That old saying -- that those who have the least are the ones who give the most -- it never ceases to amaze me how true it is.
I spent the better part of this afternoon with a refugee family who, after being driven from their home in the south of Bhutan in the early 1990s, spent nearly two decades living in a bamboo hut with a plastic and thatch roof in a Nepalese refugee camp.
They arrived in Chicago with four bags between the five of them, stuffed with clothes and paperwork and a few pieces of jewelry. Now they live in a brown brick building in the black hat section of Devon. The walls are bare and the living room holds two twin beds. The walk up three flights of twisting stairs left me winded, though the 86-year-old grandpa glides up them with an ease unimaginable for a man with an inhaler and a walker.
In the early 1990s, the Bhutanese government began a multi-pronged campaign against its citizens of Nepali origin, many of whom had been settled in the south of the country for several generations. The government instituted a national dress code, burned books written in Nepali and became pickier and pickier about citizenship papers. Then, they began direct pressure. Heads of the family were called in to government offices and presented with paperwork in a language that they couldn't read. When they signed it, they relinquished rights to their land and declared they were leaving the country by their own choice. Those who didn't sign were threatened. Some were tortured.
That 86-year-old stair-climbing grandpa watched the army burn his house and farm -- the only home he'd ever known.
How do you ask someone to tell you about an experience like that? I started slowly, asking about specific memories and pointing out what few objects were around the room. When I asked about food, they called their 18-year-old daughter and before I knew it she was serving us the most amazing dumplings. I asked about the parents' wedding and they brought out pictures tucked inside a hand-me-down American children's book. I complimented the mother's necklace and they brought me a beautiful hand-beaded necklace and put it around my neck.
Really, what can you possibly say to that?
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Sects in the City
Somehow this troglodyte has found her way into a case of dueling blogs.
Part of my religion reporting class, it seems, is posting to the aptly-named class blog, Sects in the City. My first post, on Jehovah's Witness door-to-door training, was an adventure and a half.
Stay tuned for the continuing adventures. Next-up: an afternoon at a restaurant where Muslim cabbies stop to pray.
Part of my religion reporting class, it seems, is posting to the aptly-named class blog, Sects in the City. My first post, on Jehovah's Witness door-to-door training, was an adventure and a half.
Stay tuned for the continuing adventures. Next-up: an afternoon at a restaurant where Muslim cabbies stop to pray.
Friday, October 9, 2009
G-d's Word is heavy
There was music. There was dancing. There were construction-paper flags being waved from taped-together-plastic-straw poles. And in the middle of it all there was me -- dancing with a Torah scroll.
This weekend is Simchat Torah, when Jews celebrate the completion of the annual cycle of Torah readings and bring the scrolls out for the congregation to see and touch and celebrate.
I celebrated tonight at a Reform synagogue (tomorrow I will be at a Chabad shul), where women wore yarmukles and prayer shawls, and even a shiksa like me is invited to take a turn dancing with a scroll.
Even this reform congregation, where women lead many portions of the service, it was the men who stood up to take the first turn parading the scrolls around the room. The first man -- short, middle-aged, in a suit -- nearly burst with pride as he held the Torah.
I was so touched by his joy that when the rabbi prompted me to take a turn with a scroll, I couldn't say no.
And what I learned is this: not only is the scroll an awkward thing to carry, but it is much heavier than you'd think. The music and dancing are dizzying, and you are at once putting such concentration into not dropping the precious object and also lifted by the jubilant spirit around you.
The children didn't seem to have a real sense of what was happening, and their parents seemed mostly to be putting on a show to get their kids excited about it, but the older people -- this meant something to the older people. As we circled the seats carrying the scrolls, they reached out with their fingers or their texts to touch the Torah and kiss the object that had touched it.
What a blessing, to be responsible, if even for a moment, for something that brings people such meaning.
This weekend is Simchat Torah, when Jews celebrate the completion of the annual cycle of Torah readings and bring the scrolls out for the congregation to see and touch and celebrate.
I celebrated tonight at a Reform synagogue (tomorrow I will be at a Chabad shul), where women wore yarmukles and prayer shawls, and even a shiksa like me is invited to take a turn dancing with a scroll.
Even this reform congregation, where women lead many portions of the service, it was the men who stood up to take the first turn parading the scrolls around the room. The first man -- short, middle-aged, in a suit -- nearly burst with pride as he held the Torah.
