A police officer wearing protective gear and holding an automatic machine gun stands in the middle of First Avenue. An armed motorcade rolls by him and into the parking lot he’s guarding. A dozen people with cameras wait at the top of the stairs that provide access from my street to the avenue below.

It’s a Wednesday in September, and I’m headed to the pharmacy.

Where I live

I share a block, which includes three fire hydrants, twenty street parking spaces, and a mail carrier named Bill, with the Perutusan Tetap Malaysia Ke Pertubuhan Bangsa-Bangsa Bersatu, or Permanent Mission of Malaysia to the United Nations.

Bill is frustrated that the recent shakeup at the Postal Service has left him with an unbalanced route — all his buildings are residential except one, the Malaysian Mission, simply because it’s on the north side of the block, and that’s where he rolls his mail cart. He tells me, almost every day, that he’d rather cross the street to serve another residential building than stay on the same side to serve a commercial one.

I often see VIP guests arrive at the Malaysian Mission. They step from black Lincolns and gather on the sidewalk in tight bouquets of hand-painted sarongs. Well-behaved children attach themselves to thin wrists. The groups disappear into the sleek high-rise while the Lincolns idle, their drivers dozing in the cool air furnished by the running engines.

My neighbor Joanne idles, too, at her first-floor window, until the dignitaries and their families are inside. Then she peels out, knocks on windows, and shouts at the drivers to move along: “No parking! Don’t you see the signs?” Every evening, Joanne tirelessly writes letters to the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission and calls 311 with plate numbers. She logs the offenses of the drivers — toxic exhaust, valuable loading and unloading spots taken, candy bar wrappers on the street, plastic bottles filled with urine tossed in the gutter — and reports them to our local community board services agency. As to the last of the offenses — the bottles — I’ve never seen one. Perhaps I’m distracted by the gold thread in the sarongs, burning in the late afternoon sun as it reflects indiscriminately off each west-facing window of the United Nations headquarters.

What happens inside that building has always been, and will likely always be, a mystery to me. As for community appeal, I like the glistening exterior, the row of flagpoles, and the general vibe of importance. (Once, a motorcade bearing then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan passed by me, and I turned downright giddy.) I like the banners outside my building that welcome visitors to “UN Way.” Alongside “No Parking 8-6” signs are flags from Uzbekistan, Peru, Costa Rica, Kiribati, and other countries.

This is Tudor City, an eighty-year-old neighborhood on the eastern edge of Midtown Manhattan. Unlike other New York neighborhoods, Tudor City is just two square blocks, from Forty-First to Forty-Third Streets between Second and First Avenues.

This section of the island of Manhattan gently slopes upward to a granite cliff that once offered unobstructed views of the East River. In the shadow of the cliff, down on First Avenue, slaughterhouses and tenement buildings were erected in the early twentieth century. The architects who designed Tudor City’s gigantic gothic-style apartment houses included only small windows facing east to minimize the stench from below.

In the late 1940s, the slaughterhouses were torn down, and the United Nations Headquarters was built in their place. Though it is sometimes difficult for me to understand why Midtown Manhattan was chosen for the UN Headquarters and not a large open area somewhere with ample parking space, I chalk my lack of understanding up to post-9/11 worries about security. In 1945, New York apparently looked like an ideal — and safe — place to build the United Nations flagship complex. The topography does ensure that a car cannot drive straight to the UN’s front door. And the UN, juxtaposed with the gothic buildings, has Hollywood allure. The spotlights from late-night film shoots transform our neighborhood from night into day.

I moved here right after September 11, 2001. The prices in Midtown, particularly in Tudor City, had dropped substantially in the wake of residents fleeing for the presumed safety of the suburbs. My first impression of the place was that it was a Midtown anomaly, situated so close to Grand Central Station but with two little parks and the feel of a cul-de-sac. I noted snipers on several rooftops.

The annual UN General Assembly

Joanne, naturally, is the one who alerts us every year when the UN General Assembly is coming. Diplomats from over a hundred nations come to meet, greet, and speak. Every issue under the increasingly dangerous sun is discussed: environment, health, war, energy, food, water, genocide.

Out here, it’s like a festival of lights for my neighbors and me — red and blue flashes from police cars, neon protest posters, shiny orange cones. Being part of it by virtue of living in it, however, can be frustrating. The New York City Police Department, feds, and private security staff lock down the area.

The diplomats, however, don’t always stay in the neighborhood. (Qaddafi and his tent are a case in point. This year the Libyan leader, wary of elevators, tried to erect his private canvas sleeping space in Central Park and on Donald Trump’s estate in White Plains. He was denied both times.) Diplomats have needs. They visit friends and go out to dinner. My graduate school adviser, Diane, used to live quite a distance from the UN, on the Upper West Side. Still, she was stopped on West Seventy-Ninth Street: “Next thing I knew I was up against the wall being yelled at. There were tanks or Humvees and men with automatic weapons. I was in shock, but it turned out they were just providing security for Arafat, who’d come to a stationery store on the block to buy a fountain pen.” The footage of President Obama’s visit this year shows him jogging on a city street that has been emptied of cars and people. Diane and I laugh about the great lengths security staff will go to so that heads of state can do “normal” things.

Joanne forwards a notice to our building from Deputy Inspector Ted W. Bernstein, commanding officer of the Seventeenth Precinct. The accompanying map reads like a battle plan: street closures and coned-off lanes, checkpoints and vehicle inspection sites. No parking is allowed, except, it seems, for those indomitable black cars that crawl our block like roaches.

This year there is an added threat of terror. Reports of a plot, allegedly one of the most complex and sophisticated since 9/11, lead the news cycle. Authorities have discovered plans to explode homemade bombs in Grand Central Station and other New York transit hubs. Though the plot seems to have been thwarted, security is heightened, particularly on the subways. But it’s UN Week, and we are encouraged to take the subway rather than cabs or buses. I can’t decide if I’m comforted or disconcerted when Police Commissioner Ray Kelly announces that the city, accustomed to living in a state of high alert, is doing what it always does to remain secure.

A day on the ground

After the pharmacy, I hop on a bus at Nelson and Winnie Mandela Corner (just about everything in this neighborhood is named for a diplomatic star or two) and head toward the west side to pick up my camera from a repair shop. The trip takes twice as long as it usually does, and by the time I’m back, I’m ready for an afternoon latté. While waiting in line at Starbucks, I watch a bus pull up to the curb and empty itself of men in black, green, and red T-shirts. They unfurl flags and straighten out signs.

By the time I have my coffee, the men have turned up Second Avenue, along the stretch that has been renamed Yitzhak Rabin Way, and I follow them on my way to Alpian’s Dry Cleaners to drop off some clothes. I hear the noise from Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, on Forty-Sixth, well before I arrive.

“United Nations, we need your help, right now, right now,” a group from Tibet chants. I can’t cross Forty-Sixth Street at Second to continue on to the dry cleaners on Forty-Eighth because of the throngs of people and police barricades on both sides of the street. I can’t cross to the other side of the avenue either because a crowd of people has gathered as far as I can see up Forty-Sixth. While I debate what to do, a man selling buttons that read “Obama Rocks” and “Green Up Iran” proudly announces to no one in particular that he has only two of his thirty-six “America: A Nation of Immigrants” buttons left.

I reason that if I walk with the flow of foot traffic and not against it, I will be able to turn left on First Avenue and continue on my way. Halfway down the block I find an opening between barriers and sneak into the center of the street where it’s a little less crowded. I walk alongside several people with cameras and a woman with a megaphone. We pass the Holy Family Church, where parents are waiting for their children to get out of school.

Suddenly, the woman yells into her megaphone, “Hey hey, ho ho, Ahmadinejad has to go.” I look around. The crowd has organized into a march behind a banner as wide as the street. In front of us, cops pull barriers from the side of the street to erect a blockade. I follow some quick thinkers through an opening before it closes up. Behind the barriers, those ahead of the pack, some tourists and some journalists, are stuck. The cops won’t let them out. Protesters are still moving forward, repeating the woman’s spirited calls.

I’ve never been part of a protest. My vast experience as a couch observer of the news, however, makes me concerned that the protesters might push up against the barriers and strain to break through, try to overtake the UN, possibly Ahmadinejad himself. I wonder if the police will act especially brutally, if some child who has just come out of the Holy Family School will be accidentally crushed. Last year while I was in Argentina for a wedding, farmers there protesting the government blocked the roads with their equipment, causing such backups the bride’s ninety-year-old grandmother sat in a bus for eighteen hours when it should have been a two-hour trip.

Nothing that dramatic happens, of course. The police officers wait patiently on the other side of the barriers, chatting. Onlookers snap pictures. And the protesters stop exactly where they are told to stop. In a display of what I see as great restraint, power, and organization, they speak their collective mind, in unison, repeating the same simple statement. Hey hey. Ho ho. Ahmadinejad has to go. It moves me with its immobility. The voices alone, though loud, must sound like music three blocks south at the UN Headquarters.

On either side of the Iranian march are groups from Taiwan, Cameroon, Tibet, Sri Lanka, and Israel squeezed in together. An older man with a long, grey, scraggly braid yells at the protesters, “It’s a society of wimps! You’re wasting your time, you assholes!” Remarkably, a group sits on the ground in the center, unfazed, eyes closed in meditation or prayer. Behind them, a sign reads, “Falun Dafa is Great.”

The chaos of so many nations with conflicting wants is muted by the general human need of expression and order, mail delivery and lunch, money and prayer. It’s almost as if there are too many sides to make for conflict during the Assembly, or that conflict itself is what makes the Assembly operate smoothly. No matter what is going on behind those reflective windows, out here there is some sort of peace.

My arms are tired from balancing my coffee and purse with my camera bag and the clothes for dry cleaning, though I’m grateful for the camera, as I too become an onlooker taking pictures. Finally, I make it up First Avenue to Alpian’s. On the way home, I stop in Amreen’s Hallmark to buy a birthday card for my niece. I ask Amreen’s daughter, who works the register, how it’s gone so far.

