Stories by Alex Stonehill
Detention in the City of Destiny
In 2004 a new detention center opened on the tideflats below downtown Tacoma. Owned and operated by a private corporation, it houses up to a thousand immigrants at a time while arrangements are made to deport them. Alex Stonehill takes us inside, and finds out about the controversy surrounding immigration detention.
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Categories: Pacific Northwest, USA, Read, Labor and Immigration
Pakistan: Education at a Crossroads
Pakistan gets plenty of press for bomb attacks and international terrorist threats. After two months traveling the country last year, CLP journalists found that the ongoing crisis here has its roots in a corrupt and collapsing education system that is feeding poverty, discontent and violence.
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Between Worlds/Behind Bars Immigration, Detention and Deportation in the Northwest
From the dark days of the Chinese Exclusion Act to post–911 crackdowns on undocumented immigrants, immigration detention has a controversial history in both our nation and in the Puget Sound region. Between World/Behind Bars is a four-part radio series exploring immigration detention from its roots in the 1930s at “Seattle's Ellis Island" in the International District to today's privately-run Northwest Detention Center on the Tacoma Tideflats. Listen to the series on kuow.org.
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Categories: USA, Watch, Listen, Labor and Immigration
Lessons from God Poverty and Faith Fill Pakistan's Madrassas
Peshawar, PAKISTAN – Rows of adolescent boys kneel in an open marble courtyard, dwarfed by the oversized, yellowing Arabic texts opened before them. Murmuring under white knit prayer caps, their small bodies sway in rhythm with their hafiz (memorization of the verses of the Koran by rote). The entryway is adorned by a faded poster of Mulana Sami al-Haq, the owner of the sprawling grounds of the Dar al-Haqqania Madrassa and principal administrator to its 3,000 students. Shrouded in green, he holds a Koran in one uplifted arm and a Kalashnikov in the other.
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Poverty and Faith Fill Pakistan's Madrassas
For years, Pakistan's religious schools have been identified as breeding grounds for terrorists. But they're also the only opportunity millions of poor Pakistani children have to get an education. In this video, reporter Alex Stonehill goes inside madrassas to find out whats really being taught.
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Categories: Pakistan, Watch, Education, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
Alex Stonehill on PBS's Foreign Exchange with Daljit Dhaliwal CLP Journalist discusses the World Water Forum and Pollution in New Delhi's Yamuna River
Journalist Alex Stonehill discusses the pollution of the Yamuna River in India and the World Water Forum.
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Categories: India, Watch, The Environment, Poverty and Development, Global Health
The Ghost Schools of Pakistan Frightening realities from inside an education system on the brink.
September 20, 2009: Story updated with radio feature and photo slideshow. Despite ankle deep garbage, charcoal-scribbled graffiti of machine guns and the scorched remains of squatters' fires, the dusty green chalkboard still reads "December 2, 2006," the last day that classes were held in the primary school wing of Mirza Adam Khan, a government-run compound of schools in the poor and violence plagued Karachi neighborhood of Lyari.
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Categories: Pakistan, Watch, Read, Listen, Education, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
CLP's Alex Stonehill on PBS's Foreign Exchange
This week on PBS's Foreign Exchange CLP journalist Alex Stonehill discusses education in Pakistan with host Daljit Dhaliwal. The show also featured Galleries on the Go a short CLP documentary piece about the art of Pakistani truck decoration.
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Categories: CLP Updates
Big, bright and, to many, beautiful The truck artists of Karachi apply a splash of color to an otherwise bleak canvas.
KARACHI, Pakistan – At first glance, this is not a colorful city. An aerial view of Karachi reveals a sprawl of squat markets and utilitarian high-rises set among sparse vegetation and dull industrial public art, a landscape of stucco corroded by salty sea air and looming cement structures coated in urban grime.
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Categories: Pakistan, Watch, Read, Listen, Labor and Immigration, Poverty and Development
Hope for Pakistan's child workers A Karachi-based group bent on eradicating child labor is offering school lessons outside working hours.
