Los Angeles are awash in them. But beyond live-animal markets, the enormous demand for chicken, pork, beef and other animal flesh means that animals must be mass-produced in crowded, feces-ridden farms, travel in filthy trucks, and be slaughtered on killing floors that are covered with bodily fluids and dangerous pathogens.

In 2009, hundreds of sick pigs died in a massive pig operation in Mexico, just before the swine flu outbreak spread to the U.S. and resulted in more than 274,300 hospitalizations and 12,400 deaths. The outbreak, as USA Today recently pointed out, stemmed from the pig populations of both countries. And some historians suspect that the virus associated with the 1918 flu pandemic — also known as the Spanish flu — originated at a chicken farm in Kansas.

Bird flu spreads easily on chicken farms so crowded that they make a subway car during rush hour in Tokyo look roomy. There are at least 144 different strains of bird flu, including the H5N1 variety, which kills the most birds and about 60% of humans who catch it. And as if we didn’t have enough to worry about with COVID-19, bird flu was recently discovered on a poultry farm in Germany, as well as being identified in the Philippines, India, Ireland, England and some other countries.

PETA recently sent a letter — and launched an international petition — to the World Health Organization, urging it to call for the permanent closure of all live-animal markets.

Animal markets were banned in China after the SARS outbreak, which also originated in such a market, but they were reopened in 2003. We see where that’s gotten us. While some live-animal markets in China have been closed again, at least temporarily, many such pockets of disease continue to operate throughout Asia, Africa, Europe and the U.S. Regardless of the country it takes place in, raising and killing animals for food threatens human health and causes tremendous animal suffering. It’s not only time to end live markets but also to take responsibility, to get away from consuming animals and their “products.” It is safer, kinder and better for the environment for all of us to eat vegan — not just now but also after the COVID-19 pandemic subsides.

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FYI:

🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶:

A GREAT AMERICAN WRITER♥️🇺🇸!!: