For Immediate Release
Contact: Macreena Doyle
Coordinator of News Services
315-229-5587
[email protected]
http://www.stlawu.edu
CANTON, N.Y. -- St. Lawrence University Professor of Chemistry Paul Connett is hoping to draw attention to a community he visited in South Africa last year, and that the attention will result in government assistance to move the community's residents to a safer environment.
The videotape, made while Connett was in South Africa in August of 1998 during a sabbatical leave from St. Lawrence, shows residents of the small settlement Aloes, near Port Elizabeth. Some 100 families live there, between a leaking hazardous waste landfill and a regional medical waste incinerator. Fearing health problems resulting from their proximity to these facilities, the residents are seeking government assistance to be moved to another location.
"My hope is that as people watch this videotape around the country and beyond, it will generate pressure on the local and federal authorities to provide these people with urgent medical attention and to move them to a safer place to live," Connett says. "No people, however poor or humble, should be forced to live in such a location." Connett has scheduled a screening of the 41-minute video, titled "Aloes Weeping," on campus at St. Lawrence. It includes interviews he conducted with local activist Joan Coulridge and Aloes community leader Nelson Fezi, and a recording by the Soweto String Quartet of the song "Weeping," from their CD "Renaissance."
Connett, a widely known critic of incinerators who has given talks around the world about the health risks associated with the facilities' use, has also given a copy of his tape to the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C., and is urging those who see the tape to write to the embassy in support of moving the residents of Aloes.
For more information and/or copies of the tape, contact Professor Connett, at 315-229-5853.
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