The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Posted by

Longreads

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Can Checks Save Lives?

Longreads Pick

As a teenager, Jonah Ogles began sponsoring a poverty-stricken boy in the Caribbean. Twelve years and thousands of dollars later he flew down to meet him—and to learn if his efforts did any good at all.

When I started sponsoring Ervenson, I was camping at a Christian alt-music festival in rural Illinois, where bands played concerts for sweaty mosh pits of Jesus-loving teens. Between two of the shows, someone from Compassion International got on stage and talked about how difficult it was to be a child in places like Haiti. They described the lack of clean water, the rampant disease, the voodoo ceremonies on every corner. Even then I was vaguely aware of my privilege as a white American male and felt a little guilty about it. Plus, I had a part-time job at a guitar store, which meant that I had enough spending money that I wouldn’t miss thirty-odd dollars out of my monthly paycheck. I signed up as soon as I got home. All I had to do was get online, do a quick search by age, country, or birthday (in case I wanted someone who shared mine), and then click that I agreed to send the checks.

Author: Jonah Ogles

Source: Outside

Published: Jan 31, 2014

Length: 21 minutes (5,331 words)

- Facebook
- Twitter

→

Posted by

Longreads

On March 2, 2012, a tornado hit the village of Moscow, Ohio. A look at how the residents fared:

At approximately 4:47 p.m., it hits the riverfront homes. In the first second, a tornado can break every window in a house. It rips shingles loose and pries the roof free, moving over it like air over a jet wing. With the windows now holes, the houses fill with wind. Roofs lift, exterior walls push outward, interior walls collapse. With nothing left to protect the structure, the tornado takes what’s inside—papers, furniture, tools, photographs, instruments, lamps, antique dressers, refrigerators, chairs, sofas, beds—and adds it to its growing, spinning wall.

On the riverfront, Linda Niehoff doesn’t hear the tornado the way almost everyone else will. It hits too fast for that. She is on the second floor of her large brick home, trying to get downstairs, when the lights go out. The tornado is here, she knows it; there’s no time to make it to the lower level so she dives into the bathroom, near an interior wall where the chimney comes up from the floor below. She crouches in a fireplace as the tornado demolishes her walls and roof, carrying away everything the floods hadn’t been able to over the last 214 years.

“This Beautiful, Sweet Little Town Is Just Gone.” — Jonah Ogles, Cincinnati Magazine