Wings of a Bird

Taking the Fight to the Taliban - N.Y. Times
... This valley in Zabul reminded one of them, Specialist Joshua Pete, of canyons where the U.S. Army once fought his Navajo ancestors. Pete thought he had had a calling, that his country needed him. But because of Afghanistan, he had lost both his scholarship to Dartmouth and his fiancée. He didn’t believe in “this” anymore. Half the Afghans, he said, didn’t even want “our billions to build this country.” He wanted to be home fighting drug gangs in downtown L.A. or helping impoverished people in Flagstaff.
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Later, when I met a Taliban commander in Pakistan, he told me that they knew the Americans listened to their radios, so that the five daily prayers were often used as code to signal anything from “I’ve run out of food” to “Ambush them.”
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Bringing vision to kids - and the system - Seattle P-I
For King County Councilwoman Kathy Lambert, what began with tiny, random observations of the students she taught years ago in the fifth, sixth and seventh grades may soon open a lot of eyes in the juvenile justice system.
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Before glasses, many of these students got in trouble. They thought they were slow, and so did their schoolmates. They were teased, bored and disruptive.
When they came back after winter break wearing glasses, Lambert recalls it was often a different story. Classmates would say, "Hey! He's not stupid anymore!"
And, since Lambert also wears glasses, she created a safe environment for the newly bespectacled. "If you tease them for wearing glasses, you're making fun of me, too," she cautioned. "And, remember, I'm the biggest one in class."
...
After the young offenders and custodial cases were given glasses and tracked for one year, almost none returned to detention. Recidivism dropped to nearly nothing. ...

Doctors struggle to save wounded Marine - A.P.
The team knew as Higgins arrived in the summer heat that the injuries were bad. He was an "urgent surgical," the most severe category.
His heart had stopped while he was being carried onto the helicopter. Medics were pumping his chest as the chopper landed.
The Marine would begin to suffer brain damage after just five minutes without oxygen. As the helicopter landed, medics rushed him by gurney into the hot and crowded surgical tent.
The first step took only 60 seconds - a "clamshell" procedure that entailed cutting the Marine's sternum and pulling open his rib cage.
Inside, the surgeons found terrible damage.
The bullet had pierced the right side of Higgins' back, searing diagonally across his body before leaving the front of his chest.
His diaphragm had been torn off. His liver was damaged, one lung had collapsed and his right chest cavity was full of blood.
Worst of all, the bullet had clipped the right atrium of his heart in two places, letting blood build up around the heart's muscles.
Doctors found a blue, bulging sack with a silent heart sitting inside. ...

Africa’s World of Forced Labor, in a 6-Year-Old’s Eyes - N.Y. Times
Just before 5 a.m., with the sky still dark over Lake Volta, Mark Kwadwo was rousted from his spot on the damp dirt floor. It was time for work.
Shivering in the predawn chill, he helped paddle a canoe a mile out from shore. For five more hours, as his coworkers yanked up a fishing net, inch by inch, Mark bailed water to keep the canoe from swamping.
He last ate the day before. His broken wooden paddle was so heavy he could barely lift it.
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... they are indentured servants, leased by their parents to Mr. Takyi for as little as $20 a year.
Until their servitude ends in three or four years, they are as trapped as the fish in their nets, forced to work up to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, in a trade that even adult fishermen here call punishing and, at times, dangerous.
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[They are] conscripts in a miniature labor camp, deprived of schooling, basic necessities and freedom — are part of a vast traffic in children that supports West and Central African fisheries, quarries, cocoa and rice plantations and street markets. The girls are domestic servants, bread bakers, prostitutes. The boys are field workers, cart pushers, scavengers in abandoned gem and gold mines.
By no means is the child trafficking trade uniquely African. Children are forced to race camels in the Middle East, weave carpets in India and fill brothels all over the developing world.
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In a region where nearly two-thirds of the population lives on less than $1 a day, the compensation for the temporary loss of a child keeps the rest of the family from going hungry. Some parents argue that their children are better off learning a trade than starving at home.
Indeed, the notion that children should be in the care of their parents is not a given in much of African society.
Parents frequently hand off children to even distant relatives if it appears they will have a chance at education and more opportunity.
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In 2003, Nigerian police rescued 194 malnourished children from stone quarries north of Lagos. At least 13 other children had died and been buried near the pits, the police said.
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A dozen boys, interviewed in their canoes or as they sewed up ratty nets ashore, spoke of backbreaking toil, 100-hour workweeks and frequent beatings. They bore a pervasive fear of diving into the lake’s murky waters to free a tangled net, and never resurfacing.
One 10-year-old said he was sometimes so exhausted that he fell asleep as he paddled.
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Kofi, 10, said his mother had told him his earnings would feed their family. But he suspects another motive. “They didn’t like me,” he said softly. ...

