Rick Guzman joins Nahom at Bryan House (picture-Mary Compton-Sun Times Media)
—by Nancy Strunk Kirby—
FAMILY OF NCC PROFESSOR RICHARD GUZMAN AIMS TO BREAK CYCLE OF WORKING CLASS POVERTY
For the Guzman family of Naperville, helping the poor and homeless of the western suburbs has been a way of life for decades.
A passion for service has intertwined the family with the community of North Central College, where Dr. Richard Guzman has served on the faculty for the past 32 years. It has enveloped their church, Community Christian in Naperville, and inspired hundreds of volunteers ranging from students at NCC and Naperville North High School to congregation members from numerous churches.
“I’ve worked with issues of homelessness for more than 30 years now,” says family patriarch Richard, professor of English at North Central. Wife Linda serves on the board of directors for Hear Us, a national organization devoted to serving homeless women and children.
Through their church the Guzman’s have been involved for years with refugee resettlement, working with World Relief, an international organization that brings refugees from war-torn areas of the world to the United States. Richard’s son Rick, a North Central graduate, and Rick’s wife Desiree founded a not-for-profit organization to assist with refugee resettlement in 2002.
Rick remembers a seed that was planted years ago when his father took him and his brothers to Aurora’s Hesed House homeless shelter.
“When Hesed House was first founded, my dad took us to volunteer there, so it’s always been kind of cool to recognize my interest and awareness of homelessness from a very young age,” he said.
Tragedy struck the Guzman family in December 2006, when youngest son Bryan, a 21-year-old student at North Central, drowned in Lake Michigan while walking his girlfriend’s dog along the Chicago lakefront. Rather than retreat in grief, the Guzman’s redoubled their efforts to serve the refugee community.
When Bryan died, Rick was in law school at Northern Illinois University and Desiree was working as assistant director of ministry and service at North Central. Despite hectic schedules, their desire to honor Bryan’s spirit inspired them to purchase a five-unit brick apartment building on Aurora’s near West Side in 2007. After significant renovations, the apartment building would soon be transformed into a haven for refugee families.
Naming the apartment complex in Bryan’s memory seemed like the right thing to do.
“At the age of 21, he did genuinely have this spirit of wanting to give back,” said Rick, who received his law degree in 2009.
He estimates that at many as 1000 individuals have been involved in Bryan House since its inception.
“We have a database of over 500 people who have given at one point or another,” Rick said. “And then in terms of actually coming out and getting their hands dirty, it’s another several hundred on top of that.”
The first families began moving into Bryan House in late 2008, coming from war-torn countries including Iraq, Eritrea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Mauritania, Togo, Burundi and Bhutan. Each family’s story is unique, heart-rending and inspirational.
Eight refugee families have moved through Bryan House into independent housing. A typical refugee family stays for a year to 18 months, saving their monthly rent and often qualifying for a matching grant of $4,000 from World Relief. This allows them to leave with savings of around $15,000 to $16,000, which is used to purchase a home or rent an apartment. For families with children, a portion of the money is set aside for a college savings program.
“What we’re about is breaking that cycle of working class poverty through home ownership or through college scholarship to make sure that the next generation has better opportunities,” Rick said.
Now the successful concept of Bryan House is expanding. Through the support of Community Christian Church’s non-profit organization, Community 4:12, Rick has been hired to launch The Emmanuel House Project. The project’s purpose is to replicate the Bryan House model to serve the Hispanic community on Aurora’s near East Side.
Bryan’s middle name, Emmanuel, which translates as “God with us,” serves as inspiration. For 2011, The Emmanuel House Project has set an ambitious goal of opening three housing units that will put residents on a path toward home ownership. The model relies on matching a church sponsor with an individual housing unit, so the project is actively recruiting church involvement.
“We feel like this is the work that God has called us to,” Rick said. “We are not a faith-based organization, but we like to say that we are faith-motivated.”
♦ RETURN to the Emmanuel House / Bryan House main page. In 2016, Emmanuel House was named one of the “Top 100 Most Innovative” social change organizations in the world. In 2018, it merged with former partner The Joseph Corporation to become THE NEIGHBOR PROJECT. Bryan house served 5 families, Emmanuel House 25, but now The Neighbor Project serves 3000 families and individuals…and counting.
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The article as it looked in the paper on Thursday, February 17, 2011.
Rubber, The Movie
The dialogue in Quentin Dupieux’s really odd film Rubber begins when a police man, crawling nonsensically out of a car’s trunk, addresses us about all the things that don’t make sense in movies. This prepares us for seeing a tire slowly twist itself out of the ground, and, after crushing a plastic bottle and a couple of insects, realize it has telepathic powers that can kill things—first a rabbit, then a bird, then people. All of this a group of people watch through binoculars. It’s their watching that keeps this movie and its murderous tire star keep going. When the police man who had first addressed us—he’s the master puppeteer—decides he’s had enough of the movie, he has the watchers killed. Having watched in the desert for hours, they’re starving by the next morning and ravenously descend upon a poisoned turkey. All except one. He lives and continues watching, and so no one—not even “the master”—can stop. The movie must continue. Tired of the tire and wanting to speed up the film’s ending, the master finally just blows the murderous tire away, handing the remains to the lone watcher.
Suddenly, however, the lone watcher realizes the tire’s been reincarnated—as what I’ll let you discover: it’s so fitting and even crazier than the tire bit—and the reincarnation blows him away. But the film still doesn’t end. The reincarnation rolls down the street, a pied piper now, tires coming to life everywhere it passes and joining a growing procession of tires which finally comes to rest in front of famous letters on a Los Angeles hill. H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D. It’s going to take the concentrated telepathy of the reincarnation and all those tires to blow that up.
If you don’t like something, then don’t watch it. This movie has a more cynical take on that simplistic cliche. Rubber finally says it’s not enough to blow up everyone in an audience, or even the actors in a film. You have to blow up HOLLYWOOD itself, and this weird indie film makes the prospect feel like an actual solution. But, of course, it isn’t. Hollywood may have turned reality into film, but the Internet, and YouTube, and Facebook have turned reality into a screen—something everything seems to have these days. We watch them—screens—incessantly, 24/7. In colleges and universities some are beginning to use the term “screen studies” instead of “film studies.” And if someone—like you—isn’t on a screen, how real can you be, after all? Blowing up Hollywood would be just a beginning.
(2010, Dir. Quentin Dupieux, 82m, R. I say 3 stars.)
*** See a list of other reviews.