280 Living
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neighborly news & entertainment
September Features
Volume 5 | Issue 12011 | September 2011 | September | w
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Expanded healthcare on 280 What’s happened? By KATHRYN ACREE
Lake Lovers Contest | pg B15 Editor’s note
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Greek Food Festival
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Songwriter Troy Jones
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People you should know
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Debra Goldstein
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Game day gear
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Fall gardening
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Restaurant Showcase
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Business Spotlight
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280 Business Happenings
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Alabama/Auburn previews
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Sports
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School House
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Kari Kampakis
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Library Happenings
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Rick Watson
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Paul Johnson
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Calendar of Events
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In the summer of 2010, 280 Living reported on the much-anticipated expansion of healthcare facilities on the 280 corridor. Trinity Medical Center was preparing to move its hospital campus from Montclair Road to the unfinished former HealthSouth campus near the Cahaba River. Brookwood Medical Center was set to start on a freestanding emergency department at the intersection of Highway 280 and Highway 119. Both hospitals had received their Certificate of Need approval from Alabama’s State Health Planning and Development Agency in Montgomery. A year has passed without construction at either location. What happened? Trinity on 280 Trinity’s move to the Cahaba Grand campus met expected opposition from Birmingham’s St. Vincent’s Health Systems and Brookwood Medical Center. The case is currently in the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals due to a lawsuit challenging Trinity’s $280 – 300 million relocation and
The new Trinity medical center planned for the vacant building on Highway 280 is tied up in court battles. Photo by Madoline Markham.
expansion. Trinity’s CEO Keith Granger said he is optimistic the case will be ruled in their favor and that Trinity will be “relentless in its pursuit” to complete the planned campus. “When the record of facts and details (on the case) is heard, the community’s need for this project will ultimately prevail, and we will be allowed to proceed,” Granger said. Granger emphasized the positive
economic impact Trinity on 280 will bring to our area. He is saddened by the continued delays when considering what his company could have been spending on construction and related products and services rather than the expenses the hospital has incurred over the last 12 months due to court proceedings. If the court rules on favor of Trinity, the new campus could be completed in
See HEALTHCARE | page A12
A voice from the darkness By MADOLINE MARKHAM
On her Highway 280 commute from Chelsea into Irondale each day in the late 1990s, Kimberly L. Smith contemplated her life in middle age, parenting the last of her children still in the house, working as a vice president of marketing, staying involved at church—all good things, she said, but something was missing. It was what she describes as a “restless growl in my soul.” One morning while driving on County Road 43, a vivid vision played out of what would happen if she died in a car wreck there and then. Smith’s vision became the beginning of the story of Make Way Partners, a Birmingham-based organization that fights human trafficking internationally, and of Smith’s dream to tell the stories of the oppressed. “God has a unique dream for each of us,” Smith said. “So many of us are caught up in the American Dream—I was— until we find what that unique dream is.” In her book, Passport Through Darkness, released the first of this year, Smith chronicles her journey from living on acreage in Chelsea to serving as “comfortable” missionaries in Spain and then from stumbling across human trafficking victims on a trip to Portugal to
Kimberly Smith, author of Passport Through Darkness, ministers to orphans in Darfur as part of Make Way Partners’ efforts to fight human trafficking. Photo courtesy of Make Way Partners.
spending years ministering to the victims of human trafficking in Sudan and elsewhere in the world. The compelling book is very real and very raw, as Smith honestly speaks of her own personal struggles in giving of herself and sharing in the suffering of so many. “It’s worth it to me (to be so honest in order) to help some people and encourage
others to step outside and live an authentic life,” she said. With her words, Smith paints the faces of the women and children she meets. Through her own story, she tells their individual stories of rape, of abduction, of fear, of torture, of murder, of abandonment and of hope.
See SMITH | page A19