Stories by Sarah Stuteville
Seattle's Ellis Island
An imposing brick building on Airport Way at the edge of the International District housed detained immigrants from 1931 to 1999. It was once known as Seattle's Ellis Island. Producer Sarah Stuteville takes us to this now-empty building and uncovers dark memories of life within its walls.
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Categories: Pacific Northwest, Listen, Labor and Immigration
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
Journalism and Democracy Sarah Stuteville on KUOW's Weekday
The face of journalism is changing. Traditional newspapers are declining. Television networks are becoming more streamlined and editorial in their content. What kind of journalism does a democracy need in order to thrive? How do you define good journalism? CLP reporter Sarah Stuteville joined a panel on KUOW's Weekday discussing these issues and more.
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Categories: Listen, CLP Updates, The Media
Pakistani immigrants in Seattle confront a huge challenge at home As highly skilled people pour out of the troubled country, the local Pakistani community is working to stop the brain drain and help educate those back home.
As the first notes of the Quran, sung by a diminutive imam in an embroidered prayer cap, fill the Westin Bellevue's ornate Grand Ballroom, a sea of hands moves to cover heads.
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Categories: Pakistan, USA, Read, Education, Labor and Immigration, Poverty and Development
Educating Humiera Pakistanis in Seattle give a Pakistan community the gift of girls' school
BUGNA, Pakistan — Thirteen-year-old Humiera Kausar's oversized sneakers hurry over piles of granite boulders and through scrubby pines bristling with last night's rain. A headscarf and pink shawl are wound tightly around her small frame to protect against the thick mist that has settled over her high mountain village.
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Categories: Pakistan, Read, Listen, Education, Gender, 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
Karachi Nights
No matter how frenzied the exhaust-coated sun-saturated day is in Karachi—this city really lives at night.
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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
Caught in Pakistan's crossfire Taliban militants, Pakistani military units, and US drone attacks spark an uneasy exodus.
The day is closing in Jellozai and children run along the narrow dusty rows of UNICEF-stamped tents, trying to squeeze a little more play time out of the dying evening. Some 43,000 people live in this refugee camp just outside of Peshawar, after fleeing violence in the tribal regions not far from here.
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Categories: Pakistan, Read, Human Rights, Labor and Immigration, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
Letting the Terrorists Win
Pale columns of smoke are rising from a sea of blue tents stretching into the distance of the flat khaki plain that is Jellozai, a refugee camp eight miles outside of Peshawar, home to an estimated 43,000 people fleeing violence in the tribal regions not far from here.
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Categories: Pakistan, Blogs, The Media, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
Hanging with the Ladies
In the gray light of my first morning in Pakistan, the thick salty smell of sulfur introducing me to the seaside city of Karachi, the streets were full of men. With few exceptions it was men congregating in front of the still dark airport, men piled onto buses carnival-decorated with Technicolor and chrome, and men weaving through the thickening traffic on motorbikes and rickshaws.
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Categories: Pakistan, Read, Blogs, Education, Human Rights, Gender, Politics and Conflict
Fear Factor: Pakistan
I’ve become terrified of my e-mail. I’ve always been a little skittish of the inbox, never knowing what that first login might bring to my day – an outraged critique of a recent article, a Facebook request from a long-lost ex-boyfriend – but in the weeks leading up to our departure, my crowded inbox has set my stomach lurching in newly anxious ways as I sift through daily accounts of the chaos that has touched down in Pakistan.
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Categories: Pacific Northwest, Pakistan, USA, Read, Blogs, Education, 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
The Most Dangerous Men in Kenya
They spoke of poverty and of being expected to feed and take care of themselves by their early teens. Many described turning to theft almost immediately, well aware that even the lowest paying factories of Kisumu wouldn't hire them--they came from the wrong neighborhood, none of them had finished school and anyway around here any available job, no matter how menial, was filled before the help wanted sign could even go up.