“Good. Not too busy,” she says as she rings up the $3 card.

“Have you had more customers than usual?”

She shrugs. “No, but we have sold out of some stuff.” She points toward a shelf. “We’ve sold a bunch of our New York trinkets!”

As I approach my building, a motorcade stops right in front. Suited men get out and flank a town car. Behind it, a suburban full of men in vests holding machine guns waits. I’m about five feet from them. My building’s awning is behind me, and a group of tourists is watching. A woman walking her dog approaches. The shih tzu makes his big decision of the afternoon — curb or tree — and chooses the curb. The dog squats, the woman watches with plastic bag ready, I snap a photo of the men with guns, the suited men on the street wait for a signal then return to their vehicles, and the motorcade rolls away.

Inside I ask José at the front desk how the day has been. “Beautiful!” he says. It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. A neighbor writes on her Facebook wall, “I walked outside to protests by every ethnic and religious group known to humanity. Then, President Obama passed by in a car, waving. I almost got picked up by secret service, and [literally] bumped into Katie Couric. The traffic is only a small price to pay for this much fun!” In true UN General Assembly style, we get a little bit of the spotlight — and the festival of lights — every year.

Joanne, however, is already on to other things. I get an email about bus route interruptions as construction on a new Second Avenue subway line proceeds. And as for my friend on Facebook, she soon follows her comment with another: “On second thought, I’m so over the important people hanging out in my hood. They are clearly diluting my status as a local celeb.”

 “You look like you came from a meeting with Bill Gates!” announced Simon Cowell, American Idol’s irascible judge, when the clean-cut contestant Anoop Desai appeared at the Season 8 auditions dressed in shorts, flip-flops, and a button-down plaid shirt with rolled-up sleeves. Throughout the season, it seemed as though Desai’s competitive edge was underscored by Cowell’s perception of his squareness.

While it was not actually uttered, the word “nerd” hung there suspended and then descended to fit squarely around Desai. The world Twittered about the racial stereotypes embedded in that remark. “Call him ‘Kumar’ and be done with it,” said one Internet wit. To my mind, the remark raised a whole range of issues, not the least being racial.

The original “nerd”

Dr. Seuss’ 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo first introduced the word “nerd” as a longhaired, unkempt crosspatch with a mouth that held still and straight, with no indication of laughter: “And then, just to show them, I’ll sail to Ka-Troo And Bring Back an IT-KUTCH a PREEP and a PROO a NERKLE a NERD and a SEERSUCKER, too!”

In the mid-50s and ’60s, the term morphed into meaning a “square” or a “drip,” a connotation that has persisted till today, and is used with much derisive inflection around middle and high school lockers.

A hair’s-breadth difference between nerds and geeks does exist, and New York Times columnist David Brooks explains the difference: “At first, a nerd was a geek with better grades.” In casual parlance, however, both terms are sometimes used interchangeably, with the established understanding that a nerd is a grade-getter and most probably athletically challenged, and a geek is, generally speaking, obsessed with an obscure passion.

The ascendancy of nerds can be closely tied to the rise of Silicon Valley. Considered the intellectual capital spreading out of and from Stanford, the Valley produced and fostered the modern-day renaissance nerd: inventors, entrepreneurs, innovators, researchers, and investors. As companies like Intel, Cisco, and Sun grew in size and profitability, the population of nerds exploded in the Valley. Then came the age of startups, whence Valley entrepreneurs began to attract media coverage and wealth — considerable wealth. Bill Gates became the richest man in the world, and Silicon Valley became the mecca of success, prompting Robert Metcalfe’s comment, “Silicon Valley is the only place on earth not trying to figure out how to become Silicon Valley.” The outsource era spotlighted India, and global Indian companies like Wipro, Infosys, and TCS entered the world stage.

Changing perceptions on “nerdiness”

The likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Biz Stone, and Nandan Nilekani, among others, changed putative standards of nerd perceptions. What was reviled and shunned yesterday became sought after and acclaimed today. Forbes’ “Big B” list has more than a few of the names listed above. A meeting with any one of these nerd luminaries could be part of a utopian dream.

With the election of Barack Obama, a paradigmatic nerd as head of the country, the nerd-acceptability factor grew even more significantly. No quibbling about Obama’s nerdiness, for even Michelle Obama once remarked about her meeting Barack for the first time, “I had already sort of created an image of this very intellectual nerd. And I was prepared to be polite and all that.” More recently, Ms. Obama has dismissed the perceived negativity associated with nerds and exhorted students to work hard and get good grades, habits that typify being studious and square.

It used to be that the nerd of the ’50s and ’60s typically wore jeans, a T-shirt, and scruffy shoes, and was possibly tall and lanky with greasy hair and thick black-rimmed spectacles. He slouched when out in the sun and spoke with an intensity that was disconcerting. The image today is of someone who is given to tucking shirts into the waistband of trousers, jeans, or shorts and has acquired the rudiments of social polish, yet still speaks with unnerving authority on subjects. To all who judge by outward appearances, the look of a shirt hanging outside trousers can dispel long-held notions of a dorkish appearance. But, Anoop Desai was dressed in shorts and a shirt that hung loose and long. So why then Cowell’s remark?

What does intelligence look like?

In a 2002 study of perceived intelligence and facial attractiveness, Looking Smart and Looking Good: Facial Cues to Intelligence and Their Origins, conducted by Leslie A. Zebrowitz, Judith A. Hall, Nora A. Murphy, and Gillian Rhodes, the researchers concluded that “attractiveness was correlated with perceived intelligence at all ages.” For sure, Desai’s regular facial fairness falls under the rubric of “attractive.” Then, does it stand to reason that Idol judge Cowell made the subliminal connection between the symmetry of Desai’s face and his intellect? Does it also stand to reason that in the vocal talent world, intelligence is misplaced?

Now, let’s approach the racial elements of Cowell’s remark. Self-effacing Indians who win spelling bees and man technology desks are not typically seen on strobe-lit stages. Once before did a Louisiana governor attempt to combat perceptions of his nerdiness with a staged speech. The result was a disastrous reinforcement of social awkwardness, his political brilliance now dubiously regarded.

According to Benjamin Nugent, author of American Nerd: The Story of My People, one form of racism is stereotyping an ethnicity. The stereotype can be seemingly positive, but with costly side effects. Take Stacey J. Lee’s study, chronicled in her book Unraveling the ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth. Asian American high school students were asked to respond to several questions, one of which was, “How did the model minority stereotype influence Asian American student identity?” Not surprisingly, perhaps, Lee found that even model minority stereotypes establish blueprints for behavior, and those that do not achieve model minority success can end up with low self-esteem and “silence” their own non-model minority experiences.

Brains and talent a poor marriage

The concept of nerdism is inherently built into the minority Indian model. So, as Anoop Desai stood before the four Idol judges and as the words issued forth from Simon Cowell, the stereotype was being ground into the American consciousness. An Indian, dressed like a nerd, or not, was quintessentially a nerd and had no reason to believe he could be successful on the Idol stage where the bikini-clad had possibly more right. A meeting with Bill Gates, the dream of millions, was to be disdained and had no relevance to the drama of reality television. A marriage of intellect and artistic talent makes for a pretty poor match.

Jaya Padmanabhan

Few of us can forget the horrors of the 1990’s Romanian orphanages. Following the fall of the Ceausescu Communist regime in 1989, Romania, though newly liberated, became known for the appalling conditions within its state-run orphanages and institutions. The world was stunned by television and newspaper images of half-starved abandoned children chained to their beds. Aid agencies rushed to help; governments throughout the world condemned what they saw; and newspaper columns were full of accounts of the atrocities.

Yet behind the scenes, the practice in Romania of abandoning children went unchallenged. A 1990 UNICEF report claimed that at the time, 86,000 children lived in institutions. Despite media attention to the situation, by 1994, that number had risen to 98,000. Perhaps even more surprising is that despite a significant increase in international adoptions, that 1994 figure had only fallen to just over 80,000 in 2005. Between 1992 and 1994, about 10,000 Romanian children were adopted by foreign families worldwide, according to a report by Toronto Life.

Official line

Officially, the orphanages in Romania have all been closed as one of the preconditions for joining the European Union (EU) in 2007, which followed a 2001 European Parliament report criticizing the country for its continued mistreatment of orphans. However, today the question remains: What exactly has happened to the thousands of children who were living in the large state orphanages?

While international adoption has been illegal in Romania since 2001, a report published by the Romanian National Authority for Child Protection in 2004 told of a total of 81,233 orphans at that time. Of those, 14,825 now live in foster care in Romania, 26,612 are in state care, and the remaining orphans are either living with extended family members or in private care homes. The now-notorious orphanages of those television images in the 1990s have all been replaced by smaller and more modern institutions, where six or seven children share a room, despite the official line that there is no overcrowding or bed sharing.  

Meanwhile, the world’s media has largely moved on to other, more current events. Aside from a few celebrities, such as J.K. Rowling, author of the “Harry Potter” books, and Sarah Brown, wife of Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who have rallied to the cause of Romanian orphans, the major problems Romania’s child care system faces have been ignored. Most people think these problems ended once and for all when Romania joined the EU in 2007. Indeed, Baroness Emma Nicholson, member of European Parliament for South East England and an international campaigner for children’s rights, was once credited with bringing media attention to the grim conditions within Romanian orphanages. Last year, however, the baroness went so far as to claim that “Romania has fundamentally reformed its child protection system and has gone from having the worst system in Europe to developing one of the best.”

The real story

Sadly, however, the reality is far different. The U.N.’s 2009 report State of the World’s Children claims Romania’s child mortality rate is 15,000 per year. In comparison, the child mortality rate in the United States is reported to be 8,000 per year. Although the children who remain in the state institutions are no longer tied to beds, they face other problems. In October 2008, the General Directorate of Social Welfare and Child Services (DGASPC) issued a report in which the Romanian head of the Social Inspection Agency, Maria Muga, stated that 92.5 percent of the children in state care do not own any toys; 97.5 percent have no cultural and sporting equipment; 77.5 percent have no school supplies; and 65 percent have no toiletry and hygiene supplies.

