Her job is to identify the remains of migrants who die in the desert trying to illegally cross the into the US from Mexico.

She tells anchor Marco Werman that sometimes the only way to identify the bodies is through the few possessions found with them.

“Even though I was a part of an educated family, I had to suffer through a lot of sexual exploitation as a young child at the hands of male relatives,” Masood said. “It was taboo to talk about it or even acknowledge it, let alone ask for legal or social or psychological help for it.”

Masood eventually left Pakistan and studied abroad. Today, she works in San Francisco as a therapist. She entered her field because “I never had a therapist to talk to.” She added: “When I tried to broach the subject of my sexual abuse with my family, it was such an awkward conversation and it caused such so much pain and dishevel, that you were taught that the best way is to just close your eyes and close your ears and not say a word and suffer through it.”

For years, Masood has worked with South Asian women facing sexual and domestic abuse, both abroad and in the United States, including at San Francisco’s Asian Women’s Shelter. The shelter is in an undisclosed location. Reporters are not allowed to visit.

On occasion, threats are made against the women living there. Advocates stress that women seeking shelter at Asian crisis centers like this are like women fleeing domestic violence anywhere. But they also note that South Asian immigrants face particular challenges.

Maitri is another non-profit in the Bay Area focused on South Asians and domestic abuse. It is located in an office park. There is no sign outside. There is a separate private entrance for clients.

Sonya Pelia, who runs Maitri, said that South Asian cultural norms coupled with immigration complications can leave some women feeling trapped. In a scenario common in Silicon Valley, a South Asian woman can join her husband who already works here. She can typically hold an H-4 or “dependent” visa, which restricts her from seeking authorized work. It can be isolating.

Pelia said that when marriages fail or turn abusive, immigrant women can worry about their visas or deportation. Sometimes, there is the shame and stigma of a failed marriage.

“We will have young women call us and say, ‘I’ll kill myself here, but I won’t go back,’” Pelia said. Meanwhile, she added, the woman’s family back home might be told that there is “something defective” with their daughter for the marriage not to work, which can compound tension—and, at times, abuse—between the couple back in the United States.

“We find many times the violence is orchestrated long-distance,” Pelia said.

Pelia also noted that domestic abuse cuts across class lines. “It happens to women who are physicians, who are nurses, who are engineers, who are highly educated,” Pelia said. “I think societal pressure is the key denominator here.”

Maitri’s hotline receives thousands of calls a year from immigrant women seeking help. The group assists them in finding jobs, apartments, transportation—and immigration lawyers. In some cases, attorneys file Freedom of Information Act requests to recover paperwork from husbands, who can hide documents.

Yet Pelia is starting to see positive change.

“When we first started doing outreach, when I joined the agency 19 years ago, I could spend an entire day in a crowd of 5,000 people, standing behind the Maitri table and not one person would come by,” Pelia said. Her group, she felt, was considered “making much ado about stuff that should be fixed and solved within the family.”

Now, she said, more women approach the group and ask about their rights.

Following the December gang rape and murder of young student in a bus in New Delhi, vigils have been held in the United States. In the Bay Area, there have been vigils in Fremont, home to a large South Asian community.

Preeti Shekar, a young immigrant from India, organized the country’s first vigil. She runs Narika, a Bay Area-based group focused on domestic violence and South Asians.

Shekar said that since the rape in India calls to Narika’s hotlines have gone up. She has also had some tough conversations at home. “Some of my family members were like, ‘Why are Indian men violent?’” she said. “Men are violent everywhere. It’s not Indian men, it’s not unique.”

She drove the point that “we are all part of these systems where we sometimes willing or unwilling have embraced these regressive notions of women.”

Shekar said that she embraces discussions like this. In fact, she is now working with other activists in California to hold a large, public discussion about gender violence in the South Asian community next month.

Benét died Dec. 16, 2012 in Santa Rosa, California. He was 98.

Below is our profile of Benét originally broadcast in August 2012.

In the 1930s, nearly 3,000 American men and women volunteered to fight in Spain’s Civil War, against General Francisco Franco and his fascist forces. These vets became known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. About 900 of them were killed in fighting. Today, only four are still alive to tell their story. One of them is James Benét, now a sturdy 98 years old, living in rural northern California.

From his home in Forestville, Benét recalls leaving for Spain in his early 20s. At the time, he was a journalist living in New York, a socialist raised in a military family. So when he heard about Americans united by their anti-fascist views heading to Spain, Benét boarded a ship to Europe.

“If the moment comes when it’s the obvious right thing and somebody’s got to do it, maybe it’s going be you,” he said.

Once he landed, he headed to northern Spain to meet up with Spanish fighters and get equipped.

“We were given these awful uniforms. They were woolen, so really too hot. I guess they were leftover winter Army uniforms or something.”

He served as an ambulance driver on the front with other volunteers–shopkeepers from Brooklyn, musicians, mill workers from the Midwest–people driven by their beliefs but without any boot camp. They became combatants overnight.