One man chooses to forgive the boy who killed his son - Christian Science Monitor
For a mere $5 - maybe less - in the lawless last days of 2004, a farmer named Gregoire Nsekerabandya could have arranged the killing of the boy who had just murdered his eldest son. After all, his son, Yves, had been shot for refusing a demand by his one-time friend, Eric, to shine the shoes of Eric's militia commander. Yves balked, and his last words were, "I don't have any water" to shine them with.
Mr. Nsekerabandya even heard the gunshot. "When a child comes to the earth, you are expecting so much from him," he says solemnly. "When all the expectations fall down in one second, it's very sorrowful."
Yet he didn't rush for revenge. Instead, he wrestled with guidance from the Bible: "It says you should respond with good deeds to bad deeds," he explains. "If I was not a good prayer, I might have taken revenge" on Eric or his family "to try to make them feel like I did."
In April 2005, he went to a reconciliation workshop. Organizers realized Eric and his mom were also participating. So, in a kind of ambush reconciliation, they united the group.
Apologies flowed. Eric sank to his knees and asked forgiveness while his mother, Jeanne Nahimana, apologized for him. Nsekerabandya accepted both apologies. "It wasn't your fault," he told Ms. Nahimana. Now she has great empathy for Nsekerabandya, whom she reverently calls "old man."
Since the apologies, the families have forged a bond. "We are now sharing water," he says, "and farming tools."
"If he needs anything," she adds, "he comes to our house."

Labels: forgiveness

Ugandans welcome 'terrorists' back - Christian Science Monitor
In the first of a four-part series, the Monitor examines how Africans are developing a unique form of reconciliation based on community and forgiveness.
Today a doe-eyed 20-something named Betty Atto, a former member of one of the world's most-brutal rebel armies, finally gets to take her first step toward redemption - toward the forgiveness she now seeks from the people she terrorized for so long.
It's a sun-drenched afternoon here in Africa's heartland, and Betty stands beneath a "blessing tree," fidgeting with the pleats in her fanciest skirt. She's waiting with 400 other former rebels for a ritual to begin that will welcome them back into their community.
"We did bad things," Betty says of her six years in the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a group infamous for chopping off lips and other body parts of civilians - and forcing children to become sex slaves and soldiers. ...

Labels: forgiveness

Killer's wife salutes Amish mercy - BBC News
The widow of a man who shot dead five Amish girls at a school in the US state of Pennsylvania has thanked the Amish community for their love and support.
Marie Roberts said she and her family were "overwhelmed by the forgiveness, grace and mercy" shown to them following the murders on 2 October.
Local man Charles Roberts killed himself after his shooting spree.
The Amish have said they forgive him and have helped set up a fund for the Roberts family at a local bank.
"Your love for our family has helped to provide the healing we so desperately need," Marie Roberts wrote in a letter addressed to Amish friends, neighbours and the local community.
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The mother and grandmother of Marian Fisher, one of the young victims, welcomed Mrs Roberts' aunt into their home the day after the shootings ...

Labels: compassionate people, forgiveness

Pakistani man's rush to marry ends in tragedy - Reuters
A Pakistani man has committed suicide outside his fiancee's home after he thought he accidentally killed her while trying to persuade her to get married early, police said on Saturday. The man, Ahmed Ashraf, was shooting a gun in the air outside his fiancee's home in the southern city of Karachi on Friday as part of his efforts to persuade her to get married two months early when a stray bullet accidently hit her, police said.
[She was not seriously hurt.] ...

