Home  About APF  Applying for Fellowship  About the APF Reporter  Fellows & Stories Index  Journalism Links  Contacting APF Search APF website

	Nogales Plans to Rescue Children from Border Underworld by Miriam Davidson Veronica was ten years old when she first went into the tunnels. She insists she wasn’t thrown out of her house or abandoned like many of the other kids who lived with her in the miles of concrete storm channels that run beneath the border between Nogales, Sonora, and Nogales, Arizona. "My mother always was looking for me," she says. But Veronica preferred gang life in the tunnels to her mother’s cardboard shack. "I just like being a vagrant," she says with a shy smile.
Mentors Can Mean Magic by Colman McCarthy The outing that day exposed Quanique Furline to a social and cultural world well removed from the blights and dead-ends all too common in the lives of urban minority children. Most adults at the Verban luncheon were baseball executives, politicians, journalists and others who have it made and for whom a couple of hours of good eats and hearing such former Cubs as Andy Pafko and Joe Pepitone reminisce is among the rewards of success.
Bram Fischer’s Journey by Glenn Frankel As Nelson Mandela and his comrades were convicted of sabotage and sentenced to life imprisonment in June 1964, the underground freedom movement in South Africa was unraveling. Many black activists were imprisoned, while many of their white comrades fled the country. One of the few who remained behind was Bram Fischer, a respected Afrikaner lawyer who had defended Mandela even while serving as secret leader of the outlawed Communist Party. He was charged later that year with party membership and was in the midst of his own trial when he decided the time had come to go underground.
	Struggling to Change in Spite of the Odds Text and Photos by Donna DeCesare Belize City, Belize–"Stinga," is a Conscious Youth success story. The former head of the Black Scorpion Posse, BSP, is one of the original gang leaders, who signed a historic truce halting gun battles on Belize City streets. Stinga surveys his muddy surroundings before venturing from the water-logged cubbyhole where he lives with his 17-year-old girlfriend Candace. He is one of the few peacemakers who is not dead, currently in prison or once again an active gang member. Stinga owes his survival not only to his precaution, but to participation in the Conscious Youth Development Program, a government effort to rehabilitate gang members.
Real Nuns Don’t Wear Habits Martha Fay My latest nuns arrived in the mail today, a pair of slightly thick around the hips Sisters with ankles to match, photographed from behind as they cross a street. Their light colored habits have been hacked off at mid-calf, their matching veils clipped in what some advisor or community committee no doubt deemed a judicious compromise between the practical and the decorous. Whatever trace dignity these outfits permit their wearers in real life is here dispatched by a couple of supermarket flyer steaks, one slapped on as a backpack for Sister-on-the-right, the other making a grainy, oversize carryall for Sister-on-the-left. The resulting composite- meant to be a witty exercise in "How to make a familiar object strange," according to the artist’s explanation printed on the flip side-is titled "Holy Cow."
Benazir and the Bomb by Emily MacFarquhar Way back in 1984, when Benazir Bhutto had just been released from years of detention by a military dictator, she traveled to Washington for benedictions and support. The brave young Pakistani politician told admiring American audiences what they wanted to hear: That she was not only seeking to bring democratic freedoms to her country, she opposed building nuclear weapons.
	Letter from Baku, Azerbaijan Text and Photos by Stanley Greene In Baku, Azerbaijan, the oil industry is the ball and chain of the city’s environment.
	Lady of Limbo Land by Cheryl Reed I didn’t know Lupe when I put my hands on her belly. I didn’t even speak her language. But when a contraction hit, she stopped in front of me, took my hands and showed me how to massage her pains. The folds of her stomach rolled like gelatin between my fingers, and I could feel the coarseness of her private hair. As the pain lingered, she squatted on the floor, spread her legs with her toes turned under her feet, and quietly groaned as she pushed.
The HMOs That Make Money Off The Poor by Fred Schulte A few years ago, fistfights would break out in the parking lots of state offices in Miami as HMO salesmen rushed to sign up welfare mothers arriving to pick up food stamps.
	African-American Music from the Mississippi Hill Country: "They Say Drums was a-Calling" Text and Photos by Bill Steber On a small, nondescript farm in rural northeast Mississippi, between the towns of Senatobia and Como, is one of America’s last and most tangible links to its African musical past.
	Ida Tarbell: Learning to Dig by Steve Weinberg "There had been women in public life in the past. What had they done? I had to satisfy myself before I went further with my science of society or joined the suffragists. It was humiliating not to be able to make up my mind quickly about the matter, as most of the women I knew did. What was the matter with me, I asked myself, that I could not be quickly sure? Why must I persist in the slow, tiresome practice of knowing more about things before I had an opinion? Suppose everybody did that. What chance for intuition, vision, emotion, action?"