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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Red-tailed hawk about to land. (Getty Images)

Here are five stories that moved us this week, and the reasons why.

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1. The Last Days Inside Trailer 83

Hannah Dreier | The Washington Post | October 17, 2021 | 4,400 words

Hannah Dreier spent a month on the ground reporting this story about a California couple on the verge of being kicked out of FEMA housing, their refuge in the wake of 2018’s devastating Camp Fire. With the clarity and compassion that are the hallmarks of her work, Dreier bears witness to what it means to suffer on the front lines of climate change, to grapple with a thinning social safety net, and — after all that — to stare down homelessness. She portrays the couple’s frustration and anger, as well as their love and resilience. But why, Dreier asks, is this happening at all? Doesn’t the government owe the displaced more, and better, than this? It’s a pressing question: More Americans will be soon displaced by fires, floods, and extreme weather. This is a quiet, intimate story, and seemingly small in scope, but don’t let it fool you — it offers a terrifying glimpse into the future. —SD

2. The Enumerator

Jeremy Miller | Harper’s Magazine | October 19, 2021 | 5,535 words

Out of financial necessity during the pandemic, reporter Jeremy Miller becomes a census enumerator in Richmond, California, for $25 an hour. In August 2020, after five months of lockdown and with little training, he sets out as a “fully deputized agent of the federal government” to follow up on those who have not completed their census forms. This piece is fascinating for Miller’s insight into trying to communicate with members of a community living in lockdown. His attempts are often futile, scary, and yet unexpectedly endearing. How many people live in the United States? With a broken census process that’s a hot target for political manipulation, no one will ever really know for sure. Some, wary of their immigration status, evade or avoid participation, understandably suspicious of government interest. —KS

3. A Very Big Little Country

Katherine LaGrave | AFAR | October 13, 2021 | 3,766 words

Ever heard of Westarctica? Neither had I. Comprising 620,000 square miles of Antarctica, since 2001 it has been “ruled” by His Royal Highness Travis I, Grand Duke. This is a micronation — a political entity whose members claim they belong to an independent state. What they lack in legal recognition they make up for in enthusiasm. Members bestow elaborate titles upon themselves and engage in heated discussions about how to govern. Westarctica is not alone: There are nearly 100 active micronations around the world. While physical landmasses have been claimed, these micronations largely exist online. Westarctica started as “a basic Yahoo website with a god-awful teal-blue background, project name, and email address.” There is a fun fantasy vibe: Westarctica’s legal tender is ice marks, “with banknotes featuring McHenry, penguins, and the Westarctican coat of arms.” However, micronations also have serious statements to make. Obsidia is a feminist-only nation with a two-pound rock as its territory and is “intent on using awareness to increase visibility for ‘femme / feminist / LGBTQ people and explore concepts for an ideal governance.’” Since 2018 Westarctica has also developed an important mission in becoming a nonprofit focused on fighting climate change. So take a dive into LaGrave’s fascinating article — and literally discover a whole other world. —CW

4. Eat, Prey, Love: A Day with the Squirrel Hawkers of East Texas

Wes Ferguson | Texas Monthly | October 15, 2021 | 2,033 words

Birds fascinate me. When I saw Wes Ferguson’s piece at Texas Monthly, I took a tern for it immediately and I have no egrets. Much more than a delightfully nerdy history of falconry and an overview of the sport in Texas, Ferguson lets us shadow falconer Charlie Alvis as he hunts with Calypso, his three-year-old red-tailed hawk. Alvis, who has a clear and deep respect for Calypso and birds in general, took up falconry in part as a way to cope with the death of his young son. Forging a deep bond with the bird has given structure and purpose to Alvis’ life. A general warning, gentle reader: This story contains violence. Hawking is hunting, after all. “Every squirrel she kills is gradually fed back to her.” —KS

5. How a McDonald’s Knockoff Became the Immigrant Dream

Omar Mouallem | Vice | October 15, 2021 | 4,044 words

I’ve always been fascinated by restaurant chains. It’s less the food than the minutiae: iconography; decor; how far a branch or franchise owner can stray from the standards and practices of corporate decree. (For years, a McDonald’s in Brooklyn kept a neon sign in its window that said MICKI DEES. It’s gone now, but I still think about it all the time.) Omar Mouallem’s piece on Burger Baron, a chain only in the loosest sense of the word based in the Canadian province of Alberta, is a doozy. “To begin with, the logo—a colourful fat knight with double-Bs in his shield—often appears on signs as a crudely drawn copy of the original,” writes Mouallem, who made a documentary about the chain that aired on Canadian television this year. “The mascot sometimes looks emaciated or downright mutilated, if he appears on the sign at all. The restaurants themselves range from drive-thru burger shacks to sprawling steakhouses.” But even if you come for the spectacle, you’ll stay for the surprisingly touching story of how Burger Baron became a lighthouse for the Lebanese immigrant community in and around Edmonton. Does it mean I ever want to try the mushroom burger? Reader, it does not. But I can still love this story. —PR

Doctors Without Patients: The Eritrean Physicians Stuck in American Licensing Limbo

Illustration by Carolyn Wells

Shoshana Akabas | Longreads | October 2021 | 16 minutes (4,762 words)

*Haben Araya was working in the local hospital when a farmer came in, bleeding from his gums. He was suffering from a snakebite — a case she’d seen many times.

*At the request of the doctors involved, some names have been changed.

Before Araya sought asylum in the United States, before she helplessly watched the COVID-19 pandemic tear across the country, and before she learned about what doctors must go through to relicense in America, she worked as one of a handful of physicians on staff at a local hospital in her home country of Eritrea. She was a general practitioner, responsible for everything from pediatric preventative medicine to minor surgeries and gynecology. She served as the regional appointed physician for malaria case management and the hospital’s Director for Tuberculosis Control. If a patient needed to be transferred to another hospital, she had to write the referral. Call the ambulance. Make sure the ambulance has enough gas. Find someone to fill up the tank.

Snakebite cases were heartbreaking for Araya because she knew the medication was prohibitively expensive: 840 Eritrean Nakfa for a single vial (about 56 USD). Sometimes four or five vials were required, costing more than many farmers would earn in a year.

The hospital insisted on taking some sort of collateral until the bill was paid, but Araya knew the farmers were good for the money. She also knew that they would likely sell their goats or sheep — whatever animals they relied on for their livelihoods — to pay for the treatment. And then, she knew, they and their children would return in a few months’ time with severe cases of malnutrition and a host of consequent health issues.

A nearby military clinic, where there was no on-site physician, had a stock of antivenom. In exchange for a free supply for her patients, Araya told the administrator of the unit that she would provide medical consultation and training. It was not a perfect solution, Araya admits, but her job was to do anything she could for her patients. “We have to do our best with what we know,” she says. “Every day we had to be more than a doctor.”

***

Doctors trained in resource-limited environments possess a unique skill set. They’re adaptable, creative, and work well under pressure. Yet, upon arriving in the U.S., internationally trained physicians like Araya must go through a licensing process so arduous it can take nearly ten years to complete. There are currently an estimated 165,000 internationally trained medical professionals living in the United States and underutilizing their skills. Many, like Araya, are sitting on crisis management experience the United States never thought they would need — until the pandemic hit.


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Eritrea has a single medical school: the Orotta College of Medicine and Health Sciences, offering a six-year medical program. With only 30 to 40 spots in each graduating class, the nationwide competition was fierce. “When I applied to medical school, my dad always tried to impress on me that I need to have Plan B and Plan C,” says Lily Yemane, an expat Eritrean physician like Araya.  But she couldn’t think of any other job she wanted to do.

