Untold Stories

The Politics of Lead Treatment

J. Malcolm Garcia, for the Pulitzer Center. Photo by Darren McCollester 

  Roma boy with lead on his teeth, Osterrode Camp, North Mitrovica

NORTH MITROVICA, Kosovo - Pediatrician Zoran Savich has seen many lead poisoned Roma children since he began working in Osterrode Camp and Chesmin Lug Camp in 2005. He had been told the camps would be temporary and the families would be moved to a place with less toxicity. He dispensed medicines. He treated more than 300 children for lead poisoning and really thought he would be successful, but he was deceived.

Year after year, the families remained in the camps. When he stopped treatment, their lead blood levels continued to rise. So he stopped going to the camps. As long as they remained on toxic land, what would be the point? They should be moved to another country free of lead but the United Nations refuses. Officials say the Roma are not refugees but internally displaced peoples and should remain in their own country. So they remain in the camps.

India kills her goddess

Ernest Waititu, for the Pulitzer Center

NEW DELHI, India – Some hundreds of meters after Wazirabad Bridge, a furious mass of darkened fluid tears through the huge concrete drain to the valley where Yamuna River once used to piously meander. According to Hindu mythology, Yamuna is the daughter of Surya, the sun god, and sister to Yama, the god of death. Goddess Yamuna is associated with sanctity and purity.  But not even godliness would have saved the river from the twin evils of a poorly managed sewage and a reckless disposal of industrial waste.

And as India’s industry rumbles and its economy thrives, the world’s largest democracy continues to fail in dealing with its human waste. Delhi has 15 million people and dumps 57 percent of its sewage into this river. In an erratic march to join the league of developed nations, not even the advice of Mahatma Gandhi – India’s father of the nation and one of the most revered citizens of the world – who asked Indians to consider decent and hygienic disposal of human waste central to their civilization, has been heeded.

Further downstream, we take a boat to experience the Yamuna first hand. Methane gas bubbles from the river.  Weighed down by tones of polythene bags brimming with garbage and religious sacrifice that land down here from atop a bridge above the river, the flow virtually stagnates.

Getting The Story or Bust

Report and photo by Darren McCollester, for the Pulitzer Center

North Mitrovica, Serbia - Everyone wants to tell you their story. No one wants to tell you their story. Come here later, I will talk with you. Come there later, I can’t talk with you. My boss says I can, my boss says I cannot. The camp leaders say I can, the camp leaders say I cannot. The people rotting in the refugee camps of north Mitrovica are bargaining chips. So much so, to call them refugees is wrong, they are not refugees, they are IDP’s; internally displaced people. To call them otherwise is incorrect, the argument over how to describe them more intense than what to do with them. They hate outsiders, you are not one of us, they need outsiders, please help us. We did nothing in the war; they did everything in the war. This is how it is in the camps of Chesmin Lug and Osterrode, on the edge of Mitrovica, in southern Serbia, or northern Kosovo, depends on who’s saying it, no one knows for sure.

Guatemala: Migration Tears

Samuel Loewenberg, for the Pulitzer Center

A meeting of workers deported by the U.S. government after the Postville, Iowa kosher meat-packing plant raid.

I am interviewing a couple about their experience working as immigrant laborers in the U.S., I'll call them Eduardo and Anita. Eduardo has told us that after working successfully for several years in New Orleans doing construction, he was arrested by U.S. immigration officials and put in jail. It was over the Christmas holidays, he says. He was separated from his family. He starts to cry.

People seem to cry a lot in Guatemala. This applies to men as well as women, the country's reputation for machismo notwithstanding. The crying seem to come especially when they are recounting their experiences as migrants to the U.S. It has been something of a surprise to be honest. Over the years I've interviewed family members of murder victims, survivors of terrorist bombings, victims of medical malpractice, and I've not quite encountered something like this before. It is not that the trauma is greater (how can you quantify trauma?), but it does seem somehow closer to the surface. More than anything, I think what brings them to tears is a sense of grand injustice.

Death Camps: Lead Poisoning Among Kosovo's Roma

Report and Photos by Darren McCollester/for the Pulitzer Center

A Roma refugee family sits in their main room in the Chesmin Lug refugee camp in North Mitrovica, Kosovo

North Mitrovica, Serbia - All the camps in all the countries begin to blur. Skin changes color but the stories are mostly the same. Ethnicity and war at the roots as much as the rest, but the bottom line, bad luck. To be born one thing in one place versus another can mean all the difference. Osterrode, Chesmin Lug, to end up living in these camps, these Roma gypsies were born with bad luck. Before the summer of 99 they lived in homes with electricity and running water. Now, to live along the railroad tracks under the shadow of a lead mine treading toxic dust with each step is bad luck.

