Palpable suffering: A crushing tale, beautifully told

Published in the Portland Phoenix

It’s rare that we can put a human face on American foreign policy. And even rarer that the visage belongs to a person who steps willingly into the limelight — though admittedly for other reasons. A House in the Sky, a new memoir by Amanda Lindhout and co-written by Portlander Sara Corbett (a writer for the New York Times Magazine, among other publications), splits the difference beautifully, and devastatingly.

In 2008, Lindhout, a Canadian reporter cutting her teeth in the harshest places on the planet (Afghanistan and Iraq during the wars), went to Somalia to write about the unrest there. Warlords, tribal leaders, and government officials with varying degrees of popular legitimacy were engaged in a massive tug-of-war; the US, through the “war on terror,” backed several opposing players, sometimes simultaneously.

Lindhout stays away from the geopolitics; her story is very much her own, though it is important to read it not just as a human tale of suffering, resourcefulness, and survival, but also as an object lesson about the real cost of US intervention overseas.

Four days into her trip to Somalia, Lindhout was captured by a band of militants who held her for 459 days. That’s not a spoiler: The only spoiler that could possibly exist is Lindhout’s name on the cover — which is at times the only reassurance a reader has that she actually survived the ordeal. (Also, you can meet her on Friday at the Portland Public Library.)

No matter what you imagine might become of a white Western woman kidnapped by Islamic  militants (who are mostly in their late teens) in the middle of an anarchic gangland, the reality is far worse. Seriously: This is a soul-breaking book about the daily, hourly, secondly ordeal of surviving a mental and emotional crucible that would, at many times, have been easier to exit feet-first.

With Corbett’s expert help and reporting, Lindhout’s story is told directly, vividly, without artifice, hyperbole, or euphemism. A scene in which she hears her mother being beaten, and her mom fighting back against her boyfriend, is told quietly, understatedly. She expertly seals the deal: “In the bunk below me, Nathaniel started to cry. ‘Are you scared?’ I whispered, staring at the dark ceiling. It was an unfair question. He was six years old.” Lindhout was just nine. Her stark self-awareness forms the foundation of a uniquely probing reader-author connection.

The account of her captivity, which forms the second two-thirds of the book, is an unrelenting read, detailing the range of physical, psychological, emotional, and sexual weapons employed against her in an attempt to extract a ransom, but always including elements of Lindhout’s impressive depth of spirit. She explains — often approaching detached wonder at her own resilience — what, exactly, happened to her, and how she found within herself the will, the means, the power to carry on.

During one particularly brutal assault, she describes an out-of-body experience: “From above, I could see two men and a woman on the ground. The woman was tied up like an animal, and the men were hurting her, landing blows on her body. I knew all of them, but I also didn’t. I recognized myself down there, but I felt no more connected to the woman than to the men in the room. I’d slipped across some threshold I would never understand. The feeling was both deeply peaceful and deeply sad. What I saw was three people suffering, the tortured and the torturers alike.”

It is left to us, as it is to Lindhout herself, to make sense of, or peace with, this horrific tale — and we in the US must pay special attention to the detailed personal accounting she offers of the ripple effects of American power.

Perhaps we can even start to take our lead from Lindhout, who has chosen to transcend her suffering by bringing to her tormentors not condemnation, but compassion — in the form of a foundation providing educational support to young people in Somalia, kids very like her captors.

AMANDA LINDHOUT + SARA CORBETT | at the Rines Auditorium, Portland Public Library, 5 Monument Square, Portland | September 13 @ 6:30 pm | portlandlibrary.com | Free
A HOUSE IN THE SKY | by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett | 384 pages | Scribner | $27

Crime Watch: Downtown shops ‘under siege’ from thefts

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Two prominent Commercial Street retailers are installing video-surveillance and other security equipment in the wake of a summer marred by thefts.

Late last month, both Motifs and Old Port Wine Merchants and Cigar Shop stepped up security, and are trying to get help combating crime in the high-pedestrian-traffic area around their shops.

Motifs owner Paula Jalbert says crime “has gotten aggressive this summer, very aggressive,” well beyond “normal run-of-the-mill shoplifting.” Thieves are “more organized, and it seems to be groups”
operating together.

“On July 5 my petty cash bag was stolen right out from under us,” she says, among other thefts of money and easily marketable items. “They’re looking for purses, wallets, cell phones, iPads, computers.”

The thieves are “older — they’re not young kids,” Jalbert says.

Earlier this summer, a woman selling jewelry from a sidewalk table set up to cater to cruise-ship visitors was found to not have made the pieces herself but stolen them from Motifs and at least one other Old Port shop.  When confronted while brazenly selling them in the open air just down the street from where the items had been taken, the woman packed hurriedly and left the area; she hasn’t been back, Jalbert says.