The Angels of Ward 57 - book excerpt from Blood Brothers: Among the Soldiers of Ward 57 by Michael Weisskopf
... I had heard about Jim, who apparently delivered McDonald's shakes and burgers several times a week. He was one of the angels of Ward 57, a special breed of patrons who brightened up a day otherwise filled with surgery, needles, bad food, and pain.
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As I would quickly learn, Jim had a feel for combat amputees no doctor could match. He was one of us, having lost both legs to a land mine in Vietnam. He had lived through every stage of recovery and knew what we were enduring beyond the pain: identity crises, loss of self-confidence, and fears about supporting ourselves and attracting the opposite sex. Jim passed along biofeedback tips — he called the process "mind f---" —for combating the jumble of severed nerve endings called phantom pain. He coached families on the need to validate their loved ones' suffering, pulling them into the hallway for a piece of advice: never tell amputees they should feel lucky to be alive.
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New arrivals often did a double take when the mustachioed African American sashayed in for the first time. But they quickly learned the benefits of staying on Mr. Nick's good side. He'd boycott the room of anyone who gave him lip. For those who didn't, such as a badly injured 19-year-old, there was nothing he wouldn't do. The soldier was so depressed he could barely speak, until Mr. Nick persuaded him to confess that he was homesick for his parents, who couldn't afford the trip to Washington. Mr. Nick immediately left the room, returning a few minutes later with a form for government assistance. He helped the patient fill it out and walked it back to the right office. "Let Uncle Sam deal with it," Mr. Nick advised. The parents arrived a few days later.
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Dead Bachelors in Remote China Still Find Wives - N.Y. Times
... But he said the pool of available brides was limited, a scarcity that increased their value — an irony, given that some rural families, conscious of China’s one-child policy, abort female fetuses before birth or abandon newborn girls.
Qin Yuxing, 80, with his grandson, Qin Tianxiang, 7. Mr. Qin bought a wife for his younger son for $500, but after she gave birth she ran away. “For girls, it doesn’t matter about their minds, whether they are an idiot or not,” he said. “They are still wanted as brides.” Dead or alive, he added, as he peered at the river.
“There are girls who have drowned in the river down there,” he said. “When their bodies have washed up, their families could get a couple of thousand yuan for them.”
Villagers and Mr. Yang, the funeral director, said a family searching for a female corpse typically must pay more than 10,000 yuan, or about $1,200, almost four years of income for an average farmer. Families of the bride regard the money as the dowry they would have received had death not intervened.
The existence of such a market for brides has led to scattered reports of grave robbing. This year, a man in Shaanxi Province captured two men trying to dig up the body of his wife, according to a local news account. In February, a woman from Yangquan tried to buy the remains of a dead 15-year-old girl, abandoned at a hospital in another city, to satisfy her unmarried deceased brother. She said the brother’s ghost was invading her dreams and demanding a wife, according to a news account.
“China is a paternal clan culture,” said Professor Guo, who did postdoctoral work in anthropology at Harvard. “A woman does not belong to her parents. She must marry and have children of her own before she has a place among her husband’s lineage. A woman who dies unmarried has no place in this world.”...families too poor to afford a minghun bride also follow a similar custom in some villages: They make a figure of straw and bury it beside a dead son as the spouse he never had. ...

Donations re-energize vandalized animal rescue in North Seattle - Seattle Times
Missy Young was on the verge of giving up animal-rescue work after vandals broke into her North Seattle shop, opened cages, stomped small rodents to death and stole some high-priced reptiles.
"Our job is really difficult to do on a day-to-day basis already," Young said. "And when we walked into this massacre, it was like the straw that broke the camel's back. I wanted to give up. I thought, 'this is too much.' "
But after news of the break-in at Animal Talk Rescue got out, the phone started ringing and people began dropping by. It was a trickle at first, but it quickly became an avalanche of assistance and support in the form of money, volunteer work and basic supplies.
One man walked into the shelter and wrote out a check for $5,000, Young said. He didn't wait around to be thanked. Another person drove up from Tacoma with the contents of his children's piggy bank. Others tucked $20 bills into the shop's door jambs. Responding to Young's plea for paper towels and bleach, donors have supplied Animal Talk Rescue with enough to last a year, she said. Young estimates the donations thus far total a few thousand dollars, in addition to the $5,000 check.
So much money has come in that Young will be able to take in about 200 cats from an Everett animal shelter that was planning to put them to death.
...

