Stories by Jessica Partnow
Living in Limbo
In our final segment, producer Jessica Partnow follows the story of one family living in immigration limbo in Auburn, Washington.
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Categories: Pacific Northwest, USA, Listen, Labor and Immigration
Washington on the Front Lines
This story takes us to Washington's border with Canada, where the Border Patrol arrests hundreds of people each year. Producer Jessica Partnow heads out on a ride along with Border Patrol and spends the night watching for smugglers.
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Categories: Pacific Northwest, USA, Listen, Labor and Immigration
Parrot Fortune Teller
People come to fortunetellers for answers and entertainment, but not all fortunetellers use a crystal ball. In Karachi, Pakistan, one street vendor tells fortunes with the help of a squawking parrot. Jessica Partnow had her fortune told by the bird and sent us this report.
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Between Worlds/Behind Bars Immigration, Detention and Deportation in the Northwest
From the dark days of the Chinese Exclusion Act to post–911 crackdowns on undocumented immigrants, immigration detention has a controversial history in both our nation and in the Puget Sound region. Between World/Behind Bars is a four-part radio series exploring immigration detention from its roots in the 1930s at “Seattle's Ellis Island" in the International District to today's privately-run Northwest Detention Center on the Tacoma Tideflats. Listen to the series on kuow.org.
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Categories: USA, Watch, Listen, Labor and Immigration
Up All Night Telemarketing in Lahore, Pakistan
Like India, Pakistan has its share of call centers, offering everything from customer service and tech support to health insurance and home security systems. Jessica Partnow takes us through a night in the life of Ali Jaffri, a professional telemarketer in Lahore.
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Categories: Pakistan, Listen, Labor and Immigration, Poverty and Development
The Ghost Schools of Pakistan Frightening realities from inside an education system on the brink.
September 20, 2009: Story updated with radio feature and photo slideshow. Despite ankle deep garbage, charcoal-scribbled graffiti of machine guns and the scorched remains of squatters' fires, the dusty green chalkboard still reads "December 2, 2006," the last day that classes were held in the primary school wing of Mirza Adam Khan, a government-run compound of schools in the poor and violence plagued Karachi neighborhood of Lyari.
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Categories: Pakistan, Watch, Read, Listen, Education, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
Big, bright and, to many, beautiful The truck artists of Karachi apply a splash of color to an otherwise bleak canvas.
KARACHI, Pakistan – At first glance, this is not a colorful city. An aerial view of Karachi reveals a sprawl of squat markets and utilitarian high-rises set among sparse vegetation and dull industrial public art, a landscape of stucco corroded by salty sea air and looming cement structures coated in urban grime.
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Categories: Pakistan, Watch, Read, Listen, Labor and Immigration, Poverty and Development
Hope for Pakistan's child workers A Karachi-based group bent on eradicating child labor is offering school lessons outside working hours.
KARACHI, Pakistan – Sher Shah is a hardworking neighborhood — a confusing knot of cramped lanes offering up a riot of rattling power looms, puttering motors and booming furnaces. This rough suburb, with its garment factories, machine shops and scrap-metal smelters far from the imposing cement skyscrapers of the city center, forms the industrial gut of Karachi.
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Categories: Pakistan, Read, Listen, Education, Human Rights, Poverty and Development
Bad times return to Karachi Renewed violence in this Pakistani port city is threatening its status as a safe haven from troubles farther north.
Despite Karachi’s decades-old reputation as Pakistan’s most violent city, over the last year this urban economic hub has remained a haven from the bombings and violence reverberating through the rest of the country. But a flaring of ethnic clashes in recent weeks, exacerbated by the arrival of thousands of refugees from the violence in northern Pakistan, has many worried that instability has returned to the streets of this massive port city on the shores of the Arabian Sea.
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Categories: Pakistan, Read, Listen, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
Behind the Scenes Update from Karachi Pakistan Video blog from the CLP's multimedia team
The CLP team takes a break to reflect on the first half of the Pakistan: Hearts and Minds reporting project.
