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Athens, Greece
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Digging in the Dustbins of History

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Christos Gabriel and Yannis Lubovicki left the faltering Eastern Bloc and came to Greece in pursuit of a happier life. But as the energy and promise of Greece’s once-fiery economy has dwindled away, immigrants like them have experienced homelessness and hostility—as well as a peculiar yearning for the old communist ways.


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Homeless Polish immigrant sitting on the sidewalk next to a moped
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Yannis Lubovicki left Poland and came to Athens in search of work. He lost his job during the Greek economic crisis and now lives on the streets.

In the Athenian neighborhood of Skouze Hill, a pair of shabbily dressed men, Polish immigrants, sit on a doorstep across the street from a supermarket, wearily asking passersby for change as they wait for store employees to throw away the day’s unsold food. Once the food has been tossed into the supermarkets’ dustbins, they will compete with the area’s other dumpster divers—ethnic Roma—for the stale bread and leftover vegetables.

When he illegally immigrated to Greece two decades ago, Yannis Lubovicki, forty-three, dreamed of a better life than what Poland—then struggling to adjust to a post-Berlin Wall world—could offer. Instead, he and his companion Christos Gabriel, fifty-three, found poverty. Now they spend their days panhandling and their nights sleeping on park benches. They survive on food from church soup kitchens and trash cans and the water from park fountains. Once a week they walk downtown to Koumoundourou Square and use the public baths there, well frequented by the homeless.

“Don’t give them any money,” says a well-dressed middle-aged woman heading into the supermarket.  “They’ll spend it on wine in a split second.” If harsh, her words are perhaps true: their breath smells of alcohol, their eyes are bloodshot, and Lubovicki—the woman points to him emphatically—is timidly taking a corkscrew out of his bag.

An estimated one person in twenty is an undocumented immigrant in Greece, a country of eleven million. Many of them, like Lubovicki and Gabriel, are transplants from the former Eastern bloc. Having moved to Greece in search of the economic opportunities that an integrated, prosperous Europe once offered, they have instead struggled to survive, one of the groups hardest hit by financial crisis in Greece—itself one of the countries hardest hit by the global recession that struck in 2007. At the same time, they have been scapegoats for the country’s ongoing malaise, with high unemployment and political turmoil—along with a humiliating dose of international ridicule for the former continental success story turned basket case—feeding  a brutal, anti-immigrant backlash within Greek society, just as they have in other immigrant magnets such as Italy, Malta, and Spain.

Yet in few corners of Europe have ultranationalism and xenophobia gained as much traction as they have in Greece. Golden Dawn, a far-right Greek political party, has seen tremendous growth since the economic crisis hit. In 1996, it received just 0.07 percent of the vote in national parliamentary elections; in 2012, it won 7 percent. Halting immigration is the party’s chief goal. Its leaders declare that “illegal alien-invaders” amount to an irregular foreign army, one bent on attacking the country’s social fabric and corrupting its national identity. The party’s extreme rhetoric has, in turn, fed violence, from the murder of a Greek antifascist rapper by a party member, to the stunning attack that Golden Dawn MP Ilias Kasidiaris unleashed on two leftist members of parliament during the live taping of a morning talk show. (After their argument grew heated, Kasidiaris—who has called Greece’s undocumented immigrants “human garbage”—punched Communist MP Liana Kanelli and threw a glass of water in the face of SYRIZA MP Rena Dourou.) Golden Dawn members have frequently harassed immigrants, going so far as to pose as police in order to intimidate street vendors.

Even in Athens, Greece’s cosmopolitan capital, Golden Dawn has substantial support. It won 16 percent of the vote in last May’s mayoral elections, a huge jump from its share of just 5 percent in 2010. “We have been swarming with Albanians, Pakistanis, Africans, and Eastern Europeans,” says the middle-aged woman at the supermarket, who did not give her name. “Now we have the Gypsy gangs, too.” Her once-affluent neighborhood used to be populated by high-ranking military officers and their families, but in recent years the poorer immigrant enclaves in the bordering downtown areas have spilled over here as well.

“That’s why they wanted us in Europe, “she adds—referring to wealthy northern European nations like France and Germany—“to keep the Third Worlders away from them so they can continue their petty little lives.”

Two Greek illegal immigrants
Christos Gabriel and Yannis Lubovicki, undocumented Polish immigrants, survive by panhandling and scrounging in dustbins for food.

Gangling and gray-haired, Gabriel walks with a limp and speaks with a thick accent. In his halting Greek, he notes happily that he recently discovered a new hideout, a tiny covered alley alongside a newly built apartment building, where he lies down on the pavement at night to sleep. He and Lubovicki have spent the last five years living in close proximity to the supermarket and its surplus food. Until a few months ago, they had been squatting in a nearby abandoned house, but then the landlord drove them out.

Gabriel has been in the country for twelve years. Back in Poland, he lived through the early years of his homeland’s transition from communism. Post-Soviet Poland quickly reformed its economy to woo investors, privatizing its coal and steel industries and knocking down regulatory hurdles. Thanks to vigorous economic growth and rising standards of living, Polish households were optimistic and exuberant, and credit flowed easily. Gabriel, then a coal miner, decided to take out a loan to buy a two-story house in the southern Polish city of Katowice for himself, his wife, and four children.

The Polish “miracle,” however, failed to curb the country’s high levels of unemployment. Laid off and unable to find a new job, Gabriel struggled to pay his 50,000-euro mortgage. Desperate, he immigrated to Greece in 2002, joining a wave of illegal immigrants drawn by the global image of pre-crisis Greece as flourishing and full of promise. (Today, there are about 50,000 Polish immigrants in the country.) Gabriel has not seen his children since he left.

But today’s moribund Greek economy—now in its seventh year of recession—now offers little in the way of hope for Gabriel and immigrants like him. In Athens, about 5,000 undocumented immigrants live in derelict buildings unfit for human habitation. When they can find work, conditions are often extreme: migrant strawberry pickers, for example, earn $26 to $33 a day for about ten hours’ work, living in makeshift huts with no access to toilets. Meanwhile, government officials warn of a “public-health time bomb,” with large numbers of new immigrants not inoculated for tuberculosis, polio, measles, and other communicable diseases.

Until the 1990s, Greece was an extremely homogenous society. The wave of Eastern European immigrants that flooded Greece after the fall of the Soviet Union was followed by another wave of immigrants from Africa and Asia in subsequent years, gradually ratcheting up anti-immigrant sentiment among the broader population. Today, as unresolved economic and immigration problems worsen an already festering resentment; Greece continues to vie for the title of Europe’s “most racist” nation.

In recent years, the government has had some success in stanching the flow of illegal immigrants into the country, which it credits in part to an eight-mile barbed-wire fence it erected along its border with Turkey, completed two years ago. The number of illegal immigrants that the government detained fell from 77,000 in 2012 to 43,000 in 2013.

These days, Gabriel stays on constant alert for police raids—not for fear of deportation (European countries, Poland and Greece included, signed the 2007 Schengen agreement that allows citizens of each country to move and work freely throughout the union), but for fear that he may be arrested for failing to pay his bank loan back in Poland. For the most part, thought, the police tend to ignore him and other homeless immigrants.

Golden Dawn wishes it were otherwise. These foreigners must be deported, the party argues, in order to save the culture and community of the “pure” Greeks. (Ironically, in spite of his slogan of “work for Greeks only,” Golden Dawn’s leader, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, happens to own a hotel in an immigrant Athens neighborhood staffed by low-wage foreign workers.) Beyond its anti-immigration platform, Golden Dawn has argued for building closer ties with Russia at the expense of the US (particularly in regards to energy resources), erasing the “illegal” Greek debt and voiding the terms of the country’s internationally funded bailout, purging the public sector, and walling the Greek economy off from global trade.

In recent months the party’s brazen militancy seems to have backfired to some extent, with two of its leaders now in jail awaiting trial—Michaloliakos for forming a “criminal organization” and a spokesperson for gun charges. Nevertheless,Nikos Kyriakidis, a forty-seven-year-old plumber from Athens, insists that Golden Dawn is the only party that will fight against Zionism, imposed multiculturalism, and the growing erosion of Greek culture. Economic anxieties also seem to be at the root of Kyriakidis’s anger. He rails against the “scumbags” of PASOK and New Democracy—the major political parties that have long run the country—that he says destroyed the Greek economy. Although he has a quarter-century worth of work experience, right now Kyriakidis is unable to support his family. They just moved to avoid living in a part of the city that has recently seen an influx of immigrants. Kyriakidis doesn’t want his children to grow up in such a rundown neighborhood, he says.

In Greece, Eastern European immigrants tend to fare better than other immigrants in one area: racist attacks. Three weeks ago Gabriel and Lubovicki witnessed a gang of thirty young men dressed in black beating Asian immigrants. “They shouldn’t have hit them, it’s not right,” says Lubovicki, a stubby and gregarious man who fills in the silences of his tall and taciturn companion. The beating took place out in the open, in a public square with numerous passersby. Four police officers were nearby but did nothing, Lubovicki claims. Fortunately, the gang did not bother the two Poles. “It is the dark ones they are after,” he notes—that is, the Pakistanis, Afghanis, Syrians, Bangladeshis, Somalis, and Eritreans who have built up the country’s largest Asian and African immigrant enclaves.

“The men were huge—real giants,” Lubovicki adds. “If one of them punched me in the face, my head would fall off.”

Homeless Polish immigrants sitting on curb
Lubovicki and Gabriel sit on a street corner in the Skouze Hill neighborhood of Athens.

A group of young men walk down the street, stopping when they notice Lubovicki and Gabriel—half-drunk and reeking of alcohol—sitting on the doorstep. “I’ll give you ten bottles of wine if you kick this car door,” says one of the men. He is short and fair-haired, in his early twenties.

“Ten more bottles if you sing,” says another, a hulking man with a humpback.

Lubovicki bursts into laughter and says he can’t do it. Gabriel cracks a smile.

The young men seem to know the Poles. They, too, are immigrants—second-generation Albanian Greeks. Many of their parents immigrated to Greece after the Soviet Union collapsed. (Today, those of the country’s unauthorized immigrants who hail from the former Eastern Bloc are chiefly from Albania: in 2013 they were almost a third of all illegal immigrants arrested that year, and Albanians also comprise a majority of the country’s total foreign-born population.)

Lubovicki has a daughter of his own, now seventeen years old. (Her name is Despoina, a Greek Orthodox name; Lubovicki converted to the Greek Orthodox faith after arriving in the country.) His marriage ended after his wife, who had moved out to Greece with him, found out about an affair. “We had a brawl,” he says. “My wife left Greece in the middle of the night with my daughter.”

Things really got bad when Lubovicki lost his job during the crisis. “I haven’t worked in five years … I was a construction worker,” he says. (The construction sector—which used to employ both men, and whose workforce is a third foreign-born—has shrunk by half since 2009.) “I’ve been a vagabond all these years, sleeping on the benches of the parks.” He smirks as he admits it.

Their descent into poverty has soured their attitudes toward the free market and made the two Polish immigrants nostalgic for Poland’s communist era—however repressive it was. They would never have left Poland if the Soviet Union had not collapsed, they point out. Back then, life was good, and they lacked nothing. Thanks to the government, Lubovicki adds, he attended a trade school.

These are views shared by a significant number of older Eastern Europeans, according to a 2009 Pew survey. While those under the age of forty tend to favor the economic and political reforms their countries have gone through over the past two decades, the older generations are more skeptical. Clearly, many have painful memories of the USSR: not just the absence of freedom and dissent, but also the frequent shortages of food and toilet paper, the constant lecturing about Marxist-Leninist creeds, the degrading monotony of Soviet life. But like Lubovicki and Gabriel, some of those who grew up under communism point out that unemployment and homelessness were virtually unknown back then. Their salaries were nowhere near American ones, but the cost of living was negligible. The Soviet educational system was excellent, ranking among the best in the world.

In recent years, Poland has, like Greece before it, seen rapid economic growth. While many Poles continue to go abroad in search of the higher wages to be found out west, living standards have improved back in their home country. Lubovicki points out that his mother, a professional chef, enjoys a pension and a cozy house of her own. Meanwhile, he lives on the streets.

Lubovicki misses his hometown, a village outside Warsaw. He misses his daughter, who speaks to him by phone every other week. He misses his mother’s cooking. But he does not believe he will go back to the old country anytime soon. “My mother calls me up all the time asking me to return to Poland, but I can’t because I can’t afford it. I need eighty-five euros to renew my passport and about 200 euros for travel expenses.”

It’s not just about the money, Lubovicki adds. Born “Yannus,” he has lived as “Yannis” since he came to Greece—now half his life. “If I go to Poland, I won’t know a thing. I’ll be unable to adjust there …. I have been living in Greece ever since I came of age, how am I supposed to start all over again?” Gabriel—who used to go by the name “Yaroslav”—nods in approval.

“Have I told you I am also a mechanic for all kinds of machines and can do some plumber work?” Lubovicki says, moving on to another, more hopeful, topic. “I may find a gig like this in the future. I know the tools of the trade.”

Then his eyes light up. The sliding doors of the supermarket have opened. Employees bearing huge trash bags head for the dustbins. Lubovicki walks over to find his next meal.

Correction, September 27: An earlier version of this article misidentified the man in the first photo. It is Yannis Lubovicki, not Christos Gabriel.

Stav Dimitropoulos is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in major US, UK, Australian, and Canadian outlets. A native of Greece, she received the Athens Medal of Honor at the age of seventeen and went on to receive a master's degree. She experimented with journalism along the way, and has been writing ever since. Facebook | Twitter: @TheyCallMeStav

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Caracas, Venezuela
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Street Fighters

Dozens died in mass demonstrations earlier this year against the Venezuelan government. While the violence has subsided, the conflict continues to spill out onto the sidewalks and storefronts of urban Caracas, where opponents and supporters of the government engage in an art of war over the symbolism of the protests and the memory of the dead.

Story and photos by J. J. Gallagher
Man walking past graffiti-marked wall in Caracas
A neighborhood in central Caracas bears the marks of dueling political groups.

Armored vehicles roll down the street, ringed by dozens of police in riot gear. Further down on the palm tree-lined Avenida Francisco Miranda, one of Caracas’s main arteries, small groups of protesters clad in bicycle helmets and gas masks arm themselves with stones and hastily construct roadblocks with whatever they can find: sign posts, bits of concrete, a steel cable taken from a nearby construction site. Bags of garbage burn nearby, spewing black smoke into the air. Though it’s early on a weekday afternoon, the storefronts that line the normally busy street have already been shuttered, antigovernment graffiti scrawled on their windows and walls. A crowd of several hundred people—a mixture of peaceful demonstrators and onlookers from nearby businesses—clank guardrails amid shouts of “Resistencia!” and “Libertad!”

Protesters sitting alongside candles and photos of the dead
People gather to remember the dead in Altamira Square, the epicenter of many of Venezuela’s fiercest protests.

Slowly at first, the police lob tear gas canisters into the crowd. Protesters quickly pick them up and cast them away. Then the canisters start raining down, scattering nearly everyone. Crates full of rocks and bottles and containers filled with gasoline appear suddenly among the demonstrators. Someone hurls a firebomb, which explodes underneath a contingent of about six officers, who, seemingly unscathed, continue advancing. Marching in rows through the choking fog, the police start aiming their tear-gas guns directly at the protesters still gathered on the street. A group of teenage boys break into a furious sprint as police on motorcycles hurtle down the sidewalks after them. One of the boys, shaking with fear, frantically jabs at apartment buzzers as a group of workers nearby shout, “Let him in! Let him in!” He slips inside the apartment building’s steel gate, just out of an officer’s reach.

The April 1 demonstration in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas—a protest march that swiftly descended into an armed brawl with security forces sent out to clear the streets—is one of dozens that have taken place this year, fueling a major popular uprising against the regime of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Since February, forty-two people have died, though the violence has tapered off in recent months. The fatalities have included both opponents and supporters of the government: José Guillén Araque, a thirty-four-year-old National Guard captain and father of two teenage daughters; twenty-two-year-old beauty queen Génesis Carmona; Adriana Urquiola, twenty-eight years old and five months pregnant; and many others, drawn from all parts of Venezuelan society.

Protesters wearing gas masks on the streets of Caracas
A protester hurls a tear-gas canister back at advancing riot police.

As in many of the popular uprisings that have broken out in places like Syria and the Ukraine in recent years, repressive tactics intended to quash the protests have only served to inflame them. And as they have elsewhere, Venezuela’s artists have been a driving force within the opposition movement, crafting a compelling narrative to motivate resistance.

Since the killings began, street artists have memorialized the dead in spray paint, tagging walls and sidewalks throughout the city with their faces and names. “[The government] has all the power. They do whatever they want, and they are extremely violent,” says Marina, a twenty-seven-year-old English teacher and a member of anti-Maduro student artist collective called Stencil Resistencia. (Because of fear of government reprisals, the protesters I spoke to asked me to withhold their last names.) “That’s the idea of painting the faces of the dead, to remind everyone of who we are dealing with. They are the violent ones.”

