TWO GREY HILLS, N.M.  —  The man on the other end of the speakerphone gasped and let out a thick, phlegm-clogged cough before responding to Marlene Montoya’s question.

“We got it, I think, on a quick trip to Albuquerque,” he said. “Me and my oldest boy are in bad shape.”

Montoya, a COVID-19 contact tracer here on the Navajo Nation in northwestern New Mexico, leaned close to the phone and spoke in a low, soothing tone to the man, who introduced himself as Freddie. Before long, she assured him that another Navajo Nation Department of Health worker would bring him a cardboard box packed with canned food, fresh produce and water.

“Please,” she told the man in his early 50s, who lives in a desolate area of the sprawling reservation, “just stay home. We need you to stay put and monitor your symptoms.”

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LORDSBURG, N.M.  —  The whispers around town started this spring during the early days of the shutdown. Something felt off, even here in this windswept crossroads far from most troubles. Dean Link had a hunch about what was to come, but when the mail arrived in August, despair overwhelmed him.

“You will be laid off effective September 7, 2020,” stated the letter from the mayor of Lordsburg informing Link that his part-time job at the museum was over.

In that moment, Link joined the growing ranks of some 20 million other Americans — many employed by corporations, industries and mom-and-pop shops, but also public sector employees like him — who have lost their livelihoods during the punishing economy wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The museum’s only paid employee, Link, a gregarious man with a drawl that immediately gives away his Southern roots, appreciated the paycheck from the $9-an-hour gig. But it was serving as the gatekeeper to the deep and at times uneasy history of this town — home to both a Japanese internment camp and a landmark aviation mission — that gave him true purpose.

“In life, I try not to harp on the bad things,” the 61-year-old said on a recent afternoon, while standing outside the A-framed museum, which now has a chain-link fence blocking the driveway.

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MINNEAPOLIS — Before he drove to the grocery store parking lot, Romeal Taylor did the same thing he’s done every day this summer — he holstered his9-millimeter handgunto the waistband of his gym shorts until he could feel it hug his right hip.

When he arrived at the store in north Minneapolis he spotted six other Blackmen, some in tactical gear, armed with Glock 23s and Smith & Wesson M&Ps. One of them beamed when he spotted Taylor and hugged him.

“Bro, good to see you,” Taylor said, muffled through a face mask.

They had come together for a meet-and-greet to introduce themselves to the community, marking one of the first public gatherings of the Minnesota Freedom Fighters.

The ad hoc groupof about two dozen men — including a retired firefighter, a healthcare worker and a veteran — formed in the days after George Floyd’s killing in response to the local NAACP chapter putting out a call for residents in predominantly Black north Minneapolis to protect small businesses from destruction as fires and unrest engulfed the city.

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MIAMI — Almost every day, it seems, a parishioner comes to Father Reginald Jean-Mary with the same plea: Pray for us, we’re scared. We can’t go back, not now.

They live in fear of a forced return to Haiti, a country where they were born and that they love, but one that’s been paralyzed by poverty, violent protests and a debilitating cholera epidemic.

They fear even more for their American-born children, who, unlike them, would be eligible to remain in the only country they’ve ever known. For many Haitian immigrants, the idea of uprooting preteens to live for the first time in a deeply impoverished country seems out of the question.

“Haiti will always be my home by birth, but this is my new home,” said Luce Janvier, a parishioner at the church. “It’s not safe in Haiti — not now, maybe never.”

Here in the Miami neighborhood of Little Haiti — along the asphalt streets where chickens run wild and Creole is the predominant language — Jean-Mary’s cream-colored Catholic church serves as a refuge for Haitians from across the city.

After a magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti in January 2010, leaving hundreds of thousands of people dead and crippling infrastructure in Port-au-Prince, the capital, tens of thousands of survivors fled to south Florida.

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ORLANDO, Fla. — Curtis Bryant Jr. has an evening routine — he scrolls through the television channels, stopping briefly for headlines on a local station before flipping to the national news.

There’s the back-and-forth impeachment drama and all-too-familiar segments about people working full-time jobs yet struggling to make ends meet. And, since the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub, a short drive from his home, he’s paid close attention to the fight over gun control.

Bryant, 38, says he is more engaged in social and political issues than ever before and that he’s counting down the days until next year’s elections.

“It’s something I never thought of before, when I was running them streets,” said Bryant, who served nearly a decade in prison for selling crack cocaine. “Voting is my voice. It’s a voice I’ve never used, but I’m ready.”

But that might prove difficult.

Bryant is among the roughly 1.4 million Floridians who had their voting rights restored last year by state voters through a ballot measure, known as Amendment 4, that cast a national spotlight on the disenfranchisement of felons, even long after they served their sentences.

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GOLDEN, Colo. — The gunman paced the hallways of the charter school, passing framed paintings of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson before stopping outside classroom 138. There, he took a deep breath, yanked open the door and began firing.

“Shooter!” shouted someone inside the classroom. “He has a gun!”

Two people seated at desks near the door jumped up and rushed the perpetrator, pinning his legs and arms against a wall, while everyone else sprinted out.

It was over in 15 seconds, and tiny yellow Nerf balls sprayed from the toy rifle littered the room. One of the men who rushed the gunman was struck in the thigh by a ball, a reminder of the personal danger involved in confronting an armed assailant.

The recent exercise was part of a two-day, $700 active shooter training course being offered at schools and churches across the country by an Ohio-based firm founded soon after the 1999 Columbine High School shooting rampage, which took place just a few miles from here.

The ALICE Training Institute, whose instructors have law enforcement or military backgrounds, provides courses for educators, church workers and small-business employees concerned about how to react if catastrophe strikes.

In packets handed out at its training sessions, the company says its aim is to empower “individuals to participate in their own survival using proactive response strategies in the face of violence.”

ALICE — which stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate — was established by a retired police officer and has held sessions in roughly 3,700 K-12 school districts nationwide, as well as more than 1,300 healthcare facilities. Dozens of companies across the U.S. offer training for dealing with active shooters.

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