As for the children now in foster care, a recent DGASPC report claims that, on average, there is one social worker for every 100 children. Since joining the EU, Romania has guaranteed that at least one social worker monitors the progress of 25 children in foster care. The report goes on to detail significant problems at the organizational level of foster care, backing up the 2006 UNICEF Romania report, which concludes, “an underestimation of the issues at stake has resulted in too many reforms under pressure, which in turn have led to uncoordinated, contradictory and unfocussed stop-and-go reforms.” 

Indeed, the sheer number of so many children requiring some kind of state help creates further problems. A joint UNICEF and World Bank study in April 2009 explored the impact of the global recession on the poor in Romania, and concluded that Romania’s state services “are either insufficient or lacking the necessary quality to effectively protect the most in need children.” It is hardly surprising that problems go unchecked or ignored when there are so few Romanian social workers. Transparency International, an anticorruption watchdog organization, ranked Romania as the second most corrupt country in the EU last year. In a country where bribes are all too common, questions still remain about the effectiveness and integrity of Romania’s child support services.

Much has been made of the success of Romanian migration workers. According to a February 2009 New York Times article, one-third of Romanians now work and live abroad, mostly within the EU member states, enjoying better wages and perhaps a higher quality of life. Meanwhile, Romanian statistics tell us that 10 percent of children in state care are there simply because their parents are working abroad and they have no family member available to look after them. Yet even those children who live with relatives could still face difficulties. According to the Romanian Child Protection Department, despite having access to cell phones and other gadgets, Romanian children still suffer the psychological damage associated with long-term separation from their parents.

The Relief Fund for Romania estimates that there are 6,000 street children in the country, while UNICEF estimated in 2004 that 2,000 children lived on the streets of Bucharest, 500 of them permanently, either working or begging to survive. The majority of these street children spend their days in the capital, either because of overcrowding where they live or because of their disinterest in school, whereas the 500 children who are mainly orphans are 24-hour street children, spending their nights sleeping rough. The 2001 Oscar-nominated film Children Underground documented their hardship, with harrowing scenes of bored children spending their days in a daze, getting high and feeling worthless.

Special cases

Life for the “typical” Romanian orphan is brighter than it is for disabled and Roma orphans. According to a 2007 Harvard Review article, “having attained EU membership, Romania now has less incentive to improve the conditions for disabled children, but has instead turned a blind eye.” Romania’s Law 272 on children’s rights specifies that orphans under the age of two cannot live in state-run institutions, but disabled orphans are to be sent there from birth.

The sad fact is that disabled children are unlikely to be placed with foster families, and they will spend their entire lives in these institutions, which may not be officially called “orphanages.” These institutions are, according to the Harvard Review, “not proper homes for children and further the development of disabilities.” UNICEF estimates that there are about 200 of these institutions in Romania, housing up to 30,000 disabled children. The report goes on to claim that only 28 percent of the 52,000 disabled children living in Romania obtain some level of education.

The Gypsy community of Romania may be romanticized by outsiders, but according to UNICEF, the Roma population, which makes up 7 percent of the Romanian population, has a poverty rate of 77 percent. Karen Bucur, director of Pathway to Joy, a Romanian-American charity that works with the Gypsy community, told me, “Their poverty is hard to describe. There is no running water, [and] with that comes health issues and diseases. The children are uneducated for the most part.”

A representative of the Scottish charity Mary’s Meals added, “With only the local rubbish dump to play on, the children are so deprived that they steal to eat. Many of them live in 19th-century conditions.” One could argue that due to the stigma attached to the Roma community within Romania, these vulnerable children rely even more on outside help in a country where their own social services cannot be relied upon.

Bucur tells of two little abandoned Roma girls, Alexandra and Alina, whom the charity found in a dreadful state last winter. The girls were without clothing and food, and with no immediate support from Social Services. The charity was forced to act independently to secure the children’s safety, and Alexandra and Alina now live with a foster family financially supported by Pathway to Joy.

One aspect worth examining, as it is seemingly ignored by the Romanian government, is the support available to the now-adult orphans of the Ceausescu regime. As explored in an in-depth 2005 BBC report, for many, a normal adult life remains out of reach. The report concluded that while some had indeed managed to make a successful life for themselves, many remained traumatized. With little support from the government and surviving on the fringes of society, many of these now-adult orphans are addicted to drugs or alcohol. Other survivors — those who had been tied into their hospital cots for their entire childhood — now show signs of stunted growth and have difficulty walking. Others still wear diapers or can take food only from a bottle because they never had the chance to develop their chewing muscles.

A scandal in Romania earlier this year involved a man who died in a hospital, waiting to be seen after he had a heart attack. One nurse admitted that nobody treated him because he “looked too poor to be able to offer a bribe to be seen.” In a country where health care can often depend on how much you are prepared to bribe doctors for treatment, orphans are unlikely to receive the best treatment possible, as fast as possible.

Following EU criticism, the Romanian government has promised reforms and recently set up a toll- free telephone number that Romanians can call to reveal the names of hospitals and doctors who have accepted bribes. Within an hour of opening, the telephone lines were inundated with calls, and jammed.

A long way to go

It could be argued that an orphan’s fate in Romania often comes down to sheer luck. If an orphan is fortunate enough to be taken in by a loving foster family or to receive help through one of the local charities such as Pathway to Joy or Mary’s Meals, he or she may well be able to have a normal childhood. However, if an orphan is disabled, or happens to have been born in a Gypsy village, or is living on the street, his or her life — and certainly mental well-being — hang in the balance.

Vast improvements have been made in Romania’s child welfare issues — undoubtedly Baroness Nicholson’s remarks give us all reason to hope this is so. Yet Romania still has a long way to go. The responsibility to remember Romanian children and to fight for their welfare lies not only with the Romanian government and with EU country members, but with individuals across the globe. Romania is no longer the country we read about a decade ago. It is receiving financial support from the EU and the World Bank, and a number of reforms have been introduced to help the poor. Admittedly, these efforts have had mixed results, with UNICEF claiming earlier this year that welfare money is not reaching the most needy. We cannot simply ignore the daily struggle the poor face in the small Balkan country of 22 million. Romania and its orphans need not only our support, but also our continued interest, to truly prosper.

Stephen Patrick Maughan

At 7 o’clock on a cool fall morning, Matthew Kongo steps out of the Spencer Press printing plant and into daylight. The air coming off the ocean to the east is moist, the world quiet compared to the printing room inside where Kongo, 65, has been working the night shift. He wears a gray fleece jacket, dark jeans, and heavy leather work boots. Large thin-rimmed glasses balance on his wide nose, magnifying soft, sleepless brown eyes.

Kongo is still for a moment, looking out into the company’s parking lot as if taking in the world anew. During his 12-hour shifts, he stands at a computer terminal, moving paper into the production line with a large crane. After a spate of recent layoffs, he has been manning two cranes at once to increase efficiency. It’s difficult, repetitive work, especially with an injured back, a lingering reminder of his previous life in Sudan.

Kongo spots his coworker Hassan Ahmed’s Toyota four-door pulling around to the worker’s entrance. He slowly walks over to the car and gets inside. Ahmed is a refugee from Sudan, as is Kongo, although they come from far corners of the large country. Ahmed is from Darfur in the west; Kongo is from southern Sudan.

During the drive back to Portland, Maine, half an hour to the north, the two men speak of their home country and the problems there. They talk about ethnic and religious conflicts, about disputes between the central government and outlying areas, about the brutal wars that have engulfed the country for most of their lives. Solutions to Sudan’s problems seem hard to come by, and the causes almost too numerous to count.

Ahmed drops Kongo off at his home, an apartment in a three-story Victorian near the heart of Portland. Kongo climbs the stairs to the third floor where he and his family live. His wife Rose is about to head off to her job at Maine Medical Center, so they have only a brief moment together before she leaves. Their 10-year-old daughter Nancy, her hair tightly braided, is just finishing breakfast and is ready for Kongo to take her to school.

Kongo slowly makes his way back down the stars as Nancy runs ahead and jumps into the backseat of his Dodge sedan. Kongo then drives her across town to Cathedral School, where she has recently started classes. She had been going to the local public school, but was recommended by her teachers to go to a private school where she might have more opportunities. Kongo and Rose are hopeful that Nancy will go to college one day. Her sister Catherine, 19, arrived in the United States as an adolescent, and has had a tougher time adjusting to life in her new home. She recently graduated from high school and is now babysitting for relatives.

After dropping Nancy off at school, Kongo returns home for breakfast and a few hours of sleep. But he has many things he needs to do today. There is a meeting with fellow refugees to discuss housing options, a stop at Hannaford for the family’s groceries, and an upcoming community event to plan. His next shift at Spencer Press starts again tonight at seven.
 
*****

The door opens and cold air rushes into the auditorium. Two young children enter and make their way to one of the round tables where other Sudanese children sit. Two tables of adults are among the children. Between the stage and the tables, a small group of boys and girls in jeans, hooded sweatshirts, and wool sweaters walk around a circle of chairs, while R & B blasts from large speakers on either side of the stage.

Kongo, dressed in a striped charcoal suit, leans back in a folding metal chair, his body relaxed but his face serious. Deep wrinkles frame his pursed lips. The deejay near the stage hits a switch and the music abruptly stops. The children run to sit down, bumping against one another, some winding up on the hardwood floor. The sound of laughter erupts inside the room. A large smile flashes across Kongo’s face as he leans forward, his hands coming together in a single loud clap.
 
Tonight is billed as a “Back to School Night” by the Sudanese Community Association of Maine, which hopes to show these children how important education is to their new lives in America. Kongo is president of the association. Fifty children are present tonight — many more than last year — but there are few parents. It’s one of the main problems the association faces in trying to send these children to college one day. For so many Sudanese in Maine, life is little more than work, school, food, and sleep. There is hardly time for events like these, where parents can show their enthusiasm for school.

