Celebrating AAPI Heritage Month: Crisis Intervention Specialist Caryl Blount on BART, family, and food
BART wishes you a wonderful Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month. We want to honor the many BART employees who are members of the AAPI community and recognize the ways their heritages and cultures have contributed to BART and the Bay Area.
To start the month off, BART Communications interviewed Crisis Intervention Specialist Caryl Blount. In the story, she discusses her Filipino roots, her gratitude for her family (including her BART family), and shares her recipe for pork sinigang.
BART celebrates heritage and diversity months throughout the year, and with stories such as CIS Blount’s, we hope to recognize some of the many exceptional employees in our organization.
We will be publishing more stories for AAPI Heritage Month throughout the month.
Read BARTable’s suggestions for celebrating AAPI Heritage Month near BART stations.
CIS Caryl Blount pictured at Lake Merritt Station.
Last April, Crisis Intervention Specialist (CIS) Caryl Blount was finishing up her shift at Millbrae Station when she and her partner, CIS Dinah Amoah-Wynn, came across an elderly woman on the platform. It was a cold night, and the station was closing. The woman sat alone on the platform with her bags.
Blount and Wynn walked up to the woman to let her know the station was closing and she needed to leave. The woman replied: “I have nowhere to go.”
After talking to her, Blount and Wynn learned her name was Juanita and that she’d come to the U.S. from the Philippines a week earlier. She was only supposed to be in San Francisco for a few days, but she had missed her return flight. It appeared she’d been sleeping at the airport and riding BART back and forth between Millbrae and SFO Station.
Blount and Wynn asked Juanita for phone numbers of people they could call for her, but she couldn’t remember any. They realized she was likely suffering from dementia.
“She gave us puzzle pieces, and we had to put the story together from there,” said Blount.
Juanita carried a notebook that contained drawings, recipes, scribbles, and fortunately, scattered phone numbers. So Blount and Wynn began dialing the numbers at random. One person picked up – it was a woman in New York named Elizabeth. Juanita, about 45 years prior, had been her nanny.
It was the early morning in New York, and after the phone call from the CIS team, Elizabeth sprang into action and bought her former nanny a ticket back to Manila. She would arrange things with Juanita’s sister to make sure she was transported safely from the plane back home.
Blount and Wynn then brought Juanita back to the airport and connected her with staff there, as well as the morning CIS team, who went to check on her the next day. Everyone wanted to make sure she got on that plane.
A day or so later, Blount received a text from Elizabeth: “Juanita arrived safely in Manila!” She thanked the CISes for their work in getting Juanita home.
The text message Blount has saved on her phone from Elizabeth.
For Blount, the encounter was deeply personal.
“She’s Filipino, and I’m Filipino. I was like, this could be my grandma!” Blount said. “I couldn’t give up on her. I had to find a way to get her home."
Blount joined BART as a CIS in 2022, coming from Contra Costa County where she worked as a case manager. The job was similar to what she does now in some ways, but the CIS work is “much more hands on, much more challenging,” she said.
Blount has been riding BART for most of her life. She grew up in Pittsburg and Antioch, and she had the opportunity to ride the trains for free thanks to her dad, Carlito, who worked at BART for 25 years before retiring a few years ago. Carlito immigrated to the U.S. from the Philippines in his teens. He started at BART as a car cleaner in the early 90s and worked his way up to become a transit vehicle mechanic, fixing the same cars he once cleaned. Blount still remembers going with him to Take Your Kids to Work Day at BART more than three decades ago. She couldn’t believe how many people it took to run the system.
“I don’t think my dad really knows how much that one visit to his work impacted me,” she said. “I learned BART is run by this massive brain. It’s not just the train operators!”
Blount and her father often bond about BART. She remembers calling him after she went to Milpitas Station for the first time, which opened in 2020.
“I said, ‘Guess what, dad? I just went to Milpitas. Have you been there?”
Blount said her father passed his intense work ethic down to her. Often, he’d leave for his shift at Concord Yard hours early just to make sure he got there on time and had a few moments to decompress before the workday kicked off.
“He hated calling in sick, missing work,” she said. “And I’m the same way. My mom always tells me I’m just like him.”
BART was such a big part of her dad’s life (and therefore her life) that Blount couldn’t be prouder to be a part of “the BART family” herself.
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“My dad provided a safe and secure home for us, and BART helped him to do that,” she said. “That’s why BART will always have a special place in my heart.”
In addition to her dad, Blount counts her mom and big brother as mentors. Her brother for teaching her street smarts, inspiring her to believe in herself and for always being there for her without judgement; and her mother for the sacrifices she’s made and the many hours she’s spent babysitting Blount’s three children while she and her husband, Jason Blount, are at work. Jason happens to also work at BART as a mechanic at the Oakland shops. Blount calls him "one of my biggest supporters."
“It takes a village to raise my kids,” said Blount, who recently returned from maternity leave (It’s a boy!). “My mom holds it down for me so I can come to BART and be my best. That’s unconditional love right there.”
Blount also credits her culture for forming her into the person she is today.
“I have that Filipino pride,” she said. “I’m proud of the fact that my dad grew up poor and came here to make a life not only for himself, but for us and his grandchildren. My parents made a great life for us here, and I’m proud of that every day.”
Blount makes sure her children know where they came from. Their dad is Black, and with Black History Month and AAPI Heritage Month being close to each other on the calendar, Blount and her husband go out of the way to celebrate and talk about their cultures.
“We want them to grow up with a sense of where they came from,” she said. “A lot of the time that means story time with the grandparents.”
A photo of Blount’s immediate family during the holidays.
Each May, Blount’s family, including her many aunties, uncles, and cousins, gather for a celebration of AAPI Heritage Month as well as Mother’s Day and her parents’ anniversary (it’s a busy month for celebrating). The gathering revolves largely around food. On the table, there is always pancit, lumpia, chicken adobo, sinigang over rice, and lots of dessert.
“Food is always at the center of everything. That’s where the conversations and the stories start,” Blount said.
The kids love to ask questions of their elders. Blount remembers a specific conversation between her daughter and her great-grandmother, who was visiting from the Philippines.
She asked things like, “What did you do for fun when you were a kid?” Blount said. And grandma would reply, “We played with rocks and sticks and built little houses,” to which her daughter would say, “You didn’t have Legos? No tv? No iPads? Wow, you must have been bored.”
Blount often takes time to reflect on her roots and the differences in her upbringing compared to her elders, as well as her many family members who still live in the Philippines. She’s full of gratitude for her roots, she said, and especially for her large, supportive family.
She asked: “Without them, who would I be?”