The founders put up a school, dug a swimming pool, and planted flower gardens.
A year ago, Michelle Obama and pupils from a Washington elementary school dug up a patch of the South Lawn to plant a White House vegetable garden.
In following summers, Mrs. LaRosa helped build a school, digging a latrine, hoisting 125-pound bags of cement and teaching students how to read and write in Spanish and converse in English.
A bulldozer will follow the winding creek from the north side of Linden Street to Martin Avenue, in the area between Newbridge Road and Bellmore Avenue, pushing through the backyards of 11 homes and the grounds of the Martin Avenue School, digging up shrubs, gardens and grass along the way.
Remkus started working for his dad out of high school, digging graves and cutting grass.
"It's not like I came up with these experiments based on this experience," Ramirez told me when I visited him at his new office at Harvard, just down the Charles River from his graduate school digs.
The film (to be shown on Tuesday on PBS) is an old-school, dig-deep production that could have been improved upon only if it had been longer.
In Niger, it said, it has improved the economy, has hired local residents and is building schools, digging wells and carrying out other "public welfare activities".
Drinking water is the most pressing problem, but community groups are also rehabilitating decrepit schools, digging irrigation canals and stringing electric wires to remote villages.
Since early summer, the city, Minamisoma, has teamed up with researchers from Tokyo University to decontaminate kindergartens and elementary schools, digging up contaminated soil in school yards and scrubbing surfaces with brushes.