The youngest children, no more than four or five years old, chase each other around the room, while the women, wearing bright dresses and dark suits, sit at their table and speak in hushed tones. At the men’s table there’s talk of Sudan, Al-Bashir, United Nations troops, and the upcoming game: Patriots vs. Dolphins. Kongo is among them, standing up to shake the hand of every adult who walks through the door. Then he leans into a conversation and answers questions in a mix of Arabic and English. Rose sits at the women’s table and speaks to a Sudanese woman in her 60s, who has just arrived in the United States. Nancy listens attentively at one of the far tables with the rest of the children.

Nancy’s sister Catherine, in jeans and a fleece jacket, is the night’s emcee. After the games, she challenges the children with trivia questions: “Who is the president of the United States?”; “Who was the first president of the United States?”; “Who was the president before the current one?”; “Who is the president of Sudan?” A child raises her hand confidently, but when she’s called on she sinks into her seat, smiles, and loses her words. Most of the children know the answer to the first three questions, but the younger ones have trouble naming the president of Sudan. Several older children, sitting at their own table in the back, raise their hands. When called on, they intone, “Al-Bashir.”

In the last 15 years, Maine has attracted Sudanese refugees with its image of a slow pace of life and the absence of violent crime. There are over 6,000 living in the state, most of them in Portland. Kongo came to Maine because he thought it would be a good place to raise his children. Unfortunately, many refugees — Kongo included — have found Portland to be a typical city with its share of drugs, racism, and hostility to immigrants.

Excitement pulses through the room as trays, bowls, and boxes of food emerge from the kitchen: okra with stewed beef, eggplant in peanut sauce, salad greens, cucumber and tomatoes, white rice, macaroni and cheese, potato chips, meatballs, and pepperoni pizza. The children are reminded to have a little of everything, to not eat just one kind of food. They line up single file, a train of children, front to back, waiting impatiently for their turn as the adults move through the line first.

When dinner is over, Kongo slowly stands and walks to the front of the room. He takes the microphone and speaks to the children in English. He urges those who have come alone to go straight home and tell their parents all about tonight. And he encourages everyone to tell their Sudanese friends who are not present how much fun they had and to come to the next event. He wishes them all a good night, and then puts the microphone down and makes his way back to his table. As children leave, Kongo joins the men folding and stacking chairs on the side of the auditorium. 

*****

Sudan, Kongo’s homeland and the largest country in Africa, sits south of Egypt on the Red Sea and covers an area of 1 million square miles — about one-third the size of the United States. Sudan has been in a state of civil war for most of the last 50 years, and as a result, Sudanese refugees have been forced to resettle throughout the world. The conflicts between the north and the south — and the recent conflict in Darfur, which began in 2003 — have complex historical antecedents that cannot be explained simply (as they often are) as a war between black Africans and Arabs or between Christians and Muslims. But however complex, Kongo is quick to point out that race and religion play an important role in the civil wars.

Sudan is a diverse country, with more than 140 native languages, 19 ethnic groups, and many local religions. Christianity arrived in the fourth century and Islam followed several hundred years later, brought into the Nile region by Arabs from the Middle East. The Arabs, who came to dominate the north, forcibly spread Islam throughout much of the area. They began programs to centralize authority in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, while marginalizing outlying areas. They enslaved black Africans and extracted resources from the south, including ivory and, more recently, oil. Most of the country’s arable land and natural resources are located in the south.

Kongo was born in Yei, a provincial headquarters on Sudan’s southern border with the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) and Uganda. He was born on December 8, 1944, 12 years before Sudan gained its independence from the British and 11 years before the south’s trouble with the north began in earnest. The British had co-ruled Sudan as a colony from 1899 until 1955 with Egypt. In practice, however, Sudan was ruled as two separate states: a northern Islamic state and a southern Christian state.

When Kongo was a boy, a mutiny by disaffected southern soldiers led the British to rush plans for Sudanese independence. They granted formal independence on January 1, 1956, before a permanent constitution could be signed into law. Debate about southern autonomy and federalism were relegated to the future. With the south’s concerns unaddressed, a civil war broke out in the form of a guerilla conflict that turned into a conventional war. Aside from a 10-year break from 1973 to 1983, which did little to ameliorate the underlying causes of the first war, war has continued for 50 years. A peace agreement signed in January 2005 signaled a chance for lasting peace in southern Sudan, just as the fighting in Darfur escalated.

Kongo was born into the Mundu, one of the many black African tribes indigenous to southern Sudan. He was raised in the Catholic Church, and moved when he was 18 to El Obeid, a town southwest of Khartoum, to start high school at the Comboni Catholic School. But after only one year he decided it would be best to leave Sudan; the civil war had intensified to the point where he feared for his life. The borders in the south were closed. The only way out of Sudan into exile would be to make the dangerous journey through the north. He telephoned his parents and told them he was about to leave the country. They gave him their blessing and said, simply, “Go in peace, and let God guide you and bless you.” He would never see them again.

Ready to make the journey out of Sudan, 19-year-old Kongo was joined by one of his teachers, Alfonse Abugo. They packed their bags and took a train to Khartoum, where they boarded a bus to the eastern city of Kassala, on the border with Ethiopia (now part of  present-day Eritrea), where the flat yellow desert stretches to the base of gray, rocky cliffs that rise 1,000 feet over the city. From Kassala they walked into the wilderness toward the border. Alert to the possibility of trouble, the two men buried their bags in the sand under a bridge before entering a small nomadic village. There, among huts thrown together with mud, canvas, and tin, they were met by several men with friendly gestures, and were given milk to drink. They took a seat on a mat outside one of the huts, where they rested.

After an hour filled with quiet conversation, a man appeared wearing a white jelabia — a long flowing shirt that reaches down past the knees — over white baggy pants. A long, curved sword hung from his waist. Their luck seemed to be up.

The man began interrogating them, asking them why they were on the border, about to leave the country. Kongo lied. He told the man that they were on their way to Asmara, in Ethiopia, for a weekend of shopping. The man became more and more suspicious, and asked them about their faith. He accused them of being antigovernment because they were southerners and Christians. He accused them of leaving the country to join the rebels. They denied the charges.

As the man became increasingly agitated, one of the other men from the village stood up and told the travelers, “Please know that I am not going to be one of those that may harm you. And let your blood not touch me or my children.” Incensed by the outburst, the hostile man attacked this man, their defender, saying that he was antigovernment. “You are a traitor,” he yelled.

While the Arab men argued, Kongo leaned over to his teacher and said, “This is the chance. You start running.” Kongo was young, broad-shouldered, and strong. He was confident that he could ward off the men if they attacked, especially since they wore long, clumsy clothes that would keep them from running fast. “And never mind about whatever is happening to me,” he told his friend. “I will be behind to make sure that nobody runs after you.”

Abugo turned and ran toward the bridge where they had hidden their bags. A commotion ensued, and the agitated man chased after Abugo. Kongo rushed after the man and kicked his legs out from under him. He took the man’s sword and stood over him. The other men scattered as Kongo brought the sword — still in its sheath — up into the air and then down onto the man’s back with a dull thud. As the man cried out, Kongo ran off into the desert, joining his teacher under the bridge, where they spent the night. In the morning, they walked several miles down the road before reaching a roadside bus stop, where they got on a bus that took them to Asmara. Kongo would not return to Sudan for 26 years.

*****

The aisles of Portland’s Hannaford supermarket are brimming with food. Kongo is in the cereal aisle, leaning into his shopping cart as he makes his way to the back of the store to pick up a carton of orange juice. He moves through the store slowly, methodically.

In the meat section, Kongo recognizes a West African immigrant in his late 30s. They shake hands and the man asks him about another member of the Sudanese community. Kongo explains that there have been two untimely deaths in the man’s family. The conversation switches directions, and the man says he knows of some jobs opening up at a local plant. He asks Kongo if he can pass the information on to the Sudanese community. “No problem,” Kongo replies.

Moving on to a new aisle, Kongo adds a box of tea and a package of sliced banana bread to his cart before heading to the customer service desk to send a remittance to his niece in Cairo, Egypt — the real business of his visit to Hannaford. Kongo’s niece and her three children, like many displaced Sudanese, are waiting in Egypt for their refugee status to be confirmed by the United Nations so that they can be accepted to a new home, most likely the United States, Canada, or Australia.

Kongo takes a Western Union slip from a pile and squints to read the instructions; he left his glasses at home. He leans on the table, his head close to the slip. After carefully filling out the form, he takes it up to the counter. “You’re missing a section,” says the young man. Kongo walks back to the pile of slips, takes another, and fills out the missing section.

Back at the counter, while Kongo waits in line, some change drops out of his pocket. “Sir,” a man behind him says, and points to the ground. A large smile flashes across Kongo’s face. He bends over to pick it up. “Thank you,” he says, before turning forward and resuming his stoic expression.

At the counter, the man looks over the form again. Everything seems to be correct this time. He spells out the name aloud while Kongo listens to make sure the money goes to the right person. “One hundred dollars,” Kongo says. “No, one hundred and twenty dollars.” The man turns to enter the information in his machine. “One hundred dollars for her rent deposit, twenty dollars for pocket money. One hundred dollars there is like five hundred dollars here.”

*****

The Kongo family lived in Cairo in 2000. They were four of the more than 414,000 displaced Sudanese there, many awaiting emigration to an unknown new home. Rose was the first to get a job, so she worked while Kongo stayed home with their young daughters.

Displaced persons seeking refugee status are required to register with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees within a week of arrival. After Kongo registered, he was given a date and time to return for an interview. He would need to provide the reason he fled Sudan and give evidence that he could not return. While many spend years awaiting refugee status, it did not take long for Kongo. His was an obvious case.