The demonstrations began in February, over local issues. College students in the western city of San Cristóbal turned out to protest a sexual assault that had occurred on campus. The resistance quickly snowballed into a national movement. Angered and aggrieved, thousands of Venezuelans have taken to the streets since then to decry the government’s failure to deal with a raft of problems.

Tire blockade with the word "Resiste"
A protest barricade, one of the opposition’s favored tactics, completely blocks a major artery in southern Caracas.

Despite having the world’s largest proven oil reserves, Venezuela has struggled economically, and in the past two years its fiscal woes have reached crisis levels. During his fourteen years of increasingly unrestrained rule, the late president Hugo Chavez succeeded in rearranging the country’s power structure and lowering the poverty rate, mainly by allocating more of the country’s oil wealth to programs for the poor. But he also left the legacy of an isolated and sputtering economy, as well as a byzantine currency-control system under which, critics say, tens of billions of dollars in public funds have gone missing.

Today, the country consistently ranks near the bottom of global measures of freedom of the press and the ease of doing business. It boasts one of the highest inflation rates in the world—more than 60 percent annually—as well as an increasingly exorbitant cost of living. Basic necessities like toilet paper, cooking oil, and flour, nearly all of which are imported, have become scarce. Alarmingly, the number of murders has also surged over the past decade: according to the United Nations, Venezuela now has the second-highest murder rate in the world.

Meanwhile, government repression of dissent has been at times brutal. The first protester fatality occurred on February 12. Bassil Alejandro Dacosta Frías, a twenty-three-year-old carpenter, left his home in the nearby city of Guatire to join two of his cousins in a protest march in Caracas. An estimated 10,000 people took to the streets that day. In a scene that would become familiar, the demonstration ended in chaos. Once the police came out in force, most of the protesters filtered out into nearby streets, but small groups stayed behind or were diverted by the security forces.

In the confusion that ensued, at least one member of the security forces opened fire into the crowd, using live ammunition. The protesters fled. A video released later showed Dacosta running and then falling to the sidewalk, struck from behind by a bullet to the head. (A forty-two-year old member of Venezuela’s national intelligence agency is now in jail awaiting trial for firing the fatal shot.) The night before he was killed, Dacosta announced on Facebook that he was going to “go out and march tomorrow without fear of anything, with the hope of finding a better future.”

Protester spray-painting a stencil of a dead protester's face on a wall
Members of a group of street artists calling themselves Stencil Resistencia adorn a wall with the faces of people killed in the protests.

In the weeks that followed, the country’s fractured politics continued to play out bloodily on its city streets, with dozens more dying in the violence. Remembering the dead became an act of resistance that united the opposition. In the outpouring of emotion following Dacosta’s death, his face became ubiquitous, popping up on T-shirts and placards, painted onto walls and sidewalks.

The activists I interviewed have helped blanket the city with his likeness, along with those of the unrest’s many other victims. “These people who died gave their lives for the country. We must not forget them,” says Alejandro, a twenty-five-year-old economics student who has dedicated much of his free time since the protests began to the opposition movement. Using digital photos published in local media and shared on social networks, he and other artists create images in Photoshop that are then cut into stencils and spray-painted onto surfaces.

Antigovernment street art carries with it some irony in Venezuela. Chavez popularized graffiti and murals as political statements, and the government still hires artist collectives to work on public projects, which often carry strong anticapitalist and anti-American messages. Chavez often mocked the highbrow sensibilities of Venezuela’s elite and sought to empower the country’s poor by celebrating their culture. But now the government-sponsored street art has become an institution as well as a propaganda tool. After his death, Chavez’s image has become omnipresent, with his face, his recognizable signature, and even his eyes occupying the sides of buildings and billboards. In Caracas, the writing on the wall is usually a good indicator of whether you are walking through an opposition or government stronghold.

Police wearing protective gear and firing tear gas
Police begin firing a barrage of tear gas at the protesters who remain on the street.

The government has also organized marches of its own and rallied an army of pro-government musicians and street artists to its side. They depict a world dominated by Yankee imperialists, allied with Venezuela’s wealthy elites, who threaten to subjugate the poor. With America’ record of meddling in the affairs of Latin American countries, Venezuela’s history of entrenched inequality, and the country’s persistent political instability—punctuated by upheaval and coups—this message resonates with the government’s supporters, who have vowed to continue the populist political agenda championed by Chavez, who died in 2013 after a prolonged fight with cancer.

Since he took office, Maduro—Chavez’s handpicked successor and the leader of the country’s ruling socialist party—has drawn heavily from his predecessor’s playbook. He has claimed to be the target of frequent coup attempts and made vague accusations of interference from US-backed militants. Amid the recent wave of protests, the president, his supporters, and the state-run media have sought to portray the opposition as bent on conflict and destruction. (Maduro has even taken to calling the protesters “Chuckies,” in reference to the ginger-haired, knife-wielding doll of 1980s horror-movie fame.)

Protesters holding a flag and flagging passing cars
Demonstrators vie for the attention of passersby at one of the many peaceful protests that took place in Caracas.

Government forces have come under gunfire in several of the confrontations, and the protesters have on numerous occasions tussled with them and set fire to buildings and vehicles. Because of the international media’s focus on the street battles that have led to deaths like Dacosta’s, masked young men have come to symbolize Venezuela’s protest movement to the outside world, even though their groups generally number in the dozens, compared to the thousands of peaceful demonstrators who turn up at major opposition marches and rallies. The protesters—many of them in their teens and early twenties—complain, in turn, about the police’s heavy-handed tactics, which they say are employed even when the demonstrations are nonviolent. (A number of protesters claim the police often incite the violence and viciously beat them even when they do not resist arrest.) Images purporting to show the bloodied and bruised bodies of demonstrators circulate widely on Twitter and other social media networks, fueling the outrage.

The government has deftly used the street skirmishes to justify its crackdown. Maduro recently vowed to bring to justice “criminals who seek to fill our country with chaos and violence.” In May, his forces raided a protest camp outside of the UN office in Caracas, even as the government engaged in internationally mediated peace talks with the opposition.

More than 3,000 people were detained in connection with the protests earlier this year, according to the Venezuelan NGO Foro Penal Venezolano; seventy-five remain jailed today. The group also says it has documented instances of beatings and torture. Beyond its violent crackdowns on demonstrations, the government has hounded opposition politicians and media outlets that it accuses of fomenting the hostilities. In June, images of Leopoldo Lopez, the former mayor of the Chacao district in central Caracas and the government’s most famous prisoner, were leaked, showing him bearded and gaunt after spending more than a hundred days in detention under charges of instigating violence and damaging property. (With his pugnacious rhetoric and overt support of the fighting in the streets, Lopez played a critical role in sparking the protest movement.) Lopez’s trial finally began in late July. His lawyers say he could face up to ten years in prison if convicted.

The April 1 protest in Caracas was set in motion by Maria Corina Machado, another vehement critic of the Maduro government, who urged her supporters to come out for a political rally and march. Machado had just been accused of treason and ousted from her seat in Venezuela’s parliament after denouncing, at a Washington meeting of the Organization for American States, human rights abuses allegedly committed by the regime. (In Venezuela Machado is a controversial figure, whose political organizations have in the past received financing from the US government. The government has long called her a puppet of the Americans, and in late May she, the US ambassador, and several other opposition politicians were publicly accused of organizing an assassination plot against President Maduro.) Thousands turned up to hear her speak at a plaza in downtown Caracas, but when it came time for the symbolic walk to the steps of the National Assembly, many of the demonstrators found themselves face-to-face with police and National Guard troops, who shut down metro stations and blocked major avenues.

Police standing on a rock-strewn street
A view of police gathering in the distance, from the protesters’ vantage point.

While they don’t agree with using violence, the protesters I spoke to see the street demonstrations as a necessary and effective tactic. Instead of addressing the country’s problems, they say, the government has marginalized legitimate political dissent and attempted to silence criticism. Beyond their hostility to the government, however, the protestors have little in the way of a unified agenda. Their demands range widely—from moderate policy reforms to regime change.

Like many middle- and upper-class Venezuelans, the activists I interviewed complain that their day-to-day lives have rapidly deteriorated over the past few years, as crime has grown and the economy worsened. “The situation is as bad as it’s been in the past fifteen years,” said Alejandro, the economics student. “The [government] officials can’t go on denying the weakest currency in the world, the lowest minimum wage in the world. We are demanding a change—not necessarily in the government, but in the policies that they are carrying out.”

With the potent symbolism of their street graffiti, artists like Alejandro have helped the dead protesters achieve a near-mythic status in Venezuela. Sympathizers often refer to them as “los caídos,” or the fallen ones. Even as tensions in the street have calmed in recent months, with no new deaths being reported, the activists say their acts of remembrance will go on. “We have to continue struggling,” says Marina. “If we go back to our daily lives, they will have died in vain.”

J. J. Gallagher is a freelance writer based in New York. Twitter: @jayjgal

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Mumbai, India
News

The White Death, Revived

Best of In The Fray 2014. Once thought cured by modern medicine, tuberculosis is making a global comeback. Rampant misuse of antibiotics and broken health-care systems have spawned deadly, drug-resistant strains that are now present in virtually every country.

By Octavio Raygoza
Mycobacterium Tuberculosis Bacteria, the cause of TB
Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the pathogen that causes TB. NIAID

She looks like a child: a baby face and large, round eyes, long and thin arms that make her seem gawky. When she sees me, her eyes brighten, and she struggles to sit up in her hospital bed. The blanket covering her drops, revealing a frail and gaunt body—a nineteen-year-old’s body. Five feet, four inches, she weighs only eighty pounds.

Sonam Yambhare is dying, and there is little modern medicine can do for her. Two years ago, she contracted a drug-resistant form of tuberculosis in her lungs. The bacteria that cause the disease have destroyed her macrophages, the body’s first defenders against foreign invasion. Constant nausea, loss of appetite, and vomiting—symptoms of the disease—have emaciated her. All medications have been infective. In her weakened state, another serious infection will likely kill her.

Ward Number Eight of the Sewri Tuberculosis Hospital is a silent room with gray concrete walls. It is a world away from the chaotic streets of Mumbai. And it is a world away from the rest of Indian society. With nowhere else to go, neglected and stigmatized TB patients like Yambhare come here—even from towns and villages hundreds of miles away—to wait out the last stages of the disease, sometimes alone.

“Everyone is depressed here,” says Chandge Mokshada, a young doctor on her rounds. In the crumbling ward, dozens of women lay quietly on their beds. There is little chance they will recover, Mokshada says. “We mostly lose our patients.”

One of the world’s most lethal infectious diseases is making a comeback. Two centuries ago, tuberculosis was responsible for a quarter of all deaths in parts of Europe and the US. Known as the “white plague” or “white death” due to the way it blanched the skin, the disease left a deep imprint on the culture. Thomas Mann and Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote about it. Emily Brontë and Henry David Thoreau died from it.

After the development of effective antibiotics in the 1940s, deaths from tuberculosis plummeted. But TB remains a formidable killer in many parts of the world. And in recent years, it has evolved in frightening ways. Its virulent new strains now defy many or all known antibiotics. And while they have ravaged Asian countries in particular, these deadlier forms of the disease are spreading everywhere.

Last month, the World Health Organization released a report about the surge in infectious diseases that are fast becoming untreatable. “A post-antibiotic era—in which common infections and minor injuries can kill—is a very real possibility for the 21st century,“ the report read. The WHO singled out drug-resistant tuberculosis as one of the greatest dangers. In 2012, it accounted for 450,000 new cases and 170,000 deaths—that is, less than 4 percent of those newly infected with TB, but 13 percent of those the disease killed. The total number of confirmed cases has grown sevenfold over seven years, with India, China, and Russia accounting for more than half of new infections. (The official statistics also understate the size of the problem, since many of the hardest-hit countries report bogus numbers.)

New strains of TB arise when the old ones are not properly treated. Not taking a full course of antibiotics, for example, can merely weaken, rather than eradicate, the bacteria that cause the disease. The remaining bacteria evolve to adapt to the drug, turning a treatable strain of TB into a resistant one.

The problem has gotten progressively worse. At one point, health officials believed TB could be eliminated. But in the 1980s, tuberculosis strains emerged that resisted the most common and safe anti-TB drugs. In the past decade, even second-line treatments have become ineffective against certain tough strains that fall under the category of “extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis” (about 10 percent of drug-resistant TB cases). To deal with them, doctors will put patients on more than one of these toxic drugs. Their side effects, however, can be severe, ranging from acne, weight loss, and skin discoloration to hepatitis, depression, and hallucinations.

For the hardest-to-treat strains, doctors are now forced to use so-called third-line drugs, an even more toxic regimen whose effects have yet to be fully tested.

Today, resistant strains can be found virtually everywhere, including the United States and Europe. But perhaps nowhere is the crisis more real than in India. The world’s second most populous country has a quarter of its TB cases—and now, many of the hardest ones to treat. While the number of Indians suffering from the disease has actually gone down in recent years, thanks in part to widespread vaccination, the WHO estimates that in 2012 the country had 21,000 new cases of drug-resistant TB of the lungs—an exponential increase from the few dozen cases the government had been reporting just six years earlier.

India also has the dubious distinction of being one of three countries—Iran and Italy being the others—where certain strains of TB have resisted every drug used against them. Four years ago, Zarir Udwadia, a noted pulmonologist at Mumbai’s Hinduja Hospital, identified twelve patients suffering from untreatable TB infections. (Three of the twelve have since died; the others have been taken into isolation by the government.) Udwadia and other researchers have described these kinds of cases as “totally drug-resistant.”

The Indian government disputes the categorization, arguing that these strains have not been tested against all of the experimental third-line drugs. Another term, “extremely drug-resistant TB,” gets around the worry of some experts that classifying such a common disease as untreatable may cause panic.

Regardless of what they are called, these hardy strains have the power to push societies back to a time before antibiotics, when the “white plague” was all but unstoppable. “If not contained,” says infectious disease specialist Charles Chiu of the University of California, San Francisco, “it poses a big problem to the world.”

In India, those infected with TB tend to be the most vulnerable people in society. Yambhare was born into a low caste. She lived in a cramped apartment, where she shared a room with her mother and two sisters. Every day she took overcrowded trains from her home in the countryside to Mumbai, where she helped her mother clean houses. In other words, her poverty made it far more likely that she would be exposed to TB, which often (though not always) settles in the lungs and can be transmitted through the air.

Two years ago, Yambhare developed a persistent cough. She visited one of the private medical clinics that line the teeming streets of the western suburb of Bandra. There, a doctor diagnosed her with tuberculosis, and Yambhare began taking antibiotics. When her family saw no improvement over two years, they switched doctors. The new doctor prescribed more drugs.

No one bothered to give her a drug-sensitivity test. The test would have revealed what strain of TB she had, and a competent doctor could have then prescribed the correct drug. Instead, the incomplete and inept treatment that Yambhare received gave the bacteria the chance to adapt and become stronger. It soon developed a resistance to all four of the first-line drugs used to treat TB.

In Yambhare’s case and thousands of others, a broken health-care system has made the problem of drug-resistant TB much worse. Hospitals are overcrowded, and the services provided are minimal. So Indians—rich and poor—flock to private doctors. But the slapdash treatment they tend to provide, with laxly administered drugs and inadequate follow-up care, has allowed drug-resistant TB to spread wildly.

Udwadia, the Mumbai pulmonologist, says that many of these doctors are unscrupulous, and most are uninformed. In 2010, he conducted a study in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum, one of Asia’s largest and the origin of many of the city’s most severe TB cases. He asked more than a hundred doctors in the area to “write a prescription for a common TB patient.” Only six were able to do it correctly. Half of the doctors he surveyed were practitioners of alternative therapies with no grounding in modern science.

Udwadia argues that India needs a law that will let only designated specialists treat drug-resistant tuberculosis patients. But at the moment the government does not bother keeping detailed records on the many private doctors now operating, much less ensuring they provide adequate care.

“The government has no control over private practitioners,” says an official in the health ministry, speaking on condition of anonymity since he is not authorized to talk to the media. “They require only once-in-a-lifetime registration, and there is no chance for them to lose their license.”

Calls for regulation by experts like Udwadia, the official says, are silenced, ridiculed, or ignored. Meanwhile, the government has been accused of underreporting the number of new cases of drug-resistant TB every year. In 2011 the official count was 4,200 cases; the next year, the government began adjusting its figures to resemble the WHO’s estimates, and the number of reported cases quadrupled. (Indian health ministry officials did not respond to emails asking for comment.)

In terms of its anti-TB spending, however, the government has been devoting more resources. In 2013 it budgeted $182 million to fight the epidemic.

Some of this money will go toward upgrading the 103-year-old Sewri hospital, which could use it. In its ward for drug-resistant patients, there is no medical equipment in sight; records are kept in rusted metal cabinets. The most pernicious forms of TB are hitting a health-care infrastructure poorly equipped to deal with them.

