Jeanne had long harbored a crush on the short Indian man who played squash at her gym. For more than a year she tried to relax and talk to him. But she usually just stared at him while telling herself “you know, you should really say something. Like, ‘Hello.’”
   
One time, she did manage to have a conversation with him. He was smiling, friendly, and seemed happy to see her. She became so tense that she could barely think. For reasons she can’t recall, she abruptly blurted out that he should just go see a doctor about his knee. He excused himself and walked away.
   
The man tried to talk to her a few more times, but each time, Jeanne was tense and terse, and each time, he backed away. Jeanne saw him one more time at the squash court, and desperately wanted to explain how sorry she was and how much she liked him. But she couldn’t, and he left.
   
That was five years ago. Just recently, they again ran into each other at the gym. He quickly left while his brother gave her dirty looks.

“You just want to cry from how tragic it is,” she says. “Even now, I can’t even say hello.”

Speechless

Today, after 11 years of therapy, numerous self-help books, and finally, a four-month class on identifying and working through anxious thoughts, Jeanne, who asked that her real name not be used out of concern for her privacy, is buoyant as she shows me around her Brooklyn neighborhood. At first she seems unfazed by the crowd in the café we head to, but after we find a table in the back, she gives stares at anyone who walks by or sits next to us. She pushes my tape-recorder behind my cappuccino and out of her view, and continues talking.

In her 40s, with brown hair and a soft, even voice, she sometimes shivers when talking about her boss or the way her chest tightens when she thinks about speaking at a business meeting. Other times she beams, as she talks about how she can finally email someone a question without being shackled by the worry that all she will get in response is a “no.”

Five million Americans are affected by social anxiety disorder each year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. The American Psychiatric Association defines the disorder as an intense fear of a potential negative judgment, usually in a public situation.  Potential triggers could be anything from eating in public or using a public restroom, to talking to strangers or having sex.

The causes and severity of apprehension vary from individual to individual, but researcher Richard G. Heimberg, author of Social Phobia: Diagnosis, Assessment and Treatment, says that up to 13 percent of the population has some form of the disorder.

Many people are shy around those they don’t know, and get nervous when they have to speak in public. For those with social anxiety disorder, these feelings reach irrational levels. Their fears are so intense that they get nauseous while thinking of them and live unsatisfying lives in an effort to avoid them.

In Jeanne’s case, attacks revolved around dating, job interviews, speaking in public, talking to authority figures, and a myriad of other situations in which she could be looked down upon. She would frequently plan her life around avoiding her fears, often at the expense of her true desires, such as when she attended a college in the city with dreams of becoming a psychiatrist. The school wasn’t her ideal choice, but because an interview, or even a personal essay, was too frightening to consider, her options were limited.

Once enrolled, Jeanne realized that she couldn’t take upper-level psychology classes without giving presentations. Plus, her family didn’t really support the idea of her studying psychology in the first place, and she began to think that people she’d work with as a psychiatrist probably wouldn’t like her anyways. Eventually, she ended up in the history department.

Her problems continued after graduation, as Jeanne found herself terrified of changing situations, even ones that made her unhappy, for fear of new situations that could leave her exposed. She’s lived in the same apartment for 19 years, has had the same job for 9, and says she’s still “way too close” to the only boyfriend she’s ever had, even though they haven’t dated in decades. She can’t even get rid of the squash partner she dislikes for fear the new one will be worse.

“I have a hard time giving things up even if they’re negative,” she says. “It’s better to have something that’s mildly negative because the next thing might be extremely negative. It’s irrational.”

It’s not as though she’s never tried to get more out of life. But it always seemed that Jeanne’s anxiety triumphed over her ambition. She tried to get back into the health field four years ago, this time focusing on becoming a dietitian. Her beginners’ classes went well, so she then contacted nearby programs by email to inquire about taking advanced courses. When her emails weren’t answered, she gave up on the idea without attempting to call or drop by the places where the programs were offered.

Jeanne currently lives and does media work in a one-room, wooden-floor, white-wall apartment in Brooklyn, where her oversize couch doubles as a bed. She has to attend an occasional office meeting, filled with pushy talkers and irritable bosses who only want to hear good news. Just the idea of entering this melee is still enough to make her vaguely nauseous, but it is now much better than the overwhelming fear she once felt, before her recent breakthrough.

“If I thought I would have to speak … I would start to feel kind of a significant fluttering in my chest, what maybe people call butterflies,” she says. “And I’d probably get a bit of a stomach ache, and a bit of a headache, and my heart would start beating very hard. There’s a lot of tension and movement at the same time.”

When Jeanne would start to feel this way, she would find herself unable to focus and would just hope to get away without being noticed or, worse, forced to talk.

“You kind of feel frozen,” she says. According to Jeanne, social anxiety disorder can wear away a person’s self-esteem, and it can condition him or her to believe that it’s better to accept a current unhappy situation than to risk change. After two decades, she couldn’t talk to the men she liked and couldn’t imagine things ever getting better.

Ready to fail

Jeanne remembers she would often eat in the empty stairwell in high school because she was too worried to eat in the lunchroom. She never knew how to sit down and talk with groups of people, and even today, she has a hard time approaching two people who are talking to each other.

Memories of spending her childhood isolated made Jeanne decide that she could never put another person through this — Jeanne says it’s commonly believed but not proven that social anxiety is hereditary — so she decided that she would never have children. She changed her mind a few years later, but decided that it was too late for it to matter anyway.

For Jeanne, the insecurity reached beyond class and work into her personal relationships. The idea of dating once made Jeanne miserable. She’s has had only a handful of dates in the past few years and one long-term relationship. The anxiety had crushed her self-worth to the point that she assumed that if she liked someone, he couldn’t possibly like her. The only dates she could go on were with men she was uninterested in.

“I had so many fears about going on a date or dating … I didn’t even want to do it. I still don’t know anything about dating,” she says. “I feel like I’m 13 in dating situations.”

She found that sweets could temporarily make her calmer and more festive around her friends, and there were times when she combated her anxiety by eating to the point where she was too nauseous to be nervous. But the relief from her fear that food provided would never last very long.

Some of her fears make more sense than others. She hates traveling out of the city for family dinners every few months because her family has always criticized her — for everything from her weight to her shyness.

“They would say things like ‘she should have a Ph.D. by now, but she’s too shy,’” she says. “I was way too fat, I had too much acne, I was very disorganized, and the teasing about that was pretty constant. I really felt like no one in my family liked me, growing up.

“The current criticism is that … recently I’ve been told that my clothes aren’t good enough by my sister and my mother, and I just think that I’m too old to be told that,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with my clothes, and you shouldn’t tell that to anyone, really.”

But often, her worries have seemed ill-founded and self-defeating. In college, there were many times Jeanne thought she was incapable of handling an assignment, and then she became too anxious to study or to ask the professor for help. Although she had always done well in high school chemistry, she dropped out of a college chemistry class because she was worried that the teacher would give her a bad grade. She would procrastinate as much as possible; sometimes she would be so worried about her ability to write a good paper that she would be unable to finish her assignment, and thus she would receive a bad grade, which further enforced her fear and destroyed her self-esteem. 

“Before I realized it was social anxiety, I just thought ‘I’m a big loser,’” she says, “‘I can’t make a good speech. I can’t take a test and do well on it.’ I just didn’t really connect it to social anxiety until recently.”

Interrupting the talking in your head

As bad as it got, Jeanne was never completely alone, as several of her friends suffered from anxiety as well. For Jeanne, it just seemed natural that people slow to build trust and friendship would gravitate toward each other.