After escaping Sudan in 1963, Kongo lived in several East African countries, graduating from high school and then working for various firms before becoming the chief executive officer of a logistics company in Uganda. The company handled all of the exports for Uganda during a coffee boom, and Kongo reaped the benefits: cars, a driver, and a staffed house. But despite the plush life he had made for himself in Uganda, Kongo yearned to return to Sudan, his home.

So in 1989, three years after marrying Rose, Kongo moved his family to Juba, the capital of southern Sudan, about 100 miles from his native Yei. He accepted a position as a relief and agricultural coordinator for Sudan Aid, a nongovernmental organization working with internally displaced people in southern Sudan during the height of the second civil war. As government soldiers shelled the towns of southern Sudan, scores of people made the journey to Juba to live in camps on the outskirts of town. Kongo arranged for aid to be distributed within the camps.

Then in 1999, without warning, Kongo was arrested and charged with aiding the rebels. He adamantly denied the charge, but was sent to a detention center anyway. Government officers interrogated him about his alleged involvement with the rebels. Interrogations in the prison involved psychological intimidation, beatings, and pressure holds. Kongo sustained a back injury that would not be treated until he reached the United States over a year later. The pain still has not totally subsided. Kongo refused to admit to a crime he had not committed, but the interrogations continued with no formal trial.

While he was imprisoned, Sudan Aid and the Catholic Church worked on his behalf. Their efforts paid off, and he was released a month after he entered prison, on the condition that he never reveal the details of his stay. He continues to keep his silence.

Knowing that he could be arrested again at any moment if he remained in Sudan, Kongo fled to Egypt with his family, leaving on a train in the middle of the night. After a year in Cairo, they were accepted into the United States and arrived in Portland on January 31, 2001.

*****

It’s Saturday night, and Portland’s many restaurants are full of patrons. As the night wears on, the tiny bars on Congress Street and the large, popular ones in the Old Port begin to fill up. Bands take the stage and music escapes through doorways into the cobbled streets.

Kongo sits on one of the couches in his living room. He leans back, letting his right leg extend straight out in front of him, his bare feet resting on the carpet. News from CNN flashes across a large-screen TV sitting prominently on a wooden entertainment center. Rebels in Darfur have scored a major victory against government soldiers in Sudan. Kongo watches attentively. With little time to read, he has turned to CNN to stay informed and learn about politics.

In the spring, Kongo’s political skills were put to the test when the Maine legislature considered a bill to divest the state’s retirement funds from Sudan. The Sudanese government uses much of its revenue for military expenditures, meaning that money invested in Sudan indirectly funds weapons used in Darfur. At the time, Maine had more than $50,000,000 invested in companies doing business in Sudan.

Several members of the Maine House and Senate were reluctant to vote in favor of the bill, so Kongo got in his Dodge sedan and drove to Augusta, the state capital, to lobby with other Sudanese refugees on behalf of the bill. He spoke to the opponents, explaining the situation in Sudan. He made the drive three times. Later, when the bill came to a vote, it passed unanimously. In April, Kongo was invited to stand beside Governor Baldacci as he signed it into law.

Kongo calls to Nancy, who is in another room doing homework while her older sister watches TV. She opens the door, and R & B follows her out of the room. Kongo asks her in Arabic to put on hot water and make a cup of Milo, a chocolate drink popular in the developing world.

“In the time I’ve been in the United States,” Kongo says, “I have never once been to a beer bar. I have never had one beer outside of my home. There just isn’t any time.”

Nancy returns with a cup of Milo on a saucer, and sets it down on the coffee table in the center of the room. Rose is working at Maine Medical Center until 1 o’clock tonight, assisting doctors in the emergency room. Nancy returns to her room through the kitchen. The girls do not like CNN, so they usually watch their own TV while Kongo takes in the world’s events by himself. Sometimes, particularly when professional wrestling is on, they all sit together in the living room and watch.

Across Portland, on Munjoy Hill and in Kennedy Park, Sudanese children are watching Egyptian movies on satellite TV; they are watching American sitcoms with their siblings, and they are playing games with neighborhood friends. Their parents are coming home from work, or are heading out the door on their way to work, or are in the next room studying for a college class. Some are sitting next to their children, telling stories. There are moments of relaxation.

“I’m becoming too old to work on my feet all the time,” Kongo says meditatively. “Perhaps I will go back to school. Political science. Or maybe economics. You need a degree to work in an office in this country.” There’s a pause, and then a smile. “I might start my own business. I ran a transportation business before, in Africa. I could buy a truck, an 18-wheeler. I know a man who would drive it.”

Tomorrow evening at 6 o’clock, Kongo will pull on his work boots and drive to Hassan Ahmed’s house to pick him up. The two will then drive to Spencer Press and start another workweek. Kongo will stand at his computer terminal for another 12 hours, moving rolls of paper into the production line.

For now, though, he sits back on his couch and contemplates the possibilities.

Kyle Boelte and Anna M. Weaver are documenting Sudanese refugee life on four continents. More information can be found at www.acrossfourcontinents.org.

Kyle Boelte

It is 6 a.m. Monday. The winter sun has not yet risen, but slowly, shadows of men flit through the dark. They gather against the bare rock walls of Pare de Sufrir Church in Woodside.

And in the morning emptiness, the laborers of Roosevelt Avenue begin their daylong vigil for temporary work.

A giant white cross hangs on the corner of the church, obscured by the elevated tracks of the No. 7 line that runs along Roosevelt. At 8:30 a.m., more than 50 Latino men, mostly from Ecuador, gather on all four corners of the intersection and wait.

For day laborers, New York City has long been a mecca where pay was good and work plentiful, according to Oscar Parades-Morales, executive director of the Latin American Workers Project in Jackson Heights. As the rest of the nation went through the subprime mortgage crisis, workers from as far off as California converged on the city looking for work, says Parades-Morales.

But in recent months, the construction industry has entered a slump. New York state has lost 2,000 jobs in construction since September 2007, according to the Department of Labor. A report released by the New York Building Congress, which represents the construction industry, expects 30,000 jobs to be lost in the city by 2010.

On Roosevelt, the workers are already facing difficult times. Last October, police arrested 10 laborers for obstructing the sidewalk at 37th Avenue and Broadway, three blocks east of the intersection. The incident was unusual, but has left the men apprehensive.

Below the white cross is a short, middle-aged, undocumented man who refused to reveal his name. “Jose” crossed into the United States from Ecuador seven years ago with his family.

“Running. Running [through] El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico,” he says. “Maybe all day here.”

Jose is desperate for work. He needs money for child support payments to maintain visitation rights to his daughter and son.

Jose’s friend, “Jorges,” who also declined to identify himself, has his family in Ecuador. He came to New York City in 1986 when Ronald Reagan was president. He is taller than the others and is dressed in a brown leather jacket and a navy blue “NY” cap turned backward on his head.

“My baby,” he says of his nine-year-old son as he pulls out a passport-size photo of a black-haired, chubby boy from his wallet. “My wife.” He displays a photo of an unsmiling woman.

“No job yesterday. This year, no job,” he says. He has filled out an application for work in Manhattan, but no one calls him. So he ends up with the uncertainty of Roosevelt, waiting for contractors who pay less than minimum wage and hire one person for jobs that require at least two workers.

The men wait at a street corner until a contractor pulls up looking for day laborers. The men come cheap and one will do the work of many Americans. They are uniformly dressed in caps, sweatshirts, and blue jeans, and tote black knapsacks. There are a disproportionate number of mustaches in the crowd, a sign of manhood in Latin American nations.

At 9 a.m., the men stand around, doing nothing. Some sit on the litter-strewn sidewalk in their baggy jeans. Concrete is a natural conductor; it sucks the warmth of the human body. The younger men choose to be in the sunlight farther down 69th Street, but the older men stay under the cold shadow of the El. When a car pulls up, the extra seconds it takes to hurry back to Roosevelt can cost them the day’s job.

Some talk. Others don’t. Women walk by without sparing them a glance. The day laborers do not seem to notice. They are transfixed by the flow of traffic. When innocuous vans pause on the street, the men stare and wait for them to pull to the curb. A car honks on Roosevelt. Every man turns his head toward the car, but it doesn’t stop.

A green sedan pulls up to the curb. Three men race up to the car, hopeful. The lady asks for directions; the men help her out.

Every time I talk to Jose and Jorges, men dart across Roosevelt, thinking I’m hiring for a job. “You want worker?” they ask.

“They are like bee. Everybody will sting the car. They are like, grab the person,” says Pamela Plum, the owner of Color and Cut, a salon on 69th and Roosevelt, outside which the laborers wait.

The men switch positions and move from the wall of the church to the edge of the sidewalk. One man in a denim shirt is barely as tall as the mailbox he leans against.
At 9:37 a.m., a gray car pulls up. Three laborers go up to it and stand at attention. The driver gets out and talks on the phone, gesturing furiously. He then haggles with the laborers. The three get hired.

The going price for labor is cheap. It used to be $120; now they are lucky if they get $80 for a whole day’s work.

George Memdoza, 25, has blue-green eyes, fair skin, and a protruding belly. He came from Ecuador 10 years ago and lives with his mother.

He got a job moving furniture Sunday at 9 p.m. He finished work at 5 a.m. For eight hours of work, he was paid $80.

“No job is easy,” he says. “There was only me. Moving everything. Bed, cabinet, chair. Right now, my eyes very sleepy.” He came directly to Roosevelt after that job. “No go back to house,” he says.

Memdoza is harsh on the police. “Police come to intersection, ask if we have coke, marijuana. I’m no <i>narco</i>. Police <i>no comprende</i>,” he says.

This erratic work is the only source of income for these men. They are undocumented and unskilled, and the economic recession has snatched away too many jobs.

“The economic crisis is horrible,” says Parades-Morales at the Latin American Workers Project. “I have workers on the street who don’t find jobs for three, four months.” Parades-Morales tells of a man who got seven hours of work one week, and then two hours of work the next.