In the United States, the pandemic forced many doctors who had never experienced shortages to make life-or-death choices about who would be given oxygen, but for Araya and Yemane, that kind of challenge was part of their regular work as physicians. “You have an idea of how a certain patient can be helped, but you don’t have the resources,” explains Yemane. “Two or three patients need a medication, and you have to decide who to give it to.” With only one or two ambulances per hospital, she often fought to convince the administration to deploy their ambulance for her patients.

Resource scarcity wasn’t the only issue. Living under the oppressive regime in Eritrea bled into every aspect of their personal and professional lives. “We don’t choose where we work, we don’t negotiate our salaries,” says Araya. “The government, basically they put our names in a fishbowl.”

Since President Isais Afwerki came to power following the country’s independence in 1993, freedom has been stifled. Afwerki’s extrajudicial executions, imprisonment of journalists and religious minorities, indefinite forced labor sentences, and other human rights violations have been documented by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Reporters Without Borders, on its World Press Freedom Index this year, ranked Eritrea last, below North Korea. There have been no presidential elections held in the country’s 28-year history. “ … You don’t get any say, you don’t vote. We’ve never voted in our entire life,” says Yemane.

When political prisoners were brought to the hospital for care — often for tuberculosis or scabies, the result of years in captivity — doctors were forced to defer to a system they vehemently opposed. Some prisoners were journalists; others had been caught at the border, trying to flee the country. “You almost never ask why,” says Yemane. “You don’t want to know.”

Each time a prisoner was brought for treatment, Yemane had to convince the guards to admit the patient to the hospital for necessary care, raising suspicions that she was on the prisoner’s side. Except once: Yemane supervised the care of a prisoner with kidney failure. When she went to check on him in the recovery facility, she was surprised to find the patient with his family, and the guards nowhere to be found. “He was free,” she says, “but they only let him go because they thought he was dying.”

There was no single moment that pushed Yemane or Araya to leave and follow their family and friends who had already fled to the US. Instead, the burden of oppression and persecution simply grew until they felt they had no choice. “My rights as a human being were being violated,” says Araya. “I did not have the freedom — that basic, basic freedom … we all deserve as human beings.”

 ***

Yemane did not arrive in the United States naive to American culture or to the challenge ahead. She’d read plenty of English literature and loved watching Oscar-nominated movies, from My Fair Lady to La La Land. But still, the culture shock was real. While waiting the nine months for her work permit to be approved, she lived with a family member and took an anatomy course at the local public college, working towards a physician assistant’s degree in case she couldn’t relicense. Eager to resume medical practice, she also began volunteering at a free clinic, which helped her to feel more at home as she gradually met more like-minded people.

Reporters Without Borders, on its World Press Freedom Index this year, ranked Eritrea last, below North Korea. There have been no presidential elections held in the country’s 28-year history.

When Araya reached the United States the following year, more than a dozen Eritrean doctors like Yemane — who’d fled in the months before her — warned her of the difficult road ahead. She’d have to have her credentials verified before she could sit for the three intensive U.S. medical licensing exams (USMLE) and apply for a residency program to repeat her training — the last step before finally being able to practice on her own.

For most refugees arriving with few resources, the financial cost — of translating educational records into English, covering the exam fees (nearly $1,000 each), and working a clinical internship (often unpaid) to help get a residency — is prohibitive. And the Eritrean doctors were struggling to get past the very first step in the process. For their primary source verification, authorized representatives from the Eritrean medical school would need to confirm that their documents, including their diploma and transcript, were authentic.

They’d contacted the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG), a non-governmental, non-profit agency, responsible for primary source verification. Of roughly 3,500 operational institutions in the World Directory of Medical Schools, ECFMG accepts credentials from approximately three-quarters — including the medical school in Eritrea. But when Araya and Yemane’s colleagues applied for verification, the Eritrean administrators wouldn’t respond to ECFMG’s inquiries.

The medical school and placement system in Eritrea, like many countries, is controlled by the government, which has the power to withhold the records of anyone they don’t want to assist. “In the eyes of the government,” says Yemane, “we are traitors — which is not true. We served our country when we were there. I worked with very little pay, like everybody else in the country, for four years, outside of my hometown. And we did serve the people. We did our best. But the government was not understanding of that. So when we left, we were considered traitors.”

Kara Oleyn, Vice President for Programs and Services at ECFMG, was assigned to their case. ECFMG sees 20,000 applications each year, and Oleyn was no stranger to verification challenges. When ISIS infiltrated Iraq and medical school officials fled to the south, Oleyn’s team worked with the Iraqi Ministry of Health to track them down, so they could provide verification for their former students. In Crimea, where both the Russian and Ukrainian governments claimed the medical university, they had to determine who was actually authorized to verify credentials. “We do need to assure the public that the individuals who are going to be laying hands on them have the appropriate credentials,” says Oleyn, “and primary source verification is a big part of that.”

But Araya’s and Yemane’s cases — and the cases of their Eritrean colleagues — stumped Oleyn. “There was absolutely no information coming out of Eritrea,” she says.

Araya and her peers were devastated. “The fact that the government I left was able to affect me here — it was just heartbreaking,” says Araya. “America, they gave me protection to stay here, but the [Eritrean] government was able to retaliate and hold me hostage, even when I’m here.”

In rare cases where verification couldn’t be obtained — often for political asylees — the ECFMG used an alternate process: having three U.S.-licensed physicians who attended the same international school swear on their medical license that they have personal knowledge that the individual graduated from medical school. Unfortunately, the Eritrean medical school, founded less than 20 years ago, had no prior graduates working in the United States to provide testimony.

Oleyn’s three-person team relentlessly contacted any sources they thought might be able to share information. “We were trying to triangulate exams that we knew they took in Sudan with Sudanese officials, and we couldn’t get anywhere,” she says. Even the US Department of State couldn’t offer any contacts in Eritrea besides those already refusing to cooperate. Instead, the State Department confirmed what she recalled the Eritrean applicants had already told her: “They’re not going to reply to you, because they don’t want their physicians … their young, bright, educated people to leave their country.”

Yemane and Araya’s feeling of helplessness intensified as the pandemic rolled through their new homeland, and they watched as the news quickly became saturated with reports of hospitals running out of beds and doctors to care for COVID patients. When Eritrea went into lockdown, they feared for their friends and family left behind. Yemane would close her eyes and remember the limited number of beds in the hospital’s ICU, imagining them all filled. The staff was already underpaid and overworked before the pandemic.

“In a perfect world, when this happens, what do you do? You just go home and you help, and then you come back,” says Yemane. “We could not go back home, even to help, even to contribute.” And in America, she couldn’t help either. “… Imagine sitting with the capacity to do something but not being able to do anything … What was the whole point of your training if you cannot do something, even in a pandemic?”

Many internationally trained doctors have valuable experience working in the thick of SARS and Ebola epidemics, conflict zones, and other limited-resource conditions — not unlike the conditions faced by hospitals across the United States, as doctors scrambled for personal protective equipment. “When you have a shortage in supplies all the time, you get creative,” Yemane explains. “When we didn’t have ventilators, we could make CPAPs out of things that you can access at the hospital. So we have that kind of mindset.”

Jina Krause-Vilmar, the president and CEO of Upwardly Global, a nonprofit organization that provides career services to immigrants and refugees (including several interviewed for this story), says that, despite knowing the risks of COVID-19, their clients were anxious to help and “in tears about the idea that they were standing on the sidelines at a time when their communities were suffering.”

Unable to assist medical efforts directly, Yemane volunteered for a mutual aid society to help with cooking and delivering food to a local homeless encampment, but she wished she could do more. At the height of the pandemic, “that’s when it was most painful,” she says. “You see the hospitals running low on supplies, on skill[ed workers], and you’re sitting at home doing nothing when you could have been out there helping people.”

Yemane would close her eyes and remember the limited number of beds in the hospital’s ICU, imagining them all filled.