Jeanne and her friends knew that something wasn’t right about their shyness, and five years ago they began reading about social anxiety. But even though she knew what her condition was called, she didn’t know what to do about it. Jeanne tried to do some of the exercises mentioned in a book about cognitive behavior therapy — a branch of psychiatry dedicated to modifying harmful thoughts and behaviors — but they seemed too difficult, and once again, she was too discouraged to continue.

She continued to live a life where she never talked to the men she liked, never spoke at work, and never went for the things she wanted. It was hard, but it seemed harder to change.

Then, about a year ago, while searching online for information about anxiety, she discovered a research clinic at Columbia University that was studying, and developing a treatment for, the disorder. She took an online self-help test sponsored by the university clinic. Intrigued by the results, and sick of how she lived her life, she enrolled in the school’s study on social anxiety, and qualified for a free therapy program.

She was temporarily given Paxil to decrease her tension, and was taught how to recognize and break down the thoughts that were leading to her anxiety. She was taught to figure out what the core beliefs behind her fears were, and then to write out and explain her feelings when she began to feel overwhelmed. One of the core beliefs Jeanne learned to rationalize away was that her crush at the gym would never find her interesting enough to talk with.

“That’s going on in your head, so you can’t have a normal conversation,” she says. She learned to give herself encouragement that related to specific, immediate behavior goals, such as “even if he doesn’t have a crush on me too, we could have a good conversation. I’m fully capable of having a good conversation.”

The program lasted 16 weeks. She thinks she’s off to a good start. Sometimes it’s hard for her to make herself meet new people, but the exercises usually help her stay in control.

Jeanne was encouraged by the program to put herself in uncomfortable situations so she can learn how to rationalize her fears. One sign of her progress is that Jeanne’s been attending meet-up groups organized on the Internet, to force herself to interact with strangers. On one of her first outings, she went to a lecture about self-promotion for introverts. The theme of the leader’s speech had been that introverted people should just accept who they are and not bother to change how they do things. After the speech, 11 group members, including Jeanne (“sitting at a table is my most fearful spot, so the idea that I was able to is great for me”), met for dinner at a Korean restaurant and gathered around a long table. The leader asked the group what it thought.

Although talking at a table usually reminds Jeanne of cantankerous work meetings and strained family dinners — situations she would have fled in the past — she found herself speaking up. And even disagreeing.

“I just talked about how you can accept yourself,” she says, “but what if you’re intensely nervous or panicked … and it does require some kind of change?”

Jeanne was encouraged that the group accepted her even though she disagreed with it. She says that she was able to overcome her shyness because the setting was very relaxed. She later used the lessons of the treatment in a much more stressful situation.

Though Jeanne gets lonely working at home, it allows her to avoid her bosses, one of whom is often angry and critical. While in the office recently, a coworker dumped some of her excess work on Jeanne. She didn’t have the time to do it, she told Jeanne, and she shouldn’t have been assigned it in the first place.

This coworker had the assignment for six months without telling anyone that she couldn’t finish it, and it seemed unfair to Jeanne that she had to do the work now. But when she asked her bosses about it, they took the coworker’s side.

Jeanne was horrified. She felt that the bosses didn’t think much of her and that her job wasn’t secure. She tensed up and was unable to concentrate for the rest for the day. When she went home, she was able to write down and work through her reaction, and she eventually realized that the situation didn’t really directly affect her anyway.

“I might write … ‘she is acting to protect herself and look good to the bosses,’” she says. “‘It had nothing to do with you or your competence or self-worth.’”

Before she had learned to think through her problems rationally, Jeanne says she probably would have been panicking for at least a week.

“I’m thinking much more in reality now,” she says. “Yes, there are these negative assessments; you’re going to have to live with them, and this is what you can do about them now. Just go forward from here. That’s all I can do.”

Dealing with the no

Jeanne recently went to an upscale Meetup.com event at a lodge. She ended up being paired with a man through one of the event’s gimmicks, where players are assigned cards and have to find their match. Although Jeanne was anticipating having a good time, shortly after they began chatting, the man’s friends called him away in a “suspicious manner. He said he had to go talk to his friend for a moment and he’d be right back,” she says. “And then he never came back.

“In the past I would have kind of held onto that as a rejection instead of thinking that I wasn’t happy about it, but it was very clear that we weren’t clicking, so it’s not really a rejection,” she says. “So I could talk myself down in a couple hours.”

Another way she’s been pushing herself to be more active has been by emailing questions to her coworkers, telling family members when they are hurting her feelings, and taking the lead in seeing if her friends want to hang out.

“A year ago I wouldn’t ask any questions. I wouldn’t invite people out. I wouldn’t invite myself over because I was afraid of the ‘no,’” she says, “and now I do it. And of course if there’s a ‘no’ I don’t enjoy it, but its fine.”

One of her friends of almost 30 years describes the changes she has observed in Jeanne:
“It has been frustrating for me, because I cannot rationalize with her about her fears and insecurities, and I feel sorry for her because she seems needlessly worried and unhappy. [But now], she seems more open to meeting people, going to new places, and generally, making herself vulnerable. She has also become very capable of poking fun at herself, and seeing the humor and, even sometimes, the absurdity of her behavior.”

“I just wish I was Bill Clinton. I absolutely do,” Jeanne says. “I would be able to do anything and not be afraid of a negative assessment. Just ‘okay, if you don’t like me, you don’t like me.’”

Michael Tedder

[Click here to listen to the podcast.]

Virginie Ntakarutimana wears a faded black suit jacket that hides scars she got when armed Tutsi soldiers raided her house on October 27, 1993, and slashed her with a machete.

The soldiers killed many Hutus that night, including 15 of her relatives, and forced her to flee to Tanzania.

After years in exile, she became one of the first of her family to return home to Ruyigi, an up-country village of unpaved roads in eastern Burundi. But upon arrival, she discovered that her land had been sold. And though her country is on the verge of peace, it’s the first time in her life she’s felt like killing another person, she said.

“The war is not finished,” she said. “I could bring machetes or weapons to beat them or kill them. I feel a spirit of war in myself, because we are neighbors but we can’t live peacefully with each other.”

As tens of thousands of refugees migrate back to Burundi, many are finding that neighbors and others displaced by the war have moved onto their land. The land clashes are raising concerns among aid workers and human rights organizations that the massive influx of refugees will spark renewed violence in a politically and economically unstable postwar country, where land is in short supply.

“Land issues are probably the main issues in Burundi,” said Eduardo Garcia Rolland, a protection advocacy adviser for the Norwegian Refugee Council in Burundi. “Most are coming back to find their land occupied by someone else — or someone else has sold the land, or the administration has confiscated the land.”

Burundi — a small, poor, East African country roughly the size of Maryland — is recovering from 13 years of war that left more than 300,000 people dead, displaced 117,000 internally, and forced 450,000 to flee abroad, mostly to Tanzania. 

But the absence of fighting and a successful multiparty election have raised hopes for peace. Refugee organizations say they expect hundreds of thousands of people will return home to Burundi by the end of the year. In the last five years, 350,000 refugees have already returned.

As an incentive for refugees to return home, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the U.N. refugee agency, in July began giving $50 to returnees upon arrival in addition to other assistance already given — namely, household items plus a four-month’s food ration.

UNHCR reports that more than 8,000 refugees have returned home to Burundi since that time, and they plan to further repatriate more than 50,000 by the end of the year.

Faced with land disputes, many returnees are seeking recourse through the courts. The cases often pit neighbor against neighbor, families against friends.

