J. Malcolm Garcia

Cursing, I slam down the receiver and run out of the house, shout for Bro. He stands by his car still parked on the street. Arms folded, he turns to me, a stocky young man with black hair and a heavy mustache. He wears a leather jacket and jeans. He used to lift weights and box. Despite a potbelly he could kick my ass.

We descend into Cité Soleil. Mattresses smolder on the trash-strewn roads in this sprawling seaside slum of Port-au-Prince. Gray smoke blows off islands of refuse and the charred remains of burned cars, and the twisted, immolate [...]

As my U.N. flight from Islamabad taxis to a stop at Kabul International Airport, I see Masood and Wahob waiting for me behind the wire gate of the parking lot….Together the two of them took me for four hundred dollars the last time I was there.

Here in the capital of Honduras, one of the youngest and poorest democracies in the western hemisphere, where the average income is about 30 dollars a month, no street kids? Not even beggars?

Doesn’t make sense.

The throbbing music emanating from Le Carnivore Restaurant behind our hotel grows tinnier with each tortured beat, the voices rising to ever higher levels of screeching, and although Darren and I feel exhausted from the twenty-four-hour flight from B [...]

Cut grass blows into the face of a cartonero as he looks out the door of a White Train. Buenos Aires, June 2007 The White Train carries us. We racket from side to side on warped steel tracks, our nostrils burning with the odor of aged [...]

I arrived in Kabul yesterday afternoon from Washington, D.C., two months after the September 11 attacks, one of four reporters with Knight Ridder Newspapers. Three years earlier, I was divorced and brokenhearted. I left my California home and a thirteen-year social work career for newspaper jobs on the East Coast. Little did I know then that my despair-injected, impetuous move would one day lead to a second career in journalism and an assignment in Afghanistan.

A scrim of dust hovers above the alley and drains the light, turning this December afternoon into dusk long before sunset. Peter and I walk to a rotted wood door that leads us into a corridor of mud and clay. Moving slowly, we crouch beneath a slumped brick walk that spans a narrow passageway and walk past bearded old men, foul smelling and ragged, who squat amid caged birds. The birds' desperate high-pitched songs follow us deeper inside, past the dirt-smeared faces of boys who leer at us, like shadows against the walls. We keep walking toward a blanket behind which rise the shouts of men.

Watch the suit run, the boys chasing him. War orphans, some of them, others carrying their younger siblings, polio afflicted, across their shoulders, hands outstretched. “Money, mister,” they beg. Clutching his jacket, his shirt, they are a locus [...]

Lead blackens the children's teeth, blanks out memories and stunts growth. Other symptoms of lead poisoning include aggressive behavior, nervousness, dizziness, vomiting and high fever. The children swing between bursts of nervous hyperactivity and fainting spells. Some have epileptic fits.

Osterrode Camp and Chesmin Lug Camp were established by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 1999 as a temporary measure, when the 9,000-member Roma or gypsy neighborhood on the southern shore of the Ibar River was burnt down by Albanians in the dying days of the Kosovo conflict. The Albanians had accused the Roma of collaborating with the Serb army, a charge the Roma dismiss as unfounded.

The sad looking man with the forced smile works the counter at Church’s Chicken.He takes orders, sweats in the numbing glare of heat lamps.His dark, lined face strains. He has an engineering degree from Kabul University.

In the mid-1940s when Mel Luetchens was a boy on his family’s Murdock, Nebraska, farm where he still lives, he sometimes hung out with his father’s hired hands, “I looked forward to it,” he said. “They played games with us and brought us candy and gum.” The hearty young men who helped his father pick corn or put up hay or build livestock fences were German prisoners of war from a nearby camp. “They were the enemy, of course,” says Luetchens, now 70 and a retired Methodist minister. “But at that age, you don’t know enough to be afraid.”

A sixteen-year-old boy told me he was voting for President Hamid Karzai so that the next five years will be better than the last. I asked him how he could vote, since no one under 18 was eligible. He had a simple explanation. The village elder called a meeting and announced his support for Karzai, commanding that all the people should vote for him, too. Then he contacted representatives of the voting commission to come to the village and register the people. Although Ahmad is sixteen, the village elder said he and many other teenagers were eighteen.

In the PM newsroom, two men listen to the strains of a narcocorrido drifting from a police scanner. The vague shrill discord of accordions and a brass band echoes in the glass office until a burst of distortion shatters the ill-begotten melody and imposes a staticky silence. They know in the expanding quiet that someone will die tonight.

The killing in October 2007 of Mr. Quinn, a 21-year-old truck driver who grew up in the militant rural county known as South Armagh, offers a stark reminder that Northern Ireland’s legacy of paramilitary violence has yet to fade more than a decade after the U.S.-brokered agreement ended the war between local Roman Catholics and Protestants loyal to British rule.