Football helps broken community to mend after teen's death - Seattle Times
... Time for Timothy Miller to eulogize his 16-year-old son. Michael Miller lies below the podium in a wooden casket. And just beyond the casket sit five brothers — including one stepbrother charged with first-degree manslaughter in Mikey's death.
"I have broken many bones," Miller says, his voice cracking and wavering. "I have passed hundreds of kidney stones. I have had a heart attack, and I have had a stroke. And you know what?
"I'd rather endure all those right now and be set on fire than deal with what I'm dealing with now. Such is the love that I have for my son."
A box of tissues floats through the church until both empty nearly three hours after the service started.
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[The football coaches] would work between 70 and 90 hours a week in season, teaching and coaching, with minimal compensation. They'd be coaching a team with players of at least 10 different ethnicities, at a school where 38 languages are spoken. Most of their kids are from low-income, single-parent families.
"They have every reason in the world to be down on themselves," says Lele Teo, an assistant coach, "to be pissed off at the world. But they handle things really well because they know they have a family here that will take care of them."
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Friendly. That was Mikey, too. The kind of kid who bagged groceries at the local Albertsons, bugging people with one item to insist on carryout just so he could talk with them en route to their car.
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"I've lived a long life, and I don't know a fraction of the people Mikey knew." [said his father]
Miller stands at the center of a complicated tragedy. An inspiration, assistant coach Teo says. The kind of father who went to two-a-day practices this summer so he could know the people his kids were hanging out with.
Now one son is dead. Another is charged as an adult with first-degree manslaughter, for recklessness, according to police. And four other sons, all so young, are trying to make sense of it.
Speaking about Jordan, the stepbrother charged in Mikey's death, Miller chokes up again. He doesn't want Jordan to go to jail.
"He revered Mikey and loved him," Miller says. "It was one child using bad judgment. And for this to happen, it's a bad nightmare from which he cannot wake up."
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Thief took more than just a fancy bicycle - Seattle P-I
For his tireless work with Seattle's at-risk kids, Johnny Ohta received a very special gift. A thief stole it, and what happened next says a lot about the community -- and more about Johnny.
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... while the thief took the bike he possessed for less than a day, it wasn't possible to steal the respect so many people have for him. ...
On the day of Ohta's anguish, a 23-year-old heroin addict, who Ohta had long worked with, had a big breakthrough. He helped get the woman into rehab.
Lost a bike. Saved a life.
The latter, Ohta knows, matters most.

34 days behind bars: Journalist recounts imprisonment, release in Darfur - Seattle Times
...Luckily, his demoralized, war-weary men disregarded those orders [to kill them]. Instead, they deserted by twos and threes every night. Others got drunk on date wine gulped from old automotive antifreeze jugs. Still others went on impromptu safaris with my stolen vehicle, taking potshots out the windows at wild cranes and storks. (They missed.) After holding us in lice-infested huts for three days, Garsil traded us to the Sudanese army for a large box of new uniforms.
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Yet moderates within the regime must have ultimately prevailed in our case. For on Aug. 19, we three scruffy "spies" were transferred to a civilian jail. We still faced 20 years in prison. But we now enjoyed access to Sudanese attorneys. Better yet, Moussa, Anu and I were reunited, albeit sometimes with 16 other men — pickpockets, con men, gun runners — in a 15-by-15-foot cell. I traded my wristwatch for a cellphone call to my wife. Our police guards acted like human beings. ...

One Man Leads Often Dangerous Quest to Quell Violence in Yemen - N.Y. Times
... Mr. Marwani traces his determination to end the violence to a severe injury he suffered at age 12, when he and his friends were playing with a grenade that exploded. Although the wounds have healed, he says, he can never forget the damage that the continuous conflict had done to Yemen’s society and culture. ...
In 1996, with the civil war finally over, he formed a council to try to settle tribal disputes in his region. But when he tried to settle a feud in another province, they refused his services and chased him out of town, he said.
He said he realized he had to broaden his effort, to reach out to other tribes ...
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Through his organization, Dar Al Salam, or the House of Peace, which he formed in 1997 to spread the message of tolerance, he says he has negotiated cease-fire deals between warring tribes and even persuaded some to disarm.
This year he persuaded the government to declare election day a weapons-free day. Then he helped cajole Yemen’s combative tribes to sign a contract agreeing to leave their weapons at home, and he enlisted businessmen to plaster his trademark symbol, a pistol crossed out with a thick red line, on billboards, in newspapers, and on bottles of water and laundry detergent, among other items.
Eight people were killed on election night, The Associated Press reported, but that was down from the 67 killed and more than 100 wounded during local council elections in 2001. ...

