really fundamental to their ability to engage with  i'm sally so i'm the chair of the council's taxi for hire and limousine thank you for being involved in doing community journalism that i have a soft spot in my heart for it because it's where i started i started out as a print journalist actually and worked for community level newspapers for a while before moving into nonprofit work and doing communications for a nonprofit so it is a labor of love on top of everything that you do to actually pay the rent pay the mortgage so but it's really important to connection with the community and i do think that the knowledge that people get from community levels really fundamental to their ability to engage with the with the city and with what effects their lives so we we were talking about how the media coverage of the taxi debate has gone and we've had a lot of media coverage from mainstream television loves of the story because they can talk with people and then they can go out and they can shoot video of texas cabs running around or pick mustaches running around and we've had relatively good coverage from the seattle times i don't i don't mean good in that it doesn't matter to me if i agree with it or disagree with it just they're covering it and we wanted to make sure that we reached out to some of the media that actually is and depended upon by the drivers whose lives are going to be affected by the rules that were passing and so that's a lot of why we brainstormed and worked with the office of in your inner immigrant refugee affairs to try to figure out ok how could we do a better job talking directly to that media and talking directly to the folks who read that media so thank you for being willing to come we have been working under say a few things and then we can do question and answer on any subject you want but mostly we thought we would talk with you about taxes so we started about a year ago knowing that there was a problem between conventional taxis and the flat rate two tone cars they have been any chair there for a long time accusing each other of taking each other's fares mostly the taxi people accusing the flat rate to turn cars of stealing their fares picking up street hales when they shouldn't and there had been a proposal to put some more money into city enforcement of the rules and so i thought ok well i could i could handle that we'll do a committee on that so i raised my hand and then it became clear that it was going to be a much bigger question because we had the new companies coming in the lifts and the goobers in the goober x s coming into the market and so very soon the committee became something a little bit different where we have been talking about enforcement and there will be more money that goes into enforcement and we are changing some of the rules that taxi drivers live under not enough to my mind quite yet but really the new rules we're putting in place are trying to address and make legal in some way the new companies and it's been controversial because certainly when we have these committee meetings that room is filled with drivers and owners  people who are trying to make a living very much when we started in these traditional taxis and flat rate cars as the year has progressed i think it's much more difficult for us to say that all of the drivers who we've heard from are only driving for taxis now what we hear is that the drivers who don't already own their own vehicle are sometimes driving shift with a taxi and sometimes they're driving a shift with her ex and sometimes they might be driving a town car and they're doing all of those things to try to make a living so that you know with like everything cultural and so we hope you can join us in one hundred twelfth one big one and also i think there's many ethiopians and other african americans who come to america in the seattle area just you know this outer area there is about thirty thousand ethiopians you know and many of them have this great right but you know they either can't afford college or some other things he know and we would like you know to one day have some kind of connection with the university of washington it's create african american studies and international studies and we hope to work on you with that and if you want wonderful we it's it's a field that we were just discussing it's a field that's still young  huge amount of potential we the history department here was just in the last ten years has hired an african historian thomas she's very good we have other africanus in other parts of the university in our history and half apology and so i think we're beginning to see a momentum now in favor of getting african studies going on the university of washington campus and getting the kind of representation and attention that that that we'd i know that most of you will be but do you think you'll write about like other situations that happened during the time that was really added to it so you could just basically write about the specific time well  you why are you interested in ethiopia so i'm going to look at that too i'm reading what the kinds of messages that matter what was trying to get out but also how those messages were received especially by the pope in rome because  italians of course are catholic the pope is an important leader for many italians so i'm reading the italian press and even the vatican press to try to bring that story that part of the story out to so i mean what i'm trying to do is to  chapters in each touch on some of these other issues give you enough of the flavor of of these issues to to to make it interesting to the reader but not so much detail that it's that it's heavy  people growing up in america is that they so easily lose track of where they came from and i mean my own i can tell you that my own family came to the states some of them came from  england some came from germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and they they obviously people they came here because they were unhappy where they were it was difficult and one natural reaction to that was that they wanted nothing to do with where they came from they closed themselves off from their families back there and they built a new life here and one of the sad things of that is that they have no we now later generations have no connections with the old country no connections with the culture the language and there's a good side to that in a way we're comfortable or happy on the other hand there's a sense that we're missing something that there are important family relationships that we've missed important cultural ties i think present generations of americans people who've come more recently are a lot better at staying in touch partly that's technology to use your to you can fly you don't have to take a boat  internet and telephone to stay in touch and i think that's all good so i mean my advice would be to take advantage of that stay in touch if you can go back if you can those are important relationships to cultivate and to develop for you and for your children when these these are this is and these are wonderful things to have and to hold on to and to pass on