a visit to the classrooms the kids left behind / NY Times

From a story just published in The New York Times Opinion pages:

“This was an epicenter of the virus. We have a lot of teachers that lost family and got sick themselves, and they’re scared to death to come back,” said Principal Keane. “I basically cried at my budget meeting on Friday — I’ve got teacher salaries and that’s pretty much it. I keep asking where the tape is for the floor, to measure six feet, but it’s not here. We might have to furlough cleaning staff though we only have two now. We only have one nurse. We need more of these people, not less.”

In the South Bronx, Principal Keane has taken to parking out of sight behind the building when she comes to work. If the neighborhood kids see her car out front they try to come to school.

“It turns out the one place they didn’t think they wanted to be,” she said, “is the place they want to be more than anywhere else.”

TRACKSMITH

Above all else, I respect integrity. So, working on this Tracksmith shoot that ran as an advertisement in the NY Times with the courageous Mary Cain and the writer Malcolm Gladwell and the team at Tracksmith was a dream come true. 

Story here.

Black Lives Matter, NYT

The Curfew Is Over. New York City’s Fight Is Not.

Thousands continue to take to the streets in Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx.

By ASHLEY GILBERTSON

June 8, 202

For nearly two weeks thousands of protesters have marched in cities and towns across the United States to denounce police brutality and systemic racism.

In New York, people marched until police officers with cans of pepper spray advanced into the crowd, followed by officers swinging batons. The sounds of screaming and chanting mixed with that of bodies hitting the pavement and zip ties being tightened around wrists. For a moment, the demonstration would subside.

But then they would return, more forcefully than before.

“I fought to be free for 17 years of my life,” said Hammond Ells, an Army veteran. “We export freedom overseas. Why don’t we have it at home?”

On Tuesday, just south of Union Square, a figure emerged from the crowd and implored the police officers to understand the pain he had experienced as a black man. He then asked them repeatedly to kneel in solidarity. Without a word, an officer took a knee. Then another. The protester cried.

Well after curfew on Thursday night, I followed a small group as they fled the police, ducking into Central Park. They had started out at least 1,000 strong, but as they made their way uptown their numbers had been thinned by arrests. A large group of police officers gave chase before retreating and leaving the protesters alone in the darkness, and silence, of the park at night.

After a peaceful weekend the curfew has been lifted. The insistence on change will remain.

This New York pastor says his parish lost 44 people to coronavirus - CNN

From CNN: Raul Luis Lopez is No. 33 on a list that keeps growing.

The 39-year-old restaurant deliveryman died last month in a New York hospital.

And at Saint Peter’s Church in Manhattan, he’s part of a devastating tally: Coronavirus Deaths from Our Parish.

The list sits on the Rev. Fabian Arias’ desk, beneath the N95 mask he plans to wear to the next funeral he’s presiding over. There are dozens of names on it, and he fears soon there will be more.

Arias and other church leaders say the pandemic has killed 44 people from their parish.

The Birth of the Coronavirus Economy

New York was still making money a week ago. A few people wearing masks, some closings, but generally business as usual. And then we tumbled down a cliff. By Friday, commuters arriving at Grand Central Terminal paused as they entered the main concourse — stunned by its emptiness, the usual din quieted by stay-at-home orders from companies and the government. For the first time, the vast, star-covered ceiling seemed appropriate.

Earlier this month, I started to travel the city to document the onset of one type of economic activity — the anxious purchase of emergency supplies — and the collapse of many, many others.

Read here.

Running Into the Night — and Traffic

From an ongoing series about running in New York City with the Orchard Street Runners.

“We have to know the streets, and more important, how they work. Aim for the center point of the approaching car and look beyond it to find a line. Be ready to jump. Watch rear vision mirrors for intent. Never make eye contact with New Yorkers when you’re threading through a packed cross walk — they panic and stop like prey. Never disturb the city’s cadence. Use its flow. Find your line.”

The Doctor Who Stayed Behind to Save Babies in His Long-Suffering Homeland

In the Central African Republic, which ranks next to last in the world on quality of life indicators, a peace accord allows a pediatrician and his trainees to build a future. LINK TO STORY HERE

NY TIMES - THE LITTLE PARK THAT COULD

Story here.

In Senegal’s largest national park, where lions and elephants once roamed in great numbers, just a handful of larger beasts remain, habitats destroyed by fires lit by poachers, hit by cars on a multi-national highway, shot by hunters, scared off by illegal gold miners blowing up a mountain inside the park boundaries. A tiny band of over stretched, but committed rangers, supported by the international conservation group Panthera, do their best to protect them. And against the odds, they may succeed.

A herd of elephants have only just returned to the park, and the nearly extinct West African lions have been spotted more regularly by rangers of late. 