KARACHI, Pakistan – Sher Shah is a hardworking neighborhood — a confusing knot of cramped lanes offering up a riot of rattling power looms, puttering motors and booming furnaces. This rough suburb, with its garment factories, machine shops and scrap-metal smelters far from the imposing cement skyscrapers of the city center, forms the industrial gut of Karachi.
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Categories: Pakistan, Read, Listen, Education, Human Rights, Poverty and Development
Delhi's Dark Waters
NEW DELHI – The Yamuna River, which flows through the heart of India's capital city, is one of the holiest rivers in Hindu mythology. It's also one of the most polluted rivers in the world, absorbing more than 200 million gallons of sewage from the city each day. This video takes us to the banks of the Yamuna, where some still eke out a living from a river that others are fighting to bring back to life.
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Categories: India, Watch, Read, The Environment, Poverty and Development, Global Health
Karachi Nights
No matter how frenzied the exhaust-coated sun-saturated day is in Karachi—this city really lives at night.
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Behind the Scenes Update from Karachi Pakistan Video blog from the CLP's multimedia team
The CLP team takes a break to reflect on the first half of the Pakistan: Hearts and Minds reporting project.
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Categories: Pakistan, Watch, Blogs, The Media, Politics and Conflict
Pakistan's Viral Video
The release of a grainy video showing a girl being flogged for adultery by the Taliban in the Swat valley has created an uproar in Pakistan. In this video-blog journalist Alex Stonehill discusses why, amidst all the violence in Pakistan, this particular video has evoked such a reaction.
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Categories: Pakistan, Watch, Blogs, Human Rights, Gender, The Media
Getting Our Minds Into the Gutter Media Coverage for Global Sanitation Issues
An estimated 35,000 people died last week as the 5th World Water Forum convened in Istanbul, Turkey. If you didn’t hear the news, don’t be surprised; the 35,000 deaths the week before, and the week before that didn’t grab any headlines either.
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Categories: Turkey, Blogs, The Environment, The Media, Poverty and Development
The Journalism Hustle
The CLP's latest investigative feature hit the newsstands – er internets – last night. The punch-drunk Seattle PI posted on the Tacoma Immigration Detention Center as a web-only feature about 25 headlines below the lead story about who has a heavily anticipated art opening in Greenwood tonight.
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Categories: Pacific Northwest, USA, Blogs, Labor and Immigration, The Media
Young immigrant among thousands of federal detainees in Tacoma
NORTHWEST DETENTION CENTER, Tacoma -- Arms poking stiffly from an oversized blue jumpsuit, Vitaliy Budimir recounted his crimes in a hesitant voice that barely revealed his Russian origins.
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Categories: Pacific Northwest, USA, Watch, Read, Listen, Human Rights, Labor and Immigration
Fourth Estate Foreclosure Why We Need a National Endowment for Journalism
2009 promises to be another tough year for the journalism industry, and it looks like it’s our turn to take a beating here in Seattle. The imminent closure of the Seattle Post –Intelligencer, the city’s oldest and second largest newspaper was announced last week, just a few months after the second round of major staff cutbacks in 2008 went down at our other major newspaper, the Seattle Times.
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Categories: Pacific Northwest, USA, Blogs, The Media, Politics and Conflict
Troubled Waters The Coming Calamity on Lake Victoria
The sky is just beginning to lighten over Lake Victoria and the hacking of machetes echoes along the Kenyan coastline. Fishermen, stripped to their underwear in the already rising heat, are chasing silvery baby fish through the thick grass that chokes the lake shores, in defiance of laws against fishing in these delicate breeding grounds.
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Categories: Kenya, Watch, Read, Listen, The Environment, Poverty and Development, Global Health, Politics and Conflict
Drought Spurs Resource Wars
DUBLUCK, Ethiopia — On a warm January afternoon in southern Ethiopia, thousands of ill-tempered livestock stand in groups with the pastoralists who have guided them for dozens of miles to drink. The animals dot an expansive field of Acacia trees, severed bits and pieces of dead grass and dust. Earlier in the day thousands of young goats, sheep and calves took turns to have their fill of water. And the show will not end with the cattle; camels are still waiting in line. For being the best able to resist drought, now they will be last.