Every year, more than eight million people fall ill with tuberculosis. More than a million die from it, placing TB just a notch below AIDS in its globe-spanning lethality. And a whopping one-third of the world’s population has what is called “latent TB”: they are infected by the bacteria, and a tenth of them will go on to develop the disease at some point in their lifetimes. Drug-resistant TB, in other words, is just one part of a global health emergency.

Meanwhile, the problem goes ignored in rich countries. Antibiotic treatments for TB have been so successful there that most people’s experience with the disease today is limited to works of literature: novels and poems with archaic references to “consumption” and TB sanatoriums. But that may change someday soon. In the United States, a hundred new cases of drug-resistant TB are diagnosed every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cases of extensively drug-resistant TB have already been reported.

Paul Nunn, the WHO’s TB coordinator, says that these deadly strains have cropped up in certain European countries, too, though the reports have yet to be published. “If the health system of the world fails, the highly resistant strains will replace the old,” he adds. “We’ll see a worsening of the situation if nothing is done.” On the other hand, it may be only when the resistant strains become a major problem in rich countries that the profit-seeking pharmaceutical industry will take notice and pour real money into the development of potent new treatments.

Without effective drugs to combat the most resistant strains, doctors may have to revert to remedies from an earlier era. Udwadia recalls his first patient with untreatable TB. Twenty-six years old, she had spent the last five years trying a variety of anti-TB drugs, all of which had failed. As a last resort, she underwent a pneumonectomy, a high-risk medical procedure to remove a lung. The woman later died of complications from the surgery. The procedure had not been used on tuberculosis patients since the introduction of antibiotic treatments six decades ago.

Even though so many people are infected, TB still carries a terrible stigma in Indian culture. “People treat you with disgust,” Yambhare says. As she grew sicker, she became more isolated. Her sisters were told to stay away. Her friends stopped visiting. Finding a partner or even a job was impossible. She sunk into a depression.

Meanwhile, her family struggled to pay for her treatment. Their monthly household income was just $100—not uncommon in a country where one in three people lives on less than $1.25 a day. But the expensive second-line drugs cost $80 a month. And once she began taking them, the side effects kicked in. Her skin became discolored. Her muscles atrophied. Her weight dropped.

Eventually, Yambhare’s family could no longer care for her. They sent her to the Sewri hospital.

When I visit her in the ward, orderlies are carrying out the infected mattresses of previous patients. In a nearby courtyard, they set the mattresses afire.

Yambhare watches the smoke curl past the window near her bed. Below her, in the courtyard, stray dogs fight over bones.

Yambhare turns to me, an eerie shine in her eyes. “I don’t want to die,” she says through her mask. “I want to go home and help mother.”

Octavio Raygoza is a video journalist who covers sports, news, and culture. Twitter: @olraygoza

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Athens, Greece
News

Fields of Dreams Deferred

Young college-educated workers have struggled to find jobs in the wake of a devastating global recession. In Greece, the European epicenter of the economic crisis, the hardship is on a whole different level: college graduates are giving up on the careers they planned and heading home — to work on the family farm.


Various photos of farmers and the farmers' market in Kalamata, Greece
Photos from the farmers’ market in the Greek coastal city of Kalamata, where veteran farmers sell vegetables alongside college graduates. Young Greeks like Demetra Psonis (above left) had no luck finding jobs after the country’s economy collapsed. Photos courtesy of Eleftheria

In the last several years, stories have abounded in the American press about the struggles of recent college graduates. Unable to find jobs, overeducated young workers end up waiting tables, brewing espressos, and living with their parents. In Europe, the joblessness of the young — long an issue throughout the continent — has become desperate: Spain, for example, now has a youth unemployment rate of 56 percent, 17 percentage points higher than its rate four years ago, with no relief in sight.

And yet Greece — the country worst hit by the recession in Europe — offers a new twist on this woeful tale of well-educated but luckless youth. With no good job prospects, some college grads there are turning to one of the world’s oldest professions: farming.

Foteini Kollias is one of them. Now twenty-five-years old, she graduated with a degree in physical education from the National University of Athens around the time Greece’s economy collapsed five years ago. Unable to get a full-time job in her field, she eventually turned to growing fruit in Nafplio, a seaport town to the southwest of Athens.

Once a week, Kollias makes the hour-and-a-half trip to Athens to sell her fruit in the city’s central market. Over four years of farming, the hard labor has taken a toll on Kollias’s health, leaving her with a meniscus tear in her right knee that gives her constant pain. “Imagine lifting a box loaded with forty-five kilos of cucumbers every day while weighing no more than fifty kilos [110 pounds] yourself,” she says.

It is a grim outcome for a young woman who had been on track to get a well-paid government job before the economic crisis hit. “Torturing my body for so little money and no future prospects really depresses me,” she says.

Of course, youth unemployment is not just a problem for people in rich countries. The global recession has damaged the prospects of young workers throughout the world, and even as economies have recovered, the jobs have not come back. The problem is much worse for those without college educations.

Yet facts like these provide little consolation to young, educated workers like Kollias, whose careers have been permanently scarred by the country’s deep recession, which began in 2008 and has yet to end. Last year, the economy shrank by 6.4 percent. The nation’s unemployment rate currently stands at 27.6 percent, more than twice the average rate in the Eurozone and more than three times what it was when the crisis struck in October 2008. Other countries in Europe have also been beset by severe economic problems in recent years, but Greece has been hit the hardest, becoming the focus of international efforts to stop the spread of its economic ailments throughout the continent’s interconnected market.

There are many reasons given for the collapse of Greece’s economy and the massive unemployment it unleashed. One school of thought argues that huge budget deficits and expensive government benefits — in Greece, excessively generous worker pay and pensions — were at the heart of a crisis accelerated by the global recession. Other economists point to evidence that the economic collapse had more to do with the destabilizing rush of foreign dollars into those rapidly growing economies. Regardless of why it happened, the damage is clear: In 2004, Greece’s national debt was 99 percent of its GDP. Last year, it was 157 percent.

In Greece itself, much attention has been focused on political mismanagement. According to one popular account, one-party governments led alternately by the center-right New Democracy party and the center-left PASOK spread a pandemic of corruption and incompetence within a nepotism-plagued public sector, which had been growing unsustainably up until the crisis. Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs helped the government to fudge statistics and conceal its rising debt levels from European regulators. Meanwhile, the allure of fast money had eroded ethical standards in the country to the point that tax evasion became rampant.

Amid the country’s recent decline, it is difficult to remember the Greece of the fifties, sixties, and seventies — a period called the “Greek economic miracle” — when the country’s economy was roaring. Occupied during World War II and devastated by the civil war that followed, Greece began its rebuilding in the fifties with an ambitious campaign to “urbanize” its rural communities. En masse, Greeks living in the countryside moved to the expanding concrete landscape of the cities, rapidly expanding the workforces and consumer markets to be found there. The Greek “miracle” ended in the seventies, but healthy economic growth continued over the next few decades — until 2008.

Vassilis Psonis poses at his stall in the farmers' market
Vassilis Psonis sells vegetables that he and his sister grow on their family’s farm. After he graduated from a cosmetology school, Vassilis couldn’t find work and didn’t have the funds to start his own business. Stav Dimitrοpoulos

Now the same process seems to be happening in the other direction, as young urbanites dash back to the fields. According to a survey conducted for the country’s Ministry of Rural Development in the populous counties of Attica and Thessaloniki, 68 percent of respondents — representing over one million Greeks, in a country of just ten million — are considering leaving the city. Two-thirds of them are college graduates, and a majority of them under the age of forty. Nineteen percent of those surveyed said they have already initiated their moves.

The Greek press likes to call the country’s legions of unemployed young workers its “Lost Generation” — a term also used in the US and UK, among other countries, to identify their own struggling youth. It may be hard to compare their experience to that of the iconic Lost Generation of young men and women traumatized by the bloodbath of World War I. That said, these young Greeks have been traumatized by a cataclysm of an economic kind: a massive contraction of the nation’s economy on the order of 20 percent over five years. Their job prospects remain bleak even as the global economy has recovered: youth unemployment — for workers aged twenty-four and under — now stands at 64.9 percent, triple the rate five years ago. (Among those aged twenty-five to thirty-four, the rate is 38 percent, but for those thirty-five to forty-four, it is much smaller — 25 percent — proving that unemployment is wasted on the young.)

Greece, once one of Europe’s rising stars, now looks to be headed in the same direction as Japan during its “Lost Decade” of the nineties — into an age of diminished expectations, with swelling ranks of unemployed youth, and no simple way out of its economic malaise.

In the elegant coastal city of Kalamata, sister and brother Demetra and Vassilis Psonis tend to a stall in the farmers’ market, where their many wares are on display: chestnuts, peaches, tangerines, cherries, onions, cabbages, corn, and a variety of greens. When the recession struck five years ago, Demetra was just beginning her studies at the Technological Institute of Crete, where she majored in accounting. Up until the country’s crisis, Demetra had been confident that she would land a job in a field that — back then — was highly paid and secure. “Trying to find decent employment in the recession turned out to be a wild goose chase,” says Demetra, twenty-three. “I soon ended up working in a cafeteria.”

At the time, Demetra considered moving to a wealthier country in northern Europe to seek out better employment opportunities. But she had no idea about what city to move to, much less how to transplant herself there — even within the borderless European Union, labor is not as mobile as capital. “Going abroad? Where and with whom?” she asks. “I didn’t have to dwell a lot on the decision.” So Demetra ended up returning to her family’s farm in Kalamata. She knew the work well; she had been growing vegetables there ever since she was ten years old.

Her brother soon joined her. Vassilis, twenty-five, had trained to be a hairdresser. But when he graduated from school, he couldn’t find a job, and he lacked the capital to open his own business. Even if he did have a salon, he says, it was obvious then that few people would be paying good money for haircuts in that economic climate.

Like his sister, Vassilis worked the fields of his family’s farm as a child. “I always felt I had an alternative in case things didn’t go as planned,” he says. “I like it. I like everything that involves my hands. I tell myself I hold the hoe instead of the brush.”

Oddly enough, when the siblings decided to return to Kalamata, the people most opposed were their parents. Farmers for life, they and their generation had suffered through the misery of hard manual labor. They had cheered Greek’s meteoric ascent to economic power. They had dreamed of raising future academics, lawyers, and scientists who would lodge their families — and the children and grandchildren to come — within the well-paid professional classes.

“They sacrificed their lives to offer us a good education,” Vassilis says. But when the economy fell apart, those newly minted educations became worthless. And Vassilis, Demetra, and many of their peers headed for the fields — the familiar trend of urbanization played in reverse.

Demetra and Vassilis Psonis stand next to a table of vegetables
Siblings Demetra and Vassilis Psonis inspect the onions they are selling at the farmers’ market in Kalamata. Stav Dimitrοpoulos

The ancient Greek playwrights, who developed the concept of irony, would find much to write about concerning modern Greece’s travails. Older generations of farmers who once exhorted their children to seek out more and more education now find themselves advising the same kids — off the record — to take up farming again to “fill their stomachs.”

And yet Tassos Papaphilis, a thirty-four-year-old farmer, is reluctant to advise anyone, however desperate, to follow his path. Tassos grows crops in Corinth, an hour’s drive west of Athens. He is somewhat of a celebrity in the Athenian market where he sells his fruit, a long-haired jokester who teases and compliments passersby as he implores them — sometimes aggressively — to smell the sweet fragrance of his oranges.

A trade-school graduate, Tassos used to work as an estate agent for a large Corinthian firm, but he lost his job five years ago when the recession annihilated the country’s real-estate markets overnight. Unwilling to leave his birthplace, he decided to take up his father’s profession of farming. These days, he grows oranges, tangerines, and zucchini, and rears hens to sell their eggs.

His father died around the same time that Tassos lost his job. Farming became a way of coping — more than just financially. When plowing the soil, Tassos says, he feels an intimate connection to his dead father.

But his decision to go into farming has not yet paid off with a stable income, in spite of how hard Tassos works his fields. Taking over the family farm was “the biggest self-entrapment of my life,” he insists. Early on, Tassos received a European Union farm loan of 35,000 euros to enhance his business. But the country’s consumers cut back on their spending much more than expected, and with the markets so sluggish, his plans to expand his farming business came to naught. He has yet to repay the loan, and with his payments on it now exceeding his profits, he is doubtful that his crops will ever bring in enough money to do so.

In fact, Tassos is still dependent on his grandmother’s pension to make ends meet. In this regard, he is like a growing number of young Greeks, who, unable to keep up with their monthly rent and bills, have retreated to the family nest, living off the incomes of more secure parents and grandparents.

Now well into his thirties, Tassos knows he cannot start a family when he can barely feed himself. And there is no telling if and when the troika of European and international lenders who now prop up Greece’s economy with loans will decide to pull back, leaving Greece to implode. “The worst is yet to come,” Tassos warns.

Even though his farm is doing poorly, even though he has lost his business career, Tassos the farmer keeps greeting his customers in the market with a smile and a joke. “People are grumpy and sober nowadays,” he says. “Making others laugh is an antidote to depression that comes free of charge.”

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith once observed that unemployment in the days before industrialization was unheard of: “In traditional agriculture it did not exist; there was always work to do on the farms and in the supporting rural services.” During the Depression, he added, “farm employment or farm existence of a sort was the resort of some millions of urban workers in the United States.”

The Great Depression may offer this and other practical lessons for those struggling through the Great Recession. And yet it is also true that farming has become a less reliable last resort for families, with less bread to go around to their many breadwinners.

The rise of huge corporations has transformed the practice of agriculture and drastically lowered prices — and profits. It has become abundantly clear to Kollias, the farmer from Nafplio, how much things have changed. Her parents are both well educated: her mother studied medicine and her father is a mechanical engineer. In their thirties, they chose to become farmers because they valued their freedom, Kollias says. A family farm, back then, could actually support a family. “They worked hard, but their profit was in proportion to their labor hours,” she says. “If you had been eager to devote your body and soul to the land, you could have made good money in the past.”

Not anymore. Kollias puts it bluntly: “My brother, father, mother, and four workers live in the same house and struggle to scrape together a living,” There are no more “happy farmers,” she says — nothing like the yeomen farmers of Romantic poetry and Thomas Jefferson’s writings, tilling the soil and communing with nature — just jaded, overeducated young workers like her, anxious about their unsold merchandise and demoralized about their futures.

In between her trips to the farmers’ market in Athens, Kollias works occasionally as a lifeguard and gym instructor. The jobs pay little, but they help her retain the skills she learned studying physical education in college. When she was a student, she planned to take the civil-service exams and get a government job in her field. But when the crisis hit, the exams were called off. They have yet to be unfrozen. With no one willing to hire her, Kollias continues to grow her fruit.

With the years they spent in college amounting to nothing, and their work in the fields offering diminishing returns, the talents of Greece’s younger generation are being squandered. Who is to blame for the country’s modern tragedy? Kollias is unsure. She believes everybody shares some of the fault, even if she singles out Greece’s politicians for special scorn. “Still,” she adds, “we eat what we sow.”

Stav Dimitrοpoulos would like to thank Eleftheria for the newspaper’s help in finding interviewees and photographs for this story.

Stav Dimitropoulos is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in major US, UK, Australian, and Canadian outlets. A native of Greece, she received the Athens Medal of Honor at the age of seventeen and went on to receive a master's degree. She experimented with journalism along the way, and has been writing ever since. Facebook | Twitter: @TheyCallMeStav

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Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
News / Photo Essays

All I Know Is Here

Best of In The Fray 2013. Raised in small-town Minnesota, college student Shelby Wolfe traveled to Ethiopia to shoot images for a documentary about poverty. There she met Rahel, a fourteen-year-old girl orphaned by AIDS.

By Scott Winter
Photos by Shelby Wolfe

She was shy, and that’s what drew aspiring photojournalist Shelby Wolfe to her. Her name was Rahel Nunu. Fourteen years old and hidden beneath a green scarf and brown skirt, she lived in a compound in Addis Ababa for Ethiopian children turned into orphans by the AIDS pandemic. Living HIV positive in a country where the disease is so stigmatized had taught Rahel the value of discretion. It was May, the hottest month in the Horn of Africa, but she insisted on covering her arms with the scarf: her skin had erupted with rashes and sores, side effects of the powerful antiviral medications she took. Today she’d also skipped school, not wanting to take the risk of her condition being scrutinized by her classmates, who didn’t know her secret.

A child swings from a rope
Inside the AHOPE compound for HIV/AIDS orphans in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Shelby, a college freshman from small-town Minnesota, was visiting the compound as part of a photojournalism fellowship. She gravitated toward Rahel the moment she met her. The quietest girl in the orphanage, Rahel was an observer when alone or in groups, keeping her distance from the other children as they crowded around the compound’s TV to watch soccer matches and American music videos. Shelby was quiet herself, and she could relate to Rahel.