I was so touched by his joy that when the rabbi prompted me to take a turn with a scroll, I couldn't say no.
And what I learned is this: not only is the scroll an awkward thing to carry, but it is much heavier than you'd think. The music and dancing are dizzying, and you are at once putting such concentration into not dropping the precious object and also lifted by the jubilant spirit around you.
The children didn't seem to have a real sense of what was happening, and their parents seemed mostly to be putting on a show to get their kids excited about it, but the older people -- this meant something to the older people. As we circled the seats carrying the scrolls, they reached out with their fingers or their texts to touch the Torah and kiss the object that had touched it.
What a blessing, to be responsible, if even for a moment, for something that brings people such meaning.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Friday, September 18, 2009
Earth's past, present and future in a grain of sediment
Each night, from the hill just above the private runway, the paleoclimatologists stared up at the Big Dipper and Orion and the Milky Way, waiting. A flash of light. A second. There it was! The International Space Station moved through the night's sky at astonishing speed.
The moment of awe lasted exactly that -- a moment -- and then the calculations began. How fast would the station have to be going to pass from horizon to horizon in a matter of minutes? Factor in Earth's orbit in the opposite direction, and the lengthened radius given its distance from Earth...
This was, in fact, what they did for fun after full days of presentations. Relaxation after hours spent discussing the dating of glaciers in Antarctica and New Zealand, the modeling of ancient rainfall patterns and ocean currents, and the monitoring of earth quakes on Greenlandic glaciers.
The late Land's End billionaire Gary Comer caught the climate bug on a boat trip to the Arctic. He and his shipmates decided to dare the famed Northwest Passage, and were shocked at how easy it was. Where was the ice?
The question pulled at him and he, who had never gone to college, immediately dove into the science of historical Ice Ages. One name kept coming up again and again in his research -- Wally Broecker -- a climatologist at Columbia who, among other contributions, put forward the idea of a "conveyor belt" to explain global ocean circulation.
When Comer and Broecker finally met they hit it off immediately. Believing that a better understanding of past abrupt climate changes is critical to averting one now, Comer quickly began pouring money into the work of Broecker and his colleagues.
For the last half dozen years the group of scientists, postdocs and graduate students funded by Comer have gathered on his remote Wisconsin estate to push the science forward through formal presentations, conversations over beer, and even folk songs around the campfire.
Although Comer passed away recently, the tradition has continued.
Which is how I found myself, Tuesday evening, sitting around a campfire joining in the chorus of a U Penn professor's song about Milancovitch theory (which hypothesizes that Ice Ages are spurred by changes in Earth's orbital cycles).
The things scientists can do now are amazing. Plankton shells on the deep ocean floor can tell us about precipitation patterns thousands of years ago. Calcites in ancient river basins can tell us when glaciers thousands of miles away melted.
And what all of this adds up to is: when climate changes, it changes abruptly. Past ice ages have built over periods of about 90,000 years, and warmed in about 10,000 years. Human civilization has never experienced warming of this magnitude before, but the tastes we have had haven't been pleasant.
Villagers in the European Alps had front row seats for the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-19th century. In one instance, a rush of melt water washed away a Swiss village, taking out 500 homes and killing 50 people.
The only thing scarier than what scientists know about climate change is what they don't know.
The last time Earth's climate was near what it is today, half of Greenland was gone. And here's the really scary part: scientists don't know much about how glaciers melt. It's one thing if the water melts slowly and ripples into glacial rivers called "tongues." It's another thing if the melt water seeps into cracks in the glacier and makes it down to the glacier's bed. A melted bed could unhinge the glacier and speed up melting exponentially.
In the case of the Swiss glacier, plumbing -- the way the glacier melted -- was the problem. Glacier dynamics can be counter-intuitive. For instance, "termination," when the glacier begins melting rapidly, comes at the moment that the glacier is at its biggest.
This is was the state of the Swiss glacier in 1818. Its front was sitting at the edge of a steep slope. When big chunks of ice would break off its front (a normal process called calving), they would fall into the valley below. There, they broke apart and refroze, forming an ice wall that closed off the narrow valley.
When spring came, this wall dammed the Danse River, which normally would have rushed with melt water. The villagers saw the inevitable, but couldn't act quickly enough -- the melt water burst through before they were able to carve a small tunnel to release the accumulated water in at a manageable pace. And away they went.
