BY ELIZABETH VILLARREAL About three months before my family’s Christmas vacation to Egypt, the questions started. “Are you sure it’s safe?” “Is there still time to change your plans? It just doesn’t seem prudent.” “You said you’d wait it out, but the political situation there doesn’t seem to be improving.”...

BY MINAMI FUNAKOSHI When my friends and I arrived in Dandong, the largest border city in China, our first destina­tion was duanqiao: The Broken Bridge. The bridge, which connects Dandong and Sinu­jiu, North Korea over the Yalu River, is a relic of the Korean War. Bombed by American air­craft, it...

BY ANGELICA CALABRESE On the table between us lies a small photo ID of a five-year-old boy, blonde and smiling. We’re sitting at the reception desk of the Sokos Center, a volunteer-run health clinic in Bologna, Italy, dedicated to serving the city’s undocumented immigrant population, and Boris is here to...

BY RACHEL BROWN The view could have been torn from the pages of any American college brochure—students with note­books lounging on an expanse of verdant grass, surrounded by striking buildings. But these buildings are not built of centuries-old ivy-covered stone, as in the cliché of Western grandeur. Instead, they are...

BY AARON GERTLER September 30, 2010, was an afternoon Mass like any other, until the parishio­ners saw the man in the top hat. Carlos Celdran, dapper and furious, strode to the front of Manila Cathedral, in full sight of the mayor of Manila and some of the Philip­pines’ most powerful...

Moment by moment impressions of his appearance at Yale.    

by Daniel Gordon The thermometer was edging past 100 when Girija Dhaigavi met me at a Hindu temple in Janatavasahat, an Indian slum in Pune. One would not pin Mrs. Dhaigavi, a housewife and mother, as a fighter. In India, though, what you see is rarely what you get. A politically active woman with a master’s degree,...

by Diego Salvatierra Growing up in Chile, I never complained about my chores. I didn’t have any, and neither did any of my friends. We had nanas instead. These household workers or maids––always women––are part housecleaners, part babysitters, and part cooks. Unlike other countries where having such maids is a luxury available only to the elite, many middle-class...

by Ashley Wu At 5,000 meters altitude, in the midst of a woozy, oxygen-scarce haze, it is easy to mistake the Chajnantor Plateau in Chile’s Atacama Desert for a scene out of Star Wars. Here, massive, white titanium antennas from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) project are scattered across the plateau like robots stationed for intergalactic war. Thousands...

by Sanjena Sathian Workers at the El Teniente copper mine outside of Santiago like to gossip at lunch. The hefty, orange jumpsuit clad men get only one hour for lunch, in the middle of 10 to 15-hour days of tough manual labor. Over cafeteria trays of mysterious looking jello and unknown lunchmeat, the conversation is like that...

by Diana Saverin I met René Muñoz when he was two hours into his commute home after visiting his children in the nearest town. He arrived in a pickup truck with peeling red paint to a ranch where I was staying in Aysén, a region in Chilean Patagonia. He knocked on the door, kissed the cheeks of...

by TaoTao Holmes It’s like poking a bear,” Kristin Braddock said. “You start doing good work in a community and this is what happens. You poke the bear, you wake it up.” And after a while, Braddock discovered, the bear bites back. Braddock, who is spearheading an income generation program in Delhi, has been a social worker...

Moment-by-moment impressions of her talk at Yale.