The audiotape crackles, brittle 60 years after dad lugged his reel-to-reel to the gray Florida farmhouse. He wanted to capture his immigrant parents – the scowler in her flower sack housedress, her sun-baked farmer in his cotton tee – and hear their stories again. How they climbed aboard at 19, lovers in steerage, rocked across the ocean to Ellis Island penniless and unconnected. How they picked their way through Southern […]
Shirley Muir | Hitchhiker in a headscarf
She’s not a hitchhiker. She’s one of hundreds of middle-aged women who live in our mountain village. Well, their mountain village to be precise. Dressed in baggy trousers, paisley blouse and an anorak, her toes are streaked with mud as they protrude through the tips of her leather sandals. A shiny flowered headscarf swathes her head, a riot of color when the sun shines, I expect. But not today. Through […]
Fleeing the mouth of a shark | Bill Dienst on the refugee crisis
Bill Dienst, MD, is a rural family and emergency room physician from north central Washington who has been volunteering for humanitarian medical missions since 1982, when he was a young man in medical school. His first experience profoundly changed his life and he was “hooked,” he says, volunteering repeatedly for medical exchange programs in Veracruz, Mexico, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Most recently he served as the medical […]
X.H. Collins | The foreign devil
The Foreign Devil was called so because no one knew what his real name was and because he did not look like anyone else in town, Han or Tibetan. Years later, when I saw a picture book of Santa Claus, I thought to myself, “If Santa Claus would lose so much weight that his cheeks were sunken rather than plump, that his color was grayish rather than rosy, and, if […]
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