So where does that leave us now? When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its most recent report in 2007, it updated its 2001 predictions to show how much quicker things were happening than they had expected. Already, IPCC scientists are saying the 2007 report, too, was too conservative.
Gary Comer was a smart investor, though. He didn't put all his money on the public and policymakers waking up to the science in time. He also put money into developing tools to get us out of this cesspool of greenhouse gases if we don't act in time.
The last presentation of the conference was by Klaus Lackner, a Columbia professor and an entrepreneur. Before his death, Comer partnered with Lackner to build a synthetic tree with "leaves" coated with a resin to capture carbon dioxide at higher-than-natural rates and then sequester it.
The project is still in its adolescence, but provides a counterpoint to the runaway disaster to which so much of conference's findings pointed. We got ourselves into this mess and maybe -- just maybe -- we'll be able to get ourselves out.
The moment of awe lasted exactly that -- a moment -- and then the calculations began. How fast would the station have to be going to pass from horizon to horizon in a matter of minutes? Factor in Earth's orbit in the opposite direction, and the lengthened radius given its distance from Earth...
This was, in fact, what they did for fun after full days of presentations. Relaxation after hours spent discussing the dating of glaciers in Antarctica and New Zealand, the modeling of ancient rainfall patterns and ocean currents, and the monitoring of earth quakes on Greenlandic glaciers.
* * *
The late Land's End billionaire Gary Comer caught the climate bug on a boat trip to the Arctic. He and his shipmates decided to dare the famed Northwest Passage, and were shocked at how easy it was. Where was the ice?
The question pulled at him and he, who had never gone to college, immediately dove into the science of historical Ice Ages. One name kept coming up again and again in his research -- Wally Broecker -- a climatologist at Columbia who, among other contributions, put forward the idea of a "conveyor belt" to explain global ocean circulation.
When Comer and Broecker finally met they hit it off immediately. Believing that a better understanding of past abrupt climate changes is critical to averting one now, Comer quickly began pouring money into the work of Broecker and his colleagues.
For the last half dozen years the group of scientists, postdocs and graduate students funded by Comer have gathered on his remote Wisconsin estate to push the science forward through formal presentations, conversations over beer, and even folk songs around the campfire.
Although Comer passed away recently, the tradition has continued.
Which is how I found myself, Tuesday evening, sitting around a campfire joining in the chorus of a U Penn professor's song about Milancovitch theory (which hypothesizes that Ice Ages are spurred by changes in Earth's orbital cycles).
The things scientists can do now are amazing. Plankton shells on the deep ocean floor can tell us about precipitation patterns thousands of years ago. Calcites in ancient river basins can tell us when glaciers thousands of miles away melted.
And what all of this adds up to is: when climate changes, it changes abruptly. Past ice ages have built over periods of about 90,000 years, and warmed in about 10,000 years. Human civilization has never experienced warming of this magnitude before, but the tastes we have had haven't been pleasant.
Villagers in the European Alps had front row seats for the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-19th century. In one instance, a rush of melt water washed away a Swiss village, taking out 500 homes and killing 50 people.
The only thing scarier than what scientists know about climate change is what they don't know.
The last time Earth's climate was near what it is today, half of Greenland was gone. And here's the really scary part: scientists don't know much about how glaciers melt. It's one thing if the water melts slowly and ripples into glacial rivers called "tongues." It's another thing if the melt water seeps into cracks in the glacier and makes it down to the glacier's bed. A melted bed could unhinge the glacier and speed up melting exponentially.
In the case of the Swiss glacier, plumbing -- the way the glacier melted -- was the problem. Glacier dynamics can be counter-intuitive. For instance, "termination," when the glacier begins melting rapidly, comes at the moment that the glacier is at its biggest.
This is was the state of the Swiss glacier in 1818. Its front was sitting at the edge of a steep slope. When big chunks of ice would break off its front (a normal process called calving), they would fall into the valley below. There, they broke apart and refroze, forming an ice wall that closed off the narrow valley.
When spring came, this wall dammed the Danse River, which normally would have rushed with melt water. The villagers saw the inevitable, but couldn't act quickly enough -- the melt water burst through before they were able to carve a small tunnel to release the accumulated water in at a manageable pace. And away they went.
So where does that leave us now? When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its most recent report in 2007, it updated its 2001 predictions to show how much quicker things were happening than they had expected. Already, IPCC scientists are saying the 2007 report, too, was too conservative.