Terence Nahimana, founder of Cercle d’initiative pour une vision commune (CIVIC), a conflict resolution organization which has held repatriation seminars at refugee camps in Tanzania, believes Burundi has enough land for all its 8.5 million citizens, most of whom depend on the land for subsistence farming.

But he expressed concern that Burundi’s judicial system does not have the resources or the appropriate laws on the books to deal with the returning refugees and the resulting land disputes.

“Land in Burundi is the main asset for everybody,” Nahimana said. “But the problem in this country is that there is no actual policy for repatriation.”

The lack of documentation and property deeds further complicate land disputes.

Denise Ntwawunda fled to Tanzania with her husband and nine children in the mid-1990s, only to return and become embroiled in a land dispute.

“The land is inherited,” she said. “But we don’t have any documents. It’s been our family’s land for generations. My father and my grandfather all lived on the land.”

Virginie Ntakarutimana, who still bears scars and feels at war with her neighbors, says she has all the proper records, as she rifles through piles of yellowing paperwork.

“I have documents that testify that the land is mine,” she said, clutching her passport photographs along with documents verifying her Burundi citizenship. “I prefer to get my land peacefully, but nothing is done.”

Ntakarutimana said she needs the land so she can feed herself and her children. She has AIDS and needs to eat before she takes her antiretroviral medication. 

In Tanzania, she worked as a cleaner and then as a social worker counseling pregnant women in refugee camps. Now she can’t find a job.

Her anger and despair have left her wondering whether she should have left Tanzania. She has nowhere else to go now.

“I am happy I am back in my country, but I’ve wasted a lot of time seeking justice for my stolen land,” Ntakarutimana said. “In Tanzania, I could get food. Here, I don’t have peace in my heart. I don’t have peace in my heart.”

[Click here to listen to the podcast.]  

Jonathan Richard Jones

Stopping an insurgency isn’t easy.
 
That’s the lesson in northern Uganda, home to Africa’s longest running conflict, where a rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has been fighting the Ugandan government since 1986.
 
For years, the war, which has claimed an estimated 100,000 people and displaced more than a million, has defied mediation attempts.
 
But peace talks are under way here, and there is renewed hope that the most recent negotiations in Juba, Sudan, can end the war for good.
 
There is only one problem.
 
Of all the issues on the table, including the disarmament of rebels and reparations for victims, the main sticking point revolves around arrest warrants against four of the top LRA commanders, including its leader and self-declared prophet, Joseph Kony.
 
There are many Ugandans, including most of the war’s victims, who believe the warrants issued by The Hague (The Netherlands)-based International Criminal Court (ICC) will hurt the negotiations at a time when peace finally seems within reach.
 
Recently, Vincent Otti, second-in-command of the LRA and also named in the indictment, told Reuters that the war will continue as long as the ICC presses its case.
 
In camps for displaced persons in northern Uganda’s Gulu District, there is a near unanimous chorus from the war’s victims. When asked, they say peace will not come until the arrest warrants are retracted.
 
“I think that the ICC is making a lot of problems here,” said 17-year-old Ronaldo Otto, whose parents were killed by the LRA. He now lives at the Awoch IDP camp in squalid conditions with 14,000 others. “We need to forgive the LRA leaders so that the peace talks continue, because if we decide to punish them, I know the peace talks will fail. The LRA will start [attacking] us very seriously. So what I want is forgiveness.”
 
But that doesn’t sit well with international observers and many human rights groups, which argue that formal justice is vital to a lasting peace, and want to see the fledgling ICC establish itself.

“In northern Uganda’s 21-year-conflict, horrific crimes have been committed,” said Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch in a statement on May 30, 2007. “Fair and credible prosecutions with appropriate penalties will tell would-be perpetrators that no one is above the law, thereby helping to promote a peace that is durable.”

The ICC is unlikely to pull out now, said Eric Stover, director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, which is preparing a report from the region on this issue.

But if the ICC did withdraw, said Stover, “Kony and the leaders of the LRA, who have committed up to 37,000 abductions, could get away with murder. The question is: Do people want peace without any justice? And do they understand what exactly the ICC is? Do they understand that it’s not the rank-and-file [soldiers] that people in northern Uganda want home who will be prosecuted, but the top LRA leaders?”

One of the ICC’s first cases, northern Uganda is emerging as a critical test of the court’s legitimacy.
 
But Human Rights Focus, a Gulu-based human rights organization, says the ICC intervention here is arbitrary.
 
“I’ve told the ICC, they should deal with those recalcitrant countries like the U.S. who don’t want to be under the armpit of the ICC, not a banana republic like Uganda,” said James A.A. Otto, executive director of the group. The U.S. is a not a signatory to the ICC and is exempt from prosecution, he noted.

Otto also argued that the ICC is biased because it is not prosecuting the alleged human rights violations committed by the Ugandan military, the Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF).

But the people of northern Uganda seem unconcerned with any nuanced questions of international justice. They feel they have suffered enough and just want the ICC to go away.
 
Those living in the war torn area say the ICC arrest warrants provide a disincentive for LRA rebels to come out of the bush and stop fighting.
 
“Now there is no way the rebel leaders can be punished,” said Yafes Okot, a 30-year-old former rebel who was forced by his commanders to butcher others who tried to escape. “If they know they will be punished and are asked to come out of the bush for peace talks, they won’t come. What else can be done?”

Retired Anglican Bishop Baker Ochola, former vice president of the Acholi Religious Leaders’ Peace Initiative, believes the ICC is only concerned with international legitimacy, not with healing a shattered community.  
 
“Real justice is not punishment,” said Ochola, who lost his wife to an LRA landmine. Instead of the ICC’s arrest warrants, Ochola and many other Ugandans support more traditional mechanisms of peace, including a truth and reconciliation commission and tribal justice ceremonies.

“Real justice is not killing someone because someone has killed your child, because now you’re becoming a killer just like him or her,” said Ochola. “So for us, we bring a different perspective: We are not going to kill you. We’re going to give you back your life. That’s the difference. Truth, mercy, justice, and peace must stand together.”
 
The local tribal justice systems help to rebuild the relationships between the perpetrator and the victim through reconciliation ceremonies, he said. One such ceremony is the Mato oput, a system of truth-telling followed by a series of ceremonial gestures like slaughtering livestock, sharing a meal, and drinking from the same cup.
 
Such systems stress forgiveness over punishment and accountability. But given the extent of massacres, maiming, and forced abductions by the LRA, Kony and his top commanders have a lot to account for.
 
“A culture of impunity should not be encouraged anywhere in the world for those who commit war crimes against the population,” said Lt. Col. Francis Achoka Ongom, Civil Military Relations Officer for the UPDF, whose duties include the protection of civilians in conflict areas. “That is why [the government] sought help from the ICC, so that the ICC could help the government solve this problem.”

But now, even the Ugandan government is sending mixed signals about its preference for the court. After initially inviting the ICC, the government recently signed a peace agreement with the rebels acknowledging that “the national legal and institutional framework provides a sufficient basis for ensuring accountability and reconciliation.”
 
In other words, Uganda can take care of itself.

In the coming weeks, the Ugandan government may request that the ICC abandon its prosecution of the LRA rebels.
 
If that occurs, the court will have to make a difficult decision: It can ignore the request, continue to pursue the prosecutions, and risk prolonging the war, thereby losing legitimacy in the eyes of the victims.

Or the court can abandon the prosecutions, and lose legitimacy in the eyes of international observers.