Guatemala: Death in the Streets

Samuel Loewenberg, for the Pulitzer Center

Thirteen years after the peace accords were signed here, violence and fear continue to be a way of life. In a country as bloody as Guatemala, the last two weeks have stood out. In the past several years bus drivers have became targets for street gangs seeking extortion money; but the thugs are not breaking the drivers' kneecaps, they are blowing their heads off. The number of bus drivers killed so far this year is up to 33.

Last week, as I was heading back from the countryside where I'd been visiting malnutrition clinics, the health worker who was acting as my guide told me that four bus drivers in Guatemala City had been killed all in the same day. During one attack, an infant was shot and killed. A common theory, taken seriously by both government officials and everyday Guatemalans, was that this was something beyond mere street crime, but was in fact an effort by the right-wing opposition party to spread chaos and fear to undermine the current center-left government. Public officials received anonymous phone calls warning of an imminent coup. When I asked a U.S. diplomat if a coup was likely, the answer was: "probably not."

Getting Our Minds Into the Gutter:

Media Coverage for Global Sanitation Issues

Alex Stonehill, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

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.

One of the biggest challenges facing the thousands of delegates at the forum from water and sanitation NGO’s is getting the media to take notice of the startling numbers of people dying each day from water borne illness, and the billions around the globe without access to clean water and sanitation.

Water and Sanitation Literature at the 5th World Water Forum
 
“Lack of media coverage has been a real frustration for the development community, specifically in the field of Water and Sanitation,” said Ed Cain, President of the Hilton foundation, addressing myself and forty some other journalists from around the world convened by Swiss global journalism network Media 21 to cover the forum.

Arrival: Mitrovica

J. Malcolm Garcia, for the Pulitzer Center

North Mitrovica, Serbia - Darren and I arrived in the Serbian enclave of north Mitrovica last night, March 24th, the tenth anniversary of the start of the NATO bombing in the Kosovo war.  We expected some hostility at our hotel, but received little more than curious stares and a few scowls that could have been the result of the unseasonably cold weather that followed us when we opened the door to check in as much as anything else.

It is hard to believe there a war was fought here. Young people bopped down the street listening to tunes on their iPods. Restaurants bustled with business and cars clogged the streets that were well lit with multicolored lights. 

Still, despite this bustle, we became aware of the consequences of war. Graffiti blasted in thick red paint across the walls of old communist era cinder block apartment complexes castigated the U.N. Vendors even sold postcards with a black slash through "U.N."

For women, girls and water, it's donkey's work

Jon Sawyer, Pulitzer Center

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia -- Two weeks of briefings and field interviews on water and sanitation, first in Istanbul at the World Water Forum and then in Ethiopia, leave three indelible impressions.

The first is the outrageous simplicity, the doability, of the challenge before us. Ending the scourge that claims 1.8 million lives a year isn't a matter of high science, like finding a cure for HIV/AIDS or cancer. It is simple political will, mustering the support to provide the access to clean water and decent sanitation that is all the poorest billion among us need for a reasonable chance at healthy, productive lives.

The second impression is that water and sanitation is to an extraordinary degree an issue of women and girls -- and that if educated persons in the unpoor world understood this better then surely this issue would get the focused goverment and private attention it so deserves.

The third is that the news media must do better at telling this story.

For a start try watching this short video of a no-nonsense Dutch woman, Joke Muylwijk, executive director of the Gender and Water Alliance, a non-profit multinational grouping of organizations determined to make the world see how directly these issues affect women and girls.

In developing countries around the world it is women who fetch the water. They rely on their daughters to help, keeping them out of school and thus perpetuating their unequal status for the next generation. Girls who make it to schools without decent toilets drop out, usually at the point of menstruation. Where open defecation is the rule, women and girls often wait til dusk or night to relieve themselves, in the process making them vulnerable to attacks by animals and men.

Return to Dushanbe

Ilan Greenberg, for the Pulitzer Center. Photos by Carolyn Drake

Family members and neighbours gather inside a home to dance and sing at a Pamiri wedding. The Pamiri people are part of a sect of Shia Islam called Ismaili, and they follow the spiritual leader Aga Khan, who is believed to be a direct descendant of Muhammad.

More press credential-less street interviews and meetings today including an off the record interview with the US ambassador. In the evening I went to a nightclub, a tawdry disco filled a few wealthy Tajik men and Russians of both genders –including Russian soldiers from the Russian base outside Dushanbe. I'm caught filming the dance floor and promptly escorted to the front door bouncer, who is approximately the size of a mid-sized sedan. The bouncer tells me to delete my camera. I make a show of touching a few buttons and the bouncer is satisfied.