Many fall prey to unscrupulous contractors who do not pay at the end of the day, according to Parades-Morales. The men have no Occupational Safety and Health Administration training, a fact illustrated by the fake Nikes the men wear. Too few are in heavy-duty construction boots. In 2008, 21 men were killed in construction-related accidents in New York City; 17 of them were Latinos, according to Parades-Morales.

At 10:30 a.m., a plain white van pulls up. Men dart into traffic to get to the other side of the intersection, Jorges among them. About 20 cluster around the van.

“This guy, everyday he come here, take four, five people for delivery,” explains Jose, Jorges’ friend.

Jorges is not hired. The younger men are cooler, the older ones more jittery. They have greater family obligations. They have kids and must send money home. Jorges unfolds a yellow Western Union receipt and displays a $30 deposit to Ecuador proudly. He says that he needs a job today to pay his $100-per-week rent.

The small man leaning against the mailbox is at the edge of the sidewalk, anxiously scanning traffic.

By 10:37 a.m., most conversation has ceased. The El thunders by constantly. Many younger men give up and leave. The older men hang on.

At 11:30 a.m., in a Starbucks 10 blocks down the road, two elderly white men discuss the day laborers. “I remember postcards where the authorities fight the illegal immigrants [from Latin America] off because once they land, they start sucking off the public welfare system. … They come here and find heaven.”

At 2:30 p.m., there are two men outside Pare de Sufrir. Everyone else has left. Jose and Jorges waited for five hours but they finally gave up.

One week later in November, the men complain about the residents of 69th Street. Some men had drunk beer and created a racket overnight on 69th and Broadway, for which the day laborers had been blamed.

“What we do? We trying to live,” said Jose.

As night falls, the brothels along Roosevelt traditionally come alive as day laborers seek female company away from home and family. But these days, no one goes, according to Gustavo Gomez, a day laborer with family in Ecuador. Money no longer flows along Roosevelt.
 

In The Fray Contributor

The sardonic graffiti appearing around New York’s SoHo lately seems incongruous, since this is one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods.

“Where’s my bailout?” a homeless woman asks in one stencil.

Another, in a pink makeshift frame with the words “The greatest depression” scribbled on it, shows a man being silenced by a United States of Debt dollar bill.

Graffiti has always adorned the buildings of SoHo, the formerly industrial Manhattan neighborhood that attracted artists with its spacious lofts in the ’70s, and today is home to top boutiques, restaurants, and galleries.

But the new wave of recession-themed graffiti feels like a throwback, or at least a vibrant collage of frustration and parody.

“It’s a free outlet for people to express themselves to a large audience,” said Timothy Kephart, creator of Graffiti Tracker, a web program that interprets graffiti. “Ironically, to express their displeasure with the economy, you could argue that the vandalism has a negative economic impact both in the monetary loss and in the quality of life loss.”

But some welcome the fresh dose of color.

“It’s awesome,” said Julian Kouyoumjian, a salesman at Kid Robot, a counterculture store on Spring Street that draws much of its essence from the graffiti scene. “We actually collaborate with a lot of street artists,” Kouyoumjian said. “It’s really popular and goes hand in hand with the stuff you see in here.”

And with new works appearing daily outside their doors, even some galleries can’t resist grafitti’s guerrilla appeal.

“It gives the neighborhood character,” said Alexandra Tayne, director of Lumas Editions Gallery on Wooster Street.

A poster depicting a man with “F___ the stock market, buy art” tagged along his sunglass lenses got Tayne thinking about the economy’s impact on the art industry.

Many SoHo gallery art buyers tend to work in the financial sector, she said, so times are also tough for galleries that rely on one big sale per month. “Luckily for us, we deal entirely with photography,” she explained. “So if we need to adjust prices, we can just make more prints. There will still be a limited number, and just a few are signed. Art has never been stopped by a recession.”

The community board that serves as the neighborhood’s main local voice doesn’t share the enthusiasm for street art.

“SoHo, like much of CB2, is landmarked,” said district manager Bob Gormley. “If graffiti is defined as any sort of tagging, writing, or painting on property owned by someone else, and doing so without the owner’s permission, it is always illegal. If a graffiti artist has the owner’s permission, that is a different matter. However, any such work would have to be in compliance with the city’s landmark laws.”

Certain pieces — like an illustration of an AIG employee being pummeled in the face by a pair of brass knuckles — seemed unlikely to win approval, anyway.

Resident complaints have waned considerably, though. Everyblock.com, a website that uses the mayor’s Community Affairs Unit database to compile data graffiti cleanup requests, indicated that complaints dropped significantly after the recession.

From January 2008 to April 2009, 101 graffiti cleanup requests were filed in SoHo, 70 by August 2008. But from September 2008 (when the investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, an event linked to the beginning of the recession) to March 2009, a mere 31 requests were filed.

Maybe SoHo residents are discovering an appreciation for graffiti. Or maybe they have bigger things to worry about nowadays.

“My apartment has been hit with graffiti, and it feels terrible,” said New York University student Louis Formica. “I didn’t ask for it to be tagged. It’s a strange feeling to know someone stood outside your house and vandalized it.”

If only bad news graffiti could always be on someone else’s property.

SoHo graffiti turns topical. 

In The Fray Contributor

Perhaps the most consequential single episode in the recent history of the northern Mexican city known as the Laguna occurred on May 13, 2007. On that sunny Sunday afternoon, local political heavyweight and underworld boss Don Carlos Herrera and his wife were on their way back from a trip to the local Sam’s Club when their armored car was intercepted by an armed unit. The assailants riddled the car with more than 100 rounds.

Like hurricanes, armored cars are measured on a scale from one to five, with level-five armor offering the greatest capacity to repel projectiles. Herrera’s Cadillac Escalade was a level four, but the bullets, which had never before been seen in the Laguna, blew right through it.

Both Herrera and his wife suffered bullet wounds, and they were raced to a nearby hospital. Scores of local police maintained a one-block perimeter around the area, with no unauthorized person allowed to come any closer. Herrera and his wife survived, but Herrera’s longstanding control over the local drug trade was no longer undisputed. The battle for the Laguna had begun.
 
Carlos Castañeda is a stocky man in his late 20s, with a shaved head and a wide, welcoming face. He’s worked as a reporter in the Laguna since he graduated from college in early 2000, which he says was the fulfillment of a long-held dream.

“I always wanted to work for a media outlet. As far back as I remember, that’s what I wanted to do. It seemed like the most interesting career. My family wanted me to study some other major, engineering, something that paid a little better. But no, it wasn’t what caught my interest.”

The city where Castañeda works is actually made up of several cities: the Laguna is the colloquial name given to the neighboring municipalities of Torreón, Matamoros, Gómez Palacio, and Lerdo. With more than a million inhabitants, it is the ninth-largest metro area in the nation. Its economy (based largely on exports), quality of life (relatively high), and weather (hot as can be for 10 months of the year, bone chilling for two) make it a typical northern Mexican metropolis.

When I first moved here in 2005, the tranquility of the city and the trustworthiness of its inhabitants were among its foremost traits. While neighboring regions suffered under the weight of surging drug-related violence, the Laguna was an oasis of calm, an unlikely “Pleasantville” just south of the border region. You could walk around late at night undisturbed. Physical violence didn’t go beyond bar fights. Sightings of machine gun–toting federal police and army troops were limited to the television.

In May 2007, Castañeda was a relatively new reporter to the crime beat at La I, a local tabloid newspaper with a penchant for splashy photos and direct, pithy headlines. At that point, Castañeda’s reports revolved mostly around drunk driving accidents. As luck (or more precisely, his schedule) would have it, Castañeda was not working the day Herrera was attacked. But an event of such significance prompted a phone call from his editor, and when he went to work on Monday, he began following the story. This meant little more than the mundane task of tracking Herrera’s physical improvement in the hospital, but the broader significance of the event would soon be known.

The attempted assassination of Herrera was the opening shot in what has turned out to be a very long battle for control of the city. The drug gang known as the Zetas — founded by ex-military officers and linked to traffickers in the Gulf state of Tamaulipas — had moved into town and was determined to rip control of the Laguna from Herrera and his backers in the Pacific state of Sinaloa. At stake were both valuable smuggling routes (Torreón is just six and eight hours, respectively, from key border crossings in Nuevo Laredo and Juárez) as well as the growing local drug market.

What followed was a string of recriminations, kidnappings, threats, grenade attacks, and killings that carry on to this day. In the days following the attack on Herrera, the leader of the region’s anti-kidnapping unit, Enrique Ruiz, was himself kidnapped; his captors videotaped their blindfolded victim identifying local businessmen as being in a league with Herrera.

As Ricardo Ravelo narrates in his book Chronicles of Blood, the Zetas then arranged for the video to be shown before a reunion of a local business group, many of whose members were implicated by Ruiz. A letter was read to the gathering, which warned, “The person who has illicit business outside of our organization will be bothered … be informed that any disobedience before our petition will bring irreversible consequences for yourself and your business partners.” According to Ravelo, 25 private aircraft left the area for the United States the following day.

Today, more than two years later, incidents worthy of an action film are regular occurrences. The city awakens to the sight of executed bodies on a near daily basis.

Last summer, an armed group attacked the police station in Lerdo in broad daylight, killing four officers and beating up female employees before fleeing. (The chief resigned shortly thereafter.)

In September of 2008, Torreón received national news coverage when the army arrested several dozen of its local police for working for the Zetas. Torreón celebrated Christmas Eve with a gun fight in the midst of a downtown shopping rush, and rang in the new year with a nationally televised, four-hour firefight that caused the evacuation of the city’s toniest neighborhood. Schools around the region closed days early, ahead of the 2008 Christmas holidays, due to rumors that armed groups were planning to force their way into the schools to rob all the teachers of their Christmas bonuses (worth two weeks of salary). It’s as if the various cities making up the Laguna are competing for the most sensational headline. 

