Making an impact on kids halfway around the world

At a time when it seems to have become trendy in some warped circles to look down upon the less fortunate and people from other countries and cultures, along comes a heartening story from Merrimack Middle School.

Sewing students have been staying after school for months to make colorful dresses for little girls living in an orphanage in Kenya.

Led by consumer science teacher Sue Retelle, the team of six girls has created 16 dresses so far to donate to Watoto World, an orphanage in rural Kenya. The dresses, fashioned from pillowcases, are adorable creations with ribbons and bows, and it’s easy to imagine the sight of them lighting up the faces of the little Kenyan girls.

The sewing club also has made decorative pillowcases for kids undergoing treatment at the Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth in Lebanon.

This is a great program that offers some important lessons: The world is connected; it’s important to have compassion for the less fortunate; and third-world countries and the people who live in them matter.

It makes us wish there was a grown-up version of the sewing club.

With an election coming up, we need to pay attention

He won because people weren’t paying attention. He was seated beside the others at the start of the 2001 legislative session, assigned to represent residents of Nashua’s Ward 4.

Once his views became known and it became clear that the legislative process would grind to a virtual halt until he was removed, Tom Alciere faced enormous pressure to resign his seat.

He stepped down, then went online and said he was elected by a ”bunch of fat, stupid, ugly old ladies that watch soap operas, play bingo, read tabloids and don’t know the metric system."

That’s pretty harsh, but it wasn’t even the worst of it. What got Alciere in hot water in the first place was his view that it’s OK – even necessary, in his opinion – to kill police officers.

Alciere, who now lives in Hudson, has filed papers to seek the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate. Suffice it to say he’s not your pro-law-enforcement, anti-misogyny candidate.

He won once because people weren’t paying attention. That’s not a mistake that needs to be made again.

Police chipping away at
the local opioid problem

In a little more than a month, Nashua police have made four major drug raids.

On May 5, 11 men and women were arrested on a range of felony drug charges.

On May 26, 13 people were picked up on a variety of drug-related charges, most of them felonies.

On June 1, 16 people were arrested and charged, mostly related to the use and sale of controlled substances.

On June 8, Nashua police and the FBI arrested six people on a series of drug charges. What’s especially troubling about this latest bust is that it included one couple charged with selling drugs out of their car while their 5-year-old was in the backseat.

That string of arrests is quite a run, and while we’d like to think that the latest bust represents a slowdown caused by the police making a dent in the problem, we’re not that naive.

It’s a safe bet that most of these 46 people, if convicted, will each end up costing taxpayers thousands of dollars to process through the legal system and, perhaps, warehouse in the corrections system.

We appreciate that police are doing their part to get drug dealers and users off our streets, but we also can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a cheaper, more efficient way to address the problem.