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valleysentinel.com
September 2011
VOL 16, NO 9
SEVENTY-FIVE CENTS
SPOTLIGHT
Danville native a world class baker By Alex Hicks
From an early age it was easy to see that Junell Starr Watson was destined to become, well, a star. The 25 year-old Monte Vista High School graduate and Danville resident has been gaining respect in the field of cooking for the past 11 years and shows no signs of slowing down. As long as she could remember, Junell’s passion was in the kitchen. “When I as a kid, I didn’t watch cartoons. I watched Julia Child,” she said. Following this love, she began working at Danville’s House of Bread at the ripe age of 14. She also began to study under Chef Kelly Jo in Monte Vista’s culinary
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Girls in sync at the Azuri Summer Classic. Girls U-9 Newark United coached by Marlene Rosa defeated the Mustang Sambas, coached by Brian Resendiz and Hannah & Mark Westgate. From left to right Newark United Kayla Serpa, Mustang Reyna Reseniz, and Newark United Lydia Bouza. Score was 7-0. Photo by Jeffery Weil.
Aid from Sentinels of Freedom provides better future By Dana Guzzetti
Ryan Sykes works in a wellappointed San Ramon office where he does internet research, makes reports and works hard with a special cognitive tool called Posit Science. What makes him stand out is the fact that after he nearly died fighting for the United States in Afghanistan, he came home with severe brain injuries, and in a wheel chair. In spite of his injures, Sykes is one of the seriously disabled veterans that is getting back on track to a full, self-sufficient civilian life because of the non-profit organization Sentinels of Freedom. Sykes is eager to demonstrate his newly re-acquired skills. ”When I first started, it was much harder,” he says.
In between work assignments, Sykes uses Posit’s game-like cognitive tools to retrain and increase memory function and speech recognition skills. In an adjacent office, Sentinels of Freedom founder and CEO Mike Conklin studies colored pin points scattered across a wall-sized map of the United States. Every pin point represents a town where local business and community leaders have taken a severely wounded veteran under their wing. Success in Northern California is the prototype for the others. Sentinels of Freedom was founded on an appreciation for the sacrifices that military
service personnel have made on behalf of all American citizens since 1998. “We want them (enlistees) to know that we were grateful for their service,” Conklin said. “They are doing the fighting for us.” After 9/11, the group began providing housing assistance, education, job training and retention, and mentoring so that the seriously wounded veteran can concentrate on building the foundation for long-term success in civilian life. “They (similar groups in other localities) were all here, but working independently before 9/11,” Conklin remarks. After 9/11, Conklin began building
the national organization to help other grateful communities reach out to more Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Conklin talks about each veteran in the program as if he was one of his sons. Conklin’s three sons joined the Ranger’s, two are still active. The other is back in the U. S. and in college. Travis Fugate served as a member of the Kentucky National Guard and was mobilized on active duty in December of 2004, deployed to Iraq in February of 2005. He was severely injured in May of 2005 while on patrol on a routine mission just south of Baghdad where he had been in the turret of their vehicle. An
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