Dionne Searcey and I saw a normal day in the life of Ranger Lt. Lang Halima Diedhiou at work recently: burning the brush around camp to prevent it from being enveloped by a nearby wildfire set by poachers; tracking an elephant herd and collecting their feces for sampling; collecting data from camera traps deep in the savanna down dusty red roads; and on the way back to camp, having to cut the throat of a dying antelope that had been hit by a truck on the highway. 

NY TIMES - POLLUTION IN DAKAR

From a story I worked on in Senegal with Dionne Searcey of the NY Times: Every evening, thousands of runners, wrestlers, soccer players and fitness fanatics exercise on the beaches and streets of Senegal’s capital. With every breath, they inhale increasingly dangerous air.

NY TIMES MAGAZINE: FUEL TO THE FIRE

A major investigation in collaboration with journalism non-profit ProPublica about the effects of Palm Oil on the environment is published in this weekends New York Times Magazine.

As a sidebar to the main piece, I wrote a more personal account of covering the story, that relates the destruction of the Island of Borneo to the Dayak people and their quickly disappearing way of life.

NY Times: Cameroon on Brink of Civil War

New story in the NY Times about the troubles in the anglophone region and the reelection of Paul Biya. Story Here

DIE ZEIT: NIGER MIGRATION

After years of trying, I managed to get to Agadez, a town I’ve heard about from virtually every migrant and asylum seeker. A story about those very migrants being turned back by Libya and Algeria due to pressure from EU governments was published in Die Zeit.

Arriving - Refugee Integration in Europe (work in progress)

Ongoing work documenting the process of integration in Germany in Die Zeit. The Raslan family, who I met in Serbia as they fled Syria and made their way by sea and land to Berlin, have been settling in for two years now. Challenges evolve and are overcome, and the families skin becomes thicker with every day in Europe.

The work is funded by UNICEF, and serialized in Die Zeit newsweekly. The work can be seen here.

The Bomb That Went Of Twice

The explosive compound RDX helped make America a superpower. Now, it’s poisoning the nation’s water and soil. This work takes readers through the negligent and alarming issue spanning Nevada, Tennessee, and Utah.

Children on The Line

“I remember just a little bit from before the war… I remember the summer and running with my friends in the warm rain.” Says Vadim Ignatenko, a nine-year-old from the battle-scarred city of Avdiivka.

A story I've been working on for the past couple of weeks for UNICEF was published today in Die Zeit newspaper in Germany. 

Fried Chicken in Ghana

I wish I could say I've never spent so much time inside fast food restaurants in my life, but that wouldn't be true. I worked in a McDonald's for some years back in Australia and I also love junk food.

I'm told that people who work in these joints don't eat the food anymore, but I say that's bullshit. Even with the well-documented negative health aspects, KFC in Ghana might have been the best assignment of all time. The food portion of my expense account for this story was almost entirely KFC receipts and all my clothes smelt of chicken grease and palm oil. 

Heaven.

ProPublica - Bombs in Our Backyard Part III

"Fraud. Bribery. Incompetence. The military’s use of contractors adds to a legacy of environmental damage." This is part of a multipart story I've been working on with ProPublica and their brilliant reporter Abrahm Lustgarten about military waste. It's one of those stories that becomes more astonishing the deeper one gets into the reporting.

In Amish Country, the Future is Calling.

For a week, I worked around Lancaster County, Pa., on a story about the Amish adopting technology into their everyday work lives. Our perceptions and their realities are quite different it turns out: smartphone use is permissible, so is working on highly sophisticated computers to cut and shape metal and wood, cars can be okay if the driver doesn't own them, and most homes have solar power - it's most important to be off the grid it turns out. 

The most interesting aspect of it all was at their homes though. There, far away from the fax machines and CNC routers, the family units remain intact and largely non-reliant on modern technology. There's a closeness, an intimacy that I rarely see among the English (us). Silence is uncomplicated, comfortable even.

Family comes first and smart phones and all the rest of it, are second. For now, at least.   

bombs in our backyard, by ProPublica

COLFAX, LOUISIANA — Early one evening, I went out for a run. I took a route out by Lake Iatt, passing through acre after acre of logged land, trailer homes and lush green farms. It was an easy out and back, but as I rounded the last corner, I was alarmed by clouds of black smoke that were blowing my way. Explosions crackled in the distance. The sounds put me back in Iraq, where I’d spent a bunch of tours as a photographer, listening to gun battles being fought in nearby towns or neighborhoods.

From Bombs in our Backyards, an ongoing series by ProPublica

Happy Eid

Came across a mosque overflowing with people attending the last Friday prayers on one of my favorite blocks in New York's East Village yesterday.