For Castañeda, all this has meant navigating a city that was far different than the Laguna in which he had grown up. A common trope about the drug wars in Mexico is that the drug gangs only kill each other. There’s an element of truth to that, but the underworld fighting invaded the daily routines of the Laguna as a whole. The Zetas created a climate of fear that extended well beyond those who make their living smuggling cocaine, marijuana, and the like northward. They supplemented their trafficking income with car theft, kidnapping, and extortion, all of these crimes much more of a public menace than the peaceful passage of drugs. Other criminal groups, dedicated to many of the same activities, took advantage of the chaotic backdrop to establish a toehold in the Laguna underworld.

The press was among the casualties. Castañeda talks about a local press corps that was threatened and bullied. Various newspapers and television stations were threatened as well. One reporter in Gómez Palacio was kidnapped and beaten up in response to something he wrote, but Castañeda said the threat to the local press went far beyond one mere incident.

“More than a direct threat against any reporter in particular, what you see is a change in the climate in which the reporters work,” Castañeda says. “The editorial chiefs say to be careful, to not investigate too much.”

“[You write] what the authority tells you, no more. Don’t search for more, don’t ask, don’t investigate, period. This is the problem, the self-censorship that has taken hold in the media outlets, which definitely goes hand in hand with the fact that it has gotten more dangerous. That’s how the reporters see it.”

Reporters in the Laguna have reason to be concerned. Mexico is one of the most dangerous places on the planet for a reporter, with more than two dozen journalists killed since 2000, and a handful more who have disappeared. Both Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists rank Mexico as the most dangerous country in the Western Hemisphere to work as a reporter. From the federal government down, official efforts to address the problem have been slow and ineffectual.

Castañeda says the impact of the threats is palpable. “These threats, whether they are real or not, have modified the way the coverage is carried out.” In response, some newspapers also removed authors’ bylines from crime stories and had local police stationed at the entries to the offices throughout the workday. Media outlets also coordinated their coverage, so that no one newspaper or TV station stood out too much.

Castañeda adds: “Between the media outlets, there’s a discussion among the editorial bosses, the directors, when there’s a story about a murder, and execution — any of that — it’s treated with official information, with information sent by the procuduría, and since then, nothing has been investigated. Nothing is published beyond that which is official information. Information that the authorities provide. There’s no way to balance this information. So as to not get us in trouble, to not investigate too much, to not receive threats, to not be singled out, to not provoke these powers — the drug traffickers — we’re going to go with official information.”

At the same time, the basic obligations of the job hadn’t changed, which left people like Castañeda walking an increasingly fine line. “The reporters have to be playing two games — with the company for whom they work, and with the authority. And with the organized crime, too.”

“Now the officials are so scared, that they say, ‘Don’t put me in the news. Don’t interview me, please.’ It’s really tricky, the situation now. Before, the same functionaries would call you and tell you, ‘I have a detainee here, it’s interesting’ … The authorities themselves feel threatened.”

The vacuum that the threatened media left behind ceded space for the dissemination of news through other, less formal means. Alarming, and often brutally graphic, email chains spread news of assassinations, as well as warnings of upcoming violence.

Incidents like those described above were accompanied by the daily dissemination of fear-mongering email chains. Most, written by a concerned citizen or someone pretending to be one, warned against imminent bloodbaths at some bar or another: “So I ask you to please listen it’s for your good don’t go out to bars in the night and if you see trucks without plates report them. In Lerdo be careful in San Isidro and Back Stage. Gómez: In Flamingo’s and Tonic. Torreón: K-pital and La Quinta bar.”

Other emails claimed to be the voice of one trafficking group or another, and tried to justify their presence while condemning their competitors: “[W]e DON’T KIDNAP, NOR ROB, NOR DO WE HARM INNOCENT PEOPLE, we ask that you don’t get scared with big-talking assholes that act with impunity because they are protected …”

Still others served no communicative purpose other than to terrorize. I once received an email that was just a series of snapshots of severed heads in a convenience store, all with a bloody “Z” carved below the hairline.

The impact of the rising tide of drug-related violence in Mexico has extended far beyond one mayoral administration or a small coterie of business big shots. The Laguna has seen the organic weakening of society, from top to bottom. Mexico City columnist Ricardo Raphael captured the prevailing sense of chaos during an August 2008 column:

“Until a little while ago, the Mexicans from the Laguna were famous for being big spenders and big partyers … Now, nevertheless, the streets of the Laguna empty out at eight o’clock at night and consumption has plummeted. The war against drug trafficking has dramatically affected the lives of these residents. As in Tijuana, Juárez, or Culiacán, here also fear has gained ground.”

The same day that Raphael’s column ran, a heavily armed military convoy — totaling 350 ski-masked soldiers and more than 50 Hummers and troop transports — drew stares while proceeding down Torreón’s main drag. A dozen police patrol trucks accompanied the soldiers, a handful of jackals escorting a pack of lions. The soldiers reassured the inhabitants that there was an official authority more powerful than any drug gang, but violence didn’t drop. Indeed, it continued to rise.

Just before the new year, Castañeda switched off the crime beat. Like the ex-police chief in Lerdo, he cited stress as a reason for the switch. Since his professional interest is based less on covering crime than in reporting generally, it has been an easy adjustment. Now he writes international and national news summaries, studies English in his spare time, and freelances at a new magazine called Magdalenas, which focuses on sexuality in the Laguna.

Mexico as a whole saw a drop of 26 percent in drug-related killings in the first three months of 2009. Some of the biggest drops were in Tijuana (79 percent), Juárez (39 percent), and Culiacán (45 percent) — the same trio of perennially drug-addled cities mentioned by Raphael.

Unfortunately, the Laguna largely missed out on this hopeful trend. More than 120 people were killed from January to March, which would give the Laguna a murder rate greater than any in the United States. In one night in February, 11 people were killed in firefights around the city.

In mid-May, a reporter from La Opinión, one of the two major dailies in the Laguna, was abducted and murdered. He was the first reporter to be killed for his work in the city. In its influential Bajo Reserva editorial column, Mexico City’s most prominent newspaper, El Universal, had the following reaction:

“They tell us that in the Laguna things are very, very dangerous for the press, and for society in general. Two groups are fighting for the city: Zetas and ‘the ones from the house on the hill.’ The former are locals. They tell that the two groups continue giving forced conferences to the press. Be careful. The Laguna is coming apart; some say it could be the next Juárez.”

The civilian population, from the mayor’s office, to the press, to the burrito vendors, remains cowed. The reporters who are able, find safer topics than crime to write about.

Patrick Corcoran

Saturday, April 14, 2007
Late morning
Approximately 240 hours until Final Review

Sunlight floods through skylights in a vast loft and washes over a scene of filth and chaos. Gutted Chinese food cartons, crumpled sandwich wraps, abandoned ice cream tubs oozing at the seams, razors, rulers, energy drinks, sawdust, tape, foamcore, and glue lie heaped and scattered across 40 tabletops. It is only the occasional odd structure, delicate and meticulously crafted, or the intricate drawings of complex geometry, or the laboriously worked models tossed in with the debris, that reveal this to be a place where architecture is conceived and designs struggle to find form.

This morning, in the far left corner of the studio, half a dozen young men and women are working quietly. They are first-year undergraduate students at the Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture in Brooklyn, New York. In just 10 days they have their end-of-the-year final review, where they will present their semester’s work to a jury of professors and professionals and be judged for the sophistication of their thought and the beauty and quality of their craft.

Ezra G., 19, sprawls on his stool. He stares at his laptop and sketches a complex diagram on the paper covering of his table.

“Okay Ezra, looks like you’re going to be first,” says Evan Tribus, instructor for one of the four classes that share this studio space. Tribus has come in the past several Saturdays, in addition to class time, to offer his 10 students what assistance and advice he can. He circles Ezra’s desk. So far, Ezra’s model is a sheet of intricately interconnected paper cones that look more like a scaly pelt than anything pertaining to a building. Next to it are strewn an abundance of sketches, diagrams, and equations.

“So, these are your underwater viewing chambers?” Tribus asks, peering at one of the drawings.

“Yeah …” Ezra drops the pen, wipes a hand across his face, and blinks hard. He is tall. He has wide shoulders, hair the color of pale ale, and carries himself with the loose-limbed confidence of an athlete. He is from the mountains of North Carolina and knows how to kill a deer, rebuild a motorcycle engine, and survive in the woods for days if necessary.

“Show me again how you’re going to accommodate the ocean currents,” says Tribus.

Ezra pokes his model impatiently and explains something of the engineering principles behind the structure it represents — a building of sorts that would float on the ocean surface, flush visitors through a dizzying array of water tunnels, wind halls, and pitching chambers, and guarantee them a “nauseatingly visceral” experience sure to inspire meditation on such topics as control, fate, fear, and liberation.

Tribus nods solemnly. “Okay. Great. But looks like you’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Several tables down from Ezra is Eunice K., also 19. Her desk is littered with gritty, graying pieces of paper that have clearly been glued, pulled apart, and re-glued multiple times. For some reason Eunice has replaced her stool with a shopping cart. Seated in the cart, her head barely rises above the table’s edge. Tribus surveys her table.

“I don’t have any new work,” she says quietly.

“Nice seat,” says Tribus. “You want to talk about that?”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“Look, your drawings are really nice. Make sure you present them at final too, okay? It’s important to show your process.”

The studio door swings open. A young man in shorts and flip-flops huffs in, weaves noisily between the desks, and drops his backpack with a thud by the table in the corner. 

“How are you, Eric?” asks Tribus.

“Bad. Stupid upperclassman. Totally took over the laser cutter. They wouldn’t let me use it at all.”

Like most other students, Eric has pictures, notes, and mementos of personal significance around his desk. Among his are photographs from several of his high school’s theater productions. He loves theater. He thought he might want to study set design, but his father graduated from Pratt’s School of Architecture, and his older brother attends currently. All things considered, Eric explained, he decided that architecture maybe was the more practical field to pursue.

