Latest Archives - Page 6 of 14

March 15, 2014January 20, 2017

The winter that just won’t end

It doesn’t matter where you live, but there seems to be some variation of this weather wisdom: “If you don’t like the weather in [insert your town, region, state of being], wait five minutes and it will change.” I am fairly certain that this is not a new saying, and is not directly related to the increasing intensity of climate change (though it probably isn’t helping.)

My relocation to Ohio has come (lucky me) during a particularly rough winter. I am told Ohio winters traditionally aren’t light, with the last decade being an exception. But this year has seen a suite of heavy snows in concert with the Polar Vortex, which turned neighborhoods into icicles…and that is only a slight exaggeration.

It is winter. Fine. Switzerland has snow. The Northwest U.S. has snow. So I am not foreign to fresh powder and bitter cold. But the oscillating between that bitterness and Spring-like sunshine and warmth is frustrating.

I am fully aware of the fact that this region of the United States deals with such oscillation every season. The shifts in weather, humidity, hot, and cold are blamed for the asphalt-pocked holes we call roads here. (I inverted asphalt and holes on purpose) But the problem this Winter, and the argument for the effects of climate change, is that the extremes are extending beyond norms. We might expect an extreme weather event every 10 years, not three in a season.

I reported a story from Kandersteg in 2012, I think, after severe flooding tore up roads, and endangered the town. Fortunately the damage was minimal, but the worry was real: this tourist destination and home to an international scout center was inundated with concerned messages, wondering if it would be open for the coming season. A local official told me there was never any danger it wouldn’t open…but he was a little concerned that they had two “once in a century” floods in quick succession.

These types of stories are becoming more and more frequent. While I might just be griping about an annoyingly inconsistent winter, the extreme weather events are disconcerting if just for their frequency. I would hope that things will stabilize, eventually, but in the meantime I’ll dress warm, and be prepared for a heat wave, every day.

December 26, 2013January 20, 2017

Trekking East: Holiday Edition

I have fancied myself a fairly prolific traveler in the last years, stretching the bounds of my passport and camera across mostly European locales. I was lucky enough to see sights in Norway, Germany, France, the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Italy, the Czech Republic, Poland, Greece, Egypt, Ireland, and Canada, since 2008. Each journey has its own set of challenges; in Greece, I wasn’t sure if the protestors from television would overrun my family as we climbed the Acropolis (they didn’t); or in the Czech Republic, I had to try to work as a reporter and snag interviews while not knowing any Slavic languages and having no experience there. The challenges are what make trips exciting and worthwhile, though…at least in theory.

My troupe’s latest journey set us onto America’s roadways, moving all of our things, by car, from Washington State to Ohio. Cleveland will be our new home, one that we are eager to embrace and settle into after months of transition from Switzerland to the United States. But this car journey is an epic feat for even regular drivers, and I hadn’t driven more than a few hours in the four years I lived abroad. To move us to Ohio would take more than 30 hours of driving time, spread through five long days.

Continue reading “Trekking East: Holiday Edition”

November 22, 2013January 20, 2017

‘Protecting’ the (Canadian) border

I will admit that my family is perhaps a little more internationally-minded than the average American family, but we really were just looking for lunch when we headed into Canada one Friday. When we were in Switzerland a regular outing would be to take the train to Germany or France for shopping and lunch. The border was so close, just asking to be crossed. The Schengen zone has made visa-free travel the rule in Europe, and crossing borders is as natural as a daily commute. (In fact, many border-crossers live and work in different countries) For the USA, borders are considered a little more serious areas of security and protection. U.S. citizens now need passports to get into Canada and back, and have long been profiled and searched while coming through land-crossings from Mexico.

Still, my troupe is fresh from Europe, with a slightly less sense of danger while around borders. This is why we decided to take a day trip into British Columbia one day, just to find a restaurant and then head home. In all my traveling, from Athens to Oslo to Cairo, I had never been to Canada. So we set our plans, not knowing the interrogation to come.

Continue reading “‘Protecting’ the (Canadian) border”

September 4, 2013September 17, 2021

Rediscovering the “homeland”

It wasn’t a surprise, but it also wasn’t necessarily the easiest solution: my former employer World Radio Switzerland was sold by the public service, destined to become a local commercial station in Geneva. That change has happened, and the vast majority of regular news staff from the public service were let go.

Our station had a tough history–one better explained in person and over a beverage–but it had accomplished an impressive task of producing award-winning coverage about Switzerland, and educating Swiss and ex-pats alike as to how that idiosyncratic country works (or doesn’t.)

The staff of WRS was given about a year to prepare itself for the eventual sale. Some claimed our jobs would be secure until 2014, others, myself included, expected less. We lost our political reporter and news director right away, and others were looking at the door.

