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November, 2004
On a recent Tuesday evening, Audrey Cho, 28, was sitting in front of her 10 students, holding a handout that listed this year’s federal holidays. Pointing to an item in February, she asked her class: "Who is Washington?” A confusing murmur arose in the accents of Korea, Mexico, Peru and Mongolia, above the faint buzz that emanated from bare light bulbs hanging overhead. Julio Lamas, a goateed...
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October, 2002
When Peter Magai Bul and other Sudanese boys came to the attention of aid workers in the early 1990s, they presented a grim image: a river of thousands of children, uprooted from their homes amid the chaos of Sudan's civil war, rail-thin and often naked, walking hundreds of miles in scorching heat. The world has come to know these boys—very few were girls—as "Lost Boys," named after the...
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November, 2002
Two years ago, Tankow Kwong stepped into a voting booth to cast his first ballot as a naturalized U.S. citizen. He voted for president, but skipped over all the other offices. The 71-year-old Chinatown resident said he was stymied by the list of obscure political positions that were rendered even more confusing in English than in his native Chinese. But that shouldn't happen again on Nov. 5....
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May, 1999
Inside Javier Olea Anaya’s stomach, a time bomb ticks. Since 1995, the 23-year-old native of Acapulco, Mexico, has been fighting Budd-Chiari Syndrome, a rare disorder that obstructs the veins of his liver. He has lost 18 pounds since November, though his abdominal cavity has ballooned with liters of bodily fluid accumulated by the disease. One more year, his doctor estimates, and the...
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May, 2000
Police Superintendent Terry G. Hillard led the cheers at a Dec. 27 press conference announcing that Chicago’s crime rate fell for the eighth consecutive year. “It’s been a bad year in Chicago for criminals, and that means it’s getting better for citizens,” he said. And statistics would seem to bear Hillard out: From 1990 to 1998, crimes were down 19 percent for the eight “index crime”...
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February, 1999
After escaping the Republic of Congo with his wife and flying to Paris, Maixent H. Moukoulou Soki thought he was within two hours of freedom when he landed at Chicago O'Hare International Airport last May. One more flight and he would be in Fort Worth, Texas, where a friend could help him gain asylum. But U.S. customs inspectors had other ideas. Though he carried a fake French passport,...
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May, 2001
Keevin Irons’ turning point came after his seventh arrest. For 20 years, the 41-year-old native of south suburban Chicago Heights had been hooked on drugs. “I didn’t know that it would cause me to make a career out of it,” he said, “but it did, and that was the wrong career.” His arrest in September was a wake-up call. Cook County Circuit Court Judge James L. Rhodes gave him four years’...
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March, 2004
One morning in January, José L. Oliva braved the crisp, bone-chilling weather to join a hardened group of jornaleros—day laborers, most of them immigrant men—at a dingy strip mall in Albany Park. Oliva stepped into a scrum of about 50 workers, megaphone in hand, and called out in Spanish: “We are not illegals; we are human beings. The contractors should treat us as human beings." To the...
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September, 2002
At Westlake Hospital in west suburban Melrose Park, Dr. Santhi Priya Yalamanchili (middle) is accompanied by Carmen A. Jerez, who has undergone 200 hours of training on interpreting techniques. (Photo by Mary Hanlon)All she needed was a routine prenatal check-up. But Rosa Campos dreaded the thought of visiting a northwest suburban Rolling Meadows clinic. “I felt terrible because there was nobody...
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