The other students’ models are fanciful structures, scarcely distinguishable as architecture, but Eric’s is distinctly a building. It has a smooth floor, a hint of stairs, and a watermelon-sized domed ceiling. 

There is a long moment of quiet while Tribus gazes at Eric’s model.

“Your dimensions are all wrong,” he says eventually. “You want these to be stairs, right? Do you see? They’re way too steep.”

“Mmmmmm,” says Eric.

There are apparently other problems too, something to do with the whole concept of the piece. Tribus urges Eric to consider the viewer-viewee relationship more carefully, to think in terms of feeling rather than literally, to try to convey a mood. Eric glances out the window. Tribus shrugs. “Look … I can’t make you do it, but I think it would make your project better,” and he moves on.

Charrette is a French word meaning chariot, wagon, or cart. According to legend, in the 19th century at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, students’ work was gathered up and whisked off for review by means of a horse-drawn cart. Students working frantically until the last minute would leap onto the cart and make final changes en charrette as it trundled to its destination. Now, for those in the design profession, the term refers to final crunch time before a deadline — usually a period of sleepless nights and frenzied productivity.

In April 2007, all architecture students enrolled at Pratt were in charrette, getting ready for their respective classes’ final reviews. For first-year students the pressure is particularly acute. The relentless workload and harsh critiques of the first year are designed to cull out any who might prove insufficiently bright or dedicated to pass in the program.

 “Look, if I had my way,” Tribus says one evening over dinner at a restaurant near Pratt, “they’d never leave the building. I want them there all day, every day. If you sleep, sleep there. If you need something, order in.”

Tribus is a smallish man with a tidy goatee and a sharp, intelligent gaze. He stares at me over the noodles.

“You think I’m kidding,” he says. “I’m not.”

Charrette, he tells me, can be a remarkable time too, as long as people engage in it wholeheartedly.

“Charrette is a really special time. The sheer fact of so many people working together in a contained space, so intensely … it generates an incredible creative energy. Being in that community environment helps. You can get so much done. It’s a singular, really amazing thing.” 

He recalls warmly the friendships forged and the euphoric moments of exhaustion and achievement from the charrettes of his school years.

But in architecture, he explains, the quality of one’s work correlates closely to the sheer quantity one produces. Students must be able to demonstrate their thought processes through the work they do, and be able to justify all decisions. The more work one does, the more thoroughly one thinks through the nuances of one’s project, and the better one can defend it at review.

“You can never have enough work. You could always produce more. And so you should.”

Sunday, April 15, 2007
Late night
Approximately 206 hours until Final Review

Four students bend into the puddles of light at their tables. Outside, lightning flickers and rain pours down steadily. Wet clothes drag on a rope strung between two columns. Reggae thumps quietly from another corner of the studio.

Eunice is perched on the edge of her cart. When she grins, a deep dimple punctures the left side of her chin.

“I got it to work!” she says triumphantly. Last night, she finally figured out how to connect the folded paper pieces that are the building blocks of her model. Now they spread in a stiff froth across her entire desk.

“This is a desert landscape,” she explains. “My architecture grows here, at the end. The idea is that you go from this arid, harsh landscape to a cool, really nice space, where you can relax. Every individual can rest, however they want to. It’s kind of a journey, I guess.”

Eunice tells me how she struggled for a long time to get her model to behave. She became frustrated, then lost enthusiasm for her work.

“Sometimes you get to a certain point, you think you’re doing well, then you look around and it seems other people get it so much faster, are doing so much better. And then you have a doubt here …” She touches her heart.

For some reason, Eric never bought a desk lamp, so his corner of the studio is dark. I don’t see any progress on his model, but he says things are going well.

“It’s kind of an amphitheater,” he says, then rolls his eyes. “Though I’m not supposed to call it that anymore. Tribus says it’s too literal, or something.”

Thursday, April 19 / Friday, April 20, 2007
Very early morning hours
Approximately 103 hours until Final Review

Charrette has a smell: rancid food, the tang of fermented liquid — also the students. They smell of unwashed bodies and hair, dirty clothes and feet. The reason most students wear flip-flops or pad around in socks, I’m told, is to avoid “swamp foot”: that particular condition when overlong confinement in a shoe brings on massive skin peeling and odoriferous decay.

There are many people in the studio tonight. Lights blaze. Behind a barrel overflowing with garbage, someone is sleeping on the communal couch. The couch looks like the well-used toy of a huge canine. An entire side has been ripped off, trailing stuffing. This was done on purpose, I’m told, so that tall people could sleep comfortably, too. Grueling sleep deprivation is the most renowned — indeed celebrated — aspect of architectural training.

Ezra has been absentmindedly slicing up the paper on his desk with an exacto knife, ruining the intricate drawings laid down there over weeks. On the skin between his thumb and forefinger he’s written a list of numbers that remind him of the tasks he wants to accomplish, and roughly how many hours they’ll take.

“So I know if I can take a break or not,” he says wryly. “Sometimes I fall asleep on my desk. That’s kind of comfortable,” he says. Often he sleeps under it and stays in the architecture building four or five days at a time without going home.

Patrick, a mild-mannered and diligent student, 19 years old, stands at his desk gluing together long slivers of basswood. The wood is a cream color except along the edge where the laser cutter has burned it dark brown. The pieces look like thin slices of portobello mushroom. Patrick looks like a soldier from a PBS documentary about the Revolutionary War. He is lean, has lank brown hair pulled back into a walnut-sized nub at the nape of his neck, and earnest, thoughtful expressions.

When I comment on all the empty liquor bottles scattered around the studio — and there are many — Patrick smiles lopsidedly.

“We’re trying to have a college experience too, you know.”

“You should have been here last night!” calls out Evan, an 18-year-old who could easily pass for 13. “We played this crazy drinking game … like with how fast you can eat saltines … and Patrick did these tricks …” He pauses, concentrating for a moment on the tiny bits of wood he is gluing together with the aid of dental tools.

Sunday, April 22, 2007
Early afternoon
Approximately 44 hours to Final Review

“Dude, you left your phone here,” someone tells Eric, who has just arrived and slipped quietly behind his desk.

“I know. I realized that when I got home last night and wanted to call my mom.”

“You were going to call your mom at 4 a.m.?” I ask.

“Well,” his smile is strained, “she did say to call if I ever needed anything …”

“What did you need?”

“To talk to her,” and he ducks his head.

Ezra is wearing clean clothes and is freshly shaven, but he looks exhausted. He slumps at his desk, his back curved like a question mark.

Patrick is trying to tease out pieces of wood carved, imperfectly, by the laser cutter. A delicate piece snaps. He groans with great feeling. He has made some extras, but not many.

“I didn’t make any extras at all,” says Eric. “Some of mine broke, too, and I had to glue them together. I guess my model will just have to have some seams in it.”

Brandon B. is perched delicately on his stool, teetering above the chaotic scrap pile of supplies and filth below his desk, gluing portions of his model to a blackboard and gossiping steadily with Julie, at the adjacent desk. Brandon is quick-witted and whimsically imaginative, but easily distracted. He stops gluing and happily explains his model to me. The concept is evolution, he says. At presentation he will show how a single geometric unit — the same one that ultimately succeeds in growing into a piece of architecture — could, with other rules governing its duplication, have petered out, turned in on itself, expanded uselessly and, in myriad other ways, failed.

“You know,” says Ezra, “that’s what my model last semester was all about.”

“Cool,” says Brandon, gingerly extracting his fingers, which have dried into the glue on his model.

“Yeah … it was about failure … success …. fate. You know.”

“Shoot! I got superglue on my lip again.”

At 3:00 p.m., Eric shouts, “Done! I’m done with my theater!”

“Aaaagh!” Patrick wails as another thin slice snaps.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Predawn hours
Approximately nine hours to Final Review

The studio is quiet. Eight from the class are there; Brandon and one other are working at home.

The only sound is the repeated swiping of blade on wood, where Eunice is bent over a long board, carving out the basic building blocks of her model. It takes four or five swipes along the same line to cut through the wood. Fifteen to 30 swipes per piece — that’s about half a minute for each one. Some pieces break. She needs at least a 100 to build her model. She wasn’t able to start before because she couldn’t figure the right dimensions. Ezra taught her a new computer program that helped, but it didn’t all come together until yesterday.

“I loathe my project,” says Ezra, staring contemptuously at the elegant paper sculptures and elaborate drawings scattered across his desk. “I really do … I don’t know if it’s the concept that sucks, or just me. The craftsmanship is shitty.”

Julie, a pretty girl who is rarely in the studio, always stylishly dressed, and who usually projects an aggressive self-confidence, slips through the main door looking completely dejected. Apparently an upperclassman kicked her off the laser cutter before she’d gotten the last pieces she needs. Her face threatens tears. She explains her story to her concerned classmates.

“What an asshole!” bellows Evan, who is still edging sharp slivers of wood around with his dental equipment, and everyone agrees.

Patrick is the only one who seems happy. He’s on his last drawing and exudes zealous energy. He wipes the paper with a flourish after laying down each line — his work is very clean and neat; the jury will like that.

Mysteriously, there’s a pile of balloons on Evan’s desk. Suddenly, Patrick puts aside his pencil and selects one.

“Let’s see who can blow up the balloon biggest in one breath,” he says.

Evan grins.

Eric looks up.

Kevin and Jon promptly rise from their tables and drift to Patrick’s.

“I got to see this,” says Ezra.

Everyone gets a balloon. Even Julie. Even me, and even Eunice, though she hesitates, momentarily undecided, glancing at the clock. She selects a bright yellow one.

“Ready, set, go!”

We stand in a cluster under the inky skylights. For a bright, hissing moment, nine lovely bubbles of color bloom just perfectly.

Sincere thanks to the Pratt Institute School of Architecture; Evan Douglis, chairperson undergraduate architecture; Evan Tribus, visiting assistant professor; and the students of the Arch 102.07 studio, spring 2007.

Sarah Jean Hart