Pia Hallenberg

A group of Gonzaga University students is relying on chickens to expand the school’s relationship with aid organizations in Zambia. Aubrey Weber, Joe Worthey, Max Bear and Jordan Madrid have formed a group called, Hope for Zambezi, which has already raised $25,000 to pay for the construction of chicken coops to help feed people living with HIV/AIDS in the town of Zambezi, Zambia.

Diane Weber’s class at St. Aloysius Gonzaga Catholic School got started on its textile art career last year as first-graders after reading “James and the Giant Peach.” Together with quilter Mickey McReynolds, the class produced a bed-sized peach quilt that was sold at the school’s benefit auction.

Rollover wreck snarls I-90

Vacant house burns again

When Jaimie Sassone moved to Spokane from Virginia Beach, Va., she said one of the first places she went to visit was the local library. On Tuesday, she was at the South Hill branch with her 5-year-old son, Hayden. He was busy playing educational computer games at pbskids.org and Sassone had already filled a bag with bedtime books for the rest of the week.

Marjory Halvorson began singing in grade school and she always knew she wanted to make singing her profession. Her family, however, wanted her to become a teacher. The long-time voice teacher managed to combine opera and teaching, and she has shared her inspiration and dedication with local music students since 1972.

There’s a new theater in town. Bob Nelson is opening Stage Left in a small storefront on West Third Avenue and he’s hoping people will stop by and see the remodeled building on Saturday. Nelson, who bought the building more than a year ago, has remodeled the space extensively, bringing it up to code and putting in a theater with about 65 seats.

Eleven custom-built playhouses will hit the auction block on Saturday during Spokane’s Premier Home Improvement Show at the Spokane County Fair and Expo Center. A 12th playhouse will be raffled off the same day.

In Jan Foland’s life most problems can be solved by prayer. Foland is the executive director of Off-Broadway Ministry, a street ministry that has worked with the homeless in West Central for the last 12 years, and now the ministry can add another home to its small network of halfway houses and temporary living facilities. Off-Broadway will be turning a two-story home on the corner of Nettleton Street and Mallon Avenue into its “HUB,” short for “help us believe there is hope.” The home includes a pole barn – decorated with a lighthouse mural and many handprints – that’s familiar to people in West Central.

Pines Road in 1908

Second Harvest Food Bank showed off its new semitrailer on Monday at a mobile food distribution event at West Central Community Center. The 2014 Peterbilt tractor was purchased with the help of a $110,000 grant from Wal-Mart’s Washington State Giving Program. “We have a small fleet of trucks of varying age and with varying mileage on them,” said Melissa Cloninger, Second Harvest director of community and corporate relations. “This tractor comes in very handy. It will help us get deliveries to the 250 agencies we serve.”

Connor Soth has two fire-eating great-aunts, making the Finch Elementary School sixth-grader a perfect match for the school’s circus club. The free club meets four times a week after school, and although there is no fire eating involved, there are a lot of circus stunts going on.

Commuters on Interstate 90 likely noticed as homes along the East Central stretch of the freeway began to disappear. Washington state Department of Transportation has been buying up several city blocks on each side of the freeway between Havana and Hamilton streets to make room for planned freeway expansion and for the interchange connecting to the North Spokane Corridor. Houses located there have been torn down and what’s left is an arid strip of land home to dying trees, grass and weeds. And it may be anywhere from 15 to 20 years before actual freeway construction begins.

It got to a point where Kyle Sullivan had to do something. As uncomfortable as it made him to share personal medical information with strangers, he said he decided he had to put it all out there and hope something good happens.

Sprock, an impossibly curly cuddly goldendoodle service dog, stole all the attention Friday afternoon when he and his owner, 19-year-old Daniel Swanson, accepted a $20,000 donation on behalf of Canine Assistants. “He’s a pretty laid back dog,” Swanson said of Sprock, who was much more interested in the mountain of Milk-Bone boxes than anything else.