In-person Coastal Cleanup Day returning to Lodi Lake
Lodians are invited to help clean up Lodi Lake and Mokelumne River this month as Coastal Cleanup Day resumes with in-person gatherings.
Kathy Grant, the City of Lodi’s Watershed Program Coordinator, is excited to be going out to the lake with residents again on Sept. 18 from 9 a.m. to noon.
“I’m very happy,” Grant said. “I’m hoping we’re all healthy, and that we wear masks and are able to socially distance while we clean up. After a year, I think we all know how to do that.”
This is the 18th year Lodi has participated in the national event, and the first in two years in which residents will come together in one location to pick up garbage and debris.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic last year, the event was limited to virtual cleanup and participants were encouraged to pick up litter in their own neighborhoods. They were also encouraged to record their trash pick-up data on the Litterati app.
Because COVID-19 restrictions are still in place, attendance at this year’s cleanup event will be limited to 150 participants. Those interested must preregister with San Joaquin County at www.sjwater.org.
If you are unable to register for the Lodi Lake cleanup, the county is hosting two other events at American Legion and Buckley parks in Stockton. Residents must register at www.sjwater.org to attend those events as well.
The first 350 people to pre-register for any of the cleanup events, and who submit a completed trash collection data card will receive a free 2021 Coastal Cleanup t-shirt.
Because last year’s cleanup was “virtual,” with participants responsible for submitting their own data, the county was unable to collect exact totals on how much garbage was picked up.
In 2019, more than 74,000 volunteers across the state removed more than 900,000 pounds of trash and recyclables. That year, 281 Lodians collected more than 330 pounds of trash along waterways, of which more
no mercy.”
The 5,862 evacuees who have come to Philadelphia since Aug. 28 are traveling from first-stop, emergency processing centers in countries like Germany, Spain, Qatar, and Uzbekistan.
From the airport they’re bused to Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in South Jersey, which could house as many as 10,000 evacuees, just as Fort Indiantown Gap once sheltered Vietnamese refugees in Pennsylvania.
“We cry along with them,” said Theresa Tran, 57, of Montgomery Township in Montgomery County. “My Vietnamese friends, it reminds us of what we went through, and we feel really bad for the people.”
These last weeks, she and others say, memories have flooded back.
Tran was 11 when South Vietnam ceased to exist. She and her family watched Saigon fall from a ship offshore.
Her father secured places on a boat with 250 others. Everyone was staring at the coast, waiting to see if some lastminute miracle might alter the war’s outcome.
“Once South Vietnam surrendered,” she said, “my father told the captain to go ahead and leave. We knew it was the end.”
After two days at sea, Tran and the others were picked up by a passing cargo ship.
They were ferried a thousand miles to the Philippines, then to Wake Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Eventually they were brought to Fort Indiantown Gap, and later transferred to a sponsor.
She fears for the Afghans who worked for the Americans and were left behind, because she knows what happened to members of her family who served the South — imprisonment and torture.
“They don’t know what’s waiting for them.
But we Vietnamese, we know,” said Luong Nguyen, 67, a retired Dow scientist who recently moved from Horsham to Florida.
He and his friends discuss the Taliban takeover, the ways it’s similar and dissimilar to the North Vietnamese victory. The luck and chance that saw some escape and others trapped.
Every April 30 — the anniversary of Saigon’s fall — he and his friends take stock and ask, Why are we here? Think of all the exact circumstances that had to occur to propel them out of their homeland and to safety in the United States. The Afghans who settle here, he said, will be asking themselves the same question.
On the night of April 29, 1975, Nguyen, a 21year-old college student, was pulled aboard a ship by his navy officer brother.
Every man was needed for the final battle, and forces were gathering offshore. The South Vietnamese government was about to drop a special bomb that would drive back the communists.
Of course, there was no bomb. His brother tricked him, Nguyen said, knowing he would be in danger as a college student. When Saigon fell the next day, the ship simply sailed away.
“They leave their country empty-handed,” Nguyen said of the Afghans, but he has confidence in their future. “With their mind, their strength, their eagerness to continue, they will do wonderfully.”
Philadelphia is home to the region’s largest concentration of Vietnamese, about 14,500 people, many with war-era roots. The Afghan population is small, about 700, clustered in the Oxford Circle and Mayfair neighborhoods.
It’s uncertain how many evacuees may eventually settle here, as federal and local humanitarian efforts have been defined by fluidity.
Afghanistan was not supposed to collapse. Nor was U.S.-backed South Vietnam — at least not so fast.
The 1973 Paris peace accords gave the United States a face-saving way out of what, until Afghanistan, was its longest war. But the troop withdrawal left the South vulnerable.
By April 1975, Ung recalled, refugees streamed into Saigon. Lines formed at banks that no longer dispensed money. People with unfamiliar accents showed up on the streets, believed to be spies.
Her family — like many in Afghanistan now — knew they would face prison or worse for working for the Americans. Her mother bought rat poison. Better that than to be tortured to death.
Her father was a security guard at the U.S. Embassy. Ung worked at the embassy café, where she came to know Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and his successor, Graham Martin.
Friends at the embassy told her: Don’t go far from home. You must be ready to leave Vietnam at any moment.
On April 27, rockets began exploding in Saigon. The next day, Ung’s family was given two hours to get to Tan Son Nhut Air Base.
She left her homeland carrying what would become two prized possessions: a map of Vietnam, and a South Vietnamese flag, the kind sold at the embassy.
The following day, North Vietnamese shelling wrecked the Tan Son Nhut runways and, with many sea lanes blocked, a helicopter airlift commenced. Remaining diplomats, intelligence officers, and some soldiers, along with thousands of South Vietnamese, were ferried to aircraft carriers.
The desperation of thousands of Vietnamese at the U.S. Embassy gates would be mirrored by Afghans at walls of the Kabul airport.
“You have to live through it to know the pain of losing your country,” said Ung, who prays every day for Afghan people. “We have to be kind