A Passion for Compassion It was so convenient. The picture was finally painted neatly in black and white by most mainstream media in the West. On the one side were the bad Serbs, and then there were “all the others,” who were, on the whole, victims of Serbian aggression. It made sense, there were winners…
Category: Stories
November 28, 2011
The words that greet me are, “I hate you Daddy, go away” as a small head disappears under the covers. It’s Monday morning, it’s raining, and my wife is away for a month on business, leaving me with a 1st grader and a pre-schooler, both of them precocious, high energy and high maintenance. They have…
September 15, 2007
I co-authored this piece for a peer-reviewed journal (Ambulatory Child Health) with Donna Staton and Marcus Harding — two good friends and colleagues from the world of international relief work.
September 15, 2007
A well-intentioned relative recently forwarded me an email commenting on a school shooting in the United States. The sadly misguided piece of religious propaganda reproduced in the email has been circulated on the Internet since at least the summer of 1999, at times attributed to – a probably fictitious – retired Navy chaplain, Clarence Schultz.…
September 15, 2007
KUKES, Albania, April 1999 – More than 25,000 refugees stream across the Albanian border on a cold, rainy night in late April. Terrified families are crammed together on makeshift wagons pulled by decrepit old tractors, on the run from Kosovo. Old grandmothers moan in pain and hunger, while the little ones dangle their bare feet…
September 15, 2007
In April of 1999 I went to the Albanian border with Serbia to cover the refugee crisis unfolding as the Serbian forces expelled the ethnic Albanian population from the southern province of Kosovo. On assignment for several relief agencies, I combined my primary effort at photojournalism with some dispatches that were used by my clients…
September 14, 2007
In the spring of 1996 I went to Kosovo, the conflict-ridden southernmost province of Serbia & Montenegro, home to a large majority of ethnic Albanians and one of the flashpoints for the conflct that consumed the Balkans in the 90s. I wanted to cover an angle of the Balkan conflict that hadn't already been done…
April 5, 1996
I meet Vuc over lunch. He is picking his meal out of a dumpster on an alley in central Belgrade. Like half a million other Serbs in former Yugoslavia he has come here on the run from the ethnic cleansing that has taken place in Croatia and Bosnia during the past five years. They’re an…