Sitting down next to Rahel, Shelby pulled out two sketchbooks and a pile of pencils she’d bought on the street. Shelby knew Rahel could draw. She had recently done well in a local art competition. With pencils or crayons or paint, she would draw the other girls—her sisters, as they called each other—or the beautiful women she saw on TV.

Shelby hoped the sketchbooks might get her to start talking about herself. Without speaking, Rahel drew a mother with the willowy look of a model.

Shelby drew an elephant. “Does my elephant need anything else?” Shelby asked.

Rahel took the sketchbook and added a baby elephant next to Shelby’s elephant, making it a mother.

Rahel stands in front of her painting
Rahel Nunu in front of a painting she made on one of the orphanage’s walls.

Shelby was one of ten students from the University of Nebraska who were visiting Ethiopia on a three-week fellowship. For the past few years, donors had covered the overseas travel costs for a group of the university’s student photojournalists and videographers and a few of their professors (disclosure: I was one of the professors on Shelby’s trip). There were two conditions. First was that the students use the opportunity to capture Ethiopia’s stories of poverty and help bring about change there. Second was that they show their fellow Americans a new Ethiopia, a different kind of country than the one that Sally Struthers and company had brought to public attention in the 1980s with horrifying television images of famine victims.

Shelby had just twenty-one days to finish her assignment: shoot a batch of photos and videos that would impress her professors and wind up in a documentary and related blog the class was making about poverty in Ethiopia. Shelby needed a subject, and Rahel was the girl she chose. But Shelby didn’t have the reporting experience to get Rahel to open up to her. Shelby’s past work at her college newspaper was something altogether different from documenting a life-and-death issue like HIV/AIDS in Africa—and truth be told, Shelby had struggled to pass her reporting class that spring, right before she left for Ethiopia. She had never done anything like this before.

And then there was the heartbreak of the orphanage. She saw kids curled up on bunks, clutching their stomachs; the toxic medication they took seemed to make them as sick as the disease it was meant to fight. She saw babies, too, sleeping in rows of cribs, as nurses shuttled about the room caring for them. (“They’re our children,” one nurse told her.) For Shelby, the wild swings in emotion were difficult to take. One moment, she was watching kids playing ping-pong and twirling on a tire swing in front of walls painted with Dora the Explorer and Dr. Seuss characters—one of them drawn by Rahel. Another moment, Shelby found herself in the dark office of the orphanage’s assistant director, listening to Addis Bogale’s sobs as she described the most recent death of a child. “You don’t forget them,” Bogale said.

Shelby was overwhelmed by it all. She worried about whether she could handle three weeks in such grim surroundings. And yet she also knew that Rahel, and all her orphan brothers and sisters, didn’t get to leave.

Shelby slid the sketchbooks over to Rahel.

“You can keep those,” Shelby said.

Outside the compound
Outside the compound, located near the Vatican Embassy in a residential area on the city’s west side.

Shelby Wolfe grew up in Minnesota. Her hometown, Owatonna, population 25,000, is the kind of heartland community that urges citizens on its Facebook page to make flag-themed fruit dips—strawberries, bananas, and blueberries—for the Fourth of July holiday. Her family lived an hour’s drive away from the Mall of America, one of the world’s largest shopping centers. As a kid, Shelby danced at an upscale studio. She had the same boyfriend for three years in high school. But she also loved Vietnamese food, especially a dish of grilled pork over vermicelli, and liked going to shows at First Avenue, a music venue where Prince used to play. Inspired by her globe-trotting older sister, she had hiked the Rocky Mountains and backpacked through Germany.

Shelby went off to college at the University of Nebraska. Away from home, Shelby pierced her nose. She started hanging out in coffeeshops. She became obsessed with her photojournalism class, to the point her other grades dropped and she had to do some explaining to her parents.

But that passion for photography also brought her to Ethiopia. The orphanage is funded by AHOPE for Children, a nonprofit based in Virginia. On her first day there, Shelby and her professor met with assistant director Bogale, who walked them through the part of the compound for younger children and then to a nearby group home. Bogale’s creation, the group home was a new project to integrate the children into the community so that AHOPE could get rid of the orphanage altogether. But that dream was a generation in the making.

Then Bogale brought them to another part of the compound, where Shelby met the teenage orphans. Sitting alone in one corner, watching the other girls watch music videos on the TV, was Rahel.

Rahel watches
Rahel watches other children play basketball.

Addis Ababa is a modern city, only a century old. The capital of Ethiopia, it houses the headquarters of the African Union and is also known for being the home of beloved twentieth-century emperor Haile Selassie, known as Ras Tafari, who became the muse for the reggae movement half a world away.

Shelby saw little of the city. She spent each day at the compound. Nights, she met up with the other nine student photographers and three instructors, and together they critiqued the day’s photos. Those sessions were often as stressful for Shelby and her fellow students as the orphanage itself.

The group looked over the photos on Shelby’s laptop of Rahel sitting on her bed, watching TV, and showing off her artwork. It was clear to everyone that Shelby had some good shots, but she didn’t have a story.

Shelby was growing anxious. She didn’t have many days left. Her professors told her to keep shooting photos. Keep changing perspective. Keep asking questions. Shelby threw herself into the work, getting absorbed by the technical aspects of her craft. She kept telling herself that the story wasn’t about her. She should quit focusing on her own fears. What were they compared to Rahel’s? This girl wasn’t with her family—though she had one out there somewhere, unlike many of the girls in the compound. Not even the teachers at her school knew about her HIV. Being an orphan was enough of a stigma; she didn’t need the kids to know the rest.

Rahel & friends path to school
Rahel and her AHOPE sisters walk to school, where only one teacher knows that the children are HIV positive.

One morning, Shelby followed Rahel to her school, where the staff put Shelby in front of all the kids and gave her a microphone to explain who she was and why she was there. The students lined up to meet her one by one. Then they lined up again to give her pink, orange, and white flowers. “Miss, I love you,” one girl said to her with a smile. The students giggled and begged Shelby to take their photos.

No, she could not fail at this.

One day at the orphanage, Shelby sat on the ground while Rahel rocked in a swing. Names of the world’s cities, countries, and landmarks were written in chalk on the walls of the compound. Rahel asked Shelby about the Coliseum in Rome. Shelby’s sister had been to India, and Rahel asked about how beautiful the country was. Rahel said she’d seen New York in a movie and wanted to see it for real.

Shelby asked her if she knew anyone who had visited other countries. Rahel said some of the other children had been adopted by families in the United States.

“Does that make you sad?” Shelby asked.

“Yes, but other children come.”

Rahel had been in the orphanage since she was five. Every child there, she told Shelby, was part of her family. “All I know is here,” she said.

Rahel and her friends laugh at the boys.
Rahel and her friends laugh after making fun of some boys.

“I realized this is their life and these kids are making the best of it,” Shelby told me later. “I couldn’t imagine not having a family. But at the same time it was really touching that they are each other’s family.”

Her time with Rahel made Shelby think about how fortunate she was. Shelby is close to her older sister, who is always up for going with her to concerts and hikes and bonfires. She has a dad who is a periodontist and a mom who works at a pharmacy, and they lovingly take care of all her needs—from the Ford Focus she drives, to her out-of-state college tuition, to all the dance costumes in her closet.

Rahel had none of that. She could only rely on her “family” at the compound—assuming her sister-friends didn’t leave for a home of their own. When she prayed, Rahel said, she prayed for everyone at the orphanage. She prayed for the many mentally ill among the city’s street people.

“What do you pray for yourself?” Shelby asked.

Rahel said she’d ask God to help her help others. She’d ask to go to a better place, somewhere with a family that would make her their own. God can do anything, she said.

Rahel smiling on the van
Rahel and her AHOPE sisters on the van taking them to field day at the Worldwide Orphans Complex.

Near the end of Shelby’s time in Ethiopia, Rahel and her classmates went on a trip. AHOPE and some of the other local orphanages had organized a soccer tournament, and the girls were set to play matches against the other orphanage teams—some with HIV and non-HIV kids, some with no HIV kids. As they rode to the soccer field in a red passenger van, the girls were noticeably giddy, happy to leave the compound for something other than school. In her field notes, Shelby described what happened next:

The girl sitting next to Rahel began vomiting into a narrow crevice between her seat and the doorway. The laughter and singing stopped, replaced with the sound of violent heaving.

Rahel placed her hand on her sister’s back, but her eyes were peeled forward, and her smile was gone. She handed the girl a tissue to wipe her mouth. The girl was embarrassed and turned to Rahel to say thank you. Rahel smiled slightly at her and withdrew her hand, collapsing it into her lap like it was too heavy for her to hold up on her own.

The van ride was silent for the rest of the way to the soccer fields, where they would face hundreds of other children who do not know they are HIV positive. It was as if they had forgotten, and then been reminded, of the burden they hold trying to hide their status from the world.

When they arrived at the sports complex, the girls put on their best game-faces and stepped out of the van one by one. They stuck together as they walked slowly toward the fields of children already playing.

The photos that day were strong. The van ride. The soccer match. The sidelines. The kids played games, and clapped and sang together. But most striking was an image of shy Rahel, having forgotten momentarily about the camera, dancing with her sister-friends in front of Shelby.

Rahel competes in a race
Rahel and her AHOPE sister, Ruth Tesfaye (middle left), compete in a race during field day.

The fellowship ended, and Shelby completed her assignment. Her professors were pleased. But in her field notes, Shelby was ambivalent. My work and being there for the last two-plus weeks was insignificant and maybe even selfish, she wrote.

When Shelby met Rahel before leaving through the front gate for the last time, she teared up and said, “I’ll see you later, Rahel.” But that wasn’t true.

Rahel said goodbye and waved hesitantly, with a solemn look on her face.

Then Shelby went home.

Scott Winter is an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Shelby Wolfe is a sophomore photojournalism student at the University of Nebraska, where she is a senior photographer at the Daily Nebraskan. In November her project on Rahel will be released in a seven-minute multimedia video. Twitter: @UNL_scottwinter

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News

A Country Doctor

Raised fatherless and poor in a Haitian coastal town, Dr. Jean-Gardy Marius studied medicine abroad thanks to the financial assistance of an American missionary. Now he is leading an innovative, grassroots effort to root out cholera and bring communities in Haiti’s rural north to health and self-sufficiency.


It’s easy to hear about what’s going wrong in Haiti. Search the news about the beleaguered Caribbean nation, and the negativity overwhelms. Cynical volunteers decry the country’s hopelessness. Aid organizations put forward flimsy justifications for their failures. Frustrated Haitians wait for foreign governments to make good on the “build back better” promises they made, with much fanfare, three years earlier, after an earthquake devastated the country. Today, over 350,000 people continue to live in shelters that were intended to be temporary. The ongoing cholera epidemic has claimed more than 8,000 lives, and malnutrition and famine plague the country.

It is not just that Haiti lacks homes to house its homeless, medicines to treat its sick, and food to feed its hungry. Over the decades, the country has been drained of its human talent, too. There are only four doctors, nurses, and midwives in the country for every 10,000 people, and most of them are located in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s densely populated capital. The dearth of trained professionals contributes to some heartbreaking health statistics: seventy out of every 1,000 children in Haiti die before their fifth birthday, and 350 out of 100,000 mothers die in childbirth.

It is against this national backdrop of despair that local stories of Haitian resourcefulness and resolution stand out. Even in some of the country’s most impoverished areas, there are people like Jean-Gardy Marius, a Haitian doctor leading an innovative, grassroots effort to root out cholera and bring communities in Haiti’s rural north to health and self-sufficiency.

Photo of patients awaiting services at the Oganizasyon Sante Popilè clinic.
Photo courtesy of OSAPO

Marius and his humanitarian group OSAPO have worked over the past six years to bring health services to the people of Rousseau, a poor rural community about sixty miles north of Port-au-Prince. When the earthquake struck and cholera spread quickly through tainted water supplies, OSAPO responded by putting up tents to house infected patients, distributing water purification tablets and chlorine, and creating hydration stations for ill people making their way to the hospital — ultimately saving the lives of thousands. OSAPO is now partnering with international aid organizations Oxfam and UNICEF in the country’s north to stem the spread of cholera during Haiti’s hurricane season.

But OSAPO’s efforts go beyond emergency care — and even medical treatment. Marius, who grew up in extreme poverty in a western coastal town, believes that groups like his can provide Haiti’s rural areas with the basic knowledge and resources they need to grow successfully on their own. “Our vision at OSAPO is to improve living conditions,” says Marius, forty-three, whom I interviewed over the phone while he was in Lincoln, Nebraska, in June. “To do that, we have to come up with a good primary health care system. For me, this means education for adults and kids, access to latrines, and healthy drinking water — all the things human beings need to survive.”

After all, the roots of Haiti’s current health crisis go far beyond the 2010 earthquake. The country’s deep and pernicious inequalities have existed since its days as a slave colony, the first one where the slaves revolted and threw off the yoke of colonialism two centuries ago — only to be beset by forced reparations to France, American occupation, and international trade embargoes that stunted its growth from early on. Since then, through brutal dictatorships and corrupt democracies alike, Haiti has struggled to grow its economy in any sustainable fashion, leading to a vicious circle of privation and poor health.

With Haiti’s entrenched poverty in mind, OSAPO has adopted a holistic approach to health care. The group does more than run a health clinic in Rousseau. OSAPO’s staff have trained and deployed health educators into the community to teach people about sanitation, immunization, and family planning. They have dug latrines for 360 families and constructed wells to provide clean drinking water for 2,500 more. They have trained midwives to recognize signs that a particular childbirth might require medical intervention, so that women who live hours away from OSAPO’s clinic will arrive in time to save the mother and child if complications arise.

Photo of an elderly woman awaiting care at OSAPO.
Photo courtesy of OSAPO

The organization’s focus is on helping people to help themselves. At OSAPO’s clinic, patients are charged nominal fees for each service. The fees, Marius says, are about teaching the community about self-reliance and accountability, while also avoiding the corruption that plagues other clinics. Likewise, instead of handing out food, OSAPO’s nutrition program provides seeds and chickens along with agricultural assistance and educational workshops. “You have to put people back to work,” Marius says. “Agriculture is one of the best solutions to help them economically.”

Marius knows something of self-reliance. The oldest son in a poor family, he never met his father and grew up watching his stepfather abuse his mother. After he stood up to protect her, his stepfather threatened him, and Marius moved in with an uncle.

“I took a bus to his house with hope that he could help me get back into school,” Marius says. “But my uncle used me for household labor.”

At the age of thirteen, Marius ran away from his uncle’s home. For a year, he slept and begged on the streets of Port-au-Prince. Then, a friend brought Marius with him to stay with his family in Pierre Payen, a small village in the northwest. When he was fourteen, he got a job assisting Dr. Victor Binkley, an American surgeon working in Pierre Payen. Through him, Marius met an American missionary who supported him financially when he decided to pursue a medical degree.

After studying medicine in the Dominican Republic and Germany, Marius decided — unlike many of his Haitian peers — to return to his country to work as a doctor.

Photo of OSAPO's clinic
Photo courtesy of OSAPO

In 2007, he founded OSAPO, or the Oganizasyon Sante Popilè (Popular Health Organization). After a year of working out of a mobile clinic, OSAPO built a permanent health-care center in Rousseau. Today, OSAPO has a staff of five doctors, nine nurses, and one agronomist; last year, it served roughly 52,000 clients.

OSAPO’s model of charging small fees for its services makes sense even in impoverished communities, says Dr. Kim Coleman, a radiologist from Lincoln, Nebraska, who has been to Haiti five times as a visiting doctor at OSAPO’s clinic. She points out that international aid organizations that step in to provide free services can unwittingly create “beggar economies” that undercut local organizations. “The buy-in from patients is so important,” Coleman says, “You can see the damage done by giving handouts. [Marius’s approach] is better for the people, and makes for better compliance.”

Whether foreign aid creates perverse incentives is a major point of controversy in the development world. In recent years, prominent economists such as Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly have taken opposing views of its effectiveness, while social entrepreneurs ranging from Paul Polak to Muhammad Yunus have argued — to varying degrees — for more market-driven solutions to the problems of poor nations. Perhaps nowhere else is that debate more relevant than in Haiti, which is believed to have more aid groups per capita than any other country except India — as many as 10,000, according to a 2006 report from the World Bank. (During the rule of Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, foreign governments sought to sidestep the corrupt regime — notorious for funneling aid into Duvalier’s personal coffers — by sending their funds to NGOs instead.)

Since the 2010 earthquake, ninety percent of the six billion dollars disbursed to Haiti has been given to international NGOs and private contractors, while less than half a percent has gone to Haitian businesses and locally run organizations like OSAPO. As the group’s partnership with Oxfam and UNICEF makes clear, the two approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive. And yet OSAPO’s supporters argue that its cost-effective, comprehensive, and grassroots approach to development should be scaled up. At the moment, Marius points out, there are not even enough qualified candidates to fill his clinic’s need for trained doctors and nurses. If Haiti’s most educated health-care workers continue to flock to Europe and North America, Haiti will need to keep relying on foreign assistance.