On the eve of Afghanistan’s historic election, nothing seemed apt to change. A bombed-out car at sunset in Kabul. (Rafal Gerszak / Aurora Photos)You know how it is.You can’t run off to every bombing even with a presidential election just days awa [...]

Cold winds carry lead-filled dust from a nearby slagheap, a hundred million tonnes of toxic tailings, and scatter it on clothes hanging from laundry lines, on open buckets of drinking water, on the dirt children play in, and on the feral dogs running down alleys in this former French army barracks housing about 250 displaced Roma men, women, and children.

Amina kept all the flowers her husband Masood gave her over the years. She kept the first bottle of perfume, the first scarf. She believes he will be back as strongly as she believes in God. Tomorrow or the day after or next week or next month. She doesn’t know when, but someday. She must believe this to stay motivated. If she is a fool, okay, let her be a fool.

In Bed 19, a woman suffers from high blood pressure and burns to her feet from boiling water spilled from a pot; Bed 21 burned herself lighting an oil lamp; Bed 20 fell against a hot water heater.

A 22-YEAR-OLD WOMAN lies naked on a tile platform. Ninety percent of her body is burned—her skin mottled brown and in places torn open, exposing the white tissue of seared muscle. Nurses bathe her with saline solution. An IV tube drips fluid into her right foot, one of the few unburned places on her body. The odor of her flesh mixes with lingering traces of the cooking fuel she doused herself with.

This young man sitting beside me, eyes tearing, balls of his feet bouncing ceaselessly off the pavement, tells me that he knew Paul Quinn for seven, eight years. Friends, so they were. Through school and driving tractors together and running bales in the summer.

The burn pit on Balad Airbase in Iraq had a life of its own. Black smoke and orange flames shot heavenward twenty-four seven. Big as five football fields. Ten acres easy. Lit up the whole night sky. When the seasons changed and the winds died and the air didn't move, the smoke just hung, a stagnant mass over the whole base.

Dozens of people push and shove, jostling around the grandmother, 48-year-old Magada Ahmed Mohammad. Spinning in circles, moving one way and then another with no apparent purpose other than to escape the crush of bodies descending on Cairo’s Tahrir Square for today’s demonstration, a day of “cleansing and prosecution” as organizers have called it.

Sipping tea, the shopkeepers wait for my questions while keeping a wary eye on the passing soldiers. What is it like living so close to an American base? I want to know. I expect them to grumble about the soldiers searching their shops. Instead, they tell me about a strange odor they say comes from the base. It smells of plastic.

Billy told his wife, Dina, in e-mails from Iraq that the stench was killing him. The air so dirty it rained mud. He didn’t call them burn pits. She can’t recall what he called them. He didn’t meankilling him literally. Just that the overwhelming odor was god-awful and tearing up his sinuses. He didn’t wear a mask. It would not have been practical. In heat that soared above a hundred degrees, what soldier would wear one?

Conclusions in scientific studies can often be discovered not at the end but between the proverbial lines of any given report. Certainly that is the case in the recent Institute of Medicine study, “Long-Term Health Consequences of Exposure to Burn Pits in Iraq and Afghanistan,” that found no conclusive proof that dust and pollution in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq have caused illnesses in American troops and the local populations.

I follow him up some broken stairs to the second floor of his shop. He points to a rug and we sit on the floor near an open balcony. Rifles and pistols, decorated with ivory and tin, hang from the cinder block walls beside circular shields and swords brown from rust and age. Knives and spiked battle flails lay tangled in the corners.

Her crimped fingers uncoil one by one against the gnarled restraints of arthritis. With what little flexibility remains in the nearly petrified muscles, the fingers crab walk across the rumpled sheets of her bed; they probe forward, as would a spider on ruined legs, toward a brown bottle of medicine she takes for what ailment she has long forgotten.

Uncut forests and vacant hills resurged shortly before I arrived at the DeTurcks’ stone house, but the wooded acres behind their property struggled to swallow several more pads. The sight was far from threatening to an eye already conditioned to industrial intrusions, but this is a relatively new eyesore in Greenbrier, and Dirk knew better.

We prepare to go out on a night patrol.

The captain however must pick up an Afghan policeman first. On paper, the American and European soldiers of the international security forces provide a “supportive role” only to the central Afghan government. Therefore, protocols require an Afghan police officer to lead patrols, the captain explains to me, an embedded reporter. He calls me by my last name as he does his soldiers, and tells me to ride with him.