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Categories: Pakistan, Watch, Blogs, The Media, Politics and Conflict
Young immigrant among thousands of federal detainees in Tacoma
NORTHWEST DETENTION CENTER, Tacoma -- Arms poking stiffly from an oversized blue jumpsuit, Vitaliy Budimir recounted his crimes in a hesitant voice that barely revealed his Russian origins.
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Categories: Pacific Northwest, USA, Watch, Read, Listen, Human Rights, Labor and Immigration
Kenyan Elephants Fenced Out Wildlife managers resort to an electric fence to stop elephants from raiding crops. At least it stops them from being shot.
An 83km-long electrified fence has been completed to keep elephants separate from humans in central Kenya. The controversial solution to the age-old problem of human elephant conflict was initiated and managed by the Laikipia Wildlife Forum and the Kenya Wildlife Service after other methods of deterring the species from cropraiding, such as chilli fences and noise guns, had failed to resolve the issue satisfactorily.
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Categories: Kenya, Read, Listen, The Environment, Global Health, Politics and Conflict
Troubled Waters The Coming Calamity on Lake Victoria
The sky is just beginning to lighten over Lake Victoria and the hacking of machetes echoes along the Kenyan coastline. Fishermen, stripped to their underwear in the already rising heat, are chasing silvery baby fish through the thick grass that chokes the lake shores, in defiance of laws against fishing in these delicate breeding grounds.
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Categories: Kenya, Watch, Read, Listen, The Environment, Poverty and Development, Global Health, Politics and Conflict
Kenyans Tap Sun to Make Dirty Water Sparkle
NAIROBI, Kenya--The long rainy season in Kenya has begun and sudden storms regularly burst over Nairobi. Many welcome the downpours, which signal the end of another dry summer and wash the steamy crowded capital clean each morning. In Kibera, a massive slum of rusty tin roofs and makeshift homes spreading out from the southwest of the city, the rain is turning the twisting dirt roads and alleyways to thick red mud.
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Categories: Kenya, Watch, Read, Poverty and Development, Global Health
Haramaya Voices from a Vanished Lake
ADDIS ABABA—Chala Ahmed, 26, hit the jackpot eight years ago when he won the US visa lottery in the bustling eastern Ethiopian town of Haramaya. His first thought was that he would build his mother a big beautiful house. His next thought was that the new home, painted a rosy pink behind a high white gate, should be erected on the shore of Lake Haramaya, the huge stretch of placid water that gave his hometown its name.
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Categories: Ethiopia, Watch, Read, Listen, The Environment, Poverty and Development, Global Health
A Treacherous Trek to the Crater's Edge
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia – "Just breathe," I comforted myself as I shuffled slowly through the dusty gravel. "One breath with each step," I repeated raggedly as fifty pounds of brackish water sloshed rhythmically against the sides of the muddy yellow jerry can strapped to my back.
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Categories: Ethiopia, Watch, Read, Listen, The Environment, Poverty and Development, Global Health
Quenching the thirst Seattle brings the most precious liquid abroad
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia – It's early morning and a dozen westerners, mostly Seattleites, were getting ready to leave the capital for a three-day visit to water development projects in Oromia, one of this country's largest, rural states. As they set out – a caravan of five land rovers moving through the dense traffic – many of them were still quietly coming to terms with the parting words of Adane Kassa, Executive Director of Water Action, the Ethiopian NGO that coordinates the projects they'll be visiting.
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Categories: Ethiopia, Watch, Read, The Environment, Poverty and Development, Global Health
Heading South Part 5: A Dawn with Dion
Part 5 of the CLP's multimedia blog series "Heading South": an audio blog by Jessica Partnow on the challenges of reporting on the impoverished southern Ethiopian community of Dillo. Especially while Celine Dion is blasting in the background.
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Categories: Ethiopia, Listen, Blogs, The Environment
Ethiopian Epiphany: Timkat in Addis Ababa
According to Ethiopia's unique calendar, the year 2000 started last September. Christmas was two weeks ago, on January 7th, and this weekend, at the end of the twelve days of Christmas, the country's 33 million Ethiopian Orthodox Christians celebrated Timkat, or Epiphany, a commemoration of the baptism of Christ. CLP Audio Producer Jessica Partnow brings us this report from the nation's capitol, Addis Ababa.
