Rising Water: Royal Valley
I met Rachel, a coordinator for a non-governmental organization, at a restaurant called Mesa. She wore a long, white dress and told me that she had trained as a nurse. It was 11:30 on...
Deceit and Desire: Ho Chi Minh City
At 9:00am, Lan and I finished breakfast and left the dining room on the 2nd floor of Hotel Vissai to go to the Golden Smile Clinic. It was on Ký Hoà Street in District...
A Young Visayan Man: Davao
It was a Saturday evening in Davao, at the southern tip of the Philippines, one week after a massive rally for Rodrigo Duterte, the nation’s new president, in a local park. It was the...
A Death: Davao
The house in Royal Valley was the same. With a doorway missing its door and a window frame without any glass panes, the tiny house offered little separation between an inside and an outside...
Ch. 1: In Plain Sight – Dakar
I had been on longer flights. But this one was particularly uncomfortable. Lomax, my younger brother, didn’t fare much better on the plane, but he could brush it off faster because he liked to...
Underneath the City: Moscow
That night on the boat I finished reading the yellowed pages of Notes from the Underground. I looked over the railing of the ship’s upper deck into the Moscow River, feeling the warm June...
A Dream Come True: Moscow
Johanna had been waiting for this moment a long time. A day before, the 40-year-old woman from Holland had talked about her love of Russian literature. Earlier that day, she had mentioned she studied...
Looking for Igor: Moscow
It was somewhere on a bridge over a canal in the middle of Moscow. We realized Igor wasn’t there. Standing on the steel and concrete path above the water, the seven of us looked...
A Warm Evening: Moscow
That evening in June the air was warm. I wore a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of Bermuda shorts; my companions, too, dressed lightly. But I, like the others, carried a small umbrella. Also,...
Focusing on New Research for CBD
Today, in the United States, the federal government allows one facility, at the University of Mississippi, to grow and test marijuana for the purpose of medical research. Based in Oxford, in the northern part...