So in August, she stepped up security, or, as she puts it, “I’ve gone on lockdown.”

“Now I have security cameras and they record video;” she has added a keycode lock to her office door, and all the shop’s clothes have security tags on them, too. She says the preventive steps have resulted in a significant dropoff in thefts.

Next door at Old Port Wine, owner Jacques deVillier has also stepped up security, a move he lamented in an email to customers.

He lost several hundred dollars’ worth of wine a few weeks back, and earlier in the summer police caught a well-dressed middle-aged man with a bag full of stolen cigars from his shop.

“This street is rampant,” deVillier says. Now he has four cameras feeding live video to monitors at the cash register, as well as recording footage for later review if needed.

It’s not a move he made willingly. “With much trepidation I have wrestled with the decision to install video cameras,” deVillier wrote in an August 26 email. “I have put off doing this because I think of this store as not just a wine shop but a place where all of my friends can congregate. Placing cameras seemed to be a matter of distrust and not the message I’ve received over the last seven years in Portland or the message I wanted to communicate to my friends. I love being here and I had hoped with Portland’s growth things could remain the same; things do change unfortunately, and not always for the better.”

Both shop owners say police and city officials need to do more, though Steve Hewins, interim executive director of Portland’s Downtown District, a nonprofit comprised of businesses in the city center, says he didn’t hear anything about the topic at his group’s August membership meeting.

“We’ve got great police, but how much can they do?” deVillier says.

Jalbert, who has owned retail stores in the Old Port since she opened Communiques in 1981, says she feels “like we’ve been under siege.”

She says police officers on patrol now “make a point of walking through every store” — but that only started about three weeks ago, after offices upstairs in Jalbert’s building were hit by thieves. She says officers blame the uptick in thefts on drug users, telling her illegal “drugs are on the rise in the Portland area.”

Portland Police Department spokesman Lieutenant James Sweatt says some thefts — such as those of electronics or other easily resellable items — could be connected to the drug trade, but others — of merchandise, for example — may be because a person actually wants the item stolen.

He says, though, that “there hasn’t been a significant change whatsoever” in the number of thefts reported citywide this year, compared to 2011 and 2012. He doesn’t have data broken down by region within the city, but “we’re not seeing a trending pattern here” at the police department. Sweatt did say that “businesses that do a little bit better job at security . . . are less likely to be targeted.”

Boost your skills: And improve your job prospects

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Want a new job? Or a promotion at your existing workplace? You have to learn more, do more, get more skills. It’s as simple as that.

But first, let’s get the bad news out of the way. Many employers want new hires to have skills they haven’t yet learned, even if they’re college grads. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, these are things like efficient work practices, how to handle customers on the phone, and how to communicate effectively in a businesslike way. Some of the people competing for job openings will have experience doing that stuff; if you don’t, your chances of getting a welcome-to-the-team phone call drop through the floor.

The good news is that you can acquire these skills fairly quickly, and without spending a lot of cash. Portland Adult Education — which is open to all Mainers (though Portlanders get a discount) — has classes on a wide range of job skills, in the realm of office work as well as the skilled trades. The fall schedule just came out, so check it over carefully at portlandadulted.org.

Most classes happen a couple times a week for a few months, and cost between $85 and $125, though some are more expensive. In other words, this is a relatively cheap way to buff your CV, without taking a big chunk out of your bank account — or your schedule.

Some of the classes teach pretty basic material, but it can be good for an intro if you haven’t used a particular piece of software before (like Microsoft Access, a database-management program), or if you need to brush up on accounting, or practice public speaking.

They’re all taught by local instructors, many of whom are professional active in the fields they’re teaching about, and may be able to connect you with employers seeking people with just the skills you’re learning.

You can start new projects, taking classes in website design, or specific design applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign). Or you can give your existing knowledge a boost, with “in a day” workshops, where people with basic knowledge of a piece of software can take just a few hours to pick up more complex techniques.

PAE also has courses to introduce you to a range of trades: woodworking, welding, electrical work, and plumbing. They can be good starting points to see if you like something enough to pursue a degree or certification, without risking a lot if it turns out not to be quite what you had hoped.

If you’re really committed to professional education, you can enter one of PAE’s certificate programs, which give you an unlimited amount of time to finish taking a prescribed set of courses. The three main certificates are for being an office assistant, accounting clerk, or working in a medical office. They each carry a core of eight basic office-skills courses, plus five certificate-specific classes to get you ready to take an entry-level job. (There’s also a “Microsoft Office Applications” certificate, if you take the classes teaching the basics of the five most commonly used Microsoft programs.)