Gary Comer was a smart investor, though. He didn't put all his money on the public and policymakers waking up to the science in time. He also put money into developing tools to get us out of this cesspool of greenhouse gases if we don't act in time.
The last presentation of the conference was by Klaus Lackner, a Columbia professor and an entrepreneur. Before his death, Comer partnered with Lackner to build a synthetic tree with "leaves" coated with a resin to capture carbon dioxide at higher-than-natural rates and then sequester it.
The project is still in its adolescence, but provides a counterpoint to the runaway disaster to which so much of conference's findings pointed. We got ourselves into this mess and maybe -- just maybe -- we'll be able to get ourselves out.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Cupcake and painting parties
It's a charmed life I lead.
Friday evening I put down the books and focused on the less tangible journalistic skills -- swapping stories and meeting characters at a local bar. Then headed into town for a book reading followed by cupcake party for a friend's mentor's book.
Chick-lit is not my thing, but amazing river views and swanky hors d'oeuvres spreads are.
The place was amazing, but we were exhausted and by far the youngest guests there and kept mostly to ourselves until some bored, middle-age-and-then-some husbands came to mingle.
I don't remember much, but I must have said something about religion reporting because before I knew it I was being whisked over to a woman sitting cross-legged in a beautiful black party dress on the leather sofa.
Who turned out to be a Harvard-lecturer religion and human rights reporter. Better yet, she was clearly looking for an excuse to leave the conversation she was in.
Well then.
The next day I had to get a video story. My last one was a bit of a disaster so I decided to make it easy on myself and cover a neighborhood mural painting. Not exactly hard news, but pretty and active and formulaic enough.
But -- who knew? -- there turned out to be an amazing story behind the mural (tragedy, community, hope, all the classics).
Just as I was finished interviewing a neighborhood teen a woman came over to ask what I was doing.
And who might she have been? Why, the very friendly president of the Chicago women journalists organization. And she seems to want nothing more than to introduce me to all the right people!
Not a bad weekend, I'd say.
Friday evening I put down the books and focused on the less tangible journalistic skills -- swapping stories and meeting characters at a local bar. Then headed into town for a book reading followed by cupcake party for a friend's mentor's book.
Chick-lit is not my thing, but amazing river views and swanky hors d'oeuvres spreads are.
The place was amazing, but we were exhausted and by far the youngest guests there and kept mostly to ourselves until some bored, middle-age-and-then-some husbands came to mingle.
I don't remember much, but I must have said something about religion reporting because before I knew it I was being whisked over to a woman sitting cross-legged in a beautiful black party dress on the leather sofa.
Who turned out to be a Harvard-lecturer religion and human rights reporter. Better yet, she was clearly looking for an excuse to leave the conversation she was in.
Well then.
The next day I had to get a video story. My last one was a bit of a disaster so I decided to make it easy on myself and cover a neighborhood mural painting. Not exactly hard news, but pretty and active and formulaic enough.
But -- who knew? -- there turned out to be an amazing story behind the mural (tragedy, community, hope, all the classics).
Just as I was finished interviewing a neighborhood teen a woman came over to ask what I was doing.
And who might she have been? Why, the very friendly president of the Chicago women journalists organization. And she seems to want nothing more than to introduce me to all the right people!
Not a bad weekend, I'd say.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Dog days of summer, no dog
Finally, summer has made it to the midwest.
It was brought in by a monsoon on Friday, which was of course the day that I decided I needed to get out and about. I'd been doing well in newsreporting, but Thursday night it hit me: I'm not here to do well, I'm here to do the stuff that scares me.
So, out I trudged on Friday -- with my video camera and tripod and steno pad and tape recorder and background reading -- into the gusts of wind and rain. I was off to find some immigrants willing to talk about the Obama administration's recent moves on immigration.
Of course, how exactly do you find immigrants? My first stop was the Village Market Place in Skokie. Train, bus, 20-minute walk past the golf course. Annie a frazzled, soaking mess trying to get people to talk to her in the produce aisle. Is this really how it works?
Next stop: Skokie Public Library.
Only one problem. I'm a thinking walker. Which is to say, I get lost in thought while walking and more often than not, look up to realize I have no idea where I am.
The first time I did this I found myself infront of a synagogue. So, I figured, why not? The rabbi was in and willing to chat and -- who knew? -- he's on the cutting edge of web-based judaism conversion classes. One story idea for the kitty.