Marius hopes that his example will inspire other Haitian professionals to stay at home and tend to a country that desperately needs their talents. When the aid dries up or the foreign doctors fly off, who will be there to care for the sick?

“I wanted to make something that is strong,” Marius says of his group. And in building that vision, he has made the people of Rousseau stronger.

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Seoul
News

Born This Way

In South Korea, where a Christian minority dominates the country’s culture and politics, fundamentalists are fighting a culture war against their list of abominations: homosexuality, evolution, even Lady Gaga. But one church in Seoul is fighting back, working from within the faith to make it more tolerant — one gay Christian at a time.


The Reverend Daniel Payne, left, at this year’s Korea Queer Culture Festival in Seoul. Payne, who is gay, delivers Sunday night sermons on tolerance and social justice from his church’s house of worship — a Seoul bar. Photo by Rob York

At first glance, the scene seems all too familiar. On the fringe of a gay pride festival, a local church has set up shop. A pastor preaches about homosexuality while his followers hand out Bible passages to passersby.

But look closer. The church is not protesting. The pastor is preaching a sermon of affirmation and acceptance. He is openly gay.

Much like in America, conservative Christianity dominates South Korea’s culture and politics, and there is no shortage of fundamentalist believers who call gay culture an abomination. But as the gay-rights movement has gained traction here in recent years, some liberal Christian congregations have started welcoming members of all sexual orientations, allowing gay Christians — that unlikely but real constituency — to work from within to make their faith more tolerant. One of these churches is the Open Doors Community Church, an activist Christian congregation in Seoul whose members are mostly gay.

Continue reading Born This Way →

Rob York works for a think tank in Honolulu and still prefers communication by Post-it Notes.

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Cleveland
News

The Grapes of Graft

He used to make counterfeit credit cards. Now Mansfield Frazier has embarked on an even more audacious project: launching a commercial vineyard in the middle of a poor, inner-city Cleveland neighborhood.

Story and photos by Karen Schaefer
The Vineyards of Chateau Hough, a new winery launched by ex-convict and entrepreneur Mansfield Frazier in one of downtown Cleveland’s poorest neighborhoods. Frazier has ambitious plans for urban farming in Hough: his next project is tearing down the Victorian house alongside his vineyard so that he can build a cellar greenhouse for growing shiitake mushrooms.

A garden hose snakes across the intersection at Hough Avenue and East Sixty-Sixth Street, in a poor urban neighborhood about a mile east of downtown Cleveland. One end is clamped to a city fire hydrant. On the other end, a gaunt man with a weathered face delivers a steady spray of water to the roots of a grapevine.

Around him, another half-dozen workers, dressed in T-shirts and jeans, are hoeing, clipping, and tying up the tender young grapevines of nearly three hundred plants, stretching wires between sturdy wooden posts to trestle the vines. Most of these workers are members of a nearby halfway house, performing court-imposed community service.

Once a deserted lot, the field where they work now boasts three quarters of an acre of prime Cleveland farmland. On one side is a derelict commercial building, partially obscured by weedy trees. On the other side, paint peels from the wooden siding of a boarded-up, white Victorian house.

Welcome to the Vineyards of Chateau Hough.

In the 1960s, the predominantly black neighborhood of Hough was the scene of Cleveland’s race riots, which left four dead and the city burning. For decades, the neighborhood was in decline. The area still has high crime figures and an average income well below the poverty line. Three years ago the corner lot was an overgrown eyesore, made vacant by the demolition of an apartment building abandoned in bankruptcy.

Then local entrepreneur Mansfield Frazier took over the land. At sixty-nine, Frazier is a stout man, whose salt-and-pepper beard skims the broad planes of his smiling face. He is self-educated, a Cleveland native, and a former convict (he prefers the term “formerly incarcerated”). And he is the visionary behind Chateau Hough, a vineyard in the inner city.

His personal story has traced much the same trajectory as downtown Cleveland’s over the past few decades: working-class life disrupted by a descent into lawlessness and poverty, followed by a slow recovery and reorientation toward new, less conventional livelihoods. Frazier grew up about a mile from Hough. He got married at seventeen (much too young, he admits). After high school he got a job with the local electric company. He aced the entrance exam, only to be put to work cleaning toilets. “I worked my way up to be the top welder on the steam line,” says Frazier, “but they would never promote me. They wanted me to train other guys less qualified, to promote past me. And it got very aggravating after a while. I was about to go postal.”

Mansfield Frazier.

After the 1966 race riots tore apart the area, Frazier left Cleveland and began a twenty-nine-year career in counterfeiting. “I manufactured what are called counterfeit access devices, which are credit cards. And I did that all over the country,” says Frazier. “I didn’t mean to be a criminal, I meant to be an outlaw. There’s a difference, you know. Outlaws live outside the law. I didn’t have much respect for American law, because it wasn’t treating people fairly.”

The authorities failed to see the distinction. Frazier says he was never caught, but he was turned in more than once by fellow criminals and served several sentences in various prisons. But in 1992, his life changed while he was working in a prison library. “I was a tutor in math and English and I was reading an article by William Raspberry,” says Frazier, referring to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist (Raspberry, who wrote about social issues such as race and poverty, died in July). “And I thought he was alright, but he was speaking from wealth — he’d never lived in the projects. So the other clerk said, ‘You think you can write something better?’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah!’ So on a dare, I started writing.”

While in jail, Frazier wrote and published From Behind the Wall (Paragon House, 1998), a commentary on crime, race, and the underclass. The book came out just a few days before his release. Frazier says that’s when the prison psychologist asked him a question: once he got out, was he going to go back to counterfeiting “and make everything in that book a goddamn lie”?

“That stopped me in my tracks,” says Frazier. “I felt like I’d been hit by a two-by-four.”

Frazier decided to see if he could make a success at something other than crime. After his release, he spent some time helping to build houses. Then he launched into his career as a writer. He got a job working for Cleveland’s black newspaper, the Call & Post, and later moved to the City News. He started Reentry Advocate, a bimonthly magazine that now appears in state and federal prisons in twenty states across the nation. These days, his essays on politics and race appear frequently in the Daily Beast, and he also writes a column for a local online magazine, CoolCleveland.com.

Thomas Mulready, publisher of CoolCleveland.com, admires Frazier for his fearlessness. “He’s not afraid to tackle taboo subjects,” Mulready says. “He says things other people aren’t saying.” In a recent commentary on the site, Frazier proposed that Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach who was convicted of child sexual abuse, should commit suicide.

“I’m a provocateur,” Frazier admits. “I take contrarian points of view. And my background gives me a unique perspective that a lot of people might not have.” Comments about Frazier’s essays show up in almost every issue, Mulready says. “People do disagree with him. But he’s unusual — he often comes back and corrects himself and evolves his position.”

But after years in jail, just writing about social ills wasn’t enough for Frazier. He wanted to do something more tangible to change his community — to help “recreate the black middle class,” in his words. When he got out of prison, Frazier settled down in Hough. He built his own house there and stocked it with vegetable beds, a grapevine, and nut trees. Then he began work on another of his ideas.

An Oasis in a Food Desert

Frazier thumbs through a copy of his magazine Reentry Advocate, which seeks to keep ex-convicts from landing back in prison. After years in prison for counterfeiting credit cards, Frazier became a successful journalist and is now embarking on a new career as an urban farmer.

Across the Rust Belt in recent years, in the empty lots of cities like Cleveland and Pittsburgh, Youngstown and Detroit, urban gardens have been sprouting like spring mushrooms. Generally speaking, urban agriculture is nothing new. In her book Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution, journalist Jennifer Cockrall-King points out that urban gardens flourished during World War II: at one point, 40 percent of the nation’s vegetables were grown in these “victory gardens.” (In comparison, local foods expert Brad Masi estimates that today’s urban gardens in greater Cleveland produce about 1 to 2 percent of local food consumption; in cities like Chicago, it may be as high as 5 percent.)

What is perhaps different about today’s urban farms is the focus on reclaiming tracts of land in blighted downtown neighborhoods and planting viable businesses on them. And while the movement is still small, a number of trends in recent years have converged to support it. Against a backdrop of growing interest in climate change and pesticide-free produce, books such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma and documentaries such as Food Inc. have extolled the environmental virtues of locally grown, small-scale agriculture. Urban farming projects have gained national exposure with the success of pioneers like Will Allen, a former professional basketball player and MacArthur “genius grant” recipient who heads one of the country’s largest urban agriculture programs in Milwaukee. Meanwhile, the mortgage crisis that set in motion the Great Recession five years ago has brought about an abundance of available land, as abandoned homes and cratering real estate values have made it affordable to farm again on entire city blocks.

Mansfield Frazier was one local entrepreneur who saw an opening. In 2009, as his city was still reeling from the recession, he applied for an initial $18,000 grant from Reimagining Cleveland, a citywide program designed to support sustainability projects that rebuild neighborhoods. Frazier’s idea was to start a farm on an abandoned city lot. It was not just about making money, he says, but about providing food alternatives in a low-income neighborhood with plenty of fast food, but few healthy options — what experts call a “food desert.”

“What you see young mothers putting in their grocery carts is appalling,” says Frazier. “You’ve got to make healthy choices. You can’t raise kids off of Twinkies and that sugary fruit punch.”

A vineyard was the first stage of Frazier’s plans for his nonprofit farming venture. He admits he didn’t know much about wine when he started (“I’m an expert — at taking the cork out of the bottle”). But Frazier won over his skeptics on the grant committee with his personality and passion, and over the past three years he has studied the art of winemaking intensively through his collaborations with local experts, learning enough to start advising other would-be vintners in the city. “Can’t be that hard, it’s the world’s second-oldest profession,” Frazier jokes. “Grapevines have been around forever. The great thing is, you can screw them up and they still come back.”

Frazier shows one of his workers — also a former inmate — how to tie up some grapevines. Many of the vineyard’s workers are ex-offenders from a nearby halfway house who are performing court-ordered community service.

Neighborhood Progress, a Cleveland nonprofit that funnels federal dollars into local urban agriculture projects, boasts of Frazier’s vineyard as one of their biggest success stories. “His vision is huge — and it’s long-term,” says Lilah Zautner, the organization’s program manager. “He practices what he preaches, he walks the walk. For him to say ‘I want to put a winery and a vineyard in the middle of the inner city in the Hough neighborhood’ is an amazing vision. But also not just to have that vision, but to systematically make that happen.”

The grant from Reimagining Cleveland provided Frazier with the start-up capital for his farm, but local government has also helped him build that: as part of its land-bank program, the city of Cleveland is letting him use the lot virtually for free, so long as he pays the property taxes. Since his business is nonprofit, donations provide the rest of his funding, and local volunteers help out in the fields. And thanks to an agreement with a nearby halfway house, most of the vineyard workers are ex-offenders performing unpaid community service.

“It gives me a chance to mentor,” Frazier says. “We talk when we’re working. Guys say, ‘I’m going to get out, going to get me a dope bag.’ And I say, ‘That didn’t work too well last time. Maybe you want to think about doing something else.’”

Now that the winery is in business, Frazier is moving ahead with plans to expand his urban farm. “That building we intend to do fish-farming in,” he says, pointing at the decaying commercial building next to his lot. “The county wants to give me that building also. They don’t own it, but they’ll take it from the owner; it’s a blight. So we’ll do them a favor and save them from the taxes.” Likewise, Frazier is paying off someone else’s $1,600 tax bill in exchange for the sagging Victorian house on the other end of his vineyard, whose basement he plans to convert into a bio-cellar, a semi-subterranean greenhouse that will be covered with a twenty-foot-high roof of plexiglass. There he’ll grow shiitake mushrooms for local restaurants (they’re selling now for $20 a pound, he notes). Across the street on another vacant property, Frazier sees a vegetable garden whose produce will go to area food banks.

In Hough, the supply is certainly there to meet the demand. Over the last decade there has been some reinvestment in new condominiums and private housing, but much of the neighborhood is still in disrepair, with land bank-owned boarded-up houses and vacant lots. (Overall, Cleveland has 1,200 acres of land — almost 10,000 city lots — available for projects like Frazier’s.)

Just having an urban farm nearby can shape the ways that people in the neighborhood look at their food, Frazier says. “The goal is to train kids and let them see how crops grow, and you can change their eating habits. I think that’s critically important. We are a very unhealthy nation.” And the presence of a growing, locally owned business in Hough will make the community healthier in other ways, too. Frazier sees urban agriculture jobs as a good fit for former inmates reentering the workforce — and as a productive outlet for young people as well, “to keep them off the streets and out of prison.”

Workers tend to the vineyard’s grapevines. Frazier plans to lease the abandoned commercial building in the background from Cleveland’s land bank so that he can convert it into a facility for fish farming.

That’s what Frazier means when he talks — with his characteristically heady ambition — about “recreating the black middle class” in Hough. The neighborhood doesn’t need saviors; it needs investors to tap the potential that’s already there — in the soil, and in the people. “I don’t think the neighborhood is in that much need of redemption,” Frazier notes. “I don’t think the neighborhood is bad.”

This fall, Frazier harvested his first crop. He doesn’t have a winemaking license, so he’s invited amateur vintners in the area to come and use his Traminette and Frontenac grapes. Frazier personally prefers sweeter wines, like Riesling or Moscato. But he says he doesn’t care what kind of wine comes from the grapes. He just hopes that one day locals will be able to buy a bottle of Chateau Hough.

“Everybody wants to see what the ground has wrought,” says Frazier. “And it’s impossible to tell — you can’t predict what the wine’s gonna taste like. And I’m getting curious.

“Who knows? I might even make an award-winning wine.”

Karen Schaefer is a freelance writer in Ohio.

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New York
News

The Cajun Cellist

He has played the Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall. He has performed abroad and earned international acclaim. But most days find Sean Grissom, the Cajun Cellist, playing his favorite venue — the streets and subways of New York City.

By Eli Epstein
Photographed by Dana Ullman

The crowds bustle by the rows of vendors that line the Lexington Avenue side of Grand Central Terminal. It is 5 p.m. on a Friday — rush hour — and most New Yorkers scurry past the upscale skincare shops and eateries with unseeing eyes. But as they pass a man on the corner, many do a double take; some stop in their tracks.

It could be his rainbow button-down shirt that draws their gaze, an abstract array of bright-colored shapes that looks like it belongs in a postmodern art museum. Maybe it’s his beaming smile. Or, it could be the large wooden cello he is playing — unconventionally — with the verve and daring of the Texas fiddler he once was, bowing his way through an eclectic set of twangy zydeco numbers and sweet classical arias.

Sean Grissom is the Cajun Cellist. Over his nearly three-decade career as a musician, he’s won his share of fame — invitations to play in Russia and Japan, performances at the Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall. But Grissom maintains that none of these venues are more important to him than, say, a late afternoon set at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, playing for the dreary but appreciative workers heading home. Most days find Grissom in the streets and subways of New York, filling the urban air with his unique mix of classical, jazz, country, swing, and Cajun rock melodies.

“It’s important to be able to play for everybody,” Grissom says. “Underground you’re playing for nine million people in the course of a year.” He has played for well-heeled crowds in the world’s best concert halls, but for the price of a New York subway fare, he says, anyone can listen to him: “It’s the best $2.25 show you’ll see.”

The Underground Scene

At Grand Central, Grissom plays under the auspices of MUNY — or, as he refers to it, “the program.” MUNY, which stands for Music Under New York, was founded in 1985 by the Arts for Transit division of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. It gives selected performers a set schedule every week (Grissom mostly plays at Grand Central, the Union Square subway station, Penn Station, and the Staten Island Ferry Terminal) and an official banner to hang above their setup, which in the subway musician community is treated like gold.

New York’s subways host dozens of performers and musicians, but few of these can gain the MUNY stamp of approval. The program prefers acts that reflect “the people and culture of New York,” says Lydia Bradshaw, the MTA Arts for Transit and Music Under New York manager. The selection process is rigorous. Applications and demo tapes are screened by a committee that includes veteran MUNY performers.  After whittling down the initial pool, the judges invite the remaining applicants for a five-minute audition in Grand Central — what Grissom calls “the cattle call.”  Every year about 200 new acts apply to MUNY. The handful that pass the auditions are accepted into the program, where they’re welcome for as long as they choose to keep playing.

Grissom constantly competes for the attention of commuters at Grand Central. As he plays his set, he must ignore the booming train announcements and the incessant clamor of cell phone chatter and scuttling feet. To respect the sound space of the neighboring vendors, Grissom points his amplifier toward the wall. (Thanks to the station’s acoustics, the sound bounces off the marble and proceeds up into the arches, finding its way onto the other side of the vendors.)