In a few select states, desperation finally bred change, and internationally trained physicians were given the opportunity to contribute. New York (home to roughly 13,000 foreign-trained medical professionals not able to make full use of their skills) joined New Jersey, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Colorado in adapting licensing guidelines to allow foreign-trained physicians to help with COVID efforts at various levels — but with limited success.

For some, the application was too difficult. Upwardly Global heard that in one state Russian applicants were deterred because the drop-down menu on the online application accidentally omitted “Russia” as an option for country of origin. Some, like Yemane, applied to the NJ licensing program but never heard back.

“These were emergency policies that were designed and implemented at a time of unprecedented need and at a time when states were trying to mount a response to a public health crisis like no other,” says Jacki Esposito, director of U.S. Policy and Advocacy for World Education Services Global Talent Bridge, a non-profit dedicated to helping international students, immigrants, and refugees achieve their educational and career goals. “So just by virtue of the fact that they were designed and implemented very quickly, there wasn’t the time and the space to consult all of the various stakeholders that would be consulted in a permanent reform process.”

For example, according to Esposito, some states require applicants to have active, valid licenses in another country, but many people — refugees especially — let their licenses lapse to avoid yearly fees and continuing education requirements. Esposito says the application could have required that a foreign license was in good standing when it was last active to accomplish the same goal — of weeding out those applicants with disciplinary actions on their record. “It really was a mix of getting the eligibility requirements right so that they maintain health and safety standards, but at the same time are accessible for applicants,” says Esposito. “Eligibility requirements must be workable for these policies to be effective.”

Without the time to be more intentional about the design of the application process, inform employers about the policy, or conduct outreach to applicants, the opportunity went underutilized. By the end of 2020, the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners, which operated the most robust program for applicants without residency experience, had received approximately 1,100 applications for temporary medical licenses, but, according to a spokesperson at the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs, they issued emergency licenses to only 35 individuals. And according to Gothamist, not all who received emergency licenses were able to secure positions. Many applicants who were eligible for similar programs across the country didn’t know where to look for jobs, and hospitals weren’t sure they were allowed to accept internationally trained applicants — or just thought it was easier to not employ them.

“When push came to shove, the hospitals would rather repurpose a plastic surgeon,” says Tamar Frolichstein-Appel, a senior employment services associate at Upwardly Global, who believes better outcomes could be achieved if healthcare employers, legislators, and NGOs work in partnership. Without buy-in from employers who are willing to hire from this talent pool, a license doesn’t make much of a difference. “It’s a missed opportunity that we have not, as a country, leveraged the immense talent that immigrant and refugee doctors and other healthcare workers offer,” says Esposito.

Amid the crisis, a door was cracked open for a select few. But, by and large, doctors like Araya and Yemane watched the pandemic unfold, stuck outside of a system they desperately wanted to be part of. “We got so antsy to do something,” Yemane says. “It’s a privilege to be able to help in that time, and we didn’t have that.”

***

As more time passed without any news of progress from ECFMG, the persistent uncertainty began to take a toll on the Eritrean doctors stuck in limbo. “A few of us went back to medical school again. But to go to medical school twice in one lifetime — it’s a lot to ask,” says Yemane.

After fleeing Eritrea, another doctor, Abraham Solomon, chose this option to avoid being at the mercy of a stalled bureaucratic process. But he couldn’t simply repeat medical school; he had to go back even further and complete up to 90 credits of undergraduate pre-med requirements before even taking the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT). As he sat through freshman seminars for the second time in his life, he had a strong sense that this situation wasn’t fair, but he had to make peace with it. “What [I] had to do was more important than getting lost in the emotions,” says Solomon, who worked in customer service to pay for school. “At that point, you understand this is something you can’t control.”

Mohamed Khalif, who left Somalia as a refugee when he was two years old, moved around the world with his family before graduating medical school in China. While studying for the USMLE in Washington State, he worked as a security guard and then took night shifts at a pie factory so he could volunteer at a medical clinic. Khalif has valuable skills and is fluent in five languages, including Urdu and  Mandarin, but even after he passed the USMLE he failed to match with a residency program. The screening for residency programs filters out candidates without “hands-on” clinical experience in the United States: few applicants can afford unpaid internships, and few institutions are willing to take them on over U.S. medical students. The applications cost Khalif more than $6,000 each year, in addition to flights and hotels for interviews. After four years, he decided he had to go in another direction.

As the founder of the nonprofit Washington Academy for International Medical Graduates (WAIMG), he now advocates for those who face the same challenges and offers professional development opportunities through his organization. Through this work, he met folks with similar stories, like a Japanese neurosurgeon who married an American and moved to the U.S., but, even after passing the USMLE, was still working at Starbucks because she couldn’t match into a residency program. Khalif’s organization hired her for a job that would count as “hands-on” clinical experience to improve her prospects.

“Once she found this job,” says Khalif, “she actually cried. And I felt that. Because that’s what I’ve been through — those kinds of odd jobs — and I cried with her.” These stories keep him hopeful, even though he’s not able to practice: the fact that he’s making it possible for so many others.

 ***

The matching process is a major concern for Araya, Yemane, and their peers — not having their official transcripts or diplomas will likely pose problems during the difficult process of applying to residencies — once they even reach that stage. This year, only 55 percent of immigrant international medical graduates who applied for residency were matched to first-year positions, compared to 93 percent of U.S. graduates.

And every year Araya and Yemane have spent fighting for the right to even sit the exams has cost them: The more time that passes after a candidate’s graduation year, the harder it can be to secure a residency match.

“When you only consider somebody’s graduating year as a criteria and not know the story behind that, it hurts a lot of people. It hurts a lot of people who are really passionate,” says Araya. “To come here to fight for all these years to go back into your profession — that tells a lot about the persistence and the passion that person has for medicine.”

Amid the crisis, a door was cracked open for a select few. But, by and large, doctors like Araya and Yemane watched the pandemic unfold, stuck outside of a system they desperately wanted to be part of.

Khalif began to look for a solution that wouldn’t require physicians to repeat their entire residency. “Legislators did not know about this match process and this residency process,” says Khalif. “They thought people could apply for residency through Indeed Job Search or something.”

Members from Khalif’s non-profit met with legislators and eventually started gaining traction. “COVID really changed people’s minds,” says Khalif, and in May 2021, Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed into law SHB 1129, which allows limited licenses to be granted to internationally trained doctors in Washington who have completed their USMLE, without requiring residency to be repeated in the U.S. “Once you pass all your exams now, you don’t have to settle for an odd job, or leave the profession like I did,” says Khalif. “You can qualify for a license and work under the supervision of a physician, and you can take care of patients.”

The bill was overwhelmingly supported on both sides. Republican representative Mary Dye says that her small county of Garfield, with only a handful of doctors, has benefited from internationally trained physicians from Bangladesh and South Korea, who can work without the equipment, facilities, and large medical teams that most U.S. doctors rely on. “In rural America, we need people that have different experiences,” Dye explained. “We’re grateful to have … people that are capable of serving in these remote locations, under challenging conditions, with lots of limitations, and still provide wonderful medical care for our community.”

From the rural healthcare crisis to expanding medical access for at-risk populations, advocates believe internationally trained physicians could be part of the solution if given the opportunity. “I think they have a huge role to play in terms of health equity access, because of that cultural language fluency,” says Krause-Vilmar.

“We need to re-envision what the process is for licensure for doctors in the United States,” says Esposito, “so that we are not leaving out people who have 20 years of experience in a field where we know that we need more doctors.”

Without any change in legislation in California, the current residency hurdles are still daunting for Araya and Yemane, who hope that, when the time comes, institutions will consider their circumstances and give them a chance to prove themselves. “We are all a loss for our country,” Araya says. “I hope we’re not a loss here.”

