When the Taipei City Government’s Fire Department held a disaster prevention drill at Dajia Riverside Park on Monday last week, those attending noticed a friendly lady with a “foreign” look about her, as she had features and a complexion different to most Taiwanese.
When asked where she was from, Arelis Gabot, originally from the Dominican Republic, replied: “I’m Taiwanese.”
The 42-year-old is the neighborhood chief (鄰長) of Zhongshan District’s (中山) Dongmen Borough (東門).
Photo: Lin Hui-chin, Taipei Times
She met her Taiwanese husband at a seaside park in her hometown in the Dominican Republic. They began dating and the relationship blossomed and led to their marriage.
She moved to Taiwan with her husband in 1993, with a better education environment in mind for their children.
With an outgoing and cheery personality, Gabot often participated in dancing with local elderly people, singing Hakka songs and attending community events.
That made quite an impression on Dongmen Borough Warden Liu Chao-lin (劉兆琳).
“She was actively involved with most of our borough’s events and gave her time to help people,” Liu said. “When the chief of our No. 16 neighborhood got married and relocated, I told Gabot that she should take the job of neighborhood chief.”
Gabot recalled that she was not sure what the job of neighborhood chief entailed when she took the telephone call from Liu.
“Later, I understood it was to help people and provide services. So I agreed to take up the job, ” she said. “Foreigners married to Taiwanese husbands often feel at some distance from other people. I felt that taking on the job would help me get closer to the locals and get to know Taiwanese better.”
Dongmen Borough is subdivided into 16 neighborhoods, each with about 100 households.
Since taking the job in 2011, among other duties Gabot undertakes night patrols about three times a month.
Once she came upon an elderly member of the community with dementia. She was lying in the street after falling, so Gabot asked Liu to bring clothing and food from the woman’s house.
All the while Gabot thought of her lonely elderly neighbors who lived on their own with no family and she began to sob in sympathy.
Due to her living away from her country of birth, Gabot believes she is more sensitive in caring for the elderly who are living alone.
Although most of them only speak Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) or Hakka, the communication barrier is only a minor problem.
“I understand most of what they say and can speak a little of these languages. It was good that some elderly ladies spoke Hakka, because my mother-in-law is Hakka,” Gabot said. “When thinking about them, I would go and chat with people regardless of the time. I take meals, milk or porridge for them. At the same time, I check to see if they are safe, if the gas is turned off and other things.”
Another of her endeavors is environmental protection, organizing cleanup drives and picking up garbage on the streets.
She said she once saw some students eating snacks while walking and discrading the trash along the way. She rushed up and started to lecture them.
“You three, go and pick up your trash right now. If I throw trash around, how would you feel? You would think that a foreigner is coming here and tossing garbage in your country, right?” Gabot said.
Gabot told them: “This is our community and we want to keep it clean. If you don’t pick up your trash, then I will take photographs [for evidence].”
The students stopped and gathered up their litter.
Asked about her performance as a neighborhood chief, Liu gave Gabot a very high rating.
“On her night patrols, she especially goes to check up on elderly people who live alone. She often buys food and groceries for them. It is very good neighborhood service,” Liu said.
Gabot vowed to keep up her work with a heart full of love and happiness, and to continue to serve her community and be a role model for others.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
‘GROWING UP TOGETHER’: Jensen Huang celebrated the nation’s role in the formation of the tech firm at a Silicon Valley gathering, saying ‘Taiwan saved Nvidia’ Taiwan is in the center of the new artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) told a gathering with Taiwanese on Thursday in Silicon Valley’s largest city, San Jose. Tainan-born Huang said it must be celebrated that “Taiwan is right in the middle” of a new industrial revolution in which “something new is being made, and made in a new way.” Huang recalled the manufacturing process of the RIVA 128 graphics processing unit, Nvidia’s first commercial success, describing it as the “most complicated chip at the time.” As Nvidia did not have the budget, he wrote a letter to Taiwan