Entertaining an audience underground is different than it is on any another stage — and yes, Grissom is adamant that his two- by four-foot space in Grand Central is a stage, just like Carnegie Hall. The main difference, he says, is that playing for a non-captive audience is even more challenging. “You have a ninety-second window to attract somebody — sometimes twenty seconds,” he says. “If you can learn how to grab their attention and distract them for ever a brief moment, then playing for a captive audience, that wants to be entertained, is that much easier. The energy is just there.”

The Cajun Cellist is approaching fifty. He wears his frizzy gray hair in a ponytail; rimless glasses are perched comfortably on his nose. But as he starts another long set at Grand Central, he attacks the strings with youthful gusto. He plays the James Bond theme song with exaggerated arm motions. With the Pink Panther theme, he shifts his torso to the “ba-dump” rhythm. Then, when he plays “America the Beautiful” a few minutes later, his shoulders sway to the same slowed pace of his bow.

Grissom’s set is three hours long, and he doesn’t like to repeat material.

A Cajun on a Subway, a Fiddle on a Cello

Sean Grissom was born in Texas in 1961. He grew up in a conservative household, in a particularly devout part of the state where, as he recalls, “a town wasn’t a town until it had a Baptist church.” When he was sixteen he moved to New York City. Grissom originally followed his cello teacher to New York, but a few years into his music studies, he began questioning his career choice. He enrolled at the Pratt Institute and earned degrees in painting, graphic design, and musicology. In college he would lug his classical cello outside Lincoln Center to play for change.

Grissom later enrolled in a graduate music program at Hunter College, part of the public City University of New York system. The program allowed him to work with teachers at other schools, and Grissom studied under Channing Robbins, a Juilliard professor. (“I got a Juilliard degree for a City price.”)

During his years in school, Grissom would return home to Texas on his breaks. It was then that he melded his Cajun roots with his classical cello education. “I found a fiddle teacher and I memorized more fiddle tunes in one summer than I had classical songs in my entire life,” he says. “Classical music for me was always notes on a page, whereas I had a knack for fiddle music.” Grissom was playing fiddle tunes on his cello — much to the chagrin of his teachers in New York, who told him to stick to the “three Bs” — Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven.

In 1983, Grissom got his hands on an old cello from the 1920s. “I looked at that thing, and I said … ‘I want to hotrod that.’ So I made it electric.”

Over the next two decades, Grissom played his electric cello as a member of numerous New York bands, including an Irish rock band. He did solo performances in the subways and at local hospitals. He even managed to bring his souped-up cello onto the grand stage of the New York punk scene.  “I used to lay down bass lines and solo lines at CBGB,” he says, proudly.

Nearly twenty years later, Grissom still uses the same homemade instrument. Despite its sonorous qualities, his electric cello has an antique, rustic quality to it. Its oaky color has faded over years of use. Its uneven and beaten edges confirm its salvaged beginnings. But Grissom loves his instrument and even dresses it for the occasion. He adorns its belly with a large polka-dotted handkerchief — what he calls his subway shmata (Yiddish for “rag”), used to catch cello varnish before it smears his clothing. On top of the instrument’s scroll he places a coonskin tip.

Many commuters have no idea that the ramshackle piece of wood and strings he is playing is actually a high-functioning electric cello. They gape at his strange instrument and his outlandish clothing. At this point in his career, Grissom is unfazed by crooked glances. In fact, he openly welcomes inquiries from passersby.

Grissom repeatedly insists that he doesn’t play for the money. He likes it when his listeners put cash in his black tip cap, but he prefers when they take his business card. A pile of cards sits directly to the left of his tip hat, next to a stack of his CDs (Grissom has self-produced ten records, with a classic rock album on the way). He calls his business cards “seeds” — they are how onlookers find out how to schedule him for private shows. One time, a commuter took his business card on the subway. The man moved to San Francisco. Five years later the man returned to New York and happened to find the card, and hired Grissom to play at a friend’s birthday party.

Playing on the subway makes him a better musician, Grissom adds. He says he doesn’t measure his day by the content of his tip hat, but by the quality of his performance. Did he incorporate audience interactions into his set? Was his closing number as sharp as his opening piece? Did he work in new material? “If people aren’t into what I’m doing, then I can just practice for myself to maintain my level of play,” he says. “That’s why the subway is in between a rehearsal and a performance.”

This week, MUNY has assigned Grissom to play a noon to 3 p.m. set at the Union Square subway station, right above the entrance to the N, Q, and R trains. He is happy with the new venue. At Grand Central, which he likens to a more formal cocktail hour gig, Grissom prefers not to bring his electric cello, which is too noisy for the confined space and disturbs the surrounding vendors. At Union Square, though, he sees more possibilities for experimentation and funk. The greater socioeconomic diversity of Union Square subway riders makes a difference, he says. “Union Square has a rock-club environment. It’s more indicative of subway travelers, with the L-train hipsters. The crowd is much more spontaneous.”

As a nod to the less conservative atmosphere, today Grissom has added shiny purple shoes and a black-and-yellow bow tie to his outfit. His set list has also taken on a markedly different shape than the one he played at Grand Central the previous Friday. Now, with his electric cello, he jams away to a veritable classic-rock hit list. There’s “Baba O’Riley” by the Who, “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd, and “Sweet Jane” by the Velvet Underground.  The set is lively and leans heavily on Grissom’s fiddle background. At times he frantically bangs his bow against the cello’s body. Throughout the performance he bobs his head up and down with the beat.

As the Cajun Cellist plays his set in the subway station, a woman walks by warily, staring at his handmade instrument with a confounded gaze.

“It’s a cello!” Grissom yells out to her, over the screech of the train.

Video: Sean Grissom Plays in New York’s Union Square Subway Station

Eli Epstein is a freelance writer in New York City. His work has appeared online in the Atlantic, Fortune, and Esquire.

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Saving Souls

Home to one-third of the world’s poor, India attracts hundreds of Christian humanitarian groups seeking to do God’s work in its slums and hinterlands. But while these groups make up in vital ways for the failings of government and markets, their work comes with a consequence: conversion.


On a sun-kissed Saturday morning in March, Rahul Kumar whips through a squalid Delhi neighborhood, his ashen buttoned-down shirt tucked into his dress pants and thick black hair gelled back from his forehead. He is headed to the Sanskar Centre, a bare, one-room school run by a Christian nonprofit in the city’s Shahbad Dairy slum. Every day, Rahul walks to the schoolhouse for his lessons, the best education to be had for many of the district’s poor migrant families.

Just twelve years old, Rahul is already a leader among the neighborhood children, who flock to his side as he walks, eager to embrace him. Though short for his age, he has an outsized ambition: one day, he says confidently, he will dance in Bollywood’s biggest productions. But first, Rahul says through a translator, “I need to get a job to help my family. I need to study hard.”

Rahul’s family moved to Delhi from northern India several years ago, lured by the prospect of a better life. But the situation for Shahbad Dairy’s 100,000 residents is overwhelmingly grim, their opportunities circumscribed by severe, endemic poverty. While some parts of the district enjoy government support—a public school, a maintained latrine, a health care center—most of the slum’s inhabitants live in jhuggis, or slum dwellings, without running water or proper sanitation. A thick expanse of garbage and sewage surrounds the slum and is patrolled by scavenging children and feral pigs alike.

“[Shahbad Dairy] has the dynamics seen in every ghetto or slum,” says Alfred Gnanaolivu, special projects director for Cooperative Outreach of India (COI), the Christian group that runs Rahul’s school. “You have turf warfare. You have the influence of drugs and alcohol … Unfortunately, the main victims are the children.”

A nongovernmental organization, COI works extensively in Shahbad Dairy’s slum blocks, offering clean water, food, and education to local families. Children account for 50 percent of the district’s population, Gnanaolivu notes. That’s where COI—along with the hundreds of other faith-based NGOs operating in India—can have an impact: educating the children of impoverished families that are neglected by the Indian government.

But like many NGOs working in India, COI has a slant. It provides the 500 children enrolled in its schoolhouse an education—but with evangelical undertones. Young boys and girls recite Christian hymns during class, not conscious that they are being indoctrinated. Their faith-driven education is reinforced by COI’s pastoral care workers, or religious counselors, who help the slum’s families with their economic and personal problems using a Christian form of therapy. COI says this “results in transformation of the communities.”

Rahul posing in front of the brick wall of his home
Rahul Kumar, twelve, outside his home in the Shahbad Dairy slum in Delhi, India.

While Shahbad Dairy’s families—most of which are Hindu and from India’s lower or scheduled castes—are aware of the Christian sculpting, they believe that COI is giving their children a better chance at life. And as their relationship with their Christian benefactors deepens, some families are even converting.

“Very often, children are lured in the name of providing [a] good education,” says Chandan Mitra, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) representative in India’s upper house of Parliament. “They don’t understand very often why they have become Christians until they are older.” Religious conversion is banned in many Indian states, but the laws are “violated frequently,” Mitra adds. (In Delhi, conversion is legal.)

Of course, proselytizing Indians is not a new phenomenon. Christianity has existed in India for centuries, and Protestant missionaries have been working in Delhi since the early eighteenth century. Today, Christianity is India’s third-largest religion, with approximately twenty-four million followers.

What is different today is the growth of a politically independent, economically powerful India, a rising nation of a billion-plus people that has become more comfortable asserting its culture. In India (and Indian America) today, there is a willingness now to question the outside influences that for many years were tolerated as the price of doing business. Meanwhile, India has become home to roughly a third of the world’s poor, according to World Bank data. As a result, the country is a magnet for humanitarian aid organizations, many of them Christian.

The conversion of destitute Indian families to Christianity enrages many Indians, and on blogs wild accusations fly that Christian NGOs are committing “culture murder” in India. Mitra—whose Hindu nationalist party is one of India’s two major political forces—takes a more evenhanded stance. Christian NGOs may be indoctrinating children with Christianity, he says, but they are also educating and feeding an entire community that would otherwise remain overlooked.

For its part, COI believes that its religious message helps break down some of the barriers that keep Shahbad Dairy’s residents in poverty. “The caste system has dehumanized human beings,” says Ramesh Landge, COI’s executive director. “We need to help these children, give them a reason to live, and provide them with a childhood.” Among “the few hundred families that have adopted our changes, our teachings,” Landge adds, “we’ve seen success.” He notes that before COI began working in the slum, none of the children had birth certificates, making it nearly impossible for them to enroll in government schools.

Donald Miller, a professor of religion and sociology at the University of Southern California, points out that the evangelical Christian organizations working in India today tend not to fit the colonial-era stereotypes: brazen missionaries coming over to save souls by any means necessary. “Conversion by these groups is more often a side effect as opposed to a direct, manipulative attempt to indoctrinate people,” says Miller, who studies the social ethics of religion. It’s not that they don’t want to see conversions take place. But today’s faith-based humanitarian work, particularly by evangelical organizations, “has much more language about partnership and shared goals,” he says.

Before it was a slum, Shahbad Dairy was cattle country, settled by a Hindu Haryana community of dairy farmers. In 1987, the Indian government ceded a small parcel of land to the local inhabitants to build slum dwellings. Today, most of the shanties in Shahbad Dairy are illegal. Their occupants are immigrants from across India, who left their villages to find work in the sprawling city of Delhi, India’s second largest.

Rahul’s family is originally from Uttar Pradesh, a state about 500 miles to the north. His mother, Reena Kumar, supports the family by extracting the iron from automobile tires to sell as scrap metal. Asked why she moved to the slum, far from her ancestral homeland, Kumar’s response is simple: “To survive.”

The Kumar home in Shahbad Dairy amounts to four scantily constructed shacks, which house Rahul, his mother, and five siblings. A lone television is mounted in the master bedroom, powered by stolen electricity patched in from a nearby power line.

Back from school, Rahul navigates the Indian airways to his favorite Bollywood channel. His brothers, sisters, and friends pack the tiny room, waiting to watch him perform the dance steps.

Gnanaolivu watches the children with a smile. The work that his Christian group is doing, he says, will give children like Rahul much-needed opportunities, so that one day they can achieve their dreams—in Bollywood and beyond. “If they can be given that direction and sustained love … then we can save them.” In the end, it still comes down to saving souls.

Benjamin Gottlieb was previously In The Fray’s art director. Twitter: @benjamin_max

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Freed, but Scarred

Best of In The Fray 2012. When he is feeling overwhelmed, Fernando Bermudez lies down in his son’s bedroom. After spending eighteen years in prison for a murder he did not commit, he finds the confined space soothing. For exonerated prisoners like Bermudez, the struggle to rebuild their lives goes on, long after the reporters and cameras are gone.

By Francesca Crozier-Fitzgerald
Photos by Dana Ullman
Fernando Bermudez at his home in Danbury, Connecticut.

It was dark when Fernando Bermudez stepped off the Metro-North commuter train in Connecticut. He had spent a long day in New York visiting friends and family. As he walked through the parking lot of the Danbury train station, Bermudez looked around with growing horror. He didn’t recognize the street names. The storefronts and intersections were foreign to him.

He was lost and confused, with no idea where to go, sweating and growing more anxious each minute.

It was not because Bermudez had gotten off at the wrong stop. He was less than ten minutes from home. He had walked home from this very train station many times. But tonight he couldn’t remember the way.

Several months earlier, Bermudez had been released from prison after serving eighteen years for a murder he did not commit. Even now, after being exonerated and released, walking alone down the street terrified him. Prison had conditioned him to believe that his freedom did not belong to him.

Half an hour passed. Bermudez was panicking. But he didn’t want to stop a car on the street and ask for help; people might think something was suspicious and call the cops. He was afraid to ask a store clerk for directions; they would be skeptical about why he was walking aimlessly around downtown Danbury.

Finally, Bermudez called his wife, Crystal. He broke down. Here he was, a forty-year-old man, helpless in a place where he had lived for months. Crystal knew he couldn’t have been more than ten blocks away, but he wasn’t able to tell her where he was.

After an hour of being lost in his own city, Bermudez reached a recognizable street sign. His wife walked him home over the phone.

Before he went to prison, Bermudez was a different kind of man. Tall, with amber eyes and a striking smile, he had an easy confidence. Growing up in the Bronx, he was chased by girls, revered by peers, and doted on by his mother. When he was twenty-one, he enrolled in Bronx Community College to study medicine.

In August 1991, one month before he would have started class, detectives arrived at Bermudez’s door. They arrested him for the murder of a boy he’d never met, killed at a nightclub he’d never been to. Bermudez was convicted and sentenced to twenty-three years to life.

Doubts about his conviction remained. Five of the witnesses to the shooting of sixteen-year-old Raymond Blount later recanted their testimony, saying in sworn affidavits that they had been pressured by the police and prosecutors to identify Bermudez as the shooter. After ten failed attempts to overturn his conviction, Bermudez’s lawyers finally succeeded in 2009. In his decision, Justice John Cataldo wrote that there was “no credible evidence” connecting Bermudez to the murder. He was a free man.

The day he walked out of Sing Sing prison, Bermudez was ecstatic. “What was going through my body was an exorbitant amount of palpitations,” he told a New York Times reporter, “joy and happiness to a level that I’ve never known before in my life.”

But Bermudez and his wife Crystal did not anticipate just how hard his transition from prison to ordinary life would be. Like many families of exonerated prisoners, they figured the worst was over. “You had a lot of lawyers who were excited he’s out, you have family members that were excited that he’s out,” Crystal says. “Everyone thinks the problem is over.

“No, the problem’s not over. It just got started.”

Making Up for Lost Years

Fernandoz Bermudez plays with his ten-year-old daughter Carissa and six-year-old son Fernando after picking them up from school.

Since 1989, 289 people have been exonerated using DNA evidence. (Many more have had their convictions overturned through other means.) Their average length of incarceration is thirteen years. These years have been lost. Exonerees are released, but prison has left them incapacitated.

Even getting compensated for the state’s mistake in imprisoning them is far from certain. A report by the Innocence Project, a New York-based legal clinic that exonerates wrongfully convicted individuals through the use of DNA evidence, notes that 40 percent of DNA exonerees do not receive any compensation. Depending on their state, exonerees may have to sue, and the many legal hurdles to overcome, such as proving that intentional government misconduct landed them in prison, mean that only 28 percent of DNA exonerees have won lawsuits.

Even in the twenty-seven states that have enacted laws to offer financial assistance to exonerated prisoners, the process can drag on for years, and the amount of compensation varies wildly — from a lump sum of $20,000, regardless of the time spent in prison, in New Hampshire, to $80,000 per year of imprisonment in Texas. (Under New York’s law, a court decides the amount of compensation on an individual basis.) Only five states routinely give awards that match or exceed the federal standard of up to $50,000 per year incarcerated, and only ten states offer social services targeted at exonerees.

Yet the need is great. “Nobody’s situation is the same,” says Karen Wolff, a social worker at the Innocence Project. “Each exoneree is different. Each exoneree’s needs are different, each exoneree’s state is different, each exoneree’s family situation is different …. So it’s very difficult to figure out what a fix is.”