 ***

One night, more than a year into the investigation process, Oleyn was working late in her Philadelphia office when she received a call from one of the Eritrean applicants. She detailed everything her team had tried — most recently, reaching out to the medical school in Cuba that had a partnership with the Eritrean medical school. But it was another dead end.

“Anything you can think of,” she asked on the phone that night. Anything at all.

In an attempt to leave no stone unturned, the applicants submitted lists of people they’d come into contact with during medical school — in the hope of providing a useful connection. As Oleyn’s team searched for leads through the lists of names, they found that one was a dean at a U.S. medical school. It turned out that a small number of U.S. physicians — faculty members of American medical schools like George Washington University — helped establish the school in Eritrea. The connection provided a glimmer of hope after months of coming up empty-handed.

A caseworker from Oleyn’s team contacted the dean; he didn’t remember the specific students but put them in touch with other American faculty members who had taught or helped design the post-graduate training curriculum in Eritrea. Oleyn’s team asked those physicians to verify the information about the applicants: the courses they took, which textbooks were used, and their graduation dates. They responded enthusiastically about the qualifications of each applicant and eagerly asked how they could help.

The alternate form of verification — with all the supporting evidence they had amassed — was presented to the ECFMG’s board of trustees, which finally granted approval in summer 2020. Araya and Yemane could move forward to the exam stage. When Yemane heard the news, she felt like she’d finally gotten her life back. “There was a time when I was too scared to be hopeful about that because I didn’t want to be disappointed,” she says.

Solomon had just finished a year of intro courses — Biology, Chemistry, and Physics — when the decision was released. He no longer had to repeat the rest of the prerequisite courses and medical school, and he was thankful to finally have some control over the next steps. “This is a challenge I can overcome,” he says. “An exam is just an exam. You study. You prepare.”

“It’s a good thing that we’re doing this exam,” Yemane says. “It’s a good way to revisit the basic sciences and to familiarize ourselves with what’s most important and most common in this country.”

The Eritrean physicians continue to stay in touch through their Whatsapp group, meeting occasionally, sharing job opportunities, and cheering each other on. Araya says she won’t stop rooting for their success. “Passing the exam, getting matched [with a residency program] has become more than even being a doctor: Just proving that the government back home, the school — whoever could not give us our certificates, credentials — that actually, there is justice in the world, and they could not dictate our professional pathways.”

This year, only 55 percent of immigrant international medical graduates who applied for residency were matched to first-year positions, compared to 93 percent of U.S. graduates.

In a thank you note Oleyn received an Eritrean physician wrote: “This shall also afford every graduate the privilege to revisit his/her oath to humanity, to summon his/her medical expertise, and to engage hereafter in the honored service of the people of the United States of America.”

It remains the most gratifying case Oleyn has seen in her 22 years at ECFMG.

 ***

On a warm Thursday in June 2021, Yemane traveled to San Jose to take her first exam. She hadn’t slept well the night before. Kept awake by nerves, she’d scrolled through Reddit, where other nervous exam-takers shared their anxieties. But in the morning, she pretended she’d had the best sleep of her life. “I think that worked,” she laughs. “I think I fooled my brain.”

The test center was familiar because she’d paid $75 to take a practice exam there earlier that week, but it was nerve-wracking all the same. “There was a lot of pressure on me, because I’m one of the first people taking the exam from my country,” she says. “And we begged for three years for this opportunity.”

She reminded herself that she was prepared. She’d done over 7,000 practice questions. She thought about a text her friend sent, telling her that the test outcome would not change her identity. She imagined her father and mother telling her, “You were created for this.”

When she finished the eight-hour exam, a sense of relief washed over her. This was the hardest test for her; the next one focuses on clinical skills, and she hopes to sit for it in spring 2022. After that, she will take the third and final test. The next challenge — applying for residencies — will be the final step in the long and expensive licensing process.

For now, though, she’s taking one step at a time. As she anxiously awaits the results, she knows that even if she doesn’t get the score she’s hoping for, she was brave just to take the exam after everything she’s been through. “That’s what I’m doing right now,” she says. “I’m celebrating the bravery.”

Shoshana Akabas is a writer and teacher based in New York. She primarily writes fiction and reports on refugee policy and issues of forced migration. 

* * *

Editor: Carolyn Wells 
Fact checker: Nora Belblidia

Revolt of the Delivery Workers

Longreads Pick

“For Cesar and many other delivery workers, the thefts broke something loose. Some started protesting and lobbying, partnering with nonprofits and city officials to propose legislation. Cesar and the Deliveryboys took another tack, forming a civil guard reminiscent of the one that patrolled San Juan Puerto Montaña, the small, mostly Indigenous Me’phaa village where they are from.”

Source: Curbed
Published: Sep 13, 2021
Length: 29 minutes (7,479 words)

A Tall Tree Reading List

Image by Carolyn Wells

“I’m a lumberjack and I’m OK/ I sleep all night and I work all day.” This is what was playing in my head, in an incessant loop, as I worked on this reading list. It’s a song from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a British comedy show, and includes the line: “Leaping from tree to tree/ As they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia.” This is accurate. British Columbia is where I now live, and I have seen for myself the vast swathes of felled logs clogging up rivers around the province — just without the leaping lumberjack (aka Michael Palin).  Logging is a huge industry here, a business that comes with its share of controversy — which in turn has inspired some thought-provoking writing.

And it isn’t just logging that writers have chosen as a subject matter — the beauty of trees, their communication, their struggles, and their many mysteries have all been tackled. It’s not hard to see the inspiration. On many a hike, I have stood in awe before a towering tree, tried to wrap my arms around a huge trunk to no avail, or breathed in the heady scents of the distinct species as they drift across a trail. Trees are magnificent, and so it came as no surprise that some of the words written about them are as well.

1) The Wolf Tree and the World Wide Web (Suzanne Simard, Wired, May 2021)

This essay from Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard is a wonderful way to start our journey into the woods. Simard conjures a forest scene for us with great reference, almost affection. Here she is in among some Canadian trees, researching the fascinating connections that link a forest together. Fungus plays a huge role for Team Tree, linking old trees and young seedlings by delivering nutrients and messages between them. She beautifully describes this underground network: “This courageous root was as vulnerable as a growing bone, and it survived by emitting biochemical signals to the fungal network hidden in the earth’s mineral grains, its long threads joined to the talons of the giant trees.” This interconnected, familial system leads Simard to ponder on her own family — her children, and a failing marriage.

The roots of these little seedlings had been laid down well before I’d plucked them from their foundation. The old trees, rich in living, had shipped the germinants waterborne parcels of carbon and nitrogen, subsidizing the emerging radicals and cotyledons—primordial leaves—with energy and nitrogen and water. The cost of supplying the germinants was imperceptible to the elders because of their wealth—they had plenty. The trees spoke of patience, of the slow but continuous way old and young share and endure and keep on. Just as the steadiness of my girls steadied me, and I told myself I was strong enough to endure this season of separation. Besides, I’d have a sabbatical in a year, and I could make their lunches again, drumsticks and sliced cucumber and oranges cut into smiles, and I could show them how to build go-carts and plant flowers, and Nava and I could read together more, alternating turns through pages of Mercy Watson to the Rescue. But until that magical year, I’d spirit across the mountains each weekend to reabsorb their lives, my motherhood like time-lapse photography.

2) Do Trees Talk to Each Other? (Richard Grant, Smithsonian Magazine, March 2018)

Others have also been inspired by the intimacy of forest networks, and in this article for Smithsonian, Richard Grant takes a walk into the woods with Peter Wohlleben, a German forester, and author, who has developed a unique way of talking about trees — one that has earned him some scorn among the scientific community. Wohleben takes anthropomorphism to a new level, discussing mother trees who “feed their saplings … and warn the neighbors of danger,” compared to fickle young trees who take “foolhardy risks with leaf-shedding, light chasing, and excessive drinking.”