Anna S Sussman

At age 12, Stacey Eddy weighed over 300 pounds. Her fellow sixth graders’ daily ridicule began on her journey to school. “People wouldn’t let me sit down on the bus because they were afraid I might squash them,” she recalls. In eighth grade, the bus driver assigned her a seat at the front of the bus so that she would at least have a place to sit, but that only made the teasing and taunting worse.

For the last seven months, Eddy, now 33, has made the 10th floor of Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City’s upper Manhattan her home and losing weight her full-time job. She has come from Long Island, New York to participate in a study on why people have to struggle to keep weight off. At 5 feet 4 inches tall, Eddy currently weighs 308 pounds, a monumental improvement from the 420 pounds she weighed two years ago.

Her hospital room is filled with dozens of Poland Spring water bottles, seltzers, diet sodas, and a small refrigerator containing a carefully portioned liquid diet that, according to Stacey, is “as appetizing as baby food.” With her easy smile and chatty disposition, Stacey speaks candidly about her lifelong obesity. Over 20 years after sixth grade, her bus rides aren’t much different, except that her schoolmates have been replaced by strangers who volunteer such unsolicited advice as, “You should look into gastric bypass surgery.” These daily slights are status quo for the obese. Dealing with them requires a strong mind and a will to persevere in spite of other people’s ignorance — qualities that stand out in Eddy. She, and others like her, are engaged in a war on two fronts. The first is a battle against their own bodies; the second is against those who don’t believe the first battle exists.

The stigma against the overweight and obese looms large in our society; fat people are seen as lazier, less intelligent, and weaker-willed than the average person. The obesity stigma is so severe that it can even spread to others who are not overweight. A recent study at Rice University showed that sitting next to or associating with an obese person decreases your own attractiveness and leaves a negative impression in the eyes of others. The study showed that prospective employers gave lower ratings to a male applicant whose photograph showed him seated next to a heavy woman. When the same applicant — with exactly the same resume and qualifications — was seen seated next to an average-weight woman, he received higher ratings.

This hiring prejudice is just one of many inequities that the obese face; they must also deal with a decreased likelihood of promotion, higher insurance premiums, and with earning about 12 percent less than the non-obese. These persistent biases arise from the assumption that obesity reflects personal choice or a lack of self-discipline. They suggest that the world’s latest health epidemic is a man-made predicament, and that those to blame are the fast food industry and the people who lack the moral resolve to refuse a second serving. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the prevalence of obesity among adults in the United States has reached an astounding 33 percent, affecting 65 million Americans. If obesity is really the result of poor choices and moral failing, then the United States has much more than a health problem on its hands. With so much extra fat on America’s waistlines, scientists are reexamining a central question: Is obesity simply a lifestyle choice, or is it preordained in one’s genes?

It’s all in the family

Lamont Daye is a gregarious 44-year-old with dark sunglasses and an infectious smile; he’s about 5 foot 6 inches tall and weighs 270 pounds. His wife Traci is 34 and weighs about 280 pounds. Sipping coffee at a Manhattan cafe, they relate their lifelong struggles with weight. Both of them have been on diets and 12-step programs like Overeaters Anonymous with limited success. Exasperated at the apparent unfairness of nature, Lamont describes his cousin Tony, who just can’t seem to gain weight because of his fast metabolism. “Tony will eat all the stuff in sight and won’t gain an ounce. If I eat one slice, it’s like — boom!” Lamont motions to his stomach. Traci, who has been more reserved, perks up, “I have friends that complain that they can’t gain weight, and I just want to choke them!” She says this without maliciousness, but with a tinge of frustration. Lamont and Traci’s struggles mirror those of Stacey Eddy; all three of them are trying to lose weight, but their bodies are fighting back. And they all recognize that their bodies are fundamentally different from others who can indulge in food without a second thought.

Science has confirmed this perception. Despite the societal conviction that weight is a choice, whether or not someone becomes fat is largely in the genes. The heritability of obesity is comparable to that of stature. While it’s commonly accepted that one can’t do anything to become taller or shorter, the variability in weight poses more of a conundrum. A 1986 study of adopted children and a 1990 study of twins, both performed by Dr. Albert Stunkard of the University of Pennsylvania, indicated that 70 to 80 percent of our weight can be accounted for by our genes. This means that the environment in which adopted children and separated twins are raised counts for much less than most people think.

Quite simply, obesity runs in families. Traci’s parents are both obese, as are Lamont’s. In addition, high blood pressure and diabetes are common in both of their families. That family history doesn’t bode well for their four young children despite Traci’s hopes that they don’t also become heavy. “I wouldn’t wish this on anyone,” she says.

Back in Eddy’s hospital room, she talks about her overweight mother who chose to have gastric bypass surgery 20 years ago — something that Eddy would never consider doing herself because her mother is often sick and frequently vomits. Eddy wants to lose the weight naturally, by using her mind to battle the genes she was born with.

Eric Hau-Yun Chang

Jennifer Cerami garnered a flirty smile from the guard at the Colombian consulate in midtown Manhattan. She was 27, with dark eyes and curtain of long hair. Around her in the waiting room sat a scattering of Colombians with official business back home. It was her first visit, in August of 2005, and Cerami looked uncertain, but not out of place. She cradled a stack of old papers and photographs.

When her number was called, Cerami leaned in to the window, whispering.

“I was adopted in Colombia.”

“Don’t worry,” the consular officer told her, leaning in from the other side. “We all have secrets.”

Like many adoptees, Cerami’s story has several beginnings. One of these is with Linda and Michael Cerami, a young couple from Lindenhurst, Long Island, a blue-collar community of single-family homes and above-ground pools. A high fever had damaged Linda’s fallopian tubes. Michael had lupus, which made domestic adoption difficult. So Linda began to look for a newborn overseas.

Since then, every April, on Jennifer’s birthday, Linda told her daughter this story.

“We wanted a baby very badly,” Linda would say. “And we had to go very far to find you, all the way to a country in South America. I put in the papers, and nine months later, the call came telling us that a beautiful baby girl was waiting for us in Bogotá. You had been left on the doorsteps of the orphanage. Your father and I flew down. No, we never met your mother. But we met the woman who took you in. She led us in to a room with rows and rows of bassinets, and said, ‘Guess who your daughter is?’ Well I walked down the row right past you. But your father stopped there in front of your crib and started crying. And that’s how we were blessed with a wonderful daughter, who is you.”

Jennifer’s adoption was a big event in the closely-knit neighborhood. The Heinzes and the Duffys brought their children to the Cerami front yard for the baby’s arrival, and their daughters — Teresa, Sabrina and Rebekah — became Jennifer’s life-long friends. Summers were games of hide-and-seek and Red Rover, lemonade stands, collecting fireflies. “You wouldn’t have found anything Colombian in our house,” Cerami says. “Nothing.”

Cerami thought of herself as white but there were things every now and then that didn’t jibe. When in second grade other children wrote “basketball” and “butterfly” for words that begin with B, she chose “Bogotá.” While they burnt to red in the sun, Cerami merely darkened. By the time she was ready for prom, Cerami could see the irony of choosing Rodrigo, the only other Latino she knew, for a date.

At Boston College things began to get perplexing for Cerami. She was recruited to the Latino student union, OLAA, though she spoke no Spanish. At a meeting of AHANA, a campus minority group for Asians, Hispanics, Native Americans and African Americans, the leader played “I Believe I Can Fly,” then gave a speech Cerami calls “don’t let the white man bring me down.”

“What was I supposed to do?” Cerami says about storming out of the meeting. “The white man raised me.”

During her second year she moved into the romance language dorm on campus, and studied some Spanish. For a school publication, she wrote an article called “What kind of Latina am I?” “I love my mother dearly,” it reads, “but she raised me as she was raised — Italian.”

