CityStream producer Roxeanne Vainuku takes a look at the limits and the possibilities of building backyard cottages. Meet one homeowner overjoyed to rent out her main house while downsizing to a 600 square foot cottage, while another owner has big plans for a dilapidated shed.

 Watch CityStream Back Yard Cottages now by following this link: http://www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=3071004

And don’t miss the rest of the show with host Lowell Deo at Neighborhood House in the High Point Neighborhood of West Seattle. Learn about the center’s mission of ending poverty while helping the environment at the same time. Plus, log on to learn about history. How high tech tools are allowing us a glance at the past. All of that and more are coming up on this episode of CityStream, Thursday night at 7 p.m., SEATTLE CHANNEL, Cable 21 or watch it online at www.seattlechannel.org.

Rainier Valley Food Bank board member Mark Dyce says the Food Bank is serving 10,000 people a month. “The need today is greater, I think, than any of us have experienced at the Food Bank. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve seen about a twenty percent increase in clients,” says Dyce.  

At the Ballard Food Bank, Executive Director Nancy McKinney, her two-person staff and many volunteers gave out 27,000 pounds of food in the month of September. McKinney says she is struck by the community’s generosity and “the great need right around the corner from everybody’s house.” The Food Bank’s clients include the recently unemployed like Donna Lawrence, who just months ago was working as a teacher and is now a grateful recipient of Seattle’s help. “It’s so critical for us,” says Lawrence.

Rainier Valley’s Dyce reminds us, however, that it isn’t just the clients who get something out of the food bank. “This morning when I was down here [at the food bank] I just realized how grateful and lucky I really am,” says Dyce. “Sometimes in our busy world we get…in the way of ourselves and to spend that hour down here at the food bank—it’s an amazing experience.”

 “Shop Arounds” are tours of grocery stores led by peer educators trained in basic nutrition and label reading. These free interactive tours teach people how to make healthier choices in the supermarket aisles.

CityStream went on a “Shop Around” in a Rainier Valley Safeway with Public Health’s Diana Vergis Vinh, a registered nurse, and several seniors. Vinh says, “It’s not a full nutrition course. It’s really just a sort of down-and-dirty to get people in the habit of looking at the serving sizes and looking at the label and trying to make some more informed choices.”

At any given time, there are around 80,000 items on this Safeway’s shelves–that’s a lot of choices. Vinh gives shopping tips as the tour proceeds. Tip # 1: Eat different colored fruits and vegetables at each meal. This helps insure that you’ll get lots of vitamins. Tip # 2: Your portion of meat should be about the size of a deck of cards; that will help keep your intake of saturated fats to a reasonable level. Tip # 3: Most flavored yogurt contains so much sugar that it should be treated as a dessert. Tip # 4: Sugary cereals are placed at eye level so they can be reached by children; the healthier ones are up high or down low.

If Public Health has its way, soon everyone will “Shop Around.”

 This week on Community Stories meet people who have come to the United States fleeing war and  political persecution and are now dedicating their lives to helping members of their community communicate with doctors and nurses at local hospitals. Harborview Medical Center can provide interpreters for 72 languages. Harborview’s Jasbeer Rattey, by herself, can interpret for speakers of Punjabi, Hindi, Cantonese and Indonesian. “Throughout the development of our nation, we have always had groups of individuals coming from different countries,” says Ira SenGupta, Executive Director of the Cross Cultural Health Care Program. “We are a democratic country.  We have to make sure that there is equal access [to health care] and for equal access having an interpreter is critical.”

Ben Jacobsen fled political and religious persecution in the Soviet Union’s Ukraine. He now interprets at UWMC. “It’s a very hard job emotionally,” Jacobsen says. Patients that he sees over many years become like family to him. “To see [their] evolution from being healthy to becoming disabled, sick and old, it really gets in your soul.” Yet Jacobsen persists because his work is so meaningful. He says, “My profession…eliminates discrimination and provides access to medicine for those who don’t speak English.”

How can Qliance afford this? “The real cost of primary care is small,” says Dr. Bliss. “We don’t have a lot of fancy things that we do. We don’t do invasive studies…We don’t have expensive equipment. It’s our heads and our hands.” Dr. Bliss says primary care accounts for between 80 and 90 percent of what most people need in their lifetime.

Qliance does not provide surgery, hospitalization or medical imaging except for x-rays. It limits treatment to what can be provided in a doctor’s office—except for a few standard blood tests.

Of course the other thing that Qliance has done is eliminate all the costs associated with insurance. Since patients pay Qliance’s doctors a regular flat fee, the company does not have to charge patients for the extensive staff necessary for more complicated billing, much less the Byzantine nightmare of insurance paperwork, according to Bliss.

Dr. Bliss says that the current debate over health care in Congress is missing the point. “We’ve had probably 80 conversations in Washington D.C. trying to explain to people,” says Dr. Bliss. “They are all still looking at the insurance…and trying to understand how to tweak it, ‘How am I going to turn my ball-peen hammer into a sledge hammer?’”