Dozens of Amish mourn schoolhouse killer - A.P.
Dozens of Amish neighbors came out Saturday to mourn the quiet milkman who killed five of their young girls and wounded five more in a brief, unfathomable rampage.
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'It's the love, the forgiveness, the heartfelt forgiveness they have toward the family. I broke down and cried seeing it displayed," said [a fire department chaplain from Colorado who attended the service] ...

Use their personal horrors as an excuse to abuse others? Not these people - Seattle P-I
... It made me think of, and be thankful for, all the people I've interviewed or read about who've endured their own horrors but still gone on to do worlds of good without ever blaming or suing anyone.
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I thought about KOMO weekend anchor Molly Shen who brutally lost her innocence to rape by an invading stranger in the place she should have been safest -- her childhood bedroom. But she refuses to live in shadows, offering strength and hope to other survivors of sexual attack.
And former Seattle weathercaster Shelly Monahan, who spoke bravely on behalf of victims after reporting being assaulted by the infamous South Hill rapist, Kevin Coe.
I remembered young Remi Street, the adopted Ecuadorian son of former Seattle City Councilman Jim Street and his wife, Ann. Rather than turn angry and destructive after his beloved older brother, Edwin, was struck and killed by a truck, Remi turned his energies to saving the rain forest by buying parcels of land with local "trash-a-thon" fundraisers.
And Kristin Pang, who grew up to be an idealistic and caring activist rather than wallow in the fact that, at age 10, her father, Martin, became the region's most reviled killer arsonist. It was Martin who torched his parents' Mary Pang Food Products warehouse for the insurance money, killing four Seattle firefighters in the process.
But it was Kristin who, at 19, organized a "Whiskers on Wheels" bus to rescue pet victims of Hurricane Katrina. ...

Kamiak's Pyles makes inspirational return - Seattle P-I
Pyles had always been a daredevil ... He has no memory of the ride [on his skateboard, down the city's biggest hill]. Mukilteo police estimated he was going about 50 mph when he lost control and flew face first into a parked SUV.
Pyles doesn't remember the couple who live on the corner -- a couple who have been hard sleepers all their life, but happened to wake and find Pyles pinned between the sidewalk and the vehicle, Ashby said. If they had not been stirred by the crash, doctors said, Pyles would have died.
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Virtually every bone in Joe Pyles' face was broken. His liver was punctured, and his spleen was ruptured. His right leg was fractured and would eventually be amputated at the hip. Nerves to his eyes had been severed, leaving him blind.
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A few days later, Mitch Brooks -- one of many friends who never let Pyles be alone during his hospital stays -- told his teammate that he loved him.
Unable to talk, Pyles raised his pinky and index finger, and moved his thumb, signing "I love you."
"Joe," Brooks said, "give me a thumbs up if you're going to be all right."
Piles moved his left hand and put up his thumb. ...

City hopes to dissuade suicidal jumpers - Seattle P-I
Crisis information signs, call boxes will be installed along Aurora Bridge
About four times a year, they see it when they pull in to work -- a portion of the parking lot closed, an area yellow-taped. Emergency trucks idle, lights flashing. Sometimes, a tarp covers a small mound. The paramedics' lack of haste says volumes.
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For Person and other people who live and work under the Aurora and the Interstate 5 Ship Canal bridges, theirs is a deeply personal and instantaneously detached view of suicide. By virtue of geography, they bear witness to the landing zone of strangers who jump.
This year, seven people have stepped off the Aurora Bridge and into memory. The most recent: A 20-year-old man wearing a gray sweat shirt, maroon sweat pants and black shoes climbed one way over the 4-foot-high rail in September. His body went unidentified for more than a week, prompting the King County Medical Examiner's Office to make a rare public plea for information. He left no note.
Some bodies hit the water. Many don't, landing in the Adobe parking lot or in neighborhoods. A crew team witnessed a jump just 50 feet away. A falling body struck an SUV earlier this year while the driver was inside, heading home from work. The body struck the passenger side, above the door. The driver wasn't hurt.
"But someone might be," Person said. "If (the body) had hit the roof of his car, he might not be walking around today."
Parking lots have been painted to remove stains and memorials. In the Adobe lot, workers partially blacked out a memorial to a 15-year girl who jumped in May. It still faintly reads: "We (heart) U."
One man moved his small business away from inside a houseboat under the bridge after seeing the aftermath of one jumper too many.
"You don't want to deal with it anymore," said the man, who like some neighborhood residents feels conflicted between sympathy and anger and asked to not be identified. "We were concerned -- for our safety, too. I don't want to sound unsympathetic, but it gets to you."
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[Assistant Police Chief Nicholas] Metz, a former hostage negotiator who has talked two jumpers down from the Space Needle, wondered if the issue moved to the forefront because there are more witnesses now than ever before.
Added one longtime under-Aurora dweller: "They are not lethal before they jump. Then they are, after, to themselves and to us. I'm not sure they realize that."
...
She told the story of a co-worker who saw something one morning in the parking lot. He moved toward it, thinking first it was junk, then a pile of carpet, then when he got closer, a dog.
Only when he walked right up did he see a face.

