thursday, february 5, 2004
news
the university daily kansan 5A
Irish student reflects on heritage, culture of small-town background
Annie Bernethy/Kansan Keara Hays, Lenexa sophomore, talked about grew up in Kansas and spent time in Ireland. Hays is a pre-radiology student who celebrates her Irish heritage.
By Samia Khan skhan@kansan.com Kansan staff writer
Annie Bernethy/Kansan
Editor's note: Every face in the crowd and every number in the phone book has a story behind it. This semester, Kansan staff reporter Samia Kahn will be reporting each week on a student who was picket at random.
You can find almost half of Keara Hays' family in a small town in Ireland where they still use crank-up telephones, only one channel comes in on the television and some residents might claim a fear of e-mail.
"I guess they don't want to develop," said Hays, Lenexa sophomore. "They calculate everything at the gas station by hand."
Hays' small-town Irish heritage has played a big role in her life. Her mother moved to the United Stattiny Caherline, Ireland in the 1970s. She then married Hays' father, who had just returned to the states from Vietnam. Hays has been to Caherline six times for month-long trips to see her mother's family.
"Everybody knew us, we were the Americans," she said.
Her mother's family owns a gas station in town. When Hays visited as a child, the only way to pass the day was playing at the gas station with her cousins and eating candy.
Now that she is older, she replaces her time at the gas station with the local pubs. In a town where Hays estimates the population is about 200, there are two gas stations, one supermarket and a row of six pubs.
"They drink all the time," she said. "There's plenty of alcohol to go around."
"It would be like having a pub connected to the Kansas Union," she said.
But Hays said the number of pubs doesn't translate into a drinking problem. It is simply a big piece of the daily life and culture. Thirty miles away at the University of Limerick, Hayes visited a pub located in the middle of campus.
she said.
Noticing those slight cultural differences was a big part of how Hays grew up. Her mother also raised her with a different view of St. Patrick's Day than the common American conception. St. Patrick's Day is taken seriously in Ireland, she said. Instead of drinking, the first activity on most Irish people's mind for the holiday is church, Hays said.
"My mom always thought if you're going to do something on St. Patrick's Day it should be church. Then you can go celebrate." she said.
Growing up in the United States, Hays was known as the girl who always went to Ireland. Teachers would ask her to share her pictures and stories in front of the class. She would come home with a slight Irish accent that made her friends laugh.
"It was the teasing that helped me train myself out of it every time," she said.
Even without the accent, she is still left with one noticeable mark of her heritage. Hays is the only person in her family with red hair, but she wouldn't call it the luck of the Irish.
"We have no idea where it came from. It's really bright, and I don't like it," she said.
grow out for a brief period last year.
"I like her red hair. You can really tell she's Irish," said Ward, Baxter, Iowa sophomore.
Hays has been highlightig it blonde since she was 15 years old. Her roommate Amie Ward, who dyes her own hair red, saw Hays' natural hair color when she 's 14
"There aren't huge cultural differences, but It's the little things," she said. "I know I was raised differently from everybody else."
Buckingham Hays Irish heritage has not put her worlds apart from her peers, but she said it still plays a big role
in her life.
STATE
WASHINGTON - A Senate rattled by a ricin attack began returning to business yesterday, and the lack of any reported illnesses prompted leaders to plan to reopen office buildings.
"I am not following anybody with any symptoms that would be consistent with a toxic exposure," said John Eisold, the U.S. Capitol attending physician.
The Postal Service said tests for ricin at its facility that processes congressional mail were negative. The station, closed as a precaution, was to reopen yesterday.
Senators, voting for the first time this week, acted on a judge ship nomination, and at least three Senate committees had hearings, though they were held in House buildings.
TOPEKA —The House tentatively approved a bill yesterday to fund improvements in county 911 systems with a new, 50-cent monthly fee on wireless phones.
"There's been no smoking letter information that helps tie this thing together," U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer told
Even so, officials continued to say they did not know how the poison arrived Monday in the mailroom of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn). Frist said he assumed it came in the mail because the powder was found on the tray of a machine used to cut open envelopes.
The Associated Press
Last night, a white powder was found on the first floor of the Capitol, but tests for hazardous substances were negative. The building was not evacuated.
Bowing to growing complaints, Senate leaders were letting senators and aides to briefly re-enter their offices to remove needed documents and equipment. That included the fourth-floor corridor in the Dirksen Senate office building where the toxin was discovered in Frist's mailroom.
Senate continues business after scare
Bill approved to provide money for 911 systems
—Edited by Kevin Flaherty
"It's completely normal in there," said Laurie Schultz Heim, an aide to Sen. James Jeffords (I-Vt), who said she spent less than 10 minutes removing items from his offices, which are next to Frist's.
Yet with the entire Capitol complex subject to air sampling and all congressional mail being examined, no one was willing to say the threat was over.