While trees may not have “will or intention,” it can still be argued that they are more social and sophisticated than people once thought. This is what Wohleben wants his audience to realize, and it seems his imaginative descriptions deliberately slip into the world of fairytales. People love a story, and this wordsmith uses his narrative skill to engage people with the forests he adores. In the slow-moving world of trees, adding a little drama to the “Crown princes” who “wait for the old monarchs to fall” is a clever tactic, and Wohleben does not seem too phased by the criticism: “they call me a ‘tree-hugger,’ which is not true. I don’t believe that trees respond to hugs.” A dive into Wohlleben’s world certainly isn’t boring — his language, after all, is rather delightful.

Trees can detect scents through their leaves, which, for Wohlleben, qualifies as a sense of smell. They also have a sense of taste. When elms and pines come under attack by leaf-eating caterpillars, for example, they detect the caterpillar saliva, and release pheromones that attract parasitic wasps. The wasps lay their eggs inside the caterpillars, and the wasp larvae eat the caterpillars from the inside out. “Very unpleasant for the caterpillars,” says Wohlleben. “Very clever of the trees.”

A recent study from Leipzig University and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research shows that trees know the taste of deer saliva. “When a deer is biting a branch, the tree brings defending chemicals to make the leaves taste bad,” he says. “When a human breaks the branch with his hands, the tree knows the difference, and brings in substances to heal the wound.”

Our boots crunch on through the glittering snow. From time to time, I think of objections to Wohlleben’s anthropomorphic metaphors, but more often I sense my ignorance and blindness falling away. I had never really looked at trees before, or thought about life from their perspective. I had taken trees for granted, in a way that would never be possible again.

3) Illuminating Kirinyaga (Tristan McConnell, Emergence Magazine, October 2020)

In this essay for Emergence Magazine, we go on another forest walk, this time alongside Tristan McConnell, who is documenting a “stubbly, hollow-cheeked sixty-four-year-old” named Joseph Mbaya. Walking in the mountain forests that surround Mount Kenya, Mbaya finds a portal to a “slower and more meaningful world,” and also treatments for ear infections and “pungent wind.” His knowledge of herbal cures makes walking the forest tracks with Mbaya, “like walking the aisles of CVS with a taciturn pharmacist.”

It is lovely to share an insight into the mystical remedies a forest can offer, but this essay quickly takes a darker turn, detailing how these magical forests are shrinking. Fire-clearing for farming, timber plantations, and climate change are all taking their toll — but so is simply the poverty of this region. For many here, “conservation is an unaffordable luxury” — with the forest offering a resource they need to exploit, rather than protect, in order to survive.

DEEP INSIDE THE fractured forests that still ring the mountain, a hallowed sense of wonder persists. One morning, soon after the sun burns mist from the mountainsides and clouds shroud the peaks, I visit part of the mountain’s few remaining areas of old-growth woodland with a pair of young Kenyan foresters from the Mount Kenya Trust. Marania Forest, on the mountain’s northern fringe, is a revelation: thickly towering trunks of eight-hundred-year-old rosewood reach overhead, the trees’ crowns held up to the light of the canopy, pencil-straight cedar and craggy-barked olive are draped with lichen, and moss carpets the earth, muffling sound to a church-like silence. It is dark, crowded, and otherworldly—the ground soft underfoot, the trunks damp to the touch, the trees centuries old, the sunlight breaking through in narrow shafts. At our feet, fallen trunks breach the understory like shipwrecks, gradually decaying and returning to the soil—to its subterranean fungal networks and the spreading roots of neighboring trees—as food for the rest of the forest. We all smile, the foresters and I. It is a routine venture out for them, and my first to these old forests, and yet our reactions are the same: joy and reverential wonder. We instinctively drop our voices to a whisper. We walk and talk, feet sinking into the damp, spongey soil as the foresters teach me about the trees.

4) Inside the Pacheedaht Nation’s Stand on Fairy Creek Logging Blockades (Sarah Cox, The Narwhal, July 2021)

The forests around Mount Kenya are not unique — forest exploitation is a controversial issue around the world. Within my own community in British Columbia, the debate has recently been focused around the logging of old-growth trees in an area called Fairy Creek. For many months now, protesters have been blocking access to the logging cut block — and more than 300 people have been arrested, making it one of the largest civil disobedience actions in recent Canadian history.

A few pieces have been written about Fairy Creek, but I was particularly struck by the insight Sarah Cox provided in her article for The Narwhal. Cox not only looks at the perspective of the protestors and the police, but at the viewpoint of the people on whose territory Fairy Creek lies — the Pacheedaht First Nation. It’s complicated. The Pacheedaht co-manages the annual cut on its territory, and forestry has helped them to provide revenue and jobs — even allowing them to buy back some of their ancestral lands. The Pacheedaht First Nation’s elected leadership has asked the protestors to leave, but an elder, Bill Jones, has welcomed the protestors and garnered extensive media coverage. Cox deftly peels back the layers to look at the tensions within a community that has often been overlooked in this debate.

We scramble onto the boggy shore of an island where four Pacheedaht members in hip waders are planting sedges and grasses to repair damage to fish habitat caused by decades of industrial logging — logging in which the nation played no part and from which it received no benefit. An eagle lets out a high-pitched whistle. Our boots squelch in the mud. Then, slicing through the stillness, comes the throaty chuckachuka-chuckachuka of a RCMP helicopter.

For the Chief, “everything that’s been happening,” refers to the blockades taking place in and around the Fairy Creek watershed on Pacheedaht territory and in the neighbouring territory of the Ditidaht First Nation. From the estuary, we can almost see the green spirals of the Fairy Creek valley, only a few kilometres distant, that has become the epicentre of a flourishing movement to save the last of B.C.’s unprotected old-growth forests. At this very moment, RCMP are arresting protesters wedged into tall tripods hammered together with discarded logs or lying under tarps with their arms chained inside “sleeping dragons” — metal tubes dug into the ground. When the RCMP leave each day, more protesters (or land defenders, tree protectors, tree-huggers or intruders, depending on whom you talk to) drive their cars, camper vans, trucks and SUVs up the inclines of logging roads that provide access to planned logging in the Fairy Creek watershed.

5) When The Toughest Trees Met the Hottest Fires (David Ferris, Greenwire, August 2021)

The past few months have brought home to me that logging is not the only threat to our forests — climate change is increasing the impact of fires year on year. This summer the area where I live reached an unprecedented 46 degrees, a whole town burned to the ground, and I witnessed for myself flames licking up a forested mountain, gleefully jumping from tree to tree with ease.

Old-growth forest is more fire-resistant — and in fact, this is one of the arguments for saving old growth from the saws — but as David Ferris points out in his poignant essay for Greenwire, even the very oldest are now being wrecked by blazes. Ferris tells the story of last August, when the CZU Lightning Complex Fire “climbed the ladder of lesser trees and into the crowns of the giants,” ruining redwoods that had formed “an unbroken living line from today’s Silicon Valley to the times of the Bible.” Ferris peppers his stories with these jaw-dropping facts — the trees in question are up to 2,500 years old, 350 feet tall, and have six chromosomes compared to a mere two in us humans — they are simply incredible. He also paints a vivid picture of their home, a “cloud forest, dripping and primeval,” steeped in time. In contrast, the story of the fire is tense and fast, the drama played out through the eyes of Cal Fire’s Dan Bonfante, who almost lost his life.

As the forest burns every year, the humans who live near the redwoods will experience heat waves, and evacuations, and blackouts, and droughts, and mudslides, and smoke hanging in the air. Creatures that don’t measure their lives in millennia could find their life spans nastier and shorter.