Labels: suicide

Global Sludge Ends in Tragedy for Ivory Coast - N.Y. Times
... Over the next few days, the skin of his 6-month-old son, Salam, bloomed with blisters, which burst into weeping sores all over his body. The whole family suffered headaches, nosebleeds and stomach aches.
How that slick, a highly toxic cocktail of petrochemical waste and caustic soda, ended up in Mr. Oudrawogol’s backyard in a suburb north of Abidjan is a dark tale of globalization.
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So far eight people have died, dozens have been hospitalized and 85,000 have sought medical attention, paralyzing the fragile health care system in a country divided and impoverished by civil war, and the crisis has forced a government shakeup.
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The analysis showed extremely high levels of caustic soda; mercaptans, a kind of sulfur compound; and hydrogen sulfide, he said. The last, he said, is a volatile compound that “smells of rotten eggs, but at high concentrations you can no longer smell it because it paralyzes your nervous system.”
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Several tankerloads went to the Abidjan landfill, in a community called Akouedo. Residents there are accustomed to foul odors, but knew something was particularly bad about the new material. They chased and surrounded one of the tanker trucks, forcing the driver to flee on foot, witnesses said. In other places, some trucks were simply abandoned by drivers fearful of being attacked as word of the illegal dumping crept out and public anger rose.
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Last week Jean-Baptiste Giassey, a 13-year-old schoolboy, rooted through garbage piled at Akouedo ... Stinking mud oozed from the trash under his flimsy sandals, coating his feet and legs. He was looking for scraps of aluminum, which he would sell to traders for less than 25 cents a pound. He said he had been spending five or six hours a day at the dump, trying to earn enough money for new clothes. ...

Save My Wife - N.Y. Times
YOKADOUMA, Cameroon: Prudence, 24, was from a small village and already had three small children. As she was in labor to deliver her fourth, an untrained midwife didn’t realize she had a cervical blockage and sat on Prudence’s stomach to force the baby out — but instead her uterus ruptured and the fetus died.
Prudence’s family carried her to the hospital on a motorcycle, but once she was there the doctor, Pascal Pipi, demanded $100 for a Caesarian to remove the fetus. The fetus was decomposing inside her, and an infection was raging in her abdomen — but her family had total savings of only $20, so she lay down in the maternity ward and began to die.
I arrived the next day, interviewed Dr. Pipi about maternal mortality — and found Prudence fading away in the next room. Dr. Pipi said she needed a blood transfusion before the operation could begin, so a Times colleague, Naka Nathaniel, and I donated blood (yes, the needles were sterile) and cash.
The transfusion helped Prudence, and she grew strong enough to reach out her hand and respond to people around her. Dr. Pipi said the operation would begin promptly, and Prudence’s family was ecstatic. But as we waited in the hospital lobby, Dr. Pipi sneaked out the back door of the hospital and went home for the night.
It wasn’t just the doctor who failed Prudence, but the entire system. He did operate the next morning, but by then the infection had spread further — and the hospital had no powerful antibiotics. Prudence’s breathing grew strained, as her stomach ballooned with the infection and the bag of urine from her catheter overflowed. The nurses couldn’t be bothered with a poor villager like her.
That night she began vomiting and spitting blood. She slipped into a coma, and a towel beside her head grew soggy with blood and vomit. On Tuesday afternoon, she finally passed away. ...

Shooter 'angry at life, God' - Seattle P-I
A milk-truck driver carrying three guns and a childhood grudge entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse Monday, sent the boys and adults outside, barricaded the doors with two-by-fours, and then opened fire on a dozen girls, killing three people before committing suicide.
At least seven other victims were critically wounded, authorities said.
Most of the victims had been shot execution-style at point-blank range after being lined up along the chalkboard, their feet bound with wire and plastic ties, authorities said. Two young students were killed, along with a female teacher's aide who was slightly older than the students, state police Commissioner Jeffrey Miller said.
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From the suicide notes and telephone calls, it was clear Roberts was "angry at life, he was angry at God," Miller said. ...
Miller said investigators were looking into the possibility that the attack might have been related to the death of one of Roberts' own children. According to an obituary, Roberts and his wife, Marie, lost a daughter shortly after she was born in 1997. ...