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Categories: Ethiopia, Watch, Read, The Environment, Poverty and Development, Global Health, Politics and Conflict
Off the Record: World Water Crisis
Africans’ struggles for water inevitably read to American audiences as happening “over there” in a chaotic and distant world. Connecting them to a looming global trend requires a prescience that doesn’t hold up to the exacting principles of print journalism. This is especially true because developments on the ground often outpace the scientific community -- in many neglected areas, for example, the only way to find out if rainfall has been declining is to ask a subsistence farmer, because the formal scientific data simply doesn’t exist.
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Categories: Kenya, Ethiopia, Read, Blogs, The Environment, Poverty and Development, Global Health
Running on Hope
Ethiopia has been a dominant force in long distance running for decades. Despite a shortage of training infrastructure, athletes have excelled thanks to hard work, the high altitudes in their home country and the purity of the ancient sport, where whoever runs the farthest and the fastest, wins. Alex Stonehill's photo slideshow offers a taste of training in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
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Categories: Ethiopia, Watch, Poverty and Development, Global Health
Kenyans Tap Sun to Make Dirty Water Sparkle
NAIROBI, Kenya--The long rainy season in Kenya has begun and sudden storms regularly burst over Nairobi. Many welcome the downpours, which signal the end of another dry summer and wash the steamy crowded capital clean each morning. In Kibera, a massive slum of rusty tin roofs and makeshift homes spreading out from the southwest of the city, the rain is turning the twisting dirt roads and alleyways to thick red mud.
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Categories: Kenya, Watch, Read, Poverty and Development, Global Health
Power Politics Trump Democracy in US-backed Ethiopia
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia—Dawn in the Merkato breaks over a tangle of streets jammed with shouting hawkers and towering pyramids of ripe produce from Ethiopia’s fertile countryside. Today it is a popular destination for sunburnt foreign tourists, expensive cameras poised to capture lively scenes from one of Africa’s largest open-air markets.
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Categories: Ethiopia, Read, The Media, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
Haramaya Voices from a Vanished Lake
ADDIS ABABA—Chala Ahmed, 26, hit the jackpot eight years ago when he won the US visa lottery in the bustling eastern Ethiopian town of Haramaya. His first thought was that he would build his mother a big beautiful house. His next thought was that the new home, painted a rosy pink behind a high white gate, should be erected on the shore of Lake Haramaya, the huge stretch of placid water that gave his hometown its name.
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Categories: Ethiopia, Watch, Read, Listen, The Environment, Poverty and Development, Global Health
A Treacherous Trek to the Crater's Edge
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia – "Just breathe," I comforted myself as I shuffled slowly through the dusty gravel. "One breath with each step," I repeated raggedly as fifty pounds of brackish water sloshed rhythmically against the sides of the muddy yellow jerry can strapped to my back.
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Categories: Ethiopia, Watch, Read, Listen, The Environment, Poverty and Development, Global Health
Quenching the thirst Seattle brings the most precious liquid abroad
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia – It's early morning and a dozen westerners, mostly Seattleites, were getting ready to leave the capital for a three-day visit to water development projects in Oromia, one of this country's largest, rural states. As they set out – a caravan of five land rovers moving through the dense traffic – many of them were still quietly coming to terms with the parting words of Adane Kassa, Executive Director of Water Action, the Ethiopian NGO that coordinates the projects they'll be visiting.
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Categories: Ethiopia, Watch, Read, The Environment, Poverty and Development, Global Health
Heading South Part 1: A Night on the Road
We stood in the pre-dawn glow of the streetlamps, greeted by intoxicated heckles from the previous night’s most diligent drinkers. A battered, extended cab Toyota Hilux pickup pulled up, carrying a mound of mysterious goods under a green tarp and bearing faded Ethiopian Red Cross decals on its doors. Seeing that there were already three passengers inside, I almost threw in the towel right there and sent my colleagues Ernest and Julia on without me, motivated as much by the practicalities of fitting so many people into such a tiny space as I was by the thought of my still warm bed waiting for me just down the block.