Taking the country out of the children

Last year, the U.S. State Department issued immigrant visas to over 20,000 foreign-born orphans, up from roughly 2,000 in 1969. Nearly 200,000 of the 1.6 million adopted minors living in the U.S. are foreign born. Today, exchanging children is a $1.4 billion industry, with travel and adoption agencies, visa wallahs and psychologists to fill every available economic niche.

Inter-country adoption flows in the wake of foreign war and poverty. Developed nations sheltered Koreans after the Korean war. Romanians and Russians followed the fall of Ceausescu and Communism in the early nineties. China’s one-child policy bolstered its top ranking among donor countries in the last decade. But as China’s supply levels off, Ethiopia, Liberia and other African nations are now opening up. In Latin America, and Colombia in particular, the orphan boom came in the wake of civil conflict of the late 1970s and 1980s, which means the largest group of Latino adoptees like Cerami is currently coming of age.

Still, modern international adoption has only been going on for 50 years. It remains an unfinished social experiment, bred from compassion, infertility and post-war economic divides. The legality, propriety and ethics of transnational adoption — its effect on parents, children and societies — is still hotly contested. What began as an idea about “saving kids” has turned into an acute expression of a global society. New laws, such as the Hague Adoption Convention, designed to protect children from trafficking, are allowing transnational adoptees greater access to their pasts. Both cosmopolitan and provincial, adoptees magnify the broader changes in the way we answer the basic question of where we come from.

The biggest development in the history of transnational adoption, though, is the death of the myth of a “clean break” from biological and cultural roots. Today, agencies encourage adoptive parents to foster multiple identities, through organized “culture camps” or sponsored trips home. “Cultural citizenship” spurs South American-themed wallpaper, dress-up clothes, and peculiar show-and-tell moments. As cultural anthropologist Toby Alice Volkman describes in the academic journal Social Text, transnational adoption “forges new, even fluid, kinds of kinship and affiliation on a global stage.” In other words, transnational adoptees, with their socially-constructed identities, are the avant-garde of the present global age.

Jerri Wegner, who has three adopted Colombians of her own, helps educate new families on managing their children’s identity. “I tell parents,” she says, “that we have to take our children out of Colombia in order to bring them home, but we never have to take Colombia out of our children.” Her agency, Friends of FANA, organizes Spanish-language camps in Colombia, and country-themed gatherings in upstate New York, where kids are fed Colombian food and encouraged to play soccer wearing Colombia’s yellow national team jersey.

Hollee McGinnis, a sociologist at the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute who studies identity in adoptees, wonders whether this is the best approach. She argues that “culture camp” may unnecessarily complicate the development of a healthy identity. Her research describes two layers of culture that every adoptee has. The first is an “external” layer of food, attire, language and history — things anyone with a little curiosity can pick up. But the second layer of culture is more elusive: “the culture of being,” which can only be acquired by living it. “It’s how you walk, interpret the world, your internal values,” McGinnis says. “Most adoptees lose that.”

A shifting sense of home

The Colombian in Cerami’s face is visible, but she moves like a girl from Long Island, with a wide, forward-pressing gait. These days, Cerami works as an analyst at Ann Taylor’s online marketing division, in Midtown. Before that, she did a stint on the floor for Sephora. She squeezes appointments in before racing off to the New York Sports Club, then heads home to a Lower East Side one-bedroom where her open laptop chirps with instant messages. She talks to her mother every day. “I had fights with my mother just like any teenager,” she says, “but now she’s my best friend.” And still, Cerami holds on to a desire “to be from some place.”

Like for many adoptees, Cerami’s search began with documents. Her first came in a DHL envelope, just a week after her visit to the consulate: a birth certificate. “Not a mystery solved,” she says, “but more like answers to questions I didn’t realize I had.” Her own name is Constanza Cruz. She had not been left on a doorstep.

That winter, Cerami got in touch with her orphanage in Colombia. A friend’s wedding in South America had given her an excuse to stop off in Bogotá, the first time any Cerami had returned to Colombia since Jennifer was three months old. Through a contact at the consulate, Cerami sent out an announcement on Colombian radio asking Constanza Cruz’s mother to call, but nobody responded. Colleagues at Cerami’s office, who had been following her revelations, offered donations for the orphanage, which Cerami planned to visit. Come Christmas, Linda drove her adopted daughter to the airport.

“I’m afraid I’m not going to feel,” Cerami told her mother in the car. “I’m afraid I’m going to go down to this country and be completely not affected by what I see. My life is not going to change. This isn’t going to have a connection with me, and what does that mean then?”

Matthew Fishbane

A catch in Amilcar Arroyo’s Spanish-accented voice conveyed his shock and hurt as much as his words. The slender, bright-eyed legal immigrant told a mix of Latinos and Anglos in the common room of a city church that, after 18 years of living in his adopted country, he recently felt as though he were an outsider once again. While covering a press conference at which Mayor Louis Barletta announced he would run for a third term, Arroyo, president of a Latino media company, found the silent animosity among his fellow U.S. citizens nearly palpable.

“I felt the atmosphere there. People there looked at me like a leper,” Arroyo said.

Arroyo would discover that feeling shunned was only the beginning. Asked if he would renew his support for Barletta, Arroyo said no. Arroyo had endorsed the mayor in a previous campaign but a pair of anti-illegal immigration ordinances Barletta spearheaded led Arroyo to withdraw his support. The day after the press conference Arroyo heard from a dozen callers criticizing his change of heart. Some said they had previously considered him an honest man and a respected community figure, but that his comments about the mayor had changed their views. Other calls were more ominous. “You’d better watch out. You’d better take care of yourself because you’re going to get hurt,” Arroyo said one caller warned.

Arroyo spoke at a January 22 meeting convened in the common room of Faith United Church of Christ by the Greater Hazleton Ministerium, an interfaith clergy association. The Ministerium does not take an official position on the ordinance and is seeking common ground between those on both sides of the issue. Attendees included residents, clergy, city Latino leaders, a representative of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission and a Luzerne county commissioner. A big-eyed baby watched the discussions from an infant carrier slung over his mother’s shoulder.

One of the ordinances would have prohibited renting to undocumented immigrants and called for a $1,000 per day fine for landlords who did so. Of the 4,216 rental units in the city, 236 are Latino-occupied, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. Another ordinance would have revoked the business permits of establishments which employed illegal immigrants.

Legal challenges have prevented the ordinances from being enforced although their original versions were passed in July. In response to a lawsuit by advocacy organizations, landlords and residents, U.S. District Court Judge James Munley in October deemed the ordinances temporarily unenforceable and is slated to determine the long-term fate of the laws this month. If enforced, the laws could disrupt the education of child citizens who must leave the country with their deported parents, force a plaintiff who is a legal immigrant to be evicted because she is waiting for documentation of her status, and hurt the profits of business owners and landlords, Judge Munley stated in court papers explaining his decision.

Although the ordinances are intended to curb crime, city officials did not offer statistical evidence that increasing immigration has caused an increase in crime, Judge Munley said. The city has passed revised versions of the ordinances, which critics say have harmed the Latino community even though the laws are not in effect.

“It sort of became open season on a lot of Latinos, regardless of their status,” said Fabricio Rodriguez, executive director of Philadelphia Area Jobs With Justice, which organized a September rally opposing the ordinances. Racist graffiti, vandalism and fights in school are some of the problems local Latinos reported when Rodriguez surveyed them on the impact of the ordinances.