And there’s a Certified Nursing Assistant program, which can be a good starting point for a career in the medical field. It’s true that being a CNA can be one of the toughest jobs in a hospital or nursing-home environment, but positions are always open for immediate work, and you might be able to score a post that will help you out with costs of getting more education and higher certification.

The long and the short of it is, if you want to learn something new to improve your work environment or job prospects, you owe Portland Adult Education a serious look.

Are you a business owner?Check out Corporate Training

Portland Adult Education also offers custom-teaching services to local businesses, helping them teach employees new skills and boost productivity.

Business owners can meet with a PAE consultant to see what classes might best serve the company’s, and workers’, needs. Then PAE will design classes to meet the goals you’re aiming for — whether with existing employees, new workers, or a combination of both. For example, Goodwill has worked with PAE to design a class to improve non-native speakers’ English.

PAE can also connect business owners with existing classes to improve workers’ skills, individually or as a group.

Learn from home: Take free online courses from top institutions

Published in the Portland Phoenix

As long as you have a computer, you have access to some of the best classrooms in the world, for free. MIT, Stanford, Georgetown, and the University of California–Berkeley all offer massively open online courses (called MOOCs in edu-jargon) — classes that can have students numbering in the tens of thousands, all around the globe, getting course materials online, watching streaming video of the lectures, and participating in discussions in online forums. These digital learning environments are increasingly popular and accessible, so much so that the New York Times dubbed 2012 “The Year of the MOOC.”

Sadly, there aren’t many such options originating in Maine just yet. The University of Maine, the University of Southern Maine, and Bowdoin College all have nothing of the sort. Colby College’s communications staff didn’t return multiple calls and voicemails.

Bates College is in the early stages of contemplating starting such a program; Al Filreis, a pioneer of massively open online courses at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke in May to the college’s faculty about his 36,000-student course on modern poetry. Filreis, who teaches English at Penn and is also a parent of a Bates student, had students from South Africa and Pakistan, among other far-flung locations.

And in July, Bates president Clayton Spencer joined a group of about a dozen college and university presidents from around the country in discussing MOOCs and access to higher education. She was the only participant from Maine, and the only representative of a liberal-arts college. That said, the college’s public statements about those two events make clear that Bates remains protective of the “liberal arts college experience,” which counts residence in a physical academic community as one of its key values.

Global humanitiesThe University of New England has done the most so far in Maine, through its Center for Global Humanities. While the CGH doesn’t offer courses per se — in the sense of classes that have multiple lectures and discussion groups — it does have one-off events quite regularly that are open to the public both in person and online.

“We wanted to widen the notion of ‘the humanities’ to include all kinds of people,” says Anouar Majid, who not only is the founding director of the CGH and UNE’s vice-president of communications and marketing but also serves as the university’s vice-president of global affairs.
If you head to une.edu/cgh, you’ll see options for both “Seminars” and “Lectures” on the right-hand rail. The “Seminars” page lists nine upcoming talks by university faculty or other scholars, accompanying reading (often the speakers’ own books), and specific event information if you want to attend in person. For the 2013-2014 academic year, topics include health-care, international relations, history, and philosophy.

If you can’t make it, first check with your local library: many of them around the state convene groups to read the books and watch the lectures, and then have their own local discussions. There’s no credit, and no writing assignments. You just read the book, watch the lecture, and learn something new.

If your nearest library isn’t participating (and you don’t want to start a group yourself), the video is streamed live on the site during the lectures; people watching on their computers can email their questions to an on-site moderator, who will add them to the list of possible topics to address during a question-and-answer period that follows each talk.

It gets better. Past years’ seminars, back to 2009-2010, are listed and archived on the site, letting you learn from international experts on a wide range of topics. What’s more, the “Lectures” page lists two other upcoming talks, and includes an archive of other speakers’ presentations (see sidebar: “UNE Highlights”).

Top-notch schoolsIf you want something more structured, or more like an actual college class, check out these free options from leading institutions around the world.

Introduction to Computer Science three-course package (Programming Methodology, Programming Abstractions, Programming Paradigms) | Stanford University | see.stanford.edu/see/courses.aspx

Skynet University: astronomy classes, including remote control of telescopes for observations | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | skynet.unc.edu/introastro

“Edible Education: Telling Stories About Food and Agriculture,” taught by Michael Pollan | University of California–Berkeley | webcast.ucberkeley.edu

“Global Warming Science,” an overview of the processes by which the climate changes, as well as its effects | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | ocw.mit.edu

“Sets, Counting, and Probability,” a look at the math behind card games, sports, and election results | Harvard University | extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative

“Doing Business in Latin America,” a business and economics class | University of California–Los Angeles | uclaextension.edu

“The American Novel Since 1945,” a literature class | Yale University | oyc.yale.edu

“Logic and Proofs,” a course with a rationally self-explanatory title | Carnegie Mellon University | oli.cmu.edu

There are, obviously, many more options — foreign-language classes, advanced scientific topics, and much more. Explore — the world is yours for the learning. 

