Other Voices

Cheryl Vallee believes in the kindness of volunteers and the power of information to transform lives.

Vallee is the director of the Center for Community Justice, based in Schenectady, which has just launched a new Legal Hand call-in program, an access-to-justice initiative, free for residents of Albany and Schenectady counties.

In this week’s Enterprise podcast, Vallee shares several personal narratives that, over decades, have a central theme: With the help of volunteers and pertinent information, individuals can be empowered to make beneficial changes in their lives.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, in 1998, Vallee volunteered for the Court Appointed Special Advocates program. CASA volunteers advocate for children, often foster children, who have been abused or neglected.

“They really need a voice,” said Vallee. The goal is to settle children in safe and permanent homes.

A CASA volunteer can flush out information from teachers or medical providers about a child and bring that information to the judge hearing a case. 

Vallee recalled once talking to a teacher about a middle-school boy she was helping. The teacher told Vallee, “Thank God somebody asked me about this young man because I can tell you he comes to this class every morning … puts his head down on his desk. He’s crying, and no one was asking: How is he doing in school?”

The center’s newest program — Legal Hand — also depends on volunteers.

“Access to justice means information,” said Vallee. “It means a willing ear. It means very patient, thoughtful, and kind volunteers who are helping the visitor. Often people just want someone to listen and understand. And sometimes that’s really all that they’re looking for.”

Legal Hand was started in 2015 by Helaine Barnett and Vallee believes it will eventually become a national program.

The local call-in program, which started earlier this month, trained 18 volunteers who work from computers in their homes to answer questions and help local residents navigate systems that can be complex or confusing.

A volunteer, for example, might help a visitor fill out an application for public benefits or help with employment or landlord issues. Two areas Legal Hand does not assist with are divorce cases or criminal matters.

Any Schenectady or Albany county residents seeking help can call 518-400-5544 or email [email protected].

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At the close of this week’s Enterprise podcast, through tears, Jason Houck gave a shout-out to his two daughters.

“I love you both and hope to see you again someday,” he said.

Houck of East Berne chairs the New York Affiliate of the National Parents Organization.

His organization is pushing for changes in state law that would make it more likely, after parents divorce or separate, to have their children spend half their time with each of their parents as long as those parents are fit and loving.

Currently, he reports, the norm is that children spend 65 percent of their time with their mother and 35 percent with their father.

He was divorced in 2011 and said he shared equal time with his daughters until 2013.

“Their mother had moved to a different town and the normal things started to happen where they wanted to see me every other weekend and one night during the week, and I had become a little bit hardened to that,” he said.

Houck went on, “I love my daughters. I was an involved father. I went to all their school functions, all their field trips.” His daughters had been were Berne-Knox-Westerlo students from kindergarten through elementary school.

After the estrangement started, Houck said he tried father-daughter and family counseling and reunification counseling to no avail.

“We began litigation in June of ’16,” he said. “We didn’t finish up litigation until January of 2021 — five years, seven adjournments in Family Court to try to get an ending verdict.” By the time the verdict came, his daughters had aged out of the system.

For five years, Houck said, he had “no contact at full child support” and no finding on fitness.

He also said, “When the estrangement happens with children, many times it cuts off an entire side of a family …. My mother lost the relationship with her grandchildren.” She had been “a primary caregiver” for his daughters, he said, “going through school, getting [them] on and off the bus before and after school.”

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Curling, says Kathy Bentley, is like playing chess on ice.

The ancient Scottish game is not just about technique and precision, but also about strategy.

Bentley ought to know. Two years ago, she was a United States Women’s Curling Association Senior champion along with teammates Marilyn Goldstein, Martha Naber, and Wendy Berger. The four women had been curling together for 15 years.

They competed on their home ice, which longtime Albany Curling Club member Melvin Abelseth has called the best-kept secret in Guilderland.

Their clubhouse, with two ice sheets and a “warm room” — where spectators can relax and watch the competition — is located on McKown Road. 

The club was founded in 1955 with 16 members and now has about 150.

There are four players on each team — eight players in a game — and their goal is to slide 43-pound granite rocks as close as they can to the center of a series of rings, which looks rather like a bull’s eye, 140 feet away.

Once a little-known sport, curling’s popularity increased after it became an Olympic sport in 1998.

Bentley was drawn to the sport when she went to an open house at the McKown Road facility. “Myself and my son just absolutely fell in love with it,” Bentley says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

One of the things she loves about the game is the camaraderie it inspires. Her club frequently holds weekend-long bonspiels — from the Dutch for good games. The curlers visit other clubs for bonspiels and connect with their competitors.

“After the game, the two teams, eight people total, will sit together and socialize,” says Bentley. “The winner buys the loser a drink.”