The ordinances address only illegal immigration, but xenophobic hecklers have taken them as a cue to publicly harass legal immigrants along with those who lack papers because it is impossible to differentiate the two groups based only on appearance, said Agapito Lopez, vice president of the Hazleton Area Latino Association and a member of the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Latino Affairs, in a telephone interview. Cultural differences make innocent Latinos seem suspect to their Anglo neighbors and the ordinances embolden residents to express their suspicion, Lopez said. Latinos frequently meet outdoors to share jokes and stories as they do in their native countries, Lopez said.

“When they see people gathering outside and speaking a different language, they think it’s a gang,” Lopez said. Far from being meetings of criminal cabals, the outside gatherings merely reflect how many Latinos’ sensibilities differ from those of many Anglos, Lopez said. “We don’t like to be inside because we come from tropical countries,” he said. Some Anglos’ misperceptions have led them to lash out at their Latino neighbors, Lopez said.

“There are people who are being called names in the street,” Lopez said.

Struggles to cross a racial divide

On a frigid January day shortly after the Ministerium meeting, people did not appear to linger in the street long enough to insult or be insulted. On Broad Street, the Roads End Pub and Club was dark inside and below the Blues Brothers statues on its facade a sign stated “All Legals Served.” A hat-snatching wind rushed down Wyoming Street, where well-kept older model cars lined the curbs. The vivid yellow clapboard walls of Lechuga’s market offered the eye a welcome change from the gray-stained gobs of old snow piled along the icy sidewalks. Latino grocery stores chock-a-block with sundries and tropical products, money transfer bureaus and travel agencies shared the street with employment agencies and Italian restaurants. A handful of stores stood empty; some had permits taped to their plate glass windows suggesting that new occupants were preparing to move in.

Those who work on Wyoming Street, noted for its concentration of Latino businesses, said that the consequences of the ordinances are economic as well as interpersonal. Owners of establishments that primarily serve Latinos have seen a drop in business which they trace to the ordinances. One grocery store employee said business had declined by about five percent since the ordinances passed because many immigrants have left town after raids by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

“Immigration came down here and took people away,” said Julian Figueroa, an employee of Jazmin’s Grocery on Wyoming Street. Immigration officials did not target Jazmin’s, but did visit businesses on Wyoming Street, Figueroa said one recent afternoon after waiting on a young customer whom he advised about keeping track of her small bills. Other business owners also noticed a decline in customers.

“A lot of people just left town. You notice the drop at least as far as the money transfers that you do, calling card sales which is more of what the immigrant population buys,” said Chris Rubio, an employee of Isabel’s Gifts on Wyoming Street while staffing the counter at the shop one recent weekday. Some businesses have closed due to lack of customers. Rosa and Jose Luis Lechuga, plaintiffs in the lawsuit, closed their restaurant due to a decline in business, according to court papers. The restaurant served 45 to 130 customers before a previous version of the ordinances passed, but had only six or seven patrons daily afterward. The Lechugas’ Latino grocery store served 95 to130 customers a day before the ordinances passed, but had 20 to 23 patrons daily afterward. Jose Lechuga said by phone on January 30 that he was moving to Texas and had sold the store. The city does not keep statistics on business owners’ nationality so municipal employees do not know how many Latino-owned businesses have closed or how many new immigrant-owned establishments have opened since the ordinances passed.

City officials said the ordinances were intended to protect city residents from crime, not to harm Latinos socially or economically. Shootings committed by undocumented immigrants inspired the ordinances, said Joe Yannuzzi, council president, who supported the ordinances. Municipal law did not provide for punishing crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, Yannuzzi said by phone.

Shootings are rare occurrences in the city which had about 23,000 people as of the 2000 Census. Latino advocates have said that the population has increased by about 10,000 people since 2000. Mayor Barletta has said in published reports that the population had increased by at least 7,000 since the last census. “The only thing we could do is punish the people who are here legally,” Yannuzzi said. City officials began by exploring the appropriate response to several recent shootings, and later noticed a connection between the crimes and undocumented immigrants, Yannuzzi said.

“The violent crimes were being committed by illegal aliens,” Yannuzzi said. The ordinances allow the city to protect all residents, including Latinos, Yannuzzi said. “They live here the same as we do. They don’t want to see shootings either,” he said. Yannuzzi said that Latino residents’ departures should not cause concern that Hazleton’s population has nose-dived. Those who left were quickly replaced by other Latinos, he said. “The place is still booming and there’s a lot of Latinos still living here attending the schools and getting along with everybody,” Yannuzzi said.

A fellow council member echoed Yannuzzi’s concern with crime but had voted against the ordinances. “The rationale should have been to combat crime,” said councilman Bob Nilles in a telephone interview. Nilles opposes tying anti-crime ordinances to immigration issues because doing so creates legal problems for the city.

Those who attended the Ministerium meeting also expressed concern with violent crime and said that opposing it could be a common cause for those who might disagree about the immigration ordinances. “We know violence has gone up. We know that violence is connected to the drugs,” said the Rev. Tom Cvammen of Trinity Lutheran Church in West Hazleton, who facilitated the meeting.

With a calm voice and demeanor, the Rev. Cvammen appeared ready to help attendees stay focused on the goal of reconciliation should the conversation become overheated. Some who attended the Ministerium meeting said that focusing on crimes committed by illegal immigrants obscures a general increase in crime related to drug sales in the city. One attendee objected to the Mayor’s emphasis on illegal Latino immigrants when he endorsed the ordinances and touted them a means of stemming crime.

“He failed to mention that a non-Hispanic killed my cousin,” Anna Arias, president of the Hazleton Area Latino Association and a member of the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Latino Affairs, said sharply. Mayor Barletta did not return calls. Arias said that the person who killed her cousin had sold drugs and that he committed suicide after the crime. The room was silent.

Attendees defined reducing drug sales and other crimes as a primary goal of one of the three working groups that formed at the meeting. Members of each working group gathered around a folding table in the common room to brainstorm and develop action plans. The working groups included Latinos and Anglos who were Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Quakers and those who did not state a religious affiliation. Almost all appeared to be in their forties or older. Members of the working group on crime planned to invite David Wilkerson, founder of Teen Challenge, an international Christian-based drug rehabilitation and education program, to speak to members of church youth groups throughout the city. The crime working group also planned to invite members of Unidos, a diversity group at Hazleton Area High School, to the next Ministerium meeting on February 27.

Members of the working group dedicated to addressing public fears of Latinos said they sought to reduce fear by replacing it with the truth about people of whom others might be afraid. “A lot of the fear is based on untruth or exaggerations,” said the Rev. Jane Hess of Faith UCC. Group members considered creating a public forum in which immigrants would share their memories of becoming citizens. “At that moment, you have to put aside the country where you were born. You have to love this country a lot to do that,” Arroyo said.

To help community members get to know each other across ethnic divides, a third working group planned a series of cross-cultural activities. The working group planned to connect events for the May 3 National Day of Prayer to the Cinco de Mayo (Mexican Independence Day) celebrations and to dedicate the day to appreciating diversity. Working group members also planned to ask organizers to dedicate this year’s Fun Fest to celebrating diversity and to ask Wyoming Street merchants to hold a block party to coincide with the annual festival of music, food and crafts. The working group intended to start an inter-ethnic hiking and biking club for young people.

An age-old debate

Attendees have reason to hope for greater inter-cultural understanding, the Rev. Cvammen said. Catholics and Protestants once divided the city into sections along religious lines and used to attack each other on the streets of Hazleton but have long since ceased segregating themselves and brawling. Discrimination against Italians, Irish and Poles also used to be common in the city, Lopez and Arias said. “It’s something that was worked on before,” the Rev. Cvammen said.