Mohamad, who is 23 but looks no older than 14, was shot by the Taliban last spring. Across the hall is an examination and exercise room where recent amputees learn to operate their new prosthetic limbs. Most of these patients have lost a hand or leg to land mines or rocket-propelled grenades – some of them as long ago as the 1979 Russian invasion, others in the more recent fighting between American troops and the Taliban.

We avoid open areas. Instead, we move through a maze of houses like interconnected caves. We enter one house, walk over a couch and through a wall blasted open by a rocket-propelled grenade and enter another house. We continue in this way house to house until we reach our destination. One time I got confused and emerged from a house and onto a street covered by a sniper. Radwan yanked me back inside.

As I sit in my car outside the medium-security federal prison in Forrest City, Arkansas, I clean my fingers. “Before you get here stop and buy you some of those hand wipes with bleach and the last thing you do before you walk in is wipe your hands real good,” inmate Dicky Joe Jackson had e-mailed me. “They use an ion spectrometer and nearly all money you touch out there has some trace of drugs on it, and it’s their ‘catch all’ device to deny you entry.”

Moutasem and Sarah watch their breath in the frigid February air. We are in the principal’s office of Muhammad al-Fatih, a secondary school for teenagers of Syrian refugees in Antakya, Turkey. The school has no heat, but it is better to freeze here than to be in Syria right now, my Syrian translator Hazim tells me. There, the army patrols villages and cities, killing suspected activists. Men, women, children. No one is safe. If the army could arrest the air, he says, it would.

Hazim is a Sunni Muslim as is Dr. Mousa and Tayba and all of the Syrian patients here at Reyhanli State Hospital. The hospital, just across the border from Syria in Turkey, has seen a huge influx of refugees. The Islamist-controlled Turkish government supports the forces of the mostly Sunni Free Syrian Army and its fight against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and offers free medical care to Syrian rebels and civilians.

In a storefront on the east side of Tijuana, US Army veteran Hector Barajas spoke to his nine-year-old daughter in Los Angeles a week before Christmas 2014. He wore shorts and a white tank top. Tattoos arced across his back. His shaved head reflected the glow of the ceiling light. A thin mustache drew a dark line beneath his nose. He lay on a cot in the front office of the Deported Veterans Support House, a nonprofit that stands next to an auto mechanic shop and a karaoke bar and assists veterans removed from the United States. Pizza joints and convenience stores lined the main drag, less than half a block away. At night, dogs roamed the streets, toppling garbage cans. An American flag concealed the glass front door.

With profiles of several children, J. Malcolm Garcia presents the story of street children in Kabul as NATO forces are withdrawn. While adults worry about security once the troops are gone, the kids are more concerned with the loss of their best customers.

Block by block she maneuvers through the teeming sidewalks of Kabul’s Shar-E-Naw shopping district until she enters Ice-Milk Restaurant, stops at tables.

A young man, 16 years old, maybe 20, stood with a pistol in the front door of a house in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. The house belonged to Stiveen Sanchez, a single father with two sons and not that much older than the young man confronting him.

Carlota Duarte does not teach in a conventional manner. She asks questions."What do you think?" she might ask a participant in the photography project she initiated more than 22 years ago. "What do you like, don't like, in the photograph you've taken? If you could take it again, what would you do differently?"

The San Martin mine in the Valle de Siria region of south central Honduras, 90 miles north of the capital city of Tegucigalpa, has been closed since 2009. But its impact on local communities, people living in the area say, continues to this day.

Although hundreds of miles separate them, two sisters in the neighboring Central American countries of Guatemala and Honduras see the same kinds of children.

On a recent Tuesday morning, Sr. Magdalena Pascual stood in front of an open black metal door and looked toward the woman inside. The woman wore red platform shoes, black leather hot pants, a red T-shirt and black vest. She was 30 years old but had the weary look of someone much older.

Sr. Gladys Leigh still thinks about two women she wrote to in prison in 2015. The survivors of sex trafficking had been accepted into Magdalene St. Louis, a program that helps women live free from abuse, addiction and prostitution. They served 12 months in prison for prostitution, and before their release, Leigh, a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet-St. Louis Province and a volunteer with Magdalene, wrote them encouraging letters. They responded, seeking assurance that they would really be living in a safe, loving place. They did not believe it was possible, Leigh said.

Sixto Paz opens a door and shows me the music room. He sleeps on a bed across from a piano, sheets neatly tucked, a rack of clothes on hangers beside it. Shelves of books. A Magic Marker board. A table, some chairs, and a well-thumbed Bible open to The Book of Genesis. Sixto crashes out at about midnight, wakes up at four. He has trouble sleeping.