The six-month season runs from October through the end of March although some clubs play year-round, she said.

Sometimes, in upstate New York, winters can “seem a little long,” said Bentley. But, with curling she said, she looks forward to the season. “Every winter,” Bentley said, “gives me a lot of socialization activity.”

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Following our annual tradition, for this week’s podcast, Enterprise reporters look back at some of the most important stories for 2021.

Noah Zweifel discussed how social-media accounts can vary from facts. He spoke of several stories he wrote this year — notably one involving dishonest posts meant to slur a candidate before elections — where finding and reporting the truth was essential in setting the record straight.

Zweifel, the only reporter to cover elections in the four Hilltowns, reflected on the changing political landscape in the rural towns — all of which have more enrolled Democrats than Republicans and all of which went for Barack Obama in 2012 but went red for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Republicans dominated the local elections this year after prior decades of Democratic dominance.

Melissa Hale-Spencer spoke of how pandemic coverage this year and last changed the way The Enterprise puts out news, with regular updates on the website and in a free daily newsletter as well as a weekly round-up for print readers. The goal is to make the evolving science and government programs and regulations understandable and accessible to our readers while also covering how the pandemic plays out locally.

Sean Mulkerrin discussed the ever-evolving lawsuits centering on Pyramid. At the same time the behemoth company is challenging the town of Guilderland to nearly halve its tax assessment, it also partnered with Guilderland this past year to successfully overturn a lower court decision that would have halted construction of a 222-unit apartment complex and a Costco wholesale center.

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Jessyka and Keven Brunk are perfectly matched — both as a couple and as creators of fantasy gingerbread marvels.

“Jessyka went to school for painting and art, and so she’s always been very involved with that,” says Keven in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

Keven went to Syracuse University for mechanical engineering so he designs their gingerbread creations, starting with building half-scale models.

The two of them grew up in Guilderland, both students at Altamont Elementary School, with Keven a year ahead of Jessyka.

As the years have gone by, the complexity of their creations has increased. They now make all of their own pieces rather than incorporating store-bought candies as they had when trimming the Brooklyn Bridge.

Each creation takes hundreds of hours. The couple starts working on their annual project in October to be ready for the Christmas season.

Gingerbread has long been associated with Christmas. One legend, based on an 8th-Century Greek document, has a fourth wise man setting out to bring ginger to the newborn Jesus Christ. While the three wisemen from the east arrived in Bethlehem with their gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the fourth became ill in a Syrian city, giving his chest of ginger roots to a rabbi who had cared for him.

The Hebrew Bet Leḥem means “House of Bread,” and the Syrian rabbi would have his students make houses of bread in hopes of their saviour being born in Bethlehem. The waylaid fourth wiseman, the legend goes, thought of adding ginger to the bread.

The Brunks will make a ceremony out of destroying their creation. Early on, they had left one of their gingerbread houses — far too old to eat — in the woods for deer and other animals but family dogs found it and ate it instead, becoming ill from the sugar.

“My dad thought that it should go down in ceremony after all the work we put into it,” said Jessyka. “So we shoot it with BB guns or air rifles.”

“We invite people over to come look at it ...,” said Keven. “Our friends bring their kids —

 “And we allow the kids to touch it,” said Jessyka.

The Brunks have this advice for others who might want to make a gingerbread house:

“It’s not that hard to come up with your own little patterns instead of buying the one out of the box,” said Keven.

“Even if you do get the one out of the box, you should at least make your own icing,” said Jessyka.

They both agree that following your own ideas is the most fun.

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When Pastor Kyle Delhagen writes his sermon every week, he has a prayer on his lips: Lord, your words, not mine.

“I’m in love with words,” Delhagen says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

He was installed in late October as the pastor at Hamilton Union Presbyterian Church, established in Guilderland in 1824.

Although Delhagen grew up in a pastor’s family, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be pastor or raise his own family that way. “I fought against going into the ministry for a long time,” he said.

Delhagen grew up in the Reformed Church in America. His mother’s father was also a Reformed pastor. Delhagen himself was ordained in the Reformed Church.

He likes the Presbyterian Church because it is “much, much bigger, much more expansive, much, much more tuned in to issues of justice that were passionate to my heart.”

While the Reformed Church in America is one of the oldest denominations in the country, founded in 1628, Delhagen notes it is very small. It has about 200,000 members compared to 1.7 million in the Presbyterian Church.

Delhagen loves lots of people in the Reformed Church, he said, but feels it is “tearing itself apart over issues of human sexuality.”

“And so I have found myself to be adopted into this denomination,” Delhagen said of Presbyterianism. “And I love it here.”

His congregation has taken up the Presbyteran Church’s Matthew 25 vision. In that chapter of the Bible, Delhagen explains, Jesus “talks about that day of judgment when God is going to separate out the people and put at his right hand those who did God’s will and, at his left hand, those who didn’t.