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Categories: Ethiopia, Blogs, The Environment, Politics and Conflict
Panorama: Diversity in the Muslim World
In the Winter and Spring of 2006 I set off across Asia with The Common Language Project in hopes of challenging some of the stereotypes about other countries that dominate the mainstream American press. As expected, Islam was an ever-present force in the places we visited, which not only prompted worried emails from family members back home, but also provided us with a chance to learn a lot about the religion firsthand. While we encountered mosques, headscarves and skepticism for American foreign policy in all of the Muslim countries we visited, the similarities stopped there. Stereotypical images of Islam tend to portray a monolithic, homogeneous religion of fundamentalist believers conforming to strict, unified codes of conduct. But I found myself struck by the diversity of believers in Islam, the nuances of their interpretations of the faith and the varying intensity of religion's role in their lives.
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Categories: Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Jordan, Palestinian Territories, Turkey, Watch
Bitter Harvest Guest Worker Program Isn't the Labor and Immigration Panacea It's Cracked Up to Be
Yakima, WASHINGTON--Wisit Kampilo's sparse black hair ruffles in a gust of March wind. Standing in a patch of dry yellow grass off a remote road in the Yakima Valley, he pulls a secondhand Oakland Raiders bomber jacket around his thin frame and looks back at the dingy three-bedroom manufactured home where he and 32 other Thai guest workers were housed together in the fall of 2004.
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Categories: Pacific Northwest, USA, Watch, Read, Human Rights, Labor and Immigration, Politics and Conflict
Seattle Anti War Protest
War resisters, Vietnam vets, and teenage punks all joined together to protest the Iraq War and shut down a military recruiting center in Seattle's Central District. This audio slideshow explores anti-war protest tactics and their impact on the US's presence in Iraq.
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Categories: USA, Watch, Politics and Conflict
Voting Global
On September 11th, I flew back to Seattle after almost a year reporting in Asia and the Middle East for independent media.
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Categories: USA, Blogs, Politics and Conflict
Playing the Aid Game U.S. Funding Cuts Stifle Development in Palestine
RAMALLAH, West Bank - The administrative headquarters of Ruwwad Youth Empowerment Project, housed in a newly constructed office tower on the outskirts of Ramallah, sparkle with disuse in the fluorescent overhead light. A skeleton crew of employees looking for ways to busy themselves are scattered around the offices, separated by a grid of vacant cubicles that serve as a reminder of what this project was meant to be.
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Categories: Israel, Palestinian Territories, Watch, Read, Listen, Education, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
Requiem for a Dual Hegemony
The collapse of the Soviet Union is my earliest memory of politics. The sense of relief and of victory that I felt around me was overwhelming, and I became fascinated with the idea that events on the other side of the world could mean so much in my own home. Televised images of East Germans taking sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall or Boris Yeltsin speaking from atop a tank in Red Square became the very definition of freedom in my ten year old mind, and even as I grew older and learned of the theories behind communism and the Cold War missteps of the CIA, this picture of humanity breaking free of oppression by sheer will stuck with me.
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Categories: Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Watch, Listen, Blogs, Human Rights, Politics and Conflict
Perplexed in Pakistan
Tomorrow morning we will leave Pakistan, heading back over the border to India to catch our onward flight to Kazakhstan. When we first arrived here I was full of nerves and expectations, and now, a month later, I am leaving the country still confused and newly disheartened. Pakistan is probably the most interesting country I’ve ever visited, but I can’t wait to leave.
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Faces of Pakistan
Our reporting took us to three of Pakistan's four provinces, from northern mountain regions to lawless tribal areas and the agricultural fields of Sindh, as well as Pakistan's four major cities - Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar and Islamabad. Despite mainstream news coverage that depicts a one-dimensional Pakistan seen through the lens of The Global War on Terror, our travels revealed a country of incredible diversity and remarkable complexity.
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Squatters Stand Up Cambodian Slum Women Fight for their Rights in Phnom Penh
Phnom Penh, CAMBODIA – At first glance, Tumlop 2 village looks like any third world city slum: crowded huts with corrugated tin roofs are scattered along dusty dirt paths, and barefoot children mingle with freely wandering chickens and dogs. Look closer and you’ll find that this community also houses a tidy health center where local women diagnose and treat common ailments. Look even closer and you’ll see that gender relations in this poor and traditional society may be more evolved than in the more wealthy households of the teeming and ever-expanding city that surrounds them.