Nonprofits have tried to compensate for the lack of government help. The Life After Exoneration Program, a national organization, focuses on advocacy and outreach to help exonerees after their convictions have been overturned. Similar groups scattered across the country include Life After Innocence in Chicago, Resurrection After Exoneration in New Orleans, and the Wisconsin Exoneree Network. Exonerees can turn to caseworkers at organizations like these for help with finding jobs, housing, and health care, applying to schools, obtaining driver’s licenses and insurance, and setting up bank accounts.

But the few programs that do exist to help exonerated prisoners tend to be understaffed and underfunded. The Life After Exoneration Program, for instance, had to start turning away clients in 2008, as their funding, which came solely from individual contributions, was too low to support the large pool of exonerees seeking help. “Funding just became impossible,“ says Dr. Lola Vollen, founder of the program. While the program still offers emergency financial help and advises the groups treating exonerees, it no longer provides social services, she says.

Meanwhile, many exonerees are struggling to rebuild their lives. In 2005, the Life After Exoneration Program surveyed sixty exonerees around the country. About half found it difficult to afford basic living needs such as food and housing. Twenty-five percent were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and two-thirds were not financially independent.

Exonerated prisoners cope with the trauma of not only their years in prison but also their abrupt release into a changed world. In telling their stories, I decided not to describe their time incarcerated — a continued source of pain for them, even years later — but instead focused on their reintegration. Like Bermudez, many of these men and women at first underestimate the difficulties they will face adjusting to their newfound freedom, and they are slow to seek help. Sometimes their symptoms appear in the weeks right after their release. Sometimes they show up after months or years.

A Bittersweet Homecoming

Jeffrey Deskovic in the Manhattan office of the Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice, which he established after his exoneration.

Jeffrey Deskovic remembers sitting in a courtroom in 1990, his mother’s arm around his back, his hands folded in prayer, as a jury read his verdict. The seventeen-year-old had been charged with the rape and murder of Angela Correa, a friend and classmate at their high school in New York’s Westchester County. Under police interrogation, he had falsely confessed to the crime.

The blood drained from his face as the jury pronounced him guilty. Deskovic was sentenced to fifteen years to life.

In 2006, Deskovic was exonerated, cleared by DNA evidence and the jailhouse confession of the real killer. On his last day in Sing Sing prison, Deskovic cleaned his four-by-four cell, packing up the belongings he had chosen to keep, giving away the rest to his fellow inmates when the guards looked away. He walked out of prison, his home for half his lifetime, with two bags holding everything he owned.

Sixteen years older, Deskovic had a long beard and mustache. The hair on his head had thinned.

Deskovic’s first night home was not what he had expected. As he talks about it, his eyes become glassy and he takes many long pauses. “I wish I could say that I came home to a huge party with all my relatives, and lots of food and lots of dancing,” he says. “But that would not be the truth.”

Home at last, Deskovic sat at a table with his mother, aunt, and cousin. This was their first real chance to talk, an opportunity to start renewing the relationships that had frayed over those years of incarceration. But no one had anything to say. Deskovic realized that he knew his fellow inmates better than he knew these people.

In the back of his mind, Deskovic heard a faint voice telling him, “You don’t belong here.” He stood up from the table and walked out to the backyard. “I had wanted to sit down and feel the air and not have someone tell me to go back in,” Deskovic recalls. He lay down on a bench and went to sleep. “And that was how I spent my first night.”

After several days, Deskovic had to leave his aunt’s home and find his own place. The initial elation of being out of prison had given way to the anxiety of being without a home, job, or car. Deskovic immediately applied for compensation from the state of New York, but there was a long wait. Meanwhile, the stress was getting to him. He felt he was going to have a breakdown. Desperate, he called the Life After Exoneration Program. He told them he needed therapy. The woman on the other end of the line informed him that they couldn’t help him. The program had stopped taking new cases.

Had Deskovic been an ex-convict, rather than an exoneree, he may have found it easier to get help, advocates say. For felons released on parole, state parole systems keep watch to ensure that their reentry into the outside world is smooth and efficient. Government grants go to nonprofits that assist ex-offenders, such as the Fortune Society, a New York-based social service and advocacy organization that helps former inmates find housing, job training, addiction counseling, and psychiatric services.

The availability of these programs for ex-convicts makes a difference in terms of reduced rates of recidivism and other positive outcomes, advocates for exonerated prisoners say, and they would like to see the same levels of government funding extended to their programs. Some reentry programs for former inmates cover exonerated inmates as well, but the wrongfully convicted need their own programs, Vollen argues. Her organization’s nationwide survey of exonerees found that exonerees did not want to be treated like ex-cons. “They wanted to be acknowledged for what their experience was,” Vollen says. “And they wanted services with people that were confident with dealing with the type of circumstances that they had.”

To pull himself out of his financial hole, Deskovic eventually turned to another program for exonerated prisoners: the Innocence Project’s Exoneration Fund, which assists exonerees in need of immediate income assistance upon release — which is most of them. The fund covers necessities such as food and utility bills, and provides a stipend to help pay for medical or psychological treatment. Currently, the fund is able to provide each exoneree with $10,000 to $15,000 during their first year after release, and a lifetime of counseling assistance. While he waited for the state of New York to compensate him for his wrongful conviction, Deskovic lived off this financial support.

A Stolen Identity

Kian Khatibi at Manhattan’s Dorian Gray Tap and Grill, where he works as a server and event promoter.

Yet private-sector efforts can only go so far in filling the gaping holes in the safety net for exonerated prisoners, advocates say. Karen Wolff of the Innocence Project argues that government could do more to meet the needs of people who were in jail for no fault of their own — for one thing, by offering them housing, health insurance, income assistance, and food stamps immediately upon release.

On an even more basic level, many exonerees leave prison without the kind of official paper trail they need to restart their lives in today’s society. “Some of that stuff can be done for them by the government right away, so they have it and they don’t have to wait months and months and months without, literally … an identity,” Wolff says. Yet because of bureaucratic carelessness, many exonerees end up unable to open a bank account right away, she adds, because they don’t have any identification other than their prison ID.

Some of them don’t even get that.

Kian Khatibi served nine years in prison for a near-fatal stabbing, framed by his brother, who later confessed to the crime. In 2008, Khatibi’s conviction was overturned and he was released from the Hudson Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Before they put him on the bus home, corrections officers stripped him of his prison photo ID. They told him that it was “state property.”

Back in his hometown in Westchester County, Khatibi visited the local welfare office. He explained his situation, but the staff there demanded some form of identification before they could help him. Khatibi went to the DMV to apply for a driver’s license, but he had no way of proving his identity there, either. All the other benefits and services he needed — Medicaid, bank accounts, credit cards — required a photo ID.

After his release, Khatibi spent weeks tracking down old files and painstakingly reconstructing his legal and financial identity. Meanwhile, he walked around with whatever cash he had in his pocket, storing it under his pillow at night. (One thing Khatibi didn’t have to worry about was housing: his sister let him sleep on her couch.)

The stress and frustration of the constant bureaucratic battles only aggravated Khatibi’s state of constant anxiety — the psychological scarring that had accumulated over almost a decade of being locked up. “Many people come out and say ‘I’m not angry,’ and this and that,” Khatibi says. “But there are certain days where the world is just overwhelming.”

Exonerated prisoners like him “pretty much need therapy,” he adds — “just like people that are coming back from war.”

Khatibi’s caseworker at the welfare office suggested a place to get counseling. It quickly became obvious that group counseling wouldn’t work in his case — how many other people know what it’s like to be wrongfully convicted? — and so Khatibi started seeing a therapist individually.

In therapy, Khatibi learned that he was struggling not only with post-traumatic stress disorder from his prison experience, but also with resentment toward relatives for not supporting him during his incarceration. “We agreed that he had this inner core of anger that he needed to extinguish … to be able to gain some balance in his life,” says Dr. Ross Fishman, his therapist.

Khatibi also needed to shake off his “prison mentality.” Upstate in Hudson, he had developed a hypersensitive survival instinct, which pushed him to react to any perceived danger with an immediate attack. In prison, if someone looked at you the wrong way, the expected response was to assert your dominance — “Let’s settle this” — or face the grim consequences of being perceived as weak. This mentality made perfect sense in the prison courtyard, but it was now making Khatibi impatient and agitated in harmless, everyday situations. One day, he was in a neighborhood deli when the man behind the counter looked at him in a way he didn’t like or trust. It was actually an innocent look, but it triggered an aggressive response from Khatibi. “Is there a problem?” he barked. The store clerk, alarmed, said nothing.

Incidents like this one pushed Khatibi to seek anger management counseling. With his therapist’s help, Khatibi has made substantial progress over the past four years. He graduated from New York University in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in communications. He is currently working toward a law degree at Yeshiva University.

These days Khatibi seems optimistic and at peace with himself, his outward appearance betraying no sign of his incarceration. On a recent visit to his home, a single-bedroom apartment filled with books in the East Village, Khatibi is dressed smartly in jeans and a collared polo shirt. His dedication to exercise has kept him toned and fit. He walks with a calm, steady gait — another goal he has worked steadily to achieve. (When he first left prison, his sisters taught him how to lose the “prison strut”; he knew it wasn’t good for social situations or meeting nice women.) If he tells new acquaintances about his experiences in prison, he is often forced to back up his claims with newspaper articles.

Khatibi recognizes that he is one of the lucky ones. Unlike other exonerees, he is only in his early thirties and has been able to salvage his social life. He dates and socializes with friends old and new. He claims to have made at least one great friend in every one of his college classes.

“I’ve been really blessed,” Khatibi says. “But at the same time, not everybody is like me.” When he left prison, he was lucky enough to link up with effective organizations like the Innocence Project and Innovative Health Systems in Westchester. Other people lack the knowledge or wherewithal to seek out the right kind of help, he adds. “These are the people that are probably really getting lost when they get let out of jail after all this time.”

It makes Khatibi mad that the state hasn’t done more to help exonerees like him. After all, they bear some blame in all this, he says. “It’s not like a freak accident — it’s not like you just got hit by lightning.” The state erred and caused great harm, he points out; they should make up for it. “Why do they kick you out the back and close the door?”

Yet then there are the people like Jeffrey Deskovic, who have suffered so much damage in prison that psychological services and financial boosts don’t seem enough to help them. Khatibi has spoken with him many times, and he worries that Deskovic will continue having a hard time breaking out of his funk.

‘Not Really Participating’

Jeffrey Deskovic on the day of his release in September 2006, surrounded by family and his legal team from the Innocence Project. Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Deskovic.

In a small diner underneath the Parkchester subway stop in the Bronx, Deskovic orders his breakfast in an authoritative tone. “I’ll have the corned beef hash and scrambled eggs, no toast, and bacon. I want the bacon on the side.” Since leaving prison, Deskovic has learned that he must be confident and straightforward to avoid confusion. But even simple interactions can exasperate him. He reminds the waiter, pointedly, of his order. “You heard me say no toast? And I want the bacon on a side plate.” At the end of the meal, he appears frustrated with the service. “This waiter is not going to get a good tip, I’ll tell ya that much,” he grouses. “Service was horrible.”

In some ways, things are looking up for the ex-Sing Sing inmate. After five years of waiting, Westchester County finally agreed to settle his federal civil-rights lawsuit, paying him $6.5 million in compensation for his wrongful conviction. Deskovic is currently working toward his master’s degree at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He has launched his own organization to advocate on behalf of exonerated prisoners, the Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice.

But today Deskovic finds it hard to put up a façade of positive thinking. He is agitated and curt, fixated on his tight schedule of meetings and appointments in the city. As Deskovic talks over breakfast, it becomes clear that more is bothering him than his workload. He is thirty-eight years old, and his life isn’t working out the way he hoped. He is exhausted with the unhelpful therapy sessions, tired of constantly going home to his apartment, feeling all the more discouraged and lonely.

“Sometimes I get really depressed and frustrated just thinking, and I ask myself, you know, ‘Where’s my life going?’” He pauses for several long moments. “Sure, I have my advocacy work and my nonprofit, but my personal life’s a mess. That’s what is really debilitating.”

During the years that he was locked in his cell, most boys and girls his age were falling in love for the first time and forming lasting relationships, he points out. Had he not been imprisoned, “my life would have developed in the normal cycle of life,” Deskovic says. “I would have friends from college, and friends of friends.”

He asks many people, sometimes strangers, what they would suggest he do. He has tried bars, chess clubs, ping-pong clubs, gyms, sports teams, and dating websites. He feels he has exhausted every option. “I still want to throw a ball around, go to a water park,” he says. But no one wants to go with him. “I am trying to put a social life together. How do you do that from scratch?”

On some days the anxiety and depression weigh down on him so much that he can’t bear sitting in his living room alone. He retreats to his parked car, where he will brood for three or four hours, just wondering if he should turn on the ignition. If he does, he is not sure where he would go. There is no place for him to go.

“There’s going to come a time that I’m significantly older and I’m going to realize that there’s not really that much more time to live,” Deskovic says. “And I’m going to regret the amount of time since I’ve been home … that I wasn’t really participating.”

Overwhelmed by the World

Fernando Bermudez with his son Fernando. When he is feeling overwhelmed, Fernando lies down in his son’s bedroom, the smallest in their home. It reminds him of his prison cell.

The transition to civilian life has been hard on Fernando Bermudez, too, but at least he has his family. In the weeks after his murder conviction was overturned, everything was exciting for him. He could finally lie in bed next to his wife, feel the warmth of his young son’s body cuddling on the couch, eat a home-cooked meal.

Eventually, Bermudez and his family moved from New York to Danbury, Connecticut. It was a smaller, more tranquil community, an hour-and-a-half drive from the city. Here, Bermudez would be able to focus on his advocacy work and finish his college education.

Three years after his release, Bermudez does not have a regular job. He completed his bachelor’s degree in behavioral science last December at Western Connecticut State University, and is considering returning for his master’s degree. In the meantime, Bermudez continues to do public speaking about his wrongful conviction at colleges and law schools around the country. He works hard at marketing himself and occasionally brings home checks from his speaking engagements, but it is not a career. He has filed a lawsuit seeking compensation for his wrongful conviction, but is waiting, too, on that outcome.

Bermudez contributes to the family in other ways, such as driving his ten-year-old daughter Carissa and six-year-old son Fernando to school in the morning, washing the car, and shoveling the front walk when it snows. But it is rare that Bermudez can manage all those things in one day. The stress and anxiety accumulate throughout the day and often leave him exhausted. He is not used to the speed of technology. The intricacies of simple household appliances fluster him. He doesn’t understand his children’s infatuation with texting. Driving often makes him very tense, and so Crystal drives for him. She has noticed that even small things, like composing an email, can sometimes push her husband to need a nap. Crystal recalls a family outing to the mall shortly after his release. “We went to Macy’s and he became overwhelmed by trying to find a shirt,” she says. “He didn’t know how to use money.”

His years in prison clearly traumatized Bermudez, who to this day cannot let go of the regimented prison routine. On some days, he leaps out of bed at 5 a.m., ready for the morning count. Wide awake, he paces the room endlessly, just as he used to do in his cell. The only way he can fall sleep again is by placing a T-shirt over his face, just as he used to do in his prison bunk. If Crystal is able to coax him back into bed, she rubs his back and reminds him he is home now.

Because he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Bermudez has difficulty controlling his emotions. Crystal says that at times the confusion and frustration build up to the point that her husband, a grown man, will cry in front of her.

It took Bermudez several months to starting seeing a therapist. “I needed psychological help at first, and nothing was forthcoming,” he says. He didn’t have health insurance and was piggybacking on his wife’s plan to receive temporary counseling. It wasn’t until he became a student that Bermudez qualified for an individual health plan. He still suffers from the same symptoms of PTSD, and occasionally sees a therapist. He says he finds the therapy helpful, and now that he has finished school, he hopes to attend sessions more regularly.

There are days that Bermudez feels great. But on other days, the panic attacks return. Crystal knows when her husband is feeling overwhelmed. He goes to his favorite spot in the apartment, his son’s bedroom, to lie down. “Fernando likes being in that room because it’s small,” Crystal says.

“It’s like he has a prison room with a window — like he’s fortunate enough to have a window.” The confined space soothes him, his wife notes. “He’ll lie here for hours.”

See Dana Ullman’s companion piece, Life after Innocence, for photos of the three men profiled in this article.

Francesca Crozier-Fitzgerald is a freelance journalist and recent graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Currently, she is living in her hometown of Philadelphia.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
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Playing the Streets

Big John plays chess for a three-dollar donation. C bets customers five bucks they can’t beat him. John plays days. C works the chessboard until 5 a.m. John has a family, an apartment, a job. C hustles to survive. These are New York’s street players.


He rocks in his chair from excitement, and it creaks under his weight. Finally, Cameron, a young man who goes only by “C,” moves his white bishop across the board. He takes his opponent’s knight, smashes the button on the timer with the same hand, and taunts, “How you like that?”

