Ghana 2022
Peddlers and shoppers converge on the capital city’s central market on a typical Saturday morning. Walking through Accra’s Makola Market, which opened in 1924, is like a journey through a magic kingdom of retail. If you wish, you could stock your kitchen, furnish your home and fill your closet with a seemingly infinite array of […]
Ghana 2022
A young girl seeks shade under one of the few trees standing in the common in Wute, a dying village in southeast Ghana. The girl, Akos, is the 9-year-old granddaughter of the village chieftain, Kudzo. An uncertain future awaits. Once a thriving community, Wute has lost many of its families to the capital, Accra, 90 […]
Albania 2021
Brothers await test results at a medical lab in Tirana. I was on my way to the airport for my journey home but had to have proof of a negative COVID test as I would otherwise be unable to board my plane. I could have been tested at the airport but that would have been […]
Albania 2021
The incomplete Great Mosque of Tirana rises above the capital in the city center. When the country’s Communist leader Enver Hoxha famously declared Albania the world’s first atheist nation in 1967, many of the country’s mosques and Christian churches were destroyed, abandoned or converted into community centers and museums. After the Communists were ousted in […]
Lebanon 2021
View of Jouneih, Lebanon, eight miles north of Beirut, and the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Beneath this idyllic setting an active volcano of sorts lurks. Always blessed with scenic beauty and welcoming citizens who possess boundless optimism and a penchant for adapting to any situation, the country has faced one catastrophe after another for 46 years. […]
Tokyo 1994
On a rare, uncrowded Tokyo street I walked by a building with a mirrored glass façade that sloped from top to bottom. Looking up at the building I was struck by the reflected image of geometrical patterns. One thing was missing. I waited. And, then, into the scene came a briefcase-toting businessman.
Australia 1992
Sydney Harbor at sunset. The vista is at the top of almost every most beautiful harbors in the world list. I had just completed a five-week reporting trip to Fiji, New Zealand and Australia. On my final night in Sydney I taxied to the home of a cousin I had never met, located in the […]
India 1991
On Dec. 3, 1984, a gas leak at the Union Carbide chemicals plant in the industrial city of Bhopal killed more than 3,000 people, most of them living in a nearby shanty town. It remains the world’s worst industrial accident. For the survivors, the ordeal was just beginning. Another reported 20,000 have since died from […]
Lebanon 1990
The 15-year civil war was finally ending. But families still suffered from the loss of loved ones, no work and the stress from so many years of civil strife. Jima Salami of Qousayya, a village in central Lebanon on the Syrian border, had to deal with different but equally daunting issues. Her father was imprisoned […]