Labels: anger

Colliding With Death at 37,000 Feet, and Living - N.Y. Times
Whatever the cause, it had become clear that we had been involved in an actual midair crash that none of us should have survived.
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And so began the most harrowing 30 minutes of my life. I would be told time and again in the next few days that nobody ever survives a midair collision. I was lucky to be alive — and only later would I learn that the 155 people aboard the Boeing 737 on a domestic flight that seems to have clipped us were not.
Investigators are still trying to sort out what happened, and how — our smaller jet managed to stay aloft while a 737 that is longer, wider and more than three times as heavy, fell from the sky nose first.
But at 3:59 last Friday afternoon, all I could see, all I knew, was that part of the wing was gone. And it was clear that the situation was worsening in a hurry. The leading edge of the wing was losing rivets, and starting to peel back.
Amazingly, no one panicked. The pilots calmly starting scanning their controls and maps for signs of a nearby airport, or, out their window, a place to come down.
But as the minutes passed, the plane kept losing speed. By now we all knew how bad this was. I wondered how badly ditching — an optimistic term for crashing — was going to hurt. ...

Postpartum depression - by Susan Paynter, P-I columnist
... Soon after she gave birth, Lane's moods were erratic and frightening. She felt pulled down by gravity. Her head burst with pictures of horrible things happening to her child.
"I felt disconnected from her. I resented her," she said. "I didn't want to be around my own baby, and it scared me so much I held her all the time, thinking, 'What kind of a person would feel this way?' It's such a natural thing to be a mom; everybody does it."
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Then her son was born, and she started having visions of throwing him off the back deck into a nearby Issaquah creek. "We'd be out there just watching the birds, and I'd see this image. I wasn't even angry at the time. He wasn't crying. I didn't feel frustrated."
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It matters to the rest of us if a new mom in the grip of postpartum depression has no insurance. Or if her insurance won't cover the cost of anti-depressants. Or if her coverage won't pay for the kind of drug that already is helping her until five other (less expensive) drugs have failed. ...

City hopes to dissuade suicidal jumpers - Seattle Times
... This year, seven people have stepped off the Aurora Bridge and into memory. The most recent: A 20-year-old man wearing a gray sweat shirt, maroon sweat pants and black shoes climbed one way over the 4-foot-high rail in September. His body went unidentified for more than a week ...
Some bodies hit the water. Many don't, landing in the Adobe parking lot or in neighborhoods. A crew team witnessed a jump just 50 feet away. A falling body struck an SUV earlier this year while the driver was inside, heading home from work. The body struck the passenger side, above the door. The driver wasn't hurt. ...

small steps: inspirations from a cancer survivor - by David Flood
In the summer of 2001, I began to notice a slight back pain. I saw a chiropractor on and off who did gentle manipulations with little success. Eventually I visited a primary care doctor who told me to take Advil and do a series of exercises every day. But the back pain persisted.

Then, in January of 2002, I tripped on a gym bag on the floor of my house and couldn’t get myself back up. My wife Masako called 9-1-1 and several firemen lifted me up and dragged me to bed. Something was indeed wrong.

The next day, Masako got me to see a back specialist. After X-rays, a bone scan and a urine test, I got the call. An oncologist informed me over the phone I was in an advanced stage of a disease called “Multiple Myeloma” and, according to statistics, I had a medium chance of survival of five years. I was 40 years old at the time with a three-year-old daughter. The doctor went on to tell me the disease had invaded my skull, rib cage and spine. One tumor had punctured a hole through a lumbar vertebrae (L-3), threatening to collapse it. Later another doctor would cut my survival time in half, insisting on showing me “charts” that plotted the statistical arc of my demise. I refused to look.

After the diagnosis, I was given both chemotherapy and radiation to kill as many Myeloma cells as possible. Radiation was targeted at my spine to clear up the tumor. To make sure my spine didn’t collapse in the process, I was immediately fitted for a prosthetic shell from my neck to my groin. The shell was to remain on, with the exception of showers, for three months. ...