The ebbing of historic inter-group tensions in Hazleton makes the city representative of a national trend. A century ago, public immigration debate centered on determining if Greeks and Poles could fit into U.S. society, said Randy Capps, senior research associate at the Center on Labor, Human Services and Population at the Urban Institute, a non-partisan research organization. Historic immigration debates have subsided nationwide only to be replaced by new ones.

“Now we’re debating whether or not immigrants from Mexico and Latin America are going to fit in,” Capps said. Attitudes of those participating in current debates are shaped by a different set of experiences than their early 20th century predecessors. Although the U.S. has historically been a nation of immigrants, many politicians now in office came of age during a 40-year period of relatively low immigration, Capps said. Immigration slowed between the 1920s and the 1960s due in part to ceilings on the number of people who could enter the U.S. from each country. The Great Depression also made the U.S. less attractive to immigrants seeking to escape poverty in their native lands. “We went through a period when we weren’t country of immigration, so it seems new and out of control,” Capps said.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have also changed attitudes toward immigration. The hijackers who crashed airliners into the Pentagon, the World Trade Center and the Pennsylvania countryside were legal immigrants, but their actions have shaped attitudes toward those who enter the country with or without documents. Some U.S. citizens believe that cracking down on illegal immigration ensures national security.

“People feel they are acting against terrorism,” said Myriam Torres, director of the Arnold School of Public Health Consortium for Latino Immigration Studies at the University of South Carolina. Latino immigrants who enter the country intending to do harm are rare, Torres said. “The majority of immigrants from Latin America, they are not coming to commit crimes, they are coming to work,” Torres said. Immigrants who do not have enough money to qualify for visas often enter the country illegally to assist their families by taking jobs rejected by U.S. citizens, Torres said.

“They will do anything they are asked to do, because they know whatever they are earning here, even if it is a low wage, it is much higher than they would be earning at home,” Torres said. Policymakers seeking to control illegal immigration should address the human costs of a global economy in which developing countries fare poorly, Torres said. “I do think that there is a need to work with the countries who are sending people here,” Torres said.

Sharlee Joy DiMenichi

Click above to hear “Eleanor Rigby.”

If ever there was someone in need of a time machine, it’s Jonathan Jacobs.

Amid the buzz of bar talk and acid-tripping hipsters, Jacobs leans over two Audiotronics Classroom record players, circa 1950. His shaved head and crisp grey suit — and his bulky headphones — stand in stark contrast to the increasingly raucous crowd, which doesn’t quite seem to notice him as he moves, trance-like, over the magic machines. It’s a Valentine’s Day-themed bash in a drafty, multi-level Brooklyn warehouse, and people are warming themselves with $3 Pabst Blue Ribbon and pot brownies. A huddle of especially enthusiastic partygoers plays a pickup game of spin-the-bottle opposite from the corner where Jacobs intently filters through boxes and boxes of weathered albums.

Jacobs, for his part, doesn’t appear to notice the crowd either, the blurring eyes and spilling beers and occasional loss of footing. Not even the drag queen in a pink tutu and six-inch platforms or the girl so drunk she’s fallen head-first into the spin-the-bottle table can shake his focus. He’s utterly entranced by his records, and the world that he’s creating. Like many DJs, Jacobs loves what he does but supplements his income with a day job to make ends meet. He takes requests when he spins, because his goal is to understand the vibe of the crowd wherever he manages to line up gigs: bars, cocktail parties, weddings, benefit shows, and most recently, the warehouse rager. But unlike other DJs, Jacobs aims to transport listeners into a totally separate universe. If Jacobs had his way, the year would be 1963, not 2007.

Jacobs, AKA The Vintage DJ, spins an eclectic mix of tunes from the 1930’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, and early 70’s, all from the original 78’s, 45’s, and 33’s. Sometimes he’s accompanied by his dance team, the The Salesmen — two male dancers (actor friends of Jacobs) wearing sharpie suits and carrying brown suitcases. Sometimes he projects montages of old films or live feed of the audience. His goal: to immerse listeners in a dreamlike world, an “audio time warp” that transports them to a prohibition era speakeasy, a roadside juke-joint, a mod London hotspot, or an explosive Afro-Cuban nightclub.

In other words, to take them away from here.

Not just a mac-and-cheese kind of comfort

So who is The Vintage DJ, and what makes him tick? Up until five years ago, even The Vintage DJ himself didn’t know. Like any other thirtysomething with a 9-to-5, the former theater major didn’t have much time to spend on his predilection for old jazz and AM radio stations.

Then he bought an old record player for his friend James as a birthday gift. The sound in a small room was so amazing that Jacobs began to wonder what would happen if you could have more of the same: preserving the song, but amplifying it. From thrift stores, he bought himself two record players, then four more. Not having any older, wiser Vintage DJs to act as muses or guides, Jacobs forged ahead into uncharted territory, creating The Vintage DJ persona as he went along.

He did know one thing: when he laid the needle to vinyl, “there was a weird nostalgia, and with the nostalgia came warmth, and with the warmth came an emotional response — not just a mac-and-cheese kind of comfort, but something more complete.”

Jacobs kicked off his career in 2003 by working a small benefit where he connected the headphone jack into the mixer and played directly off the records. The crowd responded, and The Vintage DJ was born. He hit the streets of New York City on the weekends, when he wasn’t working his day job, hunting down gigs. It was summertime, and that made for a lot of sweat, because Jacobs had decided that The Vintage DJ must be properly suited (and hatted, when out on the street). Plus, he had to lug around a record player and a suitcase full of albums. He made a list of the top ten most interesting bars in Manhattan — not because he liked the nightlife, but because that’s where DJs do their thing — and went to every single one looking for a chance to show his stuff. But not everyone opened their doors.

“When you create as an artist, you really have no clue how odd your work is,” Jacobs says. “People wanted to know if I had a following, which I didn’t at the time. It wasn’t only risky musically for them, but inconvenient because of all the special equipment and hookups.” While there aren’t that many technical logistics associated with his craft, Jacobs has had to figure out how to work with different systems. “When you hear a song on vinyl, you’re hearing it in a different way,” he says. “The sound quality, and the fact that you can see and hold the record jacket, it’s authentic, and it is a porthole to the past. I’m playing an object that is 40 years old and has a life. It’s a vestige and a relic. And a relic is something that will eventually be extinct, so I’m trying to keep this thing alive, to share it with people in a special way.”

The path to fame for The Vintage DJ isn’t always easy, although Jacobs is quick to point out that he makes more money as The Vintage DJ than at any of his day jobs. “I’m making a living following my passion, getting paid to be who I really am,” he says. This week, however, he’s being paid in pizza for a gig he put on for a pizza parlor-owning friend.

Erin Marie Daly

Ashfaq Khan enters Lasani, and heads directly for the restroom at the back of the restaurant, calling out “Kya haal hai?” (“How’s it going?”) to acquaintances.

The television is tuned to Geo TV, a local Pakistani channel, which is now showing the news, largely ignored by the drivers clustered around the tables, who look up from their conversations only for the cricket scores. In this almost exclusively male, South Asian milieu, cabbies are able to relax, chat with other drivers clustered over the tables, or speak loudly into their hands-free cell phone sets. A Hindi and Punjabi hum washes over the restaurant.

Khan returns with his slow, shambling gait. His middle-aged face is good-natured, open. He lacks the on-the-ball keenness of a veteran driver, having only been a cabbie for two years after a long stint as a parking lot attendant came to an unceremonious end. He picks up his order of chicken curry at the steam table, and settles down by himself to await his fresh naan bread. “Sometimes I call my friends and we eat together,” Khan, 40, says. “But I don’t want to waste their time. Time is money.”

