Monthly Archives: January 2020

Features, Multimedia

Native women are vanishing across the U.S. Inside an aunt’s desperate search for her niece

GROVE, Okla. — The woman’s oval-shaped face, on a crinkled 8 ½-by-11-inch flier, is easy to miss.

Taped on a wall inside a gas station off Highway 59 — amid a collage of business cards for lawn care and Bible tutoring services — it reads:

Name: Aubrey Dameron
Age: 25 years old
Height: 5’10
Weight: 140 lbs
Last Seen: Grove, Oklahoma 03/09/2019

Since Dameron disappeared from her northeast Oklahoma home nearly a year ago, her aunt, Pam Smith, has plastered dozens of placards around town. She has also organized search teams to scour fields and to drain a pond. And she has repeatedly pleaded for information in Facebook posts.

But so far, nothing.

“We just want to bring her home,” Smith said on a recent morning outside the gas station. “We want answers.”

Read more at Los Angeles Times 

Features, Writing

They sheltered in Florida after an earthquake. Now Trump wants these Haitians gone

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.

Read more at Los Angeles Times