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Categories: Kenya, Read, Blogs, Education, Poverty and Development
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
Power Politics Trump Democracy in US-backed Ethiopia
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia—Dawn in the Merkato breaks over a tangle of streets jammed with shouting hawkers and towering pyramids of ripe produce from Ethiopia’s fertile countryside. Today it is a popular destination for sunburnt foreign tourists, expensive cameras poised to capture lively scenes from one of Africa’s largest open-air markets.
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Categories: Ethiopia, Read, The Media, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
Being Typical
Recently a short piece I wrote about the personal conflict I felt when comparing my water-wasteful lifestyle in the United States with the stories I'd reported of water shortages in rural Ethiopia--specifically the story of one father that had lost four children to waterborne diseases--was classified by one reader as just another "guilt trip."
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Categories: Kenya, Read, Blogs, The Environment, 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 4: A Night Under the Stars
The word travel traces back to the Middle-English word travailen, meaning to journey, labor, strive and most importantly, to torment. Much of traveling does feel a little like torment and as the strange bug bites, desperate trips to the bathroom and embarrassing cultural misunderstandings mount (who knew that blowing raspberries was one of the rudest things you can do in traditional Ethiopian culture?) I often wonder how I’ve found myself so far away from home.
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Categories: Ethiopia, Blogs, The Environment
An American's Water Shortage
Addis Ababa, ETHIOPIA —The water in our new house in Addis has been turned off for days and my back is so sore I’ve been squirming around on our dirty couches all evening begging for a position that doesn’t hurt.
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Categories: Ethiopia, Blogs, The Environment, Poverty and Development, Global Health
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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In Our Backyard Tacoma Demonstrates Against Northwest Detention Center
Tacoma, WASHINGTON--It’s visiting day at the Northwest Detention Center. The facility, opened three years ago to hold undocumented people awaiting deportation, is set among a tangle of industrial roads near downtown Tacoma. A distant midday sun reflects new spirals of razor wire circling the low grey building as a middle-aged Sikh man and a frightened looking Hispanic family approach the line of police armed with plastic handcuffs and padded gear, here to guard the entrance against today’s planned protests.
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Categories: Pacific Northwest, USA, Watch, Read, Listen, Labor and Immigration
Bitter Harvest Guest Worker Program Isn't the Labor and Immigration Panacea It's Cracked Up to Be
Yakima, WASHINGTON--Wisit Kampilo's sparse black hair ruffles in a gust of March wind. Standing in a patch of dry yellow grass off a remote road in the Yakima Valley, he pulls a secondhand Oakland Raiders bomber jacket around his thin frame and looks back at the dingy three-bedroom manufactured home where he and 32 other Thai guest workers were housed together in the fall of 2004.
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Categories: Pacific Northwest, USA, Watch, Read, Human Rights, Labor and Immigration, Politics and Conflict
To Be (Or Not To Be) An Independent Journalist
There’s some pretty powerful propaganda out there romanticizing my profession.
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Tall Americano, Hold the Paycheck Tacoma teen's coffee shop servitude shows human trafficking isn't just about sex slaves.
When Abdenasser "Sammy" Ennassime returned home to visit his family in Morocco six years ago, he could brag of a bustling coffee shop, a baby son, and an American wife to show for his more than two decades in the United States. In this light, Ennassime's suggestion to bring his adolescent niece, Lamyaá, to his home in Tacoma to help with the new baby - in return for enrolling her in school and guiding her toward U.S. citizenship - was seen as the magnanimous gesture of a generous uncle.
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Categories: Pacific Northwest, USA, Morocco, Read, Human Rights, Labor and Immigration
Reflections from Pakistan
I was in Pakistan for a little over a month last year reporting on the issue of bonded labor and debt slavery in the country. Though Pakistan was only one of the ten countries I visited in an eight-month tour, it looms the largest in my memory. I was fascinated by this country so at odds with itself: as feudal as it is modern, as isolated from as it is harassed by the international community, as hospitable as it is hostile. But the real reason Pakistan is still on my mind is because America won’t let me forget it.