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Life on the Duwamish: Rediscovering Seattle's Dirty South
In the past 150 years, the Duwamish estuary has been home to a tranquil Native American community, Seattle's first white settlers, gold miners enjoying 24–hour saloons, one of the country's busiest ports and cutting edge companies like Starbucks, Boeing and Amazon.com. Life on the Duwamish explores the history, culture, and neighborhoods around the Duwamish waterway, a historical center of industry in Seattle, Superfund Cleanup site, and a focal point of communities in South Park and Georgetown.
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Categories: Pacific Northwest, USA, Watch, Listen, The Environment
Seattle Anti War Protest
War resisters, Vietnam vets, and teenage punks all joined together to protest the Iraq War and shut down a military recruiting center in Seattle's Central District. This audio slideshow explores anti-war protest tactics and their impact on the US's presence in Iraq.
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Categories: USA, Watch, Politics and Conflict
Playing the Aid Game U.S. Funding Cuts Stifle Development in Palestine
RAMALLAH, West Bank - The administrative headquarters of Ruwwad Youth Empowerment Project, housed in a newly constructed office tower on the outskirts of Ramallah, sparkle with disuse in the fluorescent overhead light. A skeleton crew of employees looking for ways to busy themselves are scattered around the offices, separated by a grid of vacant cubicles that serve as a reminder of what this project was meant to be.
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Categories: Israel, Palestinian Territories, Watch, Read, Listen, Education, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
Requiem for a Dual Hegemony
The collapse of the Soviet Union is my earliest memory of politics. The sense of relief and of victory that I felt around me was overwhelming, and I became fascinated with the idea that events on the other side of the world could mean so much in my own home. Televised images of East Germans taking sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall or Boris Yeltsin speaking from atop a tank in Red Square became the very definition of freedom in my ten year old mind, and even as I grew older and learned of the theories behind communism and the Cold War missteps of the CIA, this picture of humanity breaking free of oppression by sheer will stuck with me.
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Categories: Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Watch, Listen, Blogs, Human Rights, Politics and Conflict
Backpacks not Bombs International aid brings more than relief to earthquake victims, humanitarian challenge remains
Ayubia, PAKISTAN—Ten year old Fazia Reza was in English class when she felt the ground starting to move. She watched in terror as the walls of the school began to tremble and crack, obeying her teacher’s shouts to run outside and start praying just in time to see the roof collapse and the walls cave in. Her father, one of 40 people injured in this tiny village of just 145 families, lost his leg, and two others died in the October 8, 2005 earthquake. Almost all of the town’s buildings were destroyed.
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Categories: Pakistan, Read, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
Squatters Stand Up Cambodian Slum Women Fight for their Rights in Phnom Penh
Phnom Penh, CAMBODIA – At first glance, Tumlop 2 village looks like any third world city slum: crowded huts with corrugated tin roofs are scattered along dusty dirt paths, and barefoot children mingle with freely wandering chickens and dogs. Look closer and you’ll find that this community also houses a tidy health center where local women diagnose and treat common ailments. Look even closer and you’ll see that gender relations in this poor and traditional society may be more evolved than in the more wealthy households of the teeming and ever-expanding city that surrounds them.
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Categories: Cambodia, Read, Poverty and Development, Global Health
Sex and the City of Joy White House Morality Threatens Kolkata's Sex Workers
Kolkata, INDIA – The smells of jasmine perfume, fried food, bidi smoke and liquored breath mingle in the thick humid air. Watery pink and white neon lights from Hotel Welcome, Dream House and Love Lotus shine in the eyes of women lined up in turquoise saris or red mini skirts and the customers jostling to admire them. Backlit in shadowy doorways, young girls beckon into the night with childish voices that betray their pre-pubescence, despite alluring gestures and deep purple lipstick.
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Categories: India, Watch, Read, Listen, Human Rights, Gender, Global Health
A Landmine Survivor's Story
When Aki Ra met Chet, he was living on the streets of Phnom Penh, shining shoes to earn money and sniffing glue because a friend had told him it would make him feel full. He’d lost his left leg in a land mine accident three years earlier and hadn’t yet gotten the prosthesis he now happily shows off.
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Categories: Cambodia, Read, Listen, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
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