Author: alfabus

Happy Fourth of July and the headlines run … a 21 year old U.S. Army Private rapes and kills an Iraqi woman, along with three other members of her family. Two sons are at school when the murders happen. Several other young American soldiers are accomplices. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/us/04arrest.html This is truly, um, “f-ed up,” and when…

I’m curled in a comfortable armchair in a bar at four in the morning, fighting sleep. I have to wait for my husband to finish Deejaying before we can leave. I look up and, from across the room, a handsome dark haired man makes eye contact with me. In sign language he asks me if…

Carolyn Norr and Bridget Barsotti are two ambitious artists and educators that put their beliefs where their bodies are. Mid-September, they armed themselves with art supplies, cameras and the dedication to listen to people, and left Ann Arbor, MI on their bikes, pulling all their gear on trailers behind them. Carolyn and Bridget are the…

June 2, 2005 Day 1 in brazil: Ponta Negra, Patrick’s I almost feel like I have to lie to myself because this is a printed page, which might be indicative of the fact that I want to write this down on something less permanent….But my heart feels broken. I think it was broken long ago,…

On some simplistic level, I don’t entirely understand why it is that when extremely rich, mainly white, people (and some, very few, colored people) have such a large percentage of the nation’s wealth, it is called affluence. And it has a positive connotation. And when the poorest of the poor in America begin to take…

every story i read about the situation in new orleans leaves me with another unanswered question. but what i struggle with most is the shockingly high incidence of reported rapes and sexual assaults… how to understand this, try to place it in context, how to wrap my mind around how chaos, starvation, and desperation can…

For many immigrants and asylum seekers living and waiting for their asylum cases to be adjudicated in Germany, the third largest refugee-receiving country in the world, the battle and trauma experienced in their home country was just the first. They now face a second battle attempting to survive Germany’s discriminatory practices aimed right at them.…

I haven’t felt much like writing lately; somehow I haven’t been able to get to that point of processing yet. Everything feels like cutups. I have finished fixing the sink, uninstalling the hot water heater from the wall (it didn’t work anyway), changing the faucet, finding out it will only screw in upside down, finding…

Walking in a blizzard down empty highway parallel to the old wall, four in the morning. This part is called the East Side Gallery: the mile or two of retained wall now covered in murals. The snow sticks to my leather jacket and the front of my green fishnets like moss grows on one side…

Fear. These first few days of the new year have been very introspective for me and, in the past two days, depressive. Whenever I begin to feel real depression this spirals into fear, which leads to more depression, and silence, and the need for escapism. My anxiety over whether Juan will be here on February…