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What Does Democracy Look Like? Editorial
In the heat of a street protest in The United States the most popular chant that will rise out of the crowd is the impassioned cry, "This is what democracy looks like!" I use this example not to reiterate the tired cliche that Americans are proud of their democratic ideals, but to underscore how the term democracy has become so omnipresent in American political rhetoric that its meaning is now beginning to elude us.
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Categories: Israel, Palestinian Territories, Blogs, Politics and Conflict
Atheists in the Holy Land Three Journalists Negotiate Neutrality in the Middle East
As I woke to the muezzin’s wails straining through a riot of church bells in my cramped hostel room in Old Jerusalem, excerpts of the previous night’s angry conversations were already working their way through my mounting hangover. Shouts of, “how can you call them terrorists?” and “there aren’t two sides to this story!” and, of course, “What are you looking for anyway?!” pierced the headache I had earned over hours of politically charged debate and a steady stream of warm red wine. I rolled out of my narrow bed and groaned, cursing another day of reporting in this enraged and bitter country.
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Categories: Israel, Palestinian Territories, Blogs, 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
Trouble in the Suburbs The Dark Side of Post-Soviet Development in Kazakhstan
Almaty, KAZAKHSTAN—The sounds of construction are ubiquitous in Almaty. Pounding jackhammers, whining saws and lumbering bulldozers are at work on almost every block of this green, mountain-rimmed Central Asian city. This breakneck development takes place alongside the expensive bistros and Mercedes dealerships that cater to a new generation reveling in the riches of recently discovered oil and gas reserves, giving this city—once considered a sleepy Soviet outpost—a powerfully wealthy and cosmopolitan veneer.
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Categories: Kazakhstan, Read, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
Twenty-First Century Slavery Pakistan's Brutal Bonded Labor System Lingers On
Lahore, PAKISTAN—On the night of October 1, 2005 in the tiny town of Jannat, one hour outside of Lahore, Shoukat Masih, 35, was fast asleep. He and his extended family had pulled their rusted charpoys out into the courtyard of their one room home in order to enjoy the cool air and a night’s rest before returning at dawn to another twelve hours of hard labor in the neighboring brick kilns. Around 11:00 pm a group of men armed with pistols and sticks entered the courtyard and yanked Masih to the ground, shouting, “Are you the one making statements on the television?!” His wife was in a neighboring village visiting family, but his father, children, nieces, and nephews, all looked on in terror as he was beaten to death on the packed clay earth.
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Categories: Pakistan, Read, Labor and Immigration
The Power of Propaganda Dissolving Prejudice in Pakistan
The late afternoon sun beats down on the high-rocky landscape. Sweat runs down my face and the back of my neck–tickles my scalp underneath a long grey burka swaddled tightly around my head and shoulders, and hanging to just below my knees. My feet slip on loose pebbles as I scramble up a steep slope in the rugged foothills of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province.
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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
The Halfway Mark ... And Pakistan Looming
Well, we’re almost three months in with about three more to go. As I write this, I’m counting down the hours to our next train ride, which will take us to our fourth country: Pakistan. It seems that the halfway mark is a good place to stop, look around, and think about where we’ve been and where we’re going as a project, as journalists and as individuals.
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Saving the Sal Trees Direct Action in the Tribal Hills of Chhattisgarh
Chhattisgarh, INDIA – "Zindabad!" shouts Bindia Bai, pressing her hands together in greeting as she sits down on the hard-packed mud floor to meet with fellow village women in the sunny courtyard of her home. This revolutionary rallying cry meaning "victory" echoes throughout Batka Behra village and has been spreading across the remote tribal hills of Chhattisgarh state in recent months. A new movement challenging government corruption and resource co-option is building among these ancient people.
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Categories: India, Read, The Environment, Poverty and Development
I Come from All of India And I'm Just Like You
Ahmedabad, INDIA – In a small, dimly lit room decorated with drawings celebrating Christmas, Diwali and Eid, 40 children attending Arzoo Kids Center sit with eyes closed and hands folded as if in prayer, belting out the Indian national anthem. While this may seem like a commonplace scene in an Indian after school program, it could mean salvation for the troubled city of Ahmedabad.
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Categories: India, Read, Education, Politics and Conflict
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