“And he says, ‘You know who fed me when I was hungry, you clothed me when I was nakend, you visited me when I was sick and in prison.’ And the people say, ‘When did we do that, Jesus?’ and he says, ‘Whenever you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.’”

So churches that adopt the Matthew 25 vision seek to dismantle systemic racism and address structural poverty among other things. Hamilton Union this year focused on hunger, helping the Guilderland Food Pantry and the Regional Food Bank, Delhagen said.

Hamilton Union also raised $5,000 to fill a metaphorical ark, through Heifer International, with cows and chickens and goats to help people in undeveloped countries.

“I want to challenge my congregation and our community … to look at how issues of race and gender and economics intersect in creating systems of poverty,” said Delhagen.

He went on, “There’s a saying that, if a fish washes up on the shore, one might ask: What’s wrong with the fish? If a bunch of fish wash up on the shore you have to ask: What’s wrong with the water?”

With poverty, churches and society tend to focus on addressing individual needs, which is important but, he said, we also need to look at the larger picture and address the issues keeping people in poverty.

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Will Gibney, at 17, has written a book about the dog that changed his life.

“Toshi is my service dog,” says Will in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “He means so much to me because for years he’s been by my side.”

Once Will, at age 12, was matched with Toshi, he began to produce the antibodies he needed to fight infections.

“Toshi has been life-changing for me,” says Will, explaining why he wanted to write the book. He wants other people with disabilities, who may be scared of being ridiculed and judged, to know they can get service dogs to help them. 

In the introduction to the book, Will’s mother, child psychologist Laura Assaf, writes, “Will became more independent and mature as he started caring for another being instead of needing everyone else to care for him. The character gifts Will has — his kindness, perseverance, generosity of spirit, and empathy for others — were no longer overshadowed by the incongruent behaviors he demonstrated when his brain was inflamed.”

Will has a condition known as PANS, from which Assaf said one in 200 children may have flare-ups although the syndrome is often misunderstood and misdiagnosed. PANS stands for Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome.

Will is also immunodeficient, which fewer than 20 percent of children with PANS are, his mother said.

Assaf called it a “double whammy” since her son’s body was unable to produce the antibodies needed to fight infections so he spent lots of time getting infusions to try to build a healthier body. He also underwent seven years of long-term suppression therapy on antibiotics, probiotics, and medications to treat symptoms.

“When there’s inflammation in the body and there’s inflammation in the brain, then we get behaviors” that can often look psychiatric, leading to frequent misdiagnoses of the condition, Assaf said.

When Will’s condition was misdiagnosed by local doctors, his parents pushed to find national experts who understood the condition. Some children with PANS can be treated with a 30-day antibiotic instead of six years on an antidepressant, said Assaf. “It sends them down a very scary and dangerous path,” she said of misdiagnosis.

Will’s book, “My Boy, Will,” captures his five years with Toshi in a narrative written for children illustrated with simple expressive artwork created by Will.

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Kayleigh Reynolds-Flynn has been riding horses since she was born.

Her mother grew up riding horses, too.

“My favorite picture I have is of me when I was probably about three or four months old with my mom sitting on our old horse, Bandy,” Reynolds-Flynn says in this week’s podcast.

Her mother would take her on trail rides as a baby and she would fall asleep in her mother’s arms on the back of a horse.

Now an adult, Reynolds-Flynn’s passion for horses has not faded. She lives in Alaska with her financé, Travis Perkovich; her horse, Tango; and their husky puppy, Gimli.

She has bred a mare named Girlfriend and is expecting a foal in June. The gestation period, she explained, is 340 days or roughly 11 months.

This fall, Reynolds-Flynn became Berne-Knox-Westerlo’s first graduate to earn an American FFA Degree, the top honor earned by fewer than 2 percent of the more than 730,000 Future Farmers of America members.

Her family ran a business in Knox, providing carriage rides for weddings and special occasions like holiday sojourns around Stuyvesant Plaza in Guilderland. She described a “white Cinderella carriage” pulled by Belgian horses

Behind the fairytale was a lot of work, feeding the horses every day and gradually desensitizing them to the hurly-burly of modern traffic.

A young horse would be paired with an old horse who was “basically bombproof,” said Reynolds-Flynn as they traveled a two-mile circular route along two busy roads to get back home.

Reynolds-Flynn took classes in agriculture at BKW from Micaela Kehrer and joined the FFA.

At 16, she won the People in Agriculture competition at the New York State FFA convention after making a presentation on State Police canine handlers — her dream job at the time.

After graduating from BKW in 2019, she went to the State University of New York College of Agriculture and Technology at Cobleskill. Reynolds-Flynn started in the canine program and said she had a lot of fun working with dogs.