The shaggy, patient trees that form an unbroken living line from today’s Silicon Valley to the times of the Bible are in ruins. The sprouts bursting from their trunks suggest that the shaded cathedrals could return, though the healing may take so long that no one now alive will see them. Today’s adults will take their children to Big Basin, and to landscapes across the West where once-verdant forests have been withered by fire. They will point and talk, not of the desolation that is, but of the Eden that used to be — and could be again, one distant day.

“In my lifetime, yeah, it’s not going to look like it used to look,” said Kerbavaz with a shrug. “But in the next lifetime, probably.”

The Cult That Promises to Cure Addiction

Benjamin Rasmussen for The Atavist Magazine

This is an excerpt from The Atavist‘s issue no. 115, “The Love Bomb,” by Daniel Kolitz.

Daniel Kolitz| The Atavist | July 2021 | 10 minutes (2,100 words)

Prologue

On Super Bowl Sunday, three weeks into the 1980s, Dave Cherry had the house to himself. The 15-year-old was sprawled out on his parents’ gold bedspread watching the game, but on the list of things he cared about—Led Zeppelin, the possibility of alternate dimensions, acquiring and inhaling tremendous quantities of weed—football barely ranked. Inertia, a sense of having nothing better to do, was the only thing that kept him watching.

When the game ended, the network cut to Dan Rather, his posture as rigid as his hair. Rather introduced the subject of that week’s 60 Minutes episode: the Palmer Drug Abuse Program. “Few people outside of Texas had ever heard of PDAP,” Rather intoned, “until People magazine reported that Carrie Hamilton, the 15-year-old daughter of TV star Carol Burnett and producer Joe Hamilton, had become a drug addict, and that her parents had sent Carrie to PDAP, where she kicked her habit.”

Cherry, who lived in the suburbs of St. Louis, wasn’t familiar with PDAP, nor with Carrie Hamilton’s recovery, despite Burnett and her family making the daytime talk-show rounds—Dinah Shore, Phil Donahue—to praise the program and its founder, a recovering addict and alcoholic named Bob Meehan. “Some see Mr. Meehan as a miracle worker,” Rather said, “bringing God and clean living back into young people’s lives. Others say he gets those youngsters dependent on him and PDAP in place of their former dependence on drugs and alcohol.”

Meehan appeared on screen, looking like someone’s hazy misconception of 1970s cool: wide white sideburns, bushy blond goatee. Fury seemed to flash behind his orange-tinted aviators. Cherry, the son of strict Southern Baptists, was suddenly interested. Meehan was precisely the kind of guy his parents would despise.

“Now, I’m saying, this program works for a group of people. If it doesn’t work for you, try another one!” Meehan told 60 Minutes. “We’re not controlling you in any way, shape, or form. You don’t like it, leave!”

Meehan called his method of treating substance abuse Enthusiastic Sobriety, or ES. It was a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous for teenagers; it emphasized community and spirituality, but also insisted that participants needed to have fun. Cherry watched footage of cozy group confessionals and larger meetings that looked like pep rallies. Kids traded shoulder squeezes and looks of fervent understanding. A pretty woman, maybe 20 years old, cradled a younger boy’s head as another woman thanked him for filling a void in her life. “I love you,” she said, prompting claps and cheers from the people gathered around her.

A lonely kid, Cherry felt a stir of longing.

Meehan was so animated that, beside him, Rather looked like an expensive wax statue. When Rather questioned him about his $100,000 annual income, a combination of his PDAP salary and payments from a company that ran hospitals where PDAP referred teenagers for inpatient treatment, Meehan grinned. “If I wasn’t making money, you wouldn’t be here today, partner!” he said. Pressed for evidence of the high success rates PDAP touted in its advertisements, Meehan delivered a wandering monologue on the perils of methadone and the definition of success before telling Rather that if 60 Minutes or its host would like to give him $75,000 to conduct a study, he’d be happy to take it.

“Are you saying to me that you don’t have any data to back up your claim that you’re 75 to 80 percent successful?” Rather asked.

“The data we have is quite different from data anybody else has,” Meehan said.

“But when you boil it down, what you’ve got is a guess,” Rather pressed.

“Oh definitely,” Meehan said, inscrutable. “Definitely a guess.”

Rather presented dissenting opinions, from sources who described an environment that seemed designed to keep PDAP participants in thrall to Meehan. A mustached man in a tan leather jacket said that people were being “led to believe that we can’t make it without the program,” prompting Rather to remark, astonished, that this would make participation “never-ending.” Confronted with the notion that PDAP was manipulative and opportunistic, Meehan became even more energetic. “I’ve been a con all my life,” he told Rather. “Just, now I’m using it in a good way, see?”

The segment was in no uncertain terms a takedown. It aired on the highest-rated news program in the country, directly after the biggest event on TV. It should have been Bob Meehan’s undoing. But it wasn’t.

Over the next 40 years, Meehan proved to be a skilled shapeshifter and profiteer. Enthusiastic Sobriety, which as it turned out was even more destructive than 60 Minutes revealed, spread well beyond PDAP. It evolved, taking various names and forms; when one door closed, Meehan found another to open. Recovery programs that he ran or wielded influence over enrolled thousands of young people across the United States. Today, ES outfits run by members of Meehan’s inner circle still exist in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, and North Carolina.

ES also ensnared staff and some clients in what people who’ve abandoned it now call a cult. Meehan and his closest confidants—a group dubbed the Family—controlled every aspect of members’ lives. The story recounted here draws on interviews with 65 former clients, counselors, and loved ones of people involved with ES from its origins in the 1970s through to the present day. Their experiences echo those described in an active online community of former ES followers, who use Facebook and other social-media platforms to tell their stories. Some subjects spoke to The Atavist Magazine on condition of anonymity.

Flopped on his parents’ bed in 1980, Dave Cherry couldn’t have guessed the outsize role he’d one day play in ES, or the extent to which Meehan would come to dominate his life. Years would pass before the two even met. All Cherry knew on that Super Bowl Sunday was that he liked the guy. He thought Dan Rather had given Bob Meehan a raw deal.

***

Part One

Hard facts about Meehan’s life before PDAP are scarce, but he always told a compelling origin story—how he first shot heroin at 16; how the habit soon compelled him to pawn his parents’ furniture; how they committed him to a psychiatric ward; how he escaped and spent the next ten years on and off the streets, using not only heroin but also codeine, quaaludes, cocaine, speed, and alcohol. During this period, according to several people who knew Meehan, he claimed to have robbed several pharmacies, killed several men, and played drums in several small-time jazz ensembles.

In Meehan’s telling, his luck changed in 1971. Released from a Kentucky prison cell, he wound up in Houston, digging ditches for Rice University. At 27, he was mostly toothless—he wore dentures—and bald, save for a grimy curtain of hair running from the peak of his scalp down to his shoulders. A Fu Manchu mustache drooped past his chin. He’d mostly stopped using drugs but still wrestled with booze, and after another short stint in jail, this time for burglary and public drunkenness, he began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings at Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church.

The gatherings were presided over by Father Charles Wyatt-Brown, a soft-spoken priest beloved by his community. Wyatt-Brown took a liking to Meehan, who was outspoken in meetings. The two began having lunch together. Wyatt-Brown soon hired Meehan as his church’s janitor.

Teens made regular use of the church in those days, playing Frisbee on the grounds and popping inside to use the bathroom. Some of them were drug users, and Wyatt-Brown encouraged Meehan to befriend them, hoping he might set them on a better path. In fact, Wyatt-Brown said, Meehan’s attention was better spent helping children than vacuuming hallways.

Meehan was singularly charismatic, a perpetual motion machine with a comic’s timing and a gift for connecting with kids. It helped that he chain-smoked, cursed incessantly, and had a vast supply of dirty jokes and prison yarns to keep them entertained. Soon, with Wyatt-Brown’s permission, six young people began meeting regularly with Meehan in the church’s basement. They played cards, complained about teachers, talked about crushes. Sometimes Meehan took to the piano, leading sing-alongs. Within six months, the group’s ranks had expanded to 40, and Meehan was formally promoted to the role of youth counselor. Another six months later, attendance had reached 250, and Wyatt-Brown established the Palmer Drug Abuse Program as a nonprofit, with a board of directors to facilitate the program’s growth. Meehan was made director.