As my family had to begin to think about schooling for my child, and I had to focus on my dissertation for my MA, we made one of the hardest decisions we have ever made: quit, leave Switzerland, and leave Europe, after four years abroad. Shortly after we made this decision, and I gave my notice, the station’s sale was finalized and a timeline was in motion.

Staff had about three months before they would be laid-off, and the station and all content would disappear to be reborn as another kind of radio. It is not my kind of radio, but it didn’t really affect me; my plans were already in motion.

Readjusting to the USA, which I hadn’t visited in two years, has been difficult. It is even more difficult than when I returned from two months in Germany back in 2008. At that time I wrote this: “People ask if it’s hard to readjust after two months abroad. In some ways it is: the little German I know is now less useful, and I have to be careful not to use it without context. It’s weird not using trains and public transport, even walking everywhere. And it’s weird answering the question “is it hard to readjust after two months abroad.”

Continue reading “Rediscovering the “homeland””

July 13, 2013June 1, 2020

Keeping our eyes open

One of the earlier things I noticed when I moved to Switzerland was a seemingly large number of black men stopped by police.

It seemed that any time I saw a man of color on the street, he was surrounded by three or more Zurich police officers checking his ID, and asking what he is doing. Many of these men are asylum seekers, with the majority from Eritrea or Nigeria.

Switzerland is not the most racially diverse country, so maybe I was more sensitive to the issue of racial profiling than I otherwise would be. But I kept noticing police turning their cars around and hopping out to question a black man on the street, or when I had lunch in the park, police only seemed to question “minorities.”

I followed up on this observation with Zurich police, the city ombudswoman, and human rights activists and heard police say there was not a systematic profiling of black men, though Nigerians controlled the drug trade. The park I ate lunch in used to be a hub of drug dealing so maybe the increased presence of police is attributed to that.

The ombudswoman did have a large number of complaints of profiling and unnecessarily long questioning of mainly African males from police. Human rights campaigners complained of a lack of transparency in how Switzerland registered who was being stopped and questioned the most.

And anecdotally, some asylum seekers told me they were subjected to questioning on the street all the time. They claimed that if they complained, they were sometimes physically abused.

I couldn’t and can’t confirm their claims, and thus did not report them, but it does make me watch closer when police seem to single someone out…

Continue reading “Keeping our eyes open”

June 30, 2013November 13, 2023

Of falling stones and faith

There is an understandable and appropriate silence about a graveyard. The dead are meant to be left to their stillness. Even outside of a superstition of what might happen if one “wakes the dead,” or that a cemetery may be “holy ground,” I feel there should be a reverence to the memory of the people buried beneath one’s feet. In middle school, my English class took a field trip to an old cemetery near the rural-but-well-endowed California school house. The assignment was to make a pencil etching of a gravestone of our choice, considering dates, names, comments left carved in moss-covered stone. We would take our etchings back to the classroom and then write fiction based on the lives we conjured and assigned to these people resting beneath us. I vaguely remember penning something about “O. Henry,” a Civil War veteran who left behind his lover. The curious thing about this exercise, as inspiring as it may have been to young fiction writers, is that the people buried in that cemetery were real; their lives were lived and paid in full. One walks more carefully when one focuses on who the people were, and not who they are in a conjured world.

Yesterday I walked with my troupe around Saint Martin’s church in the local village in the French region of Picardie. The church was constructed in the 12th century, and it, and its cemetery, are a long way from the glory days.

June 12, 2013January 20, 2017

Vacations and floods

There was a time when journalists played the part of an “ambulance chaser;” ink-stained scoop-hunters would rush to see which building burned; what criminal was nabbed; what neighborhood was afflicted. With technology, newsrooms could selectively send reporters out depending on what seemed most newsworthy on the scanner. I have never been on such a beat where I had to be so on the spot for news. Much of public radio reporting’s strength is in its analysis, and ability to pull back from the news frenzy. Rushing to report is often how mistakes are made, yet time is often of the essence.

Even if I am not often covering the breaking news, I still follow it, even when I am on vacation. On a recent trip to Germany my troupe decided for a quick trip to Dresden, a lovely city in Germany’s East. We happened to arrive in early June just as storms were ripping through Central Europe. I turned on MDR, central German public television, in our hotel room before a planned walk to the River Elbe near the Altstadt (old town.) The Elbe was flooding then, but not as bad as other rivers. Dresden was affected, as were Leipzig and Passau, Prague, and many small villages between. Dresden was affected but not terribly, according to the news. We had just arrived, and a steady stream of emergency vehicles rushed outside our hotel window; a convoy of five German Red Cross vans sped back and forth.

There was only one thing for a vacationing reporter with family to do in such a situation: go for a walk and see what’s happening.

Continue reading “Vacations and floods”