But she came to the realization that her true passion was working with horses and she majored in equine husbandry.

She moved to Alaska to be with her fiancé. They live in Soldotna, population 4,000, on the Kenai Peninsula at the edge of a two-million-acre wildlife preserve.

“It’s almost like the Hilltowns,” said Reynolds-Flynn of the small-town atmosphere.

She works in a shop that melts down lead, putting it into molds to make weights for fishermen’s nets.

Reynolds-Flynn tried salmon fishing herself this past summer, donning waders and standing hip-deep in the Kenai River. “It’s almost like fly fishing,” she said.

Her major focus outside of work is on her horse, Tango. Because she competes in barrel racing — she started at the Altamont Fair — she is training Tango on endurance and bending into turns.

She likes challenges and has stepped into traditionally male roles, like being a volunteer firefighter in Knox.

Her biggest thrill was receiving her American FFA Degree on Oct. 30 at the national convention in Indianapolis. Up to 60,000 members from across the country assemble for the annual convention.

Earning her degree involved more than just an academic record or FFA membership for three years. She also had to demonstrate outstanding leadership, complete at least 50 hours of community service, earn $10,000 and invest $7,500, and work in excess of 2,250 hours in agriculture.

Reynolds-Flynn has this advice for others who might want to follow in her footsteps: When it seems like it’s getting tough, just keep on pushing through it and there’s always light at the end of the tunnel.

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Eric Reimer is a pastor who tweets.

He is the new pastor at St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Altamont. “The word of God …,” said Reimer, “needs to be proclaimed wherever people are. The Lutheran movement itself exists largely because of changes in the way people communicate.”

Martin Luther’s ideas in the 1500s had been expressed before by other theologians, but Luther was able to print them and distribute them quickly before they could be repressed, said Reimer, leading to the Protestant Reformation.

“And then once his ideas were out there, he took advantage of things like using woodcuts to make interesting illustrations to accompany his catechism, so Christian teachings and instructions would hold people’s attention,” Reimer said.

Luther was also an advocate of translating the scriptures from Latin into languages people spoke and could easily understand.

Whether it’s on Twitter or Facebook, Reimer said, the church should be where “God’s people are.” He went on, “And so whenever there are ways to advocate for peace or to care for one another or to love our neighbor, the church should show up and proclaim that.”

In his job as a pastor, Reimer says on this week’s Enterprise podcast, “A lot of what I do is creative.” This includes writing sermons and inventing fresh approaches to Bible study. 

His job also involves relationships, providing spiritual care in homes and hospitals. This has been complicated by COVID-19 restrictions, Reimer said, and some of his congregants he has met only through screens.

As a teenager, Reimer worked at a Lutheran summer camp — and continued to work there for seven summers. One of the things that attracted him to Altamont was its proximity to the Adirondacks. 

He floundered when he first went to college, Reimer said, but was grounded by his desire to return to work at the Lutheran summer camp. “Being there for others … was what I was called to do,” he said.

He discerned his call to the ministry at the camp, Reimer said, as he likened being a pastor to being a counselor for life. He described his work as a lifelong cycle of sharing joys and sorrows with a group of people.

The outdoor aspects of the camp, like hiking on the Appalachian Trail, he added, reinforced the importance of working together and caused intense bonding.

Being there for others, as Reimer put it, sometimes involves people you don’t even know. 

As the Thanksgiving holiday approaches, Reimer closed with a challenge.

“It’s always appropriate to give thanks,” he said. “And whether you’re a Christian or not, I think we can all benefit from the act of actively giving thanks and looking for things to be thankful for.”

Reimer challenged podcast listeners “to spend the week looking for different reasons to be thankful … to have gratitude. And I will then challenge you to find new ways to express that gratitude to others. And to help build relationships and spread love.”

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The longtime head of Youth and Family Services at the Voorheesville library, Gail Brown has just been named Public Librarian of the Year by the New York State Library Association.

Her goal is to create a community of learners. While she focuses on kids, her tendrils reach to nurture their parents and grandparents, too, as well as into the community at large.

In one library project, Brown paired kids with veterans so that young people would understand the sacrifices of war. The Military Memories and Veterans Voices project made history come alive and Brown believes it is something the kids will carry with them for the rest of their lives.

She recalls in this week’s podcast how one young man who loves history was paired with a Korean War veteran. “Mrs. Brown, this is better than any textbook,” he told her.

Brown had started her career as an English teacher. She paused in her teaching to raise her own children and decided to become a librarian because it allowed her to be more creative in her pursuits, not restricted by set curricula.

Brown was also instrumental in 2019, before the pandemic, in launching Voorheesville’s first Screen-Free Week.

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