The wind was still gusting when I left the synagogue and by this time three prongs of my umbrella were broken. But did I learn from my mistake? No. I wandered some more, looked up, was definitely on the wrong street, but was standing right in front of an immigration law office. Well then.
After a brief visit there, I finally found the bus, got off at the right stop, and was waiting at a stoplight in downtown Skokie, wind about to knock me over, when a luxury car pulled up. I was, again, mid-thought and thus a little dazed when the 50-something man in the car rolled down the window and asked if I wanted a ride. He was going the wrong way so I didn't even think about it enough for the warning bells to kick in, I just said no thanks.
He leaned a little closer to the window, looked at me, snapped his fingers, and said, "too bad." Oh. That's what it was. One of the many perils facing female journalists, I suppose.
I made it safely to the library, though, where I met my new BFF -- the community librarian -- who was a goldmine of contacts (an interview with the social worker who coordinates Iraqi refugee services scheduled for Tuesday!).
Then it was another bus to west Evanston -- a not-so-great part of town -- for a documentary screening about the challenges facing black men and boys.
The place was packed and I quickly made friends with the videographers in the back who taught me how to work my tripod (after my camera nearly fell off since it wasn't screwed on tightly enough). It was not an easy event to cover, but wow, it was amazing. According to the doc, one in three black men will end up in prison in his lifetime and private prisons are projecting future numbers based on 3rd grade test scores. Sadly, my footage doesn't do the evening justice.
By the time the heat arrived on Saturday I was holed up in the downtown newsroom editing film. No lollapalooza for this girl, which, judging by the guy puking on the train on the way to the show, is more than okay by me.
It was brought in by a monsoon on Friday, which was of course the day that I decided I needed to get out and about. I'd been doing well in newsreporting, but Thursday night it hit me: I'm not here to do well, I'm here to do the stuff that scares me.
So, out I trudged on Friday -- with my video camera and tripod and steno pad and tape recorder and background reading -- into the gusts of wind and rain. I was off to find some immigrants willing to talk about the Obama administration's recent moves on immigration.
Of course, how exactly do you find immigrants? My first stop was the Village Market Place in Skokie. Train, bus, 20-minute walk past the golf course. Annie a frazzled, soaking mess trying to get people to talk to her in the produce aisle. Is this really how it works?
Next stop: Skokie Public Library.
Only one problem. I'm a thinking walker. Which is to say, I get lost in thought while walking and more often than not, look up to realize I have no idea where I am.
The first time I did this I found myself infront of a synagogue. So, I figured, why not? The rabbi was in and willing to chat and -- who knew? -- he's on the cutting edge of web-based judaism conversion classes. One story idea for the kitty.
The wind was still gusting when I left the synagogue and by this time three prongs of my umbrella were broken. But did I learn from my mistake? No. I wandered some more, looked up, was definitely on the wrong street, but was standing right in front of an immigration law office. Well then.
After a brief visit there, I finally found the bus, got off at the right stop, and was waiting at a stoplight in downtown Skokie, wind about to knock me over, when a luxury car pulled up. I was, again, mid-thought and thus a little dazed when the 50-something man in the car rolled down the window and asked if I wanted a ride. He was going the wrong way so I didn't even think about it enough for the warning bells to kick in, I just said no thanks.
He leaned a little closer to the window, looked at me, snapped his fingers, and said, "too bad." Oh. That's what it was. One of the many perils facing female journalists, I suppose.
I made it safely to the library, though, where I met my new BFF -- the community librarian -- who was a goldmine of contacts (an interview with the social worker who coordinates Iraqi refugee services scheduled for Tuesday!).
Then it was another bus to west Evanston -- a not-so-great part of town -- for a documentary screening about the challenges facing black men and boys.
The place was packed and I quickly made friends with the videographers in the back who taught me how to work my tripod (after my camera nearly fell off since it wasn't screwed on tightly enough). It was not an easy event to cover, but wow, it was amazing. According to the doc, one in three black men will end up in prison in his lifetime and private prisons are projecting future numbers based on 3rd grade test scores. Sadly, my footage doesn't do the evening justice.
By the time the heat arrived on Saturday I was holed up in the downtown newsroom editing film. No lollapalooza for this girl, which, judging by the guy puking on the train on the way to the show, is more than okay by me.
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