Publications

Virginia Quarterly Review

The Bombing at Bala Baluk

The burn ward at Herat regional hospital is the best public facility of its kind in Afghanistan. It was opened with American aid money to handle the influx of women setting themselves on fire to escape domestic abuse, a countrywide phenomenon most acute in the hardscrabble villages of the western plains. The first time I visited the hospital, in the spring of 2007, a dozen teenage girls were crowded into a dank hallway of the former building. Some were covered with third-degree burns, wrapped mummylike in gauze dressings, still breathing but condemned to die.

Iraq: Orpheus's Error

Print and Image by Dimiter Kenarov, for the Pulitzer Center
Baghdad, Iraq

Taking cover from death, I live in a tomb. My CHU (Containerized Housing Unit) is tightly girded by twelve-foot-high concrete T-walls. Right in front of my door, a slab of wall has been pushed slightly forward, like an oversize tombstone, so I can sidle in and out through the convenient gaps. The T-walls would not withstand a direct mortar attack; they should, theoretically, make me feel safer.