Aaron Atencio

–Ambondrona, Madagascar–

Children’s laughter petered out against the swell of the Mozambique Channel as a handful of them—leg casts glinting like white coral—shuffled toward the waterline. From the shady courtyard, Sister Odette Rahamtamirina kept watch. Nearby, other children with the same splints slid over packed sand on their hips, leaving crooked, joyous trails.

Villa Stella Maria, perched on Nosy Be off Madagascar’s northwest coast, looks no bigger than a suburban ranch house in Ohio. Yet it has been sanctuary to more than two hundred children with disabling bone deformities since Sister Claire André Paisonneau opened its doors in 1998. At any given moment two dozen boys and girls share its bunk-lined rooms.

Space is scarce, but order reigns. A narrow galley kitchen turns out rice, greens, and the obligatory gulp of powdered milk fortified with vitamin D. Dorms are separated from the nuns’ quarters by a corridor hung with floral curtains that flutter like reef fish in the trade-wind. Outside, a tamarind tree anchors a single swing; around it lie plastic trucks, a few battered wheelchairs, and pairs of makeshift crutches hewn from driftwood. Paradise with calluses.

Most of the children suffer from severe rickets—osteomalacia born of chronic malnutrition. In Madagascar, where prices for eggs and milk can match a day’s wages, brittle bones are a predictable tax on poverty. Some legs arrive so bowed that diet alone can no longer right them. Those cases are ferried to the mainland for surgery: one limb broken and reset, then the other, each wrapped in plaster thick as reef limestone. Weeks later the children return to the villa for rehab and tutoring until they can bear weight—and, equally important, bear life—outside these walls.

Healing here goes beyond bone. The sisters drill arithmetic, Malagasy grammar, and Catholic hymns; volunteers teach dance steps that double as physical therapy. At dusk, the courtyard becomes a small republic of determination: children hoisting themselves upright, toppling, and laughing as they crawl back to the start. Their resilience is learned behavior, modeled by caretakers who themselves live on stipends thinner than communion wafers.

Villa Stella Maria cannot promise a cushioned future. What it does promise is witness and preparation: proof to each child that their bodies—however patched—belong in motion, and that the world, though uneven, can be traversed head-on. For visitors, the lesson is equally stark. Hardship is not an abstract statistic here; it is audible in the scrape of a cast across sun-baked cement, visible in the slow, deliberate climb onto a swing, tangible in the iron cross that catches the afternoon glare. What follows is up to the rest of us.

-Picher, Okla.-

Picher, Oklahoma—once the metallic heart of America’s lead-zinc boom—sits today in a hush broken only by prairie wind rattling windowless frames. Half-collapsed storefronts line streets that bleed into slag mountains of “chat,” their gray slopes laced with enough lead to poison a small city. Federal buyouts pushed almost everyone out by 2009; the U.S. labeled Picher part of the Tar Creek Superfund, a sacrifice zone deemed cheaper to evacuate than to mend.

One man refused the exit package. Gary “Lights Out” Linderman kept the Ole Miners Pharmacy open beneath a flickering green cross, filling scripts and coffee cups for anyone who still drifted through. Farmers drove twenty miles for his handshake; former miners limped in for pain meds they couldn’t afford elsewhere. If a co-pay came up short, Linderman jotted an IOU, slipped the pills across the counter, and changed the subject to high-school football. In a landscape rewritten by extraction and abandonment, he practiced a different economy—one of stubborn reciprocity.

Anthropologists talk about “place attachment,” the moral gravity that binds people to land even when the land turns hostile. Linderman embodied that gravity. He argued Picher could revive once the tailings were hauled away, the wells reclaimed, the trout returned to Tar Creek. Friends called the dream quixotic; he called it home.

On 6 June, at sixty-one, Linderman passed. The pharmacy’s neon went dark, and with it the last steady glow on Connell Avenue. Picher’s physical toxins can, in time, be capped or trucked off. The social element Linderman tended—a network of favors, trust, and unpaid debts—will be harder to remediate.

Still, his ledger of goodwill lingers in family medicine cabinets and memory. In a town where the ground itself became hazardous waste, Gary Linderman left behind one uncontaminated resource: a standard for looking after your own when everyone else has pulled out.

-Colorado-

A stalled storm system wrung out more than a year’s worth of rain over Colorado’s Front Range in less than a week, unleashing the state’s worst flooding since the Big Thompson disaster of 1976. Boulder took 9.08 inches in a single day, while a gauge at Fort Carson registered 11.85 inches—both all-time records.

The deluge followed a summer of drought and wildfire. Warm, tropical moisture lifted upslope against the Rockies and simply stopped, dumping up to 18 inches of rain on slopes already stripped of vegetation by recent burns. Creeks became rivers, rivers became wrecking balls, and an area nearly the size of Delaware disappeared under water.

More than 19,000 people evacuated; nine never made it out. Two thousand homes were wiped from their foundations, 26,000 others were damaged, and 50 major bridges lay in twisted heaps. Early damage estimates topped two billion dollars—an invoice payable in asphalt, lumber, and long memory.

Some mountain hamlets vanished behind walls of water. National Guard helicopters lifted 295 residents—pets included—from the cut-off town of Jamestown after every road collapsed. Downstream, the St. Vrain and Left Hand creeks surged through Lyons and Longmont, turning century-old main streets into shoals.