The opponent, Big John, calmly takes C’s bishop with a pawn. It is an even exchange in terms of the pieces’ values, but it leaves John in a better position, controlling more of the center of the board. C stares at the board intently, and — for a moment, at least — is quiet.

Big John about to make his move.

C has dark skin, bright eyes, and a neatly trimmed black beard. He is wide around the middle, and his loose-fitting clothes make him seem even larger. Every pound of C is filled with energy. He rattles off his words rapidly, and often berates opponents for poor moves (“What was that, what you thinking?”).

John Hill, forty-nine, who goes by “Big John” or just “John,” is a tall man with wide shoulders, whose grayish white stubble stands out against his dark face. He is soft-spoken and purposeful. He speaks unhurriedly, drawing out each of his words, even as he cracks lighthearted jokes. John reminds me of one of Tolkien’s Ents (the towering, mythical, tree-like creatures who are never rushed), while C brings to mind a 200-pound hummingbird.

John asks for a three-dollar donation for every game played, while C hustles, betting customers five dollars on the game’s outcome. John plays during the day, while C arrives in the park — New York’s Union Square — later in the afternoon, often playing until5 a.m.

John works the night shift as a security guard, his primary source of income. After work he might stop by home for a nap, but he then goes to the park to play chess, and does so on many weekend days as well.

C does not have a steady job, though he certainly does work. He plays chess in Union Square almost full-time. On days when the forecast predicts rain, C brings a large gym bag full of cheap umbrellas, which he hawks on the sidewalk. (“I got to get my money. It’s a recession! I got to get every nickel and dime. Every nickel and dime.”)

A few seconds pass before C decides on his next move — and is back to trash-talking. “You’re my fish, you’re my fish!” he yells, slamming the timer.

Playing street chess in union square
The under-the-table cash economy is vital to the street chess scene.

“No, you’re my fish.” John almost never goads an opponent, but C’s exuberance can be contagious.

“I’ve got you, I’ve got you. I’ve got you hooked,” continues C, moving a piece.

“Yeah, yeah — keep talking,” John answers, unruffled.

The onlookers, many of them street players or regular customers, watch with interest, grinning at the banter but keeping silent. Only after John wins do they begin commenting — “Oh, John, I thought you had him here when the pieces were like this,” or “Hey C, why didn’t you move here when he did this?”

After the game, C talks loudly about how in a real game John would have lost by a technicality — John had advanced his pawn to the last line of squares, but did not announce that he was promoting it to queen. John does not seem to pay C any mind. He just relaxes in his chair, triumphant.

The Game

Chess is one of the oldest board games in the world, originating in India about 1,500 years ago. In the centuries that followed, it was a game of kings, a pastime associated with high culture and martial strategy, played in royal courts in the Middle East and Europe.

But there is little that is regal about the men — and it is almost entirely men — who hold court today in Union Square and elsewhere, playing street chess for money. These men are public figures, who choose places of high visibility to sell chess games. In New York, they can be found in many parks or places of social gathering. They are a diverse group. Some are homeless, and some have jobs, apartments, and families. For some, chess is a vital — perhaps only — source of income. For others, the game is a hobby that provides additional cash. Some ask for straight donations. Others gamble, betting on the game’s outcome.

Big John has an apartment, a family, and a job, but he also spends hours every day outside, playing chess and smoking Newport cigarettes. He spends as much time in Union Square as one would spend at a full-time job. Street chess provides him with a small supplementary income, but he insists that he plays it in the parks because he loves the game. “Chess is the only sport — and I consider it a sport — that anyone of any height, weight, race, nationality, or even eyesight can do. It’s a level playing field,” he says. “Chess makes us all equal. It’s one of the things I love about it so much: that anyone can play.”

John has played chess ever since a childhood accident kept him home from school for a few years. As he grew up, he continued playing. For years he played in public parks — as a customer, playing against street players. As he began beating them, he decided to set up his own spot outside, to allow his “hobby to pay for itself.” He tried different places, including Washington Square Park and Times Square, but they didn’t have the right atmosphere. Finally, two years ago, John settled on Union Square.

The Cash Box

It is a sunny Saturday just before noon, the first clear day after a week of rain and snow. John has just arrived at Union Square and is setting up. He places a huge clipboard — the kind that art students use — on top of a cardboard box, to make a table. He drapes newspaper over upside-down plastic milk crates to make chairs. As he works, John leisurely starts to tells a story from his Brooklyn childhood, when he and some friends sneaked into an abandoned apartment building in their neighborhood.

Out of his gym bag John pulls a rolled-up mat with white and green squares. He straightens out the chessboard and clips one side of it to the clipboard. He takes a roll of tape from his bag, and slowly begins taping down his board.

It’s a new board, one that John recently bought from the Village Chess Shop, an iconic store in Greenwich Village that has catered to chess players for more than three decades. It is open all night and lets people play each other for $2.50 per hour. There you can find players of all kinds — grandmasters and children, street players and tourists. “It’s an equalizer — chess,” says Michael Propper, the shop’s owner. “You have a guy worth a million dollars, and you’ve got the guy with no home. And the big shot is the guy with no home, ’cause he’s a great chess player. And if he comes in here, he’s got authority, he’s got respect.”

Street players go to the chess shop mostly at night or when the weather is bad, especially during the winter. It provides a warm place indoors, but then their games are not as profitable, because they have to pay the house and because gambling is against the rules. (“There’s some subtle gambling that we overlook, that we know takes place, where they play for a couple of dollars against each other,” Propper says. “We have people who come here for thirty hours straight, and they’re clearly gambling.”)

Whether or not a street player chooses to play at the Village Chess Shop, he will still usually shop there. The chess shop, which also sells a $400 rosewood board, does steady business selling no-frills $8.50 chess sets to the park crowd.

John bought his new chessboard and set of pieces for twenty-five dollars, spending extra money to get heavier pieces that wouldn’t blow away in the wind and that wouldn’t break if stepped on. The color of John’s old set had also started to wear off, the white pieces turning beige from so much cleaning. Many street players make do with beat-up sets — one player uses a soda cap instead of a lost pawn, and C mixes pieces from different sets. But John says he’s aiming to attract customers. “Out here you always want to present something that’s desirable — new set, shiny pieces,” he says. “It just made more sense to go ahead and invest in a new set.”

Once his board is taped flat, John turns his attention to his cash box, the cardboard container that holds the day’s earnings. He tapes the bottom so it will hold, and he tapes down each of the four cardboard flaps so they will not be in the way. Then he reaches into his gym bag and retrieves yet another piece of cardboard. It’s a sign with John’s writing in blue pastel: “If you take a photo of the chess players please leave a donation.”

He tapes the sign to his cash box at an angle, so that the sign can flip down. That way, it can act as a lid and cover the contents of the box if a park ranger walks by. (While the authorities generally tolerate street players, gambling on chess is technically illegal, and players have been known to be hassled or fined wherever money overtly changes hands.) The cash box itself can be disassembled and reassembled fairly easily — if, for instance, skateboarders keep bumping against it.

John reaches into his bag again for a piece of purple checkered fabric, which he uses to line the bottom of his cash box. He dumps a handful of his own dollar bills into the box; this will encourage other people to donate. It’s one of the many tricks that John has picked up over the years to increase his chess income. But he does not live on what he earns in the park, nor could he. “I tend to do okay: maybe forty, fifty bucks,” he says. “A great day for me would be around eighty dollars.” But that’s just “once in a blue moon,” John adds. “This in no way is like a great windfall. You eek out a few dollars here or there.”

One reason that John makes less than some of the other players is that his prices are so low. Most players charge five dollars for games, but John charges just three dollars — to “make it inviting,” he says. “You make it affordable, where someone can actually enjoy the game if their game is not that good — someone who plays for, like I said, the love of the game.”

Finally, John pulls out his new set of weighted chess pieces, along with a sleek digital chess clock. As he meticulously puts each piece in its place, he nears the end of his story, too — this now twenty-minute chronicle of John when he was eight years old, exploring an empty apartment in Brooklyn with his friends. They were poking innocently around the rooms, John says, when suddenly his world turned upside down.

“I didn’t know what happened,” he says. “And then my friend looks at me, and he starts screaming.”

Putting down the rook he’s been holding, John whips off his cap. His silver hair is cut short, almost to the skin, making his head look like a grizzled coconut. He takes my hand and runs it along a deep groove in his skull — a scar from where a falling brick embedded itself in his head decades ago. After his accident, John remained housebound for a few years. Stuck inside, he would look out the window at kids playing outside and wish he could join them. This was the time of his life when he learned chess.

I find myself wondering where this story started: what question had I asked to provoke the twenty-minute tale? It was like John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, taking twenty minutes to answer, “Would you prefer coffee or tea?” Then I remember: earlier I had marveled that John was not tired, coming straight to the park from his graveyard shift as a security guard. His story, throughout which the mantra “enjoy life” was repeated, was an elaboration of his answer: “I like the sunshine.”

John finishes setting up his pieces. Nearby, other street players are yelling their catch phrase — “Do you play, sir?” — to passersby. But John just leans back on his crate. Behind him, the park’s performance acrobats have drawn a large crowd, their stereo blasting pop reggae. John bops his shoulders to the beat, grinning.

Chess players intentionally choose public places, like New York’s Union Square, to ply their trade.

The Players

A few hours later, John is still in good spirits. He has played a few games against the pedestrians who have dribbled in through the afternoon, and is now sucking a lollipop and playing Mike Koufakis. Mike is an eight-and-a-half-year-old whose feet dangle from his milk-crate seat, inches off the ground.

“Oh, heeeeey. He’s got me now. That’s not nice, that’s not nice.” John makes a show of mock defiance. “They sent me a ringer.”

Mike is playing well, but making mistakes. At one point he takes John’s bishop, leaving his own white queen in jeopardy. John slowly puts his bishop back where it was and taps the white queen to alert his opponent to the danger.

“How long has he been playing?” John asks Mike’s father.

“Two years,” replies Steve Koufakis.

“He’s good. He rushes, though.” As John waits, he scratches a lottery ticket with a dime. “Most of his mistakes are because he rushes.”

After John checkmates Mike and shakes his tiny hand, Mike’s father throws three dollars into the cardboard box by the table. As Mike gets up, a twenty-something man sits down. This customer is a regular.

“ I do now have a small gallery of repeat customers, ’cause I’ve been here a little while,” John says. “Most of them work in the office buildings, so they’ll take their lunch when their business is done.”

Regular customers are a vital part of street chess, but can also be a source of tension: poaching customers sometimes causes conflict. Once, another street player yelled at John for playing a steady customer. “He goes, ‘Traitor, traitor!’” John says. “It’s like, ‘Oh, you play with me.’ And it’s like, ‘Well, you know, you don’t own anybody.’”

Street players are protective of their regular customers and encourage them to come back. John asks a lower price of his regulars — two dollars instead of three. Another way that street players ensure steady business is to let their regulars win occasionally. Not everyone does this, but many do. John says that letting regulars win keeps up their morale, encourages them to keep playing chess, and ultimately teaches as well. “It’s a customer-by-customer judgment,” John says. “I enjoy this, so I try to make it enjoyable for the people I’m playing.”

For players like C who bet five dollars on a game’s outcome, letting a regular customer win once in a while is seen as a cost of doing business. After “I beat them enough where they get frustrated,” then C will consider throwing a game, he says. “Sometimes you have to give a little to make a lot. I give them five bucks, but I’ve won fifty, sixty from them.” On the other hand, some regulars are so good that they don’t need to be given wins. But hustlers like C cannot afford to play too many players like these.

Besides repeat customers, John also has repeat onlookers he recognizes. “He’s a professional watcher,” John jokes after one man refuses a game but hangs around anyway. Half-circles form around particularly intriguing or lively chess matches. These are mostly composed of interested street players, friends of customers currently playing, and customers waiting for a match. If a child is playing, this draws a particularly large crowd. John does not mind onlookers because they might evolve and “become customers,” and also because crowds cause curiosity and generate business. John compares having a crowd of onlookers to “advertising.”

The crowd is also good for any nearby street players. As Big John plays, the player next to him — also named “John,” but smaller — asks the onlookers if any of them would like to play. This is one of the reasons that chess players who are friendly with each other congregate together at the park. Another reason is security: John often asks adjacent players to watch his things if he has to run across the street to use the bathroom at Whole Foods.

Big John often teaches younger children the finer points of the game.

Rules of the Game

In the afternoon Big John is quietly engrossed in a match when a booming voice behind him announces, “The General has returned.”

“I’m back, I’m back!” C whoops, making his entrance.

“Heeeeeaaay,” John drawls, shaking C’s hand. “Where ya been?”

“Oh, you know, you know — around,” replies C, slapping hands and doling out one-armed hugs to the other players. C grabs a seat next to “Little John,” and the two begin playing.

C plays other street players, which is rare in their world. “It’s not that they have anything against each other, it’s just that some people don’t want to tip their skill level to the other player,” John explains. “If you have a bunch of people who have tables set up, one may be better than the other, a couple might be better than the rest. If you begin to play each other, then the other people know, ‘I’m better than him, I’ve played him.’ And a rivalry will begin like that. A lot of people can’t take a loss.”

When he was a street chess customer, John played all of the Union Square players. But after he set up his own spot in the park, the rules of social interaction changed — he could no longer play against other street players. “That’s like bothering someone’s other stand,” John says, motioning to the nearby Union Square vendors selling art and souvenirs. “You have a stand and you’re working. Tend to your business and let him tend his.” The only street player John will play is his friend C — and only when there are no paying customers. “Yesterday me and him played most of the day because it was real slow — I think I had like two participants all day.”

When C does play street players, he is very conscious of the difference in roles. If playing on his own board, he may stop a game at a moment’s notice if a customer shows up. But if C is playing another street player on that person’s board, he is even more hyper-aware of potential customers. Normally C might try to solicit a game from every fourth or fifth passerby, but when taking up a customer’s seat, C will ask almost every lingering pedestrian, “Do you play?”

“Do You Play?”

C looks up from his match with Little John. A young couple with cameras is watching the game.

“Do you guys play?” he asks them.

The woman shakes her head, and the man walks away. C shrugs and returns to the game. Less then a minute later an old man pauses as he walks by, and C immediately yells out, “You play, sir?”

As a means of soliciting customers, “Do you play?” is significant in that it is designed not to close conversation. If a passerby answers “Yes,” then the chess player invites that person to sit and only then — once it is more awkward to refuse — brings up money. But even if the potential customer answers “No,” the lines of dialogue remain open.

As a young woman in a college sweatshirt walks by, C asks, “Do you play?”

“No,” she answers, smiling.

“Want to learn?”

She shakes her head and walks away. But C’s follow-up question is fairly standard for street players. Dozens of times a day, the player switches roles — from a worthy adversary offering a challenging and fun match, to a patient teacher willing to impart his expertise.

Street players often do teach chess; during the summers John has parents who pay for weekly lessons for their children. But John points out that he is still learning, too. Even though they play chess for hours every day, he and other street players still actively try to improve their game. C says he occasionally pays for a chess tutor, and John keeps his skills sharp by playing bullet chess with one of his regular customers, for a reduced price. Bullet chess is an especially intense form of speed chess where each player has just one minute on the clock. (In most speed games played on the street, players have between three and ten minutes.)

When business is slow, street players pair off for a game of chess or cards.

The Endgame

It’s around eight in the evening, and John is putting away his set. He places all the black pieces in one Ziploc bag and all the white pieces in another, and wraps both baggies in a cellophane grocery bag that he stows in his gym bag. Then he slowly removes the tape holding his chessboard to the clipboard. He rolls up the mat into a tube, secures it with a rubber band, and puts it in another cellophane bag. He takes out his Walkman CD player, wraps the headphones around it, and places it in his jacket pocket. As he puts his things in order, John talks in his meandering way about how the cost of movies has risen since he was a child.

John turns his attention to his cash box. He scoops out all the dollar bills and stuffs them into his pants pocket. “I usually don’t count till I get home,” John says. “I find it’s bad etiquette.” But he guesses it was a fairly average day, netting about forty to fifty dollars.

John removes the cloth lining from the bottom of the box, and several coins clink free. (Some tourists, seeing the sign asking for donations in exchange for photos, drop loose change instead of dollar bills.) John sighs as he reaches down to pick up a nickel, a dime, and several pennies. “I used to have a dollar sign on the box,” he says. “I might put it back up.”

He folds the cash box flat, while keeping the sign attached to it. Then he lifts the clipboard off the larger cardboard box that made the table, and folds that, too.

He shakes hands with the other street players who remain, and gathers up the two folded boxes, the clipboard, and the two plastic milk crates. He walks to the west side of the square, and slides the boxes and clipboard snuggly between a wall and a recycling bin. He hides the milk crates behind a statue.

Big John adjusts the strap of his gym bag, then stretches out his large hand. “I’ll see you when I see you.”

As he walks away he turns and says, over his shoulder, “But, you know I’ll be out here tomorrow.”

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