Hector Barrios, a Vietnam veteran, lived in Tijuana. I decide to stop by the small house where he rented a room. A friend of his, Jesus Ballesteros, meets me on a sidewalk nearby, next to a red pickup that Barrios used to sell secondhand clothes from. I consider the narrow street, the house across the way with its leafy terrace and the sounds of water splashing from hoses in the driveway. Small boys scamper on the hot concrete, watering plants.

A boy stood outside my hotel, the Mustafa, when Khalid and I pulled up. I recognized him instantly. Jawad. His white shirt and pants were blotched with dark, wet stains. He rung out a mop. He looked at me and cocked his head to one side as I stepped out of the car. Slowly, a look crossed his face

Rhode Island prison inmate Steven Parkhurst gives his rap, sees the students who should be listening strutting their stuff on one side of the visiting room. Swaggering, holding court. Oh, yeah, Steven thinks. There’s me at their age. Think they’re tough. This ain’t shit. This is a field trip.

Marr wanted an instrument with a design similar to an 18th-century French bass. He liked its look — the elegantly cut scrolls and f-holes and sloping shoulders. It was also smaller and easier to play. Millard designed it. Marr’s shop, set up for furniture, had the equipment to cut the board. Since meeting in 1980, they had hung out and played in bands together. But they had never taken on a project like this.

When Carol Shamon noticed water from city pipes had leaked into the basement of her North Park neighborhood business, she thought the problem would be easily fixed: Call the city and file a report. Repairs would be made, problem solved.

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, jazz musician Marcia Forman makes her way through the day center of St. Paul’s PACE, a medical program for senior citizens. Carrying a saxophone case in one hand and a satchel stuffed with songbooks in the other, she walks toward a piano, greeting patients as they eat lunch. Unpacking her saxophone, Forman runs a hand over the piano keys. A few of the agency’s patients gravitate toward her. One complains he ate too much.

Zabiullah asked them if the jihad would pay as well as a foreigner. You will die for your smart mouth, the callers said. Zabiullah hung up. He told his wife, Sweetra, that bioStories Vol 9, Issue 1 10 should anyone ask where she works, she should tell them she was a nurse or a teacher. The truth, that she translated documents for western officials in the Ministry of Interior, would only create problems. A woman assisting westerners. No. Tell them you do women’s work.

He’s drunk, voice slurring in an ocean of saliva, jaws loose on their hinges. I just wanted a quick lunch. This little burrito joint on the corner of Leavenworth and Ellis, its grimed windows steamed and marked with the finger drawings of the owner’s small children, usually provides me a relaxed place to take a mid-day breather from work. Until Johnny showed up, I’d sat blissfully by myself

In prison, Patty Prewitt has learned the shower room is the best place to cry. She can release the grief and frustration that comes with living behind bars, wash the tears from her face and into the drain. Inmates might assume from her puffy eyes that she got lucky, that for once the water was hot.

Pat Taylor taught reading. But more than that she taught her students to love to read and to love the very idea of books and stories put to paper. She believed reading made people better citizens and exposed them to ideas they otherwise never would have considered. Taylor read endlessly. If a child liked turtles, she could recommend two or three books on the subject. She reached even the most reluctant student because she knew so many books.

The reporter sat in the living room and waited for the coroner to arrive and pick up his mother’s body. A hospice nurse had checked her blood pressure and listened to her heart just forty-eight hours earlier and had told him she was fine. One-twenty over eighty, the nurse had said. She then asked his mother if she knew the day’s date.

My Afghan colleague, Aarash, recently received a special immigrant visa (SIV). I’m a freelance reporter, and he worked with me in Kabul as a translator for five years. SIVs are available only to those Afghans who worked as translators, interpreters, or other professionals employed by or on behalf of the United States government for a minimum of two years. Aarash’s wife, Sharjeela, translated documents for the U.S. government at the Ministry of Interior. Her job made the family eligible for the visa.

I first arrived in Kabul as a reporter in 2001. Hamid and his oldest son, Sabil, worked with me as interpreters. I met them by chance when I interviewed a brother of Hamid who was employed by Halo Trust, a nongovernmental organization that cleared mines.

I arrive at Bệnh viện Đà Nẵng Hospital in downtown Đà Nẵng mid-morning, park my motor scooter and wait to meet my translator, Vương Nguyên. The courtyard swarms with people. They stare at the maze of halls and entranceways of the sprawling complex and the shoulder-to-shoulder mob of men and women filing in ahead of them, and the heat and the odor of all of us sweating rises around us as we determine what direction to take.

On a recent overcast afternoon, James Wheat stood beside his white pickup outside the Hillcrest DMV on Normal Street and reflected on his life with outreach workers from the nonprofit, People Assisting the Homeless (PATH).