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Categories: Cambodia, Read, Poverty and Development, Global Health
The Best Friends Aid Can Buy
Surprisingly, the strongest indicators of international aid presence are the words of this man, Dantali Shah, the village head here in Kakray. “We are so happy for the help of America-- please don’t be afraid of us. We welcome any more aid the Americans can offer.”
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Categories: Pakistan, Blogs, Politics and Conflict
Sex and the City of Joy White House Morality Threatens Kolkata's Sex Workers
Kolkata, INDIA – The smells of jasmine perfume, fried food, bidi smoke and liquored breath mingle in the thick humid air. Watery pink and white neon lights from Hotel Welcome, Dream House and Love Lotus shine in the eyes of women lined up in turquoise saris or red mini skirts and the customers jostling to admire them. Backlit in shadowy doorways, young girls beckon into the night with childish voices that betray their pre-pubescence, despite alluring gestures and deep purple lipstick.
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Categories: India, Watch, Read, Listen, Human Rights, Gender, Global Health
Ghosts of Bhopal
More than 20 years after the disastrous accident at Union Carbide in Bhopal, India that instantly killed more than 7,000 people, residents continue to suffer from health problems caused by exposure to the hazardous chemicals once produced at the plant. Today, the death toll has risen to more than 20,000. This slideshow explores the ruins of the chemical plant, as well as some of the work being done here to ease residents' medical trauma.
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Categories: India, Watch, The Environment
Our Fight for the Forest A testimonial by Bindia Bai and Subadra
In January the Forest Development Corporation officials came and hired some men from our village to work in the forest nearby. They said they wanted to cut some diseased trees and clear naturally felled wood, but after a couple of days we knew that the officials had bigger plans. The FDC men had started cutting healthy Sal trees as well, clearing a huge area of the forest. The village men refused to go on working. They remembered what had happened to the bamboo in the forest when we were children.
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Categories: India, Read, The Environment, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
I Come from All of India And I'm Just Like You
Ahmedabad, INDIA – In a small, dimly lit room decorated with drawings celebrating Christmas, Diwali and Eid, 40 children attending Arzoo Kids Center sit with eyes closed and hands folded as if in prayer, belting out the Indian national anthem. While this may seem like a commonplace scene in an Indian after school program, it could mean salvation for the troubled city of Ahmedabad.
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Categories: India, Read, Education, Politics and Conflict
A visit to the Akira Land Mine Museum and a demining expedition in northern Cambodia
Aki Ra took CLP reporters on a demining expedition in northern Cambodia, showing off his own technique for disarming land mines – hundreds of which he laid himself as a child soldier.
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Categories: Cambodia, Watch, Global Health
Nothing Goes According to Plan in Cambodia
In fact, you may find yourself regretting having even tried to make a plan in the first place. Today marks our two week anniversary in Cambodia. We were supposed to have flown to New Delhi a week ago. But journalism, it seems, is mostly about waiting.
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Tuol Sleng Prison and Genocide Musem, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Landmines and unexploded ordnance are not the only remnants of war in Cambodia. During the reign of the Khmer Rouge, Tuol Svay Prey High School in Phnom Penh became "Security Office 21," the central prison and interrogation center of the Khmer Rouge. From 1976 to 1979 thousands of Cambodians, at first mostly intellectuals, but later workers, farmers, officials and even Khmer Rouge soldiers themselves, all accused of opposing the Regime, were sent to S-21. They were imprisoned, had their photos and biographies recorded, and were then tortured to death or executed, often along with their children and other innocent family members. Of the 13,000 plus people who entered S-21 as prisoners, only seven came out alive. Today the compound is the Tuol Sleng (Khmer for "Poisonous Hill") Genocide Museum, which is open for public visits and remains largely in the condition it was in when it was liberated by the invading Vietnamese army in 1979.
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Categories: Cambodia, Watch, Human Rights, Politics and Conflict
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