It is just after 10 p.m. on a Monday. Most shops are shuttered, and the crowd that swells the streets during the day is heading home to bed. As business slows down, cabbies begin thinking about dinner. Switching on their off-duty lights, they pull up to the curb along 29th Street between Fifth Avenue and Broadway, where Lasani has sat for a decade now. Restaurants like Lasani are havens for the city’s South Asian cabbies. While other busy urbanites spend top dollar to sit at the bars while celebrity chefs ignore them, the cabbie joints clustered around Manhattan’s “Curry Hill” in the East 20s, on Church Street near the World Trade Center, and on the Lower East Side opposite Katz’s Deli, have cheap food and clean bathrooms — a must for busy drivers. Here, they can exchange juicy stories about goings on in the back seat, complain about the taxi medallion system, discuss the ins and outs of the U.S. immigration system, and know they will find a sympathetic ear.

Khan is no fan of the driving life, but he appreciates the fact that he can set his own pace. “See, right now, I’m hungry, so I come down to eat,” he says. “You don’t need to wait for a break. You are your own boss.”

Dreams of home

According to Schaller Consulting, a New York taxi industry research firm, New York’s $1.82 billion taxicab industry employed 42,900 yellow cab drivers in 2005, 91 percent of whom were immigrants. A large number of them — 39 percent — came from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India.

The immigrant driver will almost never possess his own medallion — an official permit required by New York State. This piece of aluminum is what separates ordinary cars from cabs. But at $350,000, the cost of obtaining the medallion is often too much for recent immigrants. So, instead of buying, they lease them from wealthier owners at around $700 a week.

While the security and profit potential of ownership is a distant dream for many drivers, the taxicab industry has always been a magnet for fresh-off-the-boat immigrants, offering a ready job and the prospect of take-home cash at the end of the shift for those willing to endure tedious hours behind the wheel. In the thirties, the job belonged to Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants. The eighties saw a wave of South Asians taking the wheel, drawing friends and relatives into the industry in their wake.

“They are often people with dual class identities,” says Vijay Prashad, professor of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, and author of The Karma of Brown Folk, a sociological study of the South Asian Diaspora in the United States. “They have aspirations.” Many cabbies come over as students, hoping to put themselves through school by driving at night, but many years later, find themselves stuck behind the wheel. Then there are cases like the small-scale farmers of Indian Punjab, who had to seek greener pastures when the government’s 1980s “green revolution” initiative brought in mechanization and favored wealthy farmers, Prashad says.

Many of these men leave their families behind in the hope of bringing them over when they are able to find higher paying jobs. For most, obtaining a measure of stability can take years. Until then, they drive cabs, share apartments with friends and relatives in South Asian enclaves in Jackson Heights, Richmond Hill, and Astoria in Queens, along Coney Island Avenue in Midwood, and Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. They try to stave off loneliness among the comforting sights of sari and gold jewelry shops and with people like themselves. This homesickness leads them to the humble, hole-in-the-wall South Asian cabbie cafes of Manhattan, with evocative names like Pak Punjab, Lahore Deli, and Chutney.

Among these restaurants, little regional touches dictate where cabbies choose to stop. Nuances like the channel playing on television, the newspapers on offer, and the language of banter make these restaurants a home-away-from-home for many drivers.

Then there’s the food. Bangla Curry on Church Street at Reade Street, and the Shipa Kasturi Pavilion on Lexington Avenue at 26th Street, for instance, feature a good selection of fish curries, favorites of Bangladeshi drivers weaned on a diet of rice and fish on the Ganges-Brahmaputra River delta. Pakistani restaurants make a fine art of naan bread, and a few restaurants offer only vegetarian entrees, catering to Indian vegetarian drivers.

Some places, like Lasani and Chandni, located on either side of the A.R. Rahman Mosque, enjoy a more diverse patronage. At Lasani, a calendar from the Tayyab Brothers Grain Market in Pakistan adorns one wall. Another bears a poster advertising prayer timings at the A.R. Rahman mosque.

Several times a day, devout Muslim drivers drape their jackets on chair backs at Lasani, wash up for prayers in the restroom, and then go downstairs to the basement mosque. “Then they come upstairs to eat,” says Komal Sultana, Lasani’s co-owner, who employs Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Arabic cooks to serve up regional specialties. “That’s the most important thing. If they don’t get good food, they won’t come.”

On her steam table, spicy red tandoori chicken (in the authentic style of the town of Lahore in Pakistani Punjab) and lamb gosht keep company with whole fried fish for Bangladeshis, and mild, aromatic squash and eggplant stews in the Arabic style for African drivers.

The spread is tempting, but cabbies have to watch what they eat, Ashfaq Khan says, as he carefully consumes a side of shredded lettuce that most other diners ignore. “If you’re gonna be sitting a long time, you get a lot of diseases,” he says, echoing the concern of a number of drivers, who, since they have to pay out-of-pocket for health insurance, often forego it altogether.

Cabbie stresses

Khan works for 10 hours on weeknights and 12 hours on weekends — Friday and Saturday nights being the most lucrative for any driver. He pays $700 a week to lease his medallion from a private owner, and an additional $50 a day for gas — a total cost of $1,050 a week. During the week, Khan can make a profit of $80 to $90 on a good day. On bad days, he may break even. Weekends are better, yielding a profit of $200 a day or more.

Even so, it takes two incomes to make ends meet. Khan’s Trinidad-born wife is a travel agent, and is gone during the day when he is home. “Sometimes we’ll see each other during the weekend,” he says as he pops a few candied fennel seeds — an after-dinner breath freshener — into his mouth. “Sometimes I go home early, wake her up, and we talk.”

On top of the bad hours, he has to deal with the Saturday night revelers. “They’re drunk and spend all the money in the bars.” With stresses like these, Khan is not long for the taxi industry. He plans to someday get an automobile or refrigerator mechanic’s certification, and then buy a house. “A man can dream,” he says, half-smiling.

It’s the hard aspects of the driving life that have convinced Bangladesh-born Mamnun Ul Huq that cabbies need to band together. Ul Huq, a 44-year-old cabbie, often visits cabbie joints to get drivers to enroll in the New York Taxi Workers’ Alliance. He eats most of his meals at home — he pauses to blow on his coffee at a Curry Hill Dunkin’ Donuts — visiting the restaurants only to meet his cabbie brethren. “It’s good food, but too much oil,” he says with a grimace.

Since its inception in 1997, the NYTWA has been trying to organize yellow cab drivers. So far, it has gathered around 7,000 members, Ul Huq says, about 16 percent of his fellow drivers.

Besides visiting the restaurants, Ul Huq often uses the Bangladeshi Citizens’ Band radio network to announce NYTWA’s plans of action. “People need to unite to get what they want,” he says, “especially in a job with unreliable working conditions, where a man can get stabbed on duty.” In March 2005, a passenger plunged a knife into Ul Huq’s neck, missing his aorta by centimeters. It took a 10-hour surgery to treat the wound, he says. These “crazy guys,” as they are called, can strike without warning. As late as last year, two Bangladeshis — a yellow cab driver and a livery cab driver — were sent into a coma when they were attacked, victims of what are believed, from eyewitness accounts, to be hate crimes.

The difficulties of being a cabbie are so great that even Ul Huq, as involved in cabbie-welfare work as he is, may quit the industry. “After the stabbing, I can’t sit for hours,” he says. “I’m trying to get some business plans together. Let’s see.”

In The Fray Contributor