Thread: VA: Picnics, Games and Culture Shock

Picnics, Games and Culture Shock
Parks Work to Tailor Services While Educating Immigrants on Rules

By Annie Gowen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 1, 2007; A01

One chilly April morning two years ago, manager Jill Vanden Heuvel was at her desk at Algonkian Regional Park expecting a quiet Sunday when the cars started to arrive. Hundreds at first, then more than a thousand, bringing scores of Iranian families toting blankets, coolers and small grills.

Picnickers without reservations plunked down in areas reserved by others. Toilets overflowed. Cars were parked haphazardly on the grass. Tempers flared. When Vanden Heuvel tried to get the crowd to disperse, they accused her of racial discrimination.

As the crowd quickly grew to 3,000 people, more than twice what the park could handle, Vanden Heuvel called her boss in a panic. They decided to shut down the park to cars -- a rare move for the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority. Feeling helpless, parks employees turned to their computers, Googling such terms as "Persian" and "holiday" and "spring." That's how they learned that on Sizdeh Bedar, a popular celebration in Iran, it's considered unlucky to stay indoors. Now each April, the park is ready with extra staff.

As the number of immigrants in the region tops 1 million, such cultural clashes are becoming more commonplace, prompting parks officials to search for ways to educate foreign-born residents on the U.S. parks system, where permits are often required, litter pickup encouraged and alcohol verboten.

Parks are changing, too: Montgomery County built a cricket field for its Jamaican and Indian expats. Fairfax County is contemplating bigger picnic pavilions for Latino families, who tend to gather in large groups and stay longer. The Northern Virginia park authority plans to offer instant kimchi, a cabbage dish, alongside hot dogs at some of its snack stands to appeal to Korean golfers.

"It's about connections rather than enforcement," said John Berlin, program section manager for the Fairfax County Park Authority. "It's putting out the welcome mat to the international community, not just saying, 'Here's how we Americans do things.' "

In the past two years, Montgomery, Fairfax and Prince William counties have hired or directed multilingual staffers and park rangers to target immigrant populations; Arlington is hiring a multilingual staffer as well.

The outreach was in part inspired by nasty clashes over soccer fields, where permitted players would arrive at a field and find a squatter team -- dubbed "cellphone leagues" because they scout for open grass and communicate by cellphone -- which then refused to move. Fairfax, for example, had 154 such incidents last year. But through multilingual education and enforcement, twice as many teams as normal joined after the season started, one sign officials are bringing some of the "cellphone" players into the fold, they say.

Parks and recreation experts say the parks must change to appeal to their new users. In the National Park Service and Forest Service, for example, surveys indicate that visitors are still overwhelmingly Caucasian, more than 90 percent. Locally, minority use is growing. In Fairfax, for example, about 80 percent of households use county parks, and although Hispanic and Asian households lag behind, their percentages are increasing, officials said.

"Parks have to remain or become relevant to the changing demographics of America if they're going to be used and funded," said Robert Burns, a professor of recreation, parks and tourism resources at West Virginia University who is studying the issue. "Most of our local, state and federal parks were designed for the 'Happy Days' family unit -- a Caucasian mother, father and two or three kids -- to go have a picnic and roast marshmallows. That's just not the demographics we have today."

On a recent Saturday in Silver Spring, Montgomery County Park Police Ranger Haleh Mirabrishami, who speaks Farsi, was on patrol, approaching a log house that probably had seen its share of Boy Scout meetings and company picnics over the years. This day it was the site for the 15th birthday party for Zully Pineda of Silver Spring, a rite of passage for many Latino girls called a "quinceañera."

Zully was posing for pictures outside in a pink beaded dress when her mother, Marlene, 32, saw the uniformed ranger approach. Marlene Pineda smiled, eyes wary, and without prompting pulled a crumpled yellow permit from her pocket to show the ranger.

The mood softened, however, as Mirabrishami peppered her lightly with questions. Did the family come here often? What did they like about the park? Did they feel safe here?

Such information, the ranger believes, is crucial for police to handle gang activity and other trouble. By the end of the exchange, Pineda and her family were laughing and asking Mirabrishami if she wanted to stay and partake of the abundant spread of chicken, beef stew, rice, pupusas and white tiered cake trimmed in pink roses.

"It shows how much it's changing," Mirabrishami said later.

Challenges remain. In the two years since the surprise Sizdeh Bedar celebration overran Algonkian Regional Park in Sterling, the Northern Virginia park authority has each year managed a more peaceful event -- but at a cost. The tab runs about $5,000 for more than a dozen extra staffers and security to manage traffic, as well as the rental of 20 portable toilets. Officials would like to see someone from the Iranian community step forward to organize the event.

But who?

"I'm kind of clueless on that," said the current park manager, Todd Benson. "Maybe it's like July 4 -- you don't reserve to go to the Mall for fireworks. You just go. I guess it's part of [Sizdeh] Bedar. It's just families showing up. . . . We're trying to learn from the mistakes we've made. We're trying to grow as well and accommodate everyone that wants to come in here."

In Fairfax, the park authority's community connections staff members -- including Berlin, Spanish speaker Ricardo Cabellos-Reyes and Korean-born Wangin Bang -- have started youth swimming classes in the Culmore neighborhood and recruited Asian seniors for other water exercise. They're also working to smooth growing pains at parks, such as Roundtree Park in Falls Church.

Tensions have arisen there because a Bolivian soccer team, which plays games on Sundays, brings in a large crowd of spectators that clog neighborhood streets and draws merchants who illegally sell food, liquor, even rugs, parks employees and neighbors said.

Neighbors say some progress has been made recently because police have been ticketing cars. Cabellos-Reyes has visited the park several times to deter the illegal food vendors, who sell roasted meat and rice in plastic foam containers out of vans.

"There have been parking problems. My dad put a sign out in the middle of the court with a cone that said, 'No Parking for the Park.' . . . It didn't work at all," said Brianna Doxzen, 16, a student at Bishop Ireton High School who lives near the park entrance. "My dad's car was broken into about a month ago, and the assumption was it was somebody from the park. But in the last couple of months it has improved. A couple of years ago, a nice day like today would be awful with the parking and the noise, and it's fine now."

On a recent Sunday, however, some of the food vendors had returned. A man who spoke no English stopped cars entering the parking lot, as if it were closed for a private event.

Javier Villarroel, 32, a mechanical engineer from Alexandria, said the Sunday games are a treasured time to catch up with friends and relatives from his homeland.

"It's a whole day. Everybody comes out, and the whole family really looks forward to it all week," Villarroel said. "It's a game, but at the same time it's a gathering where we all catch up with each other."

The league's leaders are aware of the neighbors' complaints, he said, but they have no power to control the illegal vendors.

"It's the only place we have, really," Villarroel said. "The field, it's poor quality, it's a desert. But we have to play somewhere. We take whatever we can."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 00965.html

"It's about connections rather than enforcement,"

There's the problem. With the welcoming liberal PC attitude toward anything goes for anybody of any culture anytime without reservation or restriction they have been able to turn America into an extension of the Third World. America is no longer a MELTING POT...it is a GARBAGE CAN!!!

I don't understand how foreigners can come here and start dictating what they want done!

France & England did this, look at them now!

You either come to the USA to join in, or you should be told to go back to your Country!

Sure, one can learn another culture, but this is shoving it down people's throats...and then taking over everything!

Villarroel said "We take whatever we can"

Maybe that's part of the problem.

I am so glad I don't live in Northern Va. anymore