LIFESTYLE
THE CHAMPION, THURSDAY, THURSDAY, JAN. 2 - 8, 2020 • PAGE 14
2019 LIFESTYLE
N REV EW
The Lifestyle section of The Champion covered a broad range of
topics and people in 2019—cultural, spiritual, charitable, travel, volunteer,
historical and so much more. Here’s a recap of some of what we covered
last year:
Lucy Ke lohnSemmes Charles Bennafield Jeani Chang
What the World Needs Now
At the start of 2019 The Champion Newspaper asked spiritual and
community leaders throughout DeKalb County for their views on what the
world and DeKalb County need to be a better place.
Sharing their thoughts were: Charles Bennafield, pastor of Flat Rock
Community Church in Stonecrest; Jeani Chang, president of Atlanta
Women Taiwanese Association and an epidemiologist at Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention; Lucy Ke, a metro Atlanta trainer and
course developer with an emphasis on cross-cultural customer service,
workplace civility and civic engagement, and John Semmes, interim
pastor of Shallowford Presbyterian Church in Atlanta.
What can we do as individuals to achieve a better world/community?
Bennafield: Put our gifts and skills to use and live out our God-given
talents looking for the opportunities to be difference-makers who recognize
that no matter where we are, someone else helped to blaze a trail for us to
get us to this point in life. We must pay it forward for those who follow so
that their world will be at least as good if not significantly better.
Chang: Every action we take and every decision we make will impact the
community and world in some way. Each of us is therefore responsible for
our community and world. Every person we meet and every conversation
we have, we learn something new. As we are living in a melting pot, to
understand and respect diversity is the first step to have a balanced pot or a
better community.
Ke: Practice strategic defiance, civil disobedience. If something looks
wrong to you, step up, speak up, ask hard questions, especially of elected
officials, all of whom live quite well on our dime. Don’t just be a disgrun
tled bystander: silence becomes complicity.
Semmes: There is a phrase that looms large when considering what one
person can do to make the world a better place: “Be kind, for everyone you
meet is fighting some great battle” Simple acts of kindness, performed one
at a time, speak to Mother Teresa’s belief that we can’t, as individuals, fix
all the world’s problems. We can only address the challenges immediately
in front of us, but to do so would change the world... one small step at the
time.
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Elizabeth Alier, originally from South Sudan, has been a member of the Refugee Sewing Society for five years.
Refugee Sewing Society
Working side by side, a Burmese woman and Ethiopian woman labor
over sewing machines stitching fabric into tote bags. Elsewhere a woman
is sewing leather pieces into straps for handbags and another woman is
stringing beads into a necklace. Almost all the women in this room hail
from different countries and have made Georgia their home after fleeing
their homelands—some under the most dire of circumstances.
In Clarkston several days each week, these women come to learn
sewing techniques, chat, laugh, improve their English skills and enjoy each
other’s company. In time, they may even earn some money when the goods
they make sell and they get a portion of the proceeds.
The Refugee Sewing Society was started 10 years ago by former local
resident Kathy Palmer, who grew up in Kenya and became a missionary.
Upon moving to DeKalb County, she sought to find a place to bring
together refugee women for camaraderie and activity.
Its slogan is “mending hearts, weaving hope.”
“It’s a place for the women to come for social gathering, build
relations with women, give them hope, help them heal and some might get
a job,” said Susie Helton, who currently heads the program.
The women attending the society—some weekly, some periodically—
come from South Sudan, Eritrea, Bhutan, Morocco, Syria, Iraq and other
countries.
See LIFESTYLE YIR on page 16