Burn scars worsened the catastrophe. In Fourmile Canyon, trees killed by the 2010 wildfire tore loose in debris flows, clogging channels with ash and sediment. One geologist called the event a “landscape reset,” noting that entire hillsides moved downstream in a night.

But the flood also rewired social life. Volunteer muck-out crews evolved into mutual-aid networks; neighbors shared basements and backyard campers through the winter. Arguments over new floodplain maps, rebuilding permits, and soaring insurance rates still shape local politics.

Colorado now ranks the 2013 flood alongside its worst fires and storms—a reminder that life at the foot of the Rockies is a negotiation with gradient and gravity. The rivers have retreated, yet the question they posed endures: how do communities rooted in beauty that can betray them overnight decide to stay, flee, or return?

SAUSALITO — Inside a canvas tent on Marinship Way—where Liberty ships once thundered off wartime ways—a new hull is rising plank by plank. The Matthew Turner, a 132-foot wooden brigantine named for the Bay Area’s legendary 19th-century shipwright, is still months from touching water, but she already commands the shoreline like a promise.

Most days begin before sunrise. Retired carpenters from Vallejo swap jokes with Silicon Valley coders on flex-time; a pastry chef from Mill Valley sets out cinnamon rolls alongside mallets and hand-planes. They are volunteers—nearly a thousand have logged hours so far—shaping Douglas-fir masts, spiling white-oak planks, and riveting bronze the way Turner’s crews did a century ago. Yet this vessel is no museum piece: hidden beneath her frames is a hybrid electric drive that will spin propellers into turbines under sail, feeding lithium-ion batteries powerful enough to move her when the wind quits.

The project, run by the nonprofit Call of the Sea, aims to turn the finished ship into a floating classroom for Bay-Area students—an answer to field trips that rarely stray beyond asphalt. While the hull still smells of fresh epoxy, schoolkids already stream through on hard-hat tours, tracing ribs with their fingertips and learning how a compass rose relates to algebra or how a belaying pin can double as a lever. Anthropologists would call this “embodied curriculum”: the idea that knowledge sticks best when muscle and memory conspire.

Fund-raisers keep the saws humming. At a June 7 open-house, donors paid fifty dollars to walk the deck beams, quizzing shipwrights and buying raffle tickets for a post-launch sail. The grand prize is still a few seasons away, but that only sharpens anticipation; each dollar raised locks another plank into place.

For Sausalito—better known lately for houseboats and waterfront tech offices—the Matthew Turner is both throwback and thesis statement. She argues that craftsmanship can be communal, that climate-smart technology can hide inside a 19th-century silhouette, and that a maritime town still earns its keep by facing water, not turning its back.

Outside the tent, gulls wheel over Richardson Bay. Inside, a mallet thuds, a plank bends, and an idea takes on ballast. The ship is unfinished, undeniably—her deck a patchwork of temporary scaffolds—but in the grain of each timber you can read a simple proposition: a community builds what it chooses to remember, and what it dares to imagine next.

-Denver, Colorado-

The apartment door flies open before a knock can land. “Hello, friend—welcome!” booms Mandour, his Sudanese lilt filling the hallway as surely as the scent of cardamom tea and steaming potatoes already fills the living room. Two narrow twin beds double as couches during daylight; one is wrapped tight in zebra-print sheets, corners tucked with military discipline. At a small table beneath a flickering overhead bulb, roommate Ahmed pages through a workbook, whispering conjugations: “Past simple… present perfect.”

Six months ago the pair stepped onto Colorado soil as refugees—passports stamped in Nairobi, hopes brokered by the African Community Center of Denver. Before that, they logged three uneasy years in a relay of East African camps, bartering for phone minutes, scanning bulletin boards for their names to appear on resettlement lists.

“Living in the camp was very hard,” Mandour says, slipping into the past tense like a coat he plans never to wear again. He once argued land disputes in Khartoum’s courtrooms, armed with a law degree from Al-Neelain University. Now he parks returned rental cars at Denver International Airport, steering each sedan into a gleaming row that feels, on certain mornings, like progress. “I will work where I can,” he adds, matter-of-fact.

The African Community Center—one of several satellites of the Ethiopian Community Development Council—meets families like his at the arrivals gate, hands over apartment keys, and compresses a crash course in American urban life into a frantic fortnight. Case managers ride the RTD bus loop with new arrivals until stop names lodge in memory; volunteers rehearse 911 calls and pediatric checkups, fold resumes, and translate warehouse-shift safety briefings. It is infrastructure of the most intimate kind: the scaffolding of an ordinary Tuesday.

A rap on the door interrupts. Mandour’s brother slips in with his wife and two small daughters, cheeks flushed from the cold. Ahmed shuffles homework aside, clearing space for crayons. “Batatas!” Mandour shouts, grinning as he ferries a platter of potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and still-steaming flatbread to the table. Conversation toggles briskly between Arabic and hesitant English; laughter needs no translator.

Anthropologists speak of “home” as a verb as much as a noun—actions that turn space into belonging. In this cramped unit, home is a zebra-striped bed turned sofa by day, a kettle that never cools, a grammar worksheet edged with grease from shared bread. It is also a horizon: the promise that, one distant season, violence in Sudan will ebb and the route to Khartoum will feel less like retreat than return.

For now, Denver is the axis of their maps. Outside, winter gathers against the Front Range; inside, the tea keeps pouring, the potatoes keep disappearing, and a law graduate parks one more rental car—certain that after survival comes something quieter, but just as urgent: the slow, deliberate work of starting over.