The FBI, Environmental Protection Agency, and 100 Marines from the corps' Chemical Biological Incident Response Force were among those investigating.
Although ricin inhaled or injected can kill quickly, the incident seemed to be causing less tension than the anthrax letters sent to Capitol Hill in October 2001.
The fee would raise at least $7.8 million a year, proponents said. The money would be used to upgrade county's emergency phone systems to make it easier to locate someone making a 911 call on a wireless phone.
Lawmakers and aides said that was because being targeted by a biochemical substance is no longer novel for Congress, and initial indications were that the ricin had not spread into the air.
Officials said they had not found a link between the ricin in Frist's office and ricin-laden letters found last fall in mail facilities serving the White House and the Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport in South Carolina.
Gainer said no one had claimed credit for the ricin attack on Frist. And Frist said officials "have no earthly idea" if it may have been the work of international terrorists.
House members advanced the bill on a voice vote, with final action scheduled today. The Senate passed a version last year.
Frist said barring new problems, the Senate's two other office buildings would reopen this week.
Right now, emergency personnel in most Kansas counties' dispatch centers are shown the number but not the location of a cell phone on which a 911 call is made — information automatically provided on calls made from traditional phones.
In addition, 911 calls made on cell phones are sometimes mistakenly routed to other
counties or even across state lines, supporters of the legislation said.
Proponents of the bill said wireless phone companies have the technology to deliver information about a caller's location but most counties lack the equipment to receive it.
Winter weather deadly to livestock industry
WICHITA—With calving now underway on Midwest ranches, a wave of winter storms is forcing already-weary cattlemen to try and keep their newborn calves from freezing to death.
Debbie Lyons-Blythe and her husband, Duane Blythe, have 250 cows that calve each year in January and February on their ranch near White City in northeast Kansas.
Usually they check only their heifers every four hours at night. But with the current cold, snowy weather, they are checking all their cows every two to three hours — especially at night.
It takes an hour to go
through all the herds. Then they go back to sleep for an hour or two before doing it all over again.
Despite their efforts, five of the 25 calves born since Monday have died in the extreme temperatures a half hour to an hour after being born.
The cold temperatures are also taking a toll on the state's vast feedlot industry as cold cattle shed pounds.
Terry Handke, a Muscatot feedlot operator and president of the Kansas Livestock Association, weighed his fat cattle last week. He said he figured the recent ice storm probably took 30 to 40 pounds off each animal.
"Those pounds are pretty important—the ones at the top end —because that is where your profit is," Handke said.
When a storm hits across much of the state it costs 20 or 30 pounds of weight loss for each animal meaning the loss of hundreds of thousands of pounds of beef production in states like Kansas where
there is a big feedlot industry, he said.
WORLD
Dominican child to have extra head removed
SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic - A Dominican infant born with a second head will undergo a risky operation Friday to remove the appendage, which has a partially formed brain, ears, eyes and lips.
The surgery is complicated because the two heads share arteries.
Led by a Los Angles-based neurosurgeon who successfully separated Guatemalan twins, the medical team will spend about' 13 hours removing Rebecca Martinez's second head.
The 18 surgeons, nurses and doctors will cut off the undeveloped tissue, clip the veins and arteries and close the skull of the 7-week-old baby using a bone graft from another part of her body.
"We know this is a delicate operation," Rebeca's father,
Franklyn Martinez, 28, told The Associated Press. "But we have a positive attitude."
CURE International, a Lemoyne, Pa.-based charity that gives medical care to disabled children in developing countries is paying for the surgery and follow-up care.
Dr. Jorge Lazareff, director of pediatric neurosurgery at the University of California at Los Angeles' Mattel Children's Hospital, will lead the operation along with Dr. Benjamin Rivera, a neurosurgeon at the Medical Center of Santo Domingo. Lazareff led a team that successfully separated Guatemalan twin girls in 2002.
Doctors say if the surgery goes well Rebecca won't need physical therapy and will develop as a normal child.
Hebeca was born on Dec. 17 with the undeveloped head of her twin, a condition known as craniopagus parasiticus.
Twins born conjoined at the head are extremely rare, accounting for one of every 2.5 million births. Parasitic twins like
Rebeca are even rarer.
All the other documented infants died before birth, making it the first known surgery of its kind. Lazareff and Hazim said.
Hazim said the surgery must be done now so the pressure of Rebeca's other brain doesn't prevent her from developing.
rebeca is the eighth documented case in the world of craniopagus parasiticus, said Dr. Santiago Hazim, medical director at CURE International's Center for Orthopedic Specialties in Santo Domingo.
Rebeca shares blood vessels and arteries with her second head. Although only partially developed, the mouth on her second head moves when Rebeca is being breast-fed. Tests indicate some activity in her second brain.
Martinez said doctors told him before Rebecca was born that she would have a tumor on her head, but none of the prenatal tests showed a second head developing.
Lazareff says Rebeca's chances of survival are good.
—The Associated Press
The Associated Press
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