Paris of the Plains

"Laying on that ground, bleeding out. So many people around holding my chest. People I didn't know. I come from Kansas City so death is kind of hard out here, so I thought I was dying. I didn’t think of myself as surviving."

One hundred and twenty-six. That’s the number of people killed in Kansas City in 2016. Four years earlier in 2012, that number wasn’t much different. There were one hundred and eight homicides. In the beginning of that year, Wesley Hamilton was in danger of becoming lost in that massive statistic after he was unexpectedly shot outside his former girlfriend's apartment.

How did we get here? I mean, physically, here in Kansas City. Some of us were born here, others moved from different cities, but some of us traveled here from a different country all together.

This is the second episode of an on-going series here at Paris of the Plains we’re calling How We Got Here: Stories of Immigration. Each episode features someone telling their story of immigration or a story about how immigration has changed their life. These narratives show how the people that call this place home came to be in the Paris of the Plains.

How did we get here? I mean, physically, here in Kansas City. Some of us were born here, others moved from different cities, but some of us traveled here from a different country all together.

This is the first episode of an on-going series here at Paris of the Plains we’re calling How We Got Here: Stories of Immigration. Each episode will feature someone telling their story of immigration or a story about how immigration has changed their life. These narratives show how the people that call this place home came to be in the Paris of the Plains. We start with Rodolfo and the Westside.

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By: John Evans and Matt Hodapp

On this episode of Paris of the Plains, we hear a story produced by another Fountain City Frequency podcast, Iconoclast of Things. That story details how a Syrian refugee family positively changed a small neighborhood here in the Kansas City area. Subscribe to that podcast here.

One of my favorite authors, Colum McCann, wrote in his novel Transatlantic that, “We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing mobius strip, until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.” That’s certainly true of City Councilman Quinton Lucas, who says his story was shaped by the decisions of the two most important women in his life. This is a story about how the actions of people in our past, even people we may have never met, can make us who we are today.

There’s a common phrase, “it takes a village to raise a child”, but sometimes it takes a child to bring a village together. This is a story about a family helping each other to save one of their own, and a mother going through to hell to make a better life for her kids. This is Velonder, sacrificing for her family.

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After years of eating at Wendy's almost every morning Mo Dickens managed to give up fast food after artist Adriane Herman convinced him to throw away some junk food during a photography shoot where she took pictures of people throwing things away. This inspired them both to start the Freeing Throwers art project through the Charlotte Street Rocket Grant program.

Songs used in this episode: Steadfast and Santre by Blue Dot Sessions and they has been adapted.

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A few days ago, a post was up-voted to the top of the Pokemon Go reddit about how the new video game was working against racial biases for a black man here in Kansas City. This is a story about that reddit post.

Gary Jenkins was a KCMO police officer during one of the largest mob busts in history. He retells that story and other greatest hits of historical mafia stories on his KC based podcast, Gangland Wire.

Everybody responds to tragedy differently. Some, require silence and mourning, others need to rail against the sadness with noise and celebration. This story is about one Kansas city jazz artists’ response to an international tragedy. This is Hermon Mehari playing for Paris.