UNE highlightsParticularly notable or interesting talks in the online archive
From the 2012-13 series“The Trouble with Malaria in Africa,” by James Webb Jr., author of Humanity’s Burden: A Global History of Malaria (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
“On the Brink of the Grave: Early Stories of Blood Transfusion,” by Ann Kibbie, with readings from an account of medical procedures from 1896, and from Bram Stoker’s 1897 thriller Dracula.

From the 2011-12 series“What’s Happening in Yemen?” by Daniel M. Varisco, with readings from Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s Yemen: The Unknown Arabia (Overlook, 2001).
 “Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788,” by Pauline Maier, author of the book by the same name as the lecture, published by Simon and Schuster, 2010.

From the 2010-11 series“The President, Democracy, and Permanent War,” by Dana Nelson, author of Bad for Democracy:  How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
“Desperate for Some Kindness: A History of Asking for Help in Hard Times,” by Elizabeth De Wolfe, with readings from Horatio Alger and Mary Marshall Dyer.

From the 2009-10 series“The Russian Soul in the Twenty-First Century,” by George Young, with reading from James Billington’s Russia in Search of Itself (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004).
“You Are What You Read,” by Reuben Bell, with reading from Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (HarperCollins, 2007).

From past lectures“Does America (Still) Need Unions,” by Robert Zieger.
“Lessons from the Emerald Isle: The Implications of Mass Tourism,” by Eric Zuelow.

Press Releases: Billions and billions

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Billionaire John Henry bought the Boston Globe earlier this month. Billionaire Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post just days later.

They’re following a path blazed by billionaire Sam Zell, who bought the Tribune Company, including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, in 2007, and ran it into bankruptcy; billionaire Rupert Murdoch, who bought the Wall Street Journal the same year; and billionaire Warren Buffett, who in 2012 bought two groups of newspaper companies: Lee Enterprises, publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Media General, whose flagship is the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Also on that path is billionaire Donald Sussman, who bought the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, the Kennebec Journal, and the Morning Sentinel in 2012.

Folks with that kind of money often aren’t too fond of being told what to do, but they also didn’t get to the top by reinventing other people’s broken wheels. Where Sussman’s paper has paved the way, Henry and Bezos should consider following.

Here’s what these billionaires should do — not just because fellow ten-to-the-ninthers are doing it, but because it works.

First, take themselves out of the picture. Sussman, as a hedge-fund manager, is probably more used to this sort of thing than Henry, who owns media-magnet properties including the Boston Red Sox and the Liverpool Football Club. And Bezos, as founder and CEO of Amazon.com, is hardly a stranger to the spotlight. Zell, for his part, kept putting the spotlight on himself; Murdoch can’t seem to duck away. Buffett’s holdings are too far-flung for him to be in the local mix too regularly. But then, if Bezos allots his attention according to financial proportions, the Post will take up 1 percent of his time — that’s how much he spent of his $25-billion fortune to buy it.

The more the news, and the paper as a whole, are independent of the heavy hitter behind the scenes, the better for all involved. Readers will appreciate getting information through an editorial process with integrity (which should definitely include ownership disclosures in every story where that’s relevant). Journalists will dig for truth and understanding rather than spin and marketing. Advertisers will come to understand they simply don’t carry enough financial clout to sway coverage. And the owners themselves will avoid all sorts of questions about ethics, improper influence, and messing with the public trust. They should hire respectable, reputable journalistic leaders to helm their operations — whether keeping existing staff in place or seeking new blood.

Then, they should not expect to make much money. In fact, calling newspapers, as Sussman has, an “important community resource” — not a business — would probably be a good idea. ewspapers are no longer a license to print money, but they can make a modest profit. And much of the past financial pressure on newspapers was debt, of which all these papers are now free.

Next, they need to make the product better. Sussman has invested in editorial content, and it’s paying off. Witness major pieces by Colin Woodard, for example, shifting the political conversation around government hiring lobbyists to be regulators.

Sussman is also investing in internal systems improvements, smoothing the editorial process and allowing actual financial tracking in near-real-time. But those should only be in service to improving the finished product, which is what the general public sees.

Which leads to the final suggestion: The new owners must remember they still answer to the public. Amazon.com depends on having a good reputation among millions of customers — and the same is true of the Sox. With newspapers, the ownership still answers to the audience, and depends on its trust and support. These billionaires got rich by collecting other people’s money; they should not forget transparency and accountability, especially as employers of the key enforcers of those principles.