The Kambale family, along with 22 other Congolese refugees, arrived in Missoula, MT, to start their new lives in September 2016. Less than a year earlier, the family was living in a Tanzanian refugee camp, where they had been for decades after escaping the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1996. The Kambale children, ages 10, 7 and 4, were all born in the camp, and had never seen a glimpse of life outside its dire conditions.
An outsider wouldn’t be able to tell this warm-spirited family was once fighting for survival. Despite growing up in an environment riddled with malnutrition, poor sanitation, disease and a pervasive lack of security, the Kambale children have an undeniable air of optimism and playfulness, and refuse to come inside when their parents call them in for dinner. They laugh until they fall in the grass, hula hoop and jump in the air or into each others arms.
Soft Landing Missoula, a local organization that supports the refugee resettlement office, and the International Rescue Committee, made contact with the Kambale’s, and facilitated their resettlement in Missoula. Of the 23 countries that partici- pate in third-country resettlement efforts, The United States accepts 60-70 percent of the 1 percent who qualify for refugee status, with only a fraction placed in Missoula.
A young girl twirls her younger sister around in their hometown of Hisonohama, a small town in Japan’s coastal Fukushima Prefecture, which was hit especially hard by the 2011 tsunami. The ocean lies just out of sight behind them, and consequently, the land they’re standing on was wiped out, and endured some of the highest fatalities and destruction. The building to the right behind them is, miraculously, the only structure that withstood the tsunami close to the ocean — a small Buddhist temple. In Hisonohama, and many other devastated areas, the surviving members of the community are refusing to leave, or give up, despite the loss of their homes and loved ones. They instead are rebuilding the town from the ground up, raising a new generation of children to carry on the legacy of their community.
Myrna Dumontiere and Arleen Ray Adams are sisters, and members of the Bitterroot Salish tribe in Arlee, Montana. When they were young, their grandmother was set on fire, violently murdered and left for dead in a public alley in 1959. Despite obvious signs of it being a homicide, the coroner ruled her cause of death as hypothermia. A police investigation was never opened no matter how much they begged authorities. Besides memories and keepsakes, a one-line obituary in the town’s weekly newspaper is the only tangible evidence of their grandmother’s existence. The sisters still live on the land that has been in their family for generations, and they said it connects them to their grandmother, whose life-long passion was horse riding.
Dumontiere and Adams are not alone. The story of their grandma’s murder, the deep-seeded pain and lack of justice, are a horrifically familiar experience for thousands of indigenous women.
While Native Americans make up only 6.7% of Montana’s population, they account for 26% of missing persons reports. The epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women is far- reaching, affecting indigenous communities, particularly on reservations, across the U.S. and North America.
125+ kids from By The Hand Club, a nonprofit organization committed to serving children from the most under-resourced and dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago, took a guided boat tour through the city on the Chicago river, out onto lake Michigan and down the skyline. Only a handful of the children had ever been on a boat before, or seen outside of the neighborhoods they’ve grown up in. Most of them came from one of four By The Hand Club locations, situated in Chicago’s west side Austin neighborhood. The nonprofit club, protected by bulletproof glass windows, acts as a safe haven for hundreds of kids in one of the most gang-ridden areas of Chicago. They teach the kids how to read, write and excel in school beyond their grade levels, and perhaps most importantly embrace each child with an open heart.
In The Wake of Laquan MacDonald – An anti-violence protest briefly shut down Lake Shore Drive August 2nd, with around 400 protesters then marching up Clark Street toward Wrigley Field as a Cubs game was set to start.
The protest sought to draw attention to gun violence in low-income, predominantly black neighborhoods, as well as police brutality in the wake of the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan MacDonald.
Protesters demanded the resignation of Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, claiming his lack of oversight into Chicago Police Department practices has perpetuated corruption in blatant cases of police brutality, such as the shooting of MacDonald, where three police officers are accused of covering up the actions of officer Jason Van Dyke, who shot MacDonald 16 times. A 2017 Department of Justice report on the Chicago Police Department revealed evidence of agreements between officers to hide wrongdoing.