Meehan didn’t have formal qualifications to run a drug-treatment program. What he had was life experience and an eye for demand. White middle-class Americans shaped by the promise and comforts of the postwar era were terrified that substance abuse would steal their children’s future. The war on drugs began in 1971, with Richard Nixon declaring illegal substances “public enemy number one.” Within a few years, the so-called parent movement, which preached zero tolerance of marijuana, narcotics, and alcohol, would spread across the country. But Meehan recognized that a top-down approach wasn’t likely to appeal to kids. What rebellious teenager does what their parents or president tells them to do?

Meehan started developing Enthusiastic Sobriety, which was both a theory and a practice. In order to entice teens, he believed, clean living needed to be just as fun—and just as reckless—as the alternative. If teens wanted to grow their hair long, smoke cigarettes, stay out all night, or even drop out of school, parents should let them—whatever kept them off drugs and alcohol was a good thing. Thus liberated, kids could enter the alternate social world of PDAP, which had its own dances, campouts, and house parties, all of them substance-free.

Spirituality was part of PDAP’s deal; much like AA, the program was rooted in the possibility of redemption. If that didn’t seem cool to teenagers, Meehan would be the first to tell them they were wrong. He believed that peer pressure was what drove young people to experiment with drugs and alcohol, and he aimed to use the same tactic to keep them sober. As soon as they walked in the door of a meeting, PDAP newcomers were smothered in hugs and people saying “I love you.” The tactic, called “love bombing,” is now widely recognized as a method for luring people into cults. One PDAP participant recalled thinking, “These guys are like the Hare Krishna or something. They’re going to try to make me sell flowers at the airport next week.”

In the program’s early days, Meehan met and married Joy DeFord, a diminutive, dark-haired divorcée who ran Palmer Memorial’s Alateen program, for teenagers who had alcoholics in their families. Joy came across as a polished Southern belle, a calm counterpoint to her manic husband, though she had quirks of her own, including an interest in hypnotism and homeopathy. The Meehans had a daughter and informally adopted a PDAP participant named Susan Lowry. Joy began running PDAP’s parent group, which held meetings each week. Hers was an essential role—PDAP’s smooth functioning depended on parents buying into the developing ES methodology.

PDAP could be a tough sell for parents. Beyond the smoking and the late nights, there was the fact that PDAP’s counselors looked like they could have been former drug dealers. Some of them were former drug dealers. One young man showed up for his first PDAP meeting, struck up a conversation with a counselor, and quickly realized that he’d “bought dope from the guy before.” When the adults balked about who was supervising their kids, Joy calmed them down. A common refrain was “Would you rather they were dead?”

PDAP was free, funded entirely by community donations. Participants had to commit to 30 days of sobriety, during which they would attend frequent meetings. They could keep coming to PDAP after that—in fact, they were encouraged to make the program the permanent anchor of their existence. Meehan, a fervent follower of AA, implemented a version of the 12 steps in PDAP. Participants made moral inventories and direct amends to those they’d hurt, and they admitted that substances rendered their lives unmanageable. Meehan put his own spin on other steps. His second one was “We have found it necessary to ‘stick with winners’ in order to grow.” To keep old friends around—especially if they used drugs or alcohol, but often even if they were sober—was to court relapse or worse. Once someone had PDAP, they didn’t need anyone else. In the words of one former participant, PDAP was “a whole group of people who were just like me.”

Read the full story at The Atavist

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, resources are available from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, including a 24/7 national helpline: 1-800-662-HELP (4357). Additional information on rehab abuse is available via Breaking Code Silence.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

LOS ANGELES, CA - MAY 19: Theo Henderson from We The Unhoused podcast speaks from the steps of LA City Hall as members of Unhoused Tenants Against Carceral Housing (UTACH), a newly formed tenant organization, held a news conference to demand humane treatment in Project Roomkey programs and request a meeting with city officials. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images).

This week, we’re sharing stories from Ciara O’Rourke, Haley Britzky, Alissa Walker, Julie Sedivy, and Arika Okrent.

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1. The Fugitive and the Chameleon

Ciara O’Rourke | Deseret News | August 2, 2021 | 6,154 words

“Mario’s father had gone by many names. Luis Archuleta. Lawrence Pusateri. The man the son knew as Ramon was just a fraction of his way into what may be one of the longest fugitive runs in U.S. history — a 50-year game of cat-and-mouse that played out across the West, from the streets of Colorado to the shores of California and many dusty, sun-bleached points in between.”

2. ‘We Are All Suffering in Silence’ — Inside the US Military’s Pervasive Culture of Eating Disorders

Haley Britzky | Task & Purpose | August 2, 2021 | 6,213

U.S. military service members develop harmful and unhealthy habits to maintain “body composition standards” that are outdated.

3. Theo Henderson’s Podcast Influences L.A. City Policy. For 7 Years, He’s Lived Mostly in the Park.

Alissa Walker| Curbed | October 14, 2020 | 2,505 words

“There are 60,000 unhoused people in L.A. County — (Theo) Henderson prefers ‘unhoused’ because he says ‘homeless’ has become a slur — as many as 40,000 of whom are considered, like him, to be ‘unsheltered,’ living outside the shelter system in tents, informal communities, and camps.”

4. The Strange Persistence of First Languages

Julie Sedivy | Nautilus | November 5, 2015 | 3,440 words

“Spurred by my father’s death, I returned to the Czech Republic hoping to reconnect to him. In doing so, I also reconnected with my native tongue, and with parts of my identity that I had long ignored.”

5. Typos, Tricks and Misprints

Arika Okrent | Aeon | July 26, 2021 | 3,401 words

“Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable? Don’t blame the mix of languages; look to quirks of timing and technology.”

Typos, Tricks and Misprints

Longreads Pick
Source: Aeon
Published: Jul 26, 2021
Length: 13 minutes (3,401 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

PARIS, FRANCE - NOVEMBER 06: Model Loulou Robert (L) and Roberto Eggs, President of Louis Vuitton North Europe, take part, along with Dumba (C), a female African elephant, in a ceremony to switch on and unveil the Christmas decorations by luxury brand Louis Vuitton for the Galeries Lafayette department store on November 6, 2012 in Paris, France. (Photo by Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen, and Paul Kiel, Arno Kopecky, Isaac Würmann, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, and Laura Spinney.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

1. The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax

Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen, Paul Kiel | ProPublica | June 8, 2021 | 5,717 words

“ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.”

2. Three Days in the Theater of Old-Growth Logging and Protest

Arno Kopecky | Hakai Magazine | June 1, 2021 | 6,100

“A drama 150 years in the making is playing out as logging companies and police clash with First Nations and protesters over one of British Columbia’s last remaining stands of unprotected old-growth forest.”

3. The Men in Apartment 4C

Isaac Würmann | Maisonneuve | May 11, 2021 | 5,738 words

“When Isaac Würmann’s relationship began to crumble, he started seeking out examples of queer love elsewhere. It turns out, he didn’t have to look far.”

4. La Cancion de la Nena

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal | Oxford American | June 1, 2021 | 6,937 words

“He sits on the edge of the bed to compose and work through songs, facing an amp, while I curl into his velvet-lined guitar case and listen…I have called up this memory so many times I feel the gauze of fiction starting to overlay its details. But it is a memory so dear, I reanimate it against the heaviness of the present—my father, full of promise and possibility, years before the shell he would become, now shut away in my childhood bedroom in the graying light of ever-closed blinds.”

5. The Elephant Vanishes: How a Circus Family Went on the Run

Laura Spinney | The Guardian | June 8, 2021 | 5,455 words

“Today, many circus elephants in Europe are reaching old age. Campaigners want them placed in specially built sanctuaries, where they can enjoy retirement with their own kind. But their owners insist that for the elephants, being separated from their human “families” would be traumatic.”

‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

This is an excerpt from The Atavist‘s issue no. 115, “The Snitch,” by Jordan Michael Smith.

Jordan Michael Smith | The Atavist | May 2021 | 5 minutes (1,356 words)

 

CHAPTER 1

Carle Schlaff wanted more out of his job. As an FBI agent, he’d spent more than ten years working low-level drug cases in the bureau’s Denver office. He eventually moved up to investigating organized crime—only to be transferred to the violent-crimes squad and made the liaison to a low-security prison called Englewood, in Littleton, Colorado. It was the sort of job that was good for a rookie, not a veteran. “I was kinda pissed,” Schlaff said.

The Atavist is Longreads‘ sister publication. For 10 years, it has been a digital pioneer in long-form narrative journalism, publishing one deeply reported, elegantly designed story each month. Support The Atavist by becoming a magazine member.

Schlaff was 42, with two kids, an easy smile, and an unpretentious manner. He was the type of FBI agent who read crime novels in his spare time. He’d grown up watching Hawaii Five-0. He wanted to take down mob bosses, catch serial killers, expose international drug cartels.

In August 2002, Schlaff’s luck changed: He learned that a prisoner at Englewood named Scott Kimball knew about a murder plot. Schlaff and a colleague met with Kimball in a small interview room at the prison. Kimball was 36 at the time, a weathered, stocky man who wore a goatee and had a long scar in the center of his forehead. He shared a cell with Steve Ennis, a young drug dealer. Kimball claimed that Ennis had talked about recruiting someone to kill witnesses preparing to testify against him.

“I would be willing to do some undercover work for you guys,” Kimball told Schlaff and his colleague.

If the offer seemed blunt, it was because Kimball already knew how the FBI operated. After being arrested for check fraud in Alaska in 2001, he told authorities that his cellmate, Arnold Wesley Flowers, planned to order the murders of a federal judge and a prosecutor, along with a witness in the case against him. (Flowers was facing fraud charges of his own, according to court records.) The FBI worked with Kimball and an undercover agent to record Flowers organizing the hits with help from his girlfriend. In March 2002, the couple were charged with murder for hire, witness tampering, and attempting to murder federal officials.

There was more: Kimball told the FBI that another Alaska prisoner, Jeremiah Jones, had bragged about murdering Tom Wales, a prominent assistant U.S. attorney shot to death through a window of his Seattle home in October 2001. While it investigated the matter, out of concern for his safety, the FBI transferred Kimball to his native Colorado in April 2002. Now, at Englewood, it seemed that Kimball had yet more valuable intelligence to offer.

Before Schlaff went chasing Kimball’s story, though, he wanted to know what type of person he was dealing with. He didn’t mind so much if someone had committed nonviolent crimes, but he didn’t want to work with an informant who could be easily discredited. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” Schlaff asked Kimball.

Kimball admitted that in addition to his crimes in Alaska, he’d committed fraud in Montana and served time there. He excelled at check forgery, Kimball said, but he wanted to go straight. It sounded plausible to Schlaff, who’d reviewed Kimball’s record—he didn’t have any convictions for violent crimes—and had checked for outstanding warrants.

Schlaff scribbled down on a notepad what Kimball told him. After leaving Englewood that day, he made contact with the Drug Enforcement Agency and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which were both working the Ennis case. Kimball was soon reactivated as an informant, with Schlaff as his handler. Their goal was to foil the alleged murder plot, and charge Ennis for orchestrating it.

All the pieces were falling into place: This was exactly the kind of case Schlaff had been craving.

It takes a thief to catch a thief, as Schlaff likes to say—that’s the logic behind using jailhouse snitches. In the United States, the practice has a history as troubling as it is long. Incentivized by the promise of reduced sentences, better prison conditions, and financial compensation, criminal informants sometimes offer cops and prosecutors bad information, which can lead to wrongful convictions and other miscarriages of justice. And too often, authorities treat informants as if their lives matter less than the work of law enforcement.

In recent years, there have been efforts to reform the way authorities handle informants. But back when Kimball started working with the FBI, there was less communication among law enforcement agencies and relatively minimal scrutiny of an informant’s history. It was easy to miss the kind of facts from a person’s past that might have made authorities think twice before using them as an informant.

It takes a thief to catch a thief, as Schlaff likes to say—that’s the logic behind using jailhouse snitches. In the United States, the practice has a history as troubling as it is long

Born in Boulder in 1966, Kimball was ten when his parents divorced, after his mother came out as gay. Around that time, according to Kimball and his brother, a neighbor began molesting them. Kimball told me the abuse continued until he was in his teens. The neighbor was ultimately sentenced to seven years in prison for sexual abuse of a minor. According to people who knew him as a young man, Kimball seemed haunted by his past. He once tried to end his life but only managed to wound himself—the source of the scar on his forehead.

By early adulthood, Kimball had a long rap sheet. In 1988, he received his first felony conviction for passing bad checks. In another instance, he was charged with running an illegal outfitting business in Montana, helping out-of-staters hunt elk, bear, moose, and deer. Kimball continued to commit nonviolent offenses, the kind that Schlaff later saw on his criminal record. There were other allegations against Kimball, far more unsettling ones, but due to a series of decisions made by law enforcement, finding them would have required some digging.

In June 1993, Kimball married a woman named Larissa Mineer. They moved to Spokane, Washington, and had two sons. Though they divorced in 1997, they maintained a relationship until December 1999, when, Mineer alleged, Kimball raped her at gunpoint. Kimball claimed he hadn’t harmed or threatened Mineer—according to a police report, he said that his ex was trying to sway a custody dispute over their sons in her favor. After Mineer failed a polygraph, the police decided not to file charges. (Polygraphs have been deemed unreliable by the American Psychological Association and the National Academy of Sciences, but law enforcement still use them to quickly ascertain whether someone might be telling the truth.)

In 2000, Kimball landed in prison in Montana, convicted of violating probation, which he’d been serving for a fraud offense. After a year in lockup, Kimball was transferred to a halfway house, but a month later he went on the lam. Mineer alleged that he came back to Washington, broke into her home, and then kidnapped and raped her. This time the Spokane police issued a warrant for his arrest. But when Kimball was picked up for fraud in Alaska in 2001, and then became an FBI informant, the kidnapping and assault charges went away. (The FBI said it did not request that local law enforcement drop the charges.)

As a result, when Schlaff looked up Kimball’s record, none of Mineer’s accusations were on it. The escape from the halfway house was there, but Schlaff wasn’t too worried about that—Kimball had been near the end of his sentence when he’d slipped away. Schlaff spoke to Colton Seale, an FBI special agent in Alaska, who said that Kimball had been helpful in the case against Flowers and his girlfriend. Seale, who is now retired from the FBI, told me that he has no memory of whether he knew about Kimball’s kidnapping and assault charges at the time.

At worst, Schlaff thought, he was working with a petty con artist. “He was a typical wise guy,” Schlaff told me. “He had an answer for everything.” But Kimball wasn’t a child molester or a murderer. He seemed like the type of informant who might be good before a jury.

The truth was something else entirely.

 

Read the full story at The Atavist

Three Days in the Theater of Old-Growth Logging and Protest

Longreads Pick

“A drama 150 years in the making is playing out as logging companies and police clash with First Nations and protesters over one of British Columbia’s last remaining stands of unprotected old-growth forest.”

Source: Hakai Magazine
Published: Jun 1, 2021
Length: 24 minutes (6,100 words)