“Some of them adopted the soldier’s life as if they were born to it. Fortunately, I was in pretty good physical shape,” he said. “Some of the others just had a terrible time. You had these strange experiences with guys. You know, the toughest guys you’ll ever meet, they turned out to be quite chicken. I’ve seen a guy’s hair turn white. Strangest thing in the world! He was afraid, of course. Everybody is afraid one time or another.”

Benét also remembers seeing Ernest Hemingway.

“The thing we liked about Hemingway was that he liked soldiers. He’d been under fire. He knew that you didn’t want to talk about it.”

After 18 months, Benét and many of the volunteers left Spain. They knew that with support from Hitler and Mussolini, Franco’s soldiers would win. But Benét says it was tough to go.

“You became so close to the Spanish people that you thought, I ought to stick around. Some of them went to the mountains and said okay, I’ll live and die here.”

Back in New York, Benét continued writing about the war for leftist magazines and Tass, the Soviet press agency. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade vets also organized public talks.

“We tried to explain — sure, you’re not interested in politics but politics is going to be interested in you!” he said. “Even young men who were going to be drafted, a lot of these guys just didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on. They didn’t see it.”

Some of the vets, including Benét, were viewed with suspicion, especially after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin formed a pact with Hitler in 1939.

“There were the people who disliked the Russians anyway. So they said, ‘Aha! This just shows you what rats they are!’”

Benét rejected the Soviet-Nazi pact too. But he was also dismayed that the U.S. had left Spain to fend for itself while the Soviets backed Spain’s anti-Fascists.

Well after their time in Spain, Benét and his fellow vets were labelled as Communist dupes. During the Cold War, they were called to testify before Washington groups, like the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

But Benét says he’s never regretted what he did back in the 1930s.

“I always felt that I was on the right side of history in Spain.”

It was one of many reporting trips to the Texas-Mexico border, as cartel violence slammed Ciudad Juárez, just across from El Paso. The places are so close that to get to the ATF office, I walked from Juárez, across one of the international bridges connecting the two cities. The ATF office was in an undisclosed downtown office building. After getting off the elevator, I was instructed to head down a long hallway and knock an unmarked door.

Inside, the place bustled with a handful of agents overseeing numerous investigations involving weapons seizures, many from private homes nearby. Large, microscopic maps of Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua state plastered the walls.

The ATF agents, who requested anonymity, seemed overwhelmed. Confiscated weapons nearly spilled out of one room. It was 2010, as thousands died violently in Mexico, many killed by firearms smuggled in from the US (Mexico has only one gun shop, in Mexico City; the cartels typically smuggle in guns through the U.S., Latin America and elsewhere).

In the room with seized weapons, a massive rifle stood out. It was an ArmaLite AR-50 and weighed more than 40 pounds. The gun’s thick, matte black barrel was the size of a small poster tube—designed to soften any vibrations, or “whip,” when fired. That improves accuracy. The tricked out .50-caliber, with its scope mount and muzzle, could cost more than $3,000.

Other weapons included pearl-handled Glock pistols. There were dozens of semi-automatic AR-15s and AK-47s, which one agent described as “military-style weapons because the AR is the civilian equivalent of the M-16.” Drum magazines, which can be purchased in person or online, can be added to carry an additional 100 bullets.

A stack of 20 rectangular-shaped cardboard boxes occupied one corner. It was a stash of more than 40 AK-47s found in an El Paso home.

When investigations end, the ATF destroys the weapons. Melts them down.

Many of the weapons originated from small gun shops, pawn shops, gun fairs, or at sporting goods stores. There are more than 2,000 sale points along the US-Mexico border alone.

The ATF agents worried most about straw buyers, or people with clean records buying weapons for criminals. “That’s someone coming into a gun shop with a list of weapons they need and a wad of cash,” one agent said. Guns shops are not required to alert the authorities to suspicious sales. “We hope that if someone comes in and buys 20 AKs, that they’d call us,” the agent said. Sometimes they do, “but they’re not necessarily required to.”

They also talked about gun-selling websites, from smaller outfits to generic wholesalers. Items can be shipped free, next-day anywhere in the US that holds a Federal Firearms License, or an FFL, a licensed local gun seller. The authorized dealer then transfers the weapon to the buyer. The buyer fills out a form and a background check is required (there’s a movement to subject gun owners to regular checks). Once there’s a greenlight, the transaction is done.

Websites market the AR-50 rifle as “wildly popular.” True. It’s currently out of stock on sites like Budsgunshop.com and Slickguns.com.

I lifted the 40-pound AR-50. It took two hands and felt like lifting two steel rods.

How was this used in Mexico?

“The cartel guys will take a firearm like this and mount it in the back of a Suburban,” one agent explained. “They’ll set it on a seat and have a door or a hatch out the back that they can flip up and shoot out of. Some of the people these guys are after are driving armored vehicles, too. But this weapon can go through armored glass and take out the driver.”

Who bought this gun? Where’d they recover it?

The agents traced the gun through its serial number to a woman living in Las Cruces, New Mexico, about 45 miles from El Paso. She turned out to be a sought-out straw buyer for the cartels.

In fact, one of the ATF agents said, she looked quite a bit like me: dark-haired, petite, about 5 feet 3 inches.

One of the agents testified at her trial, when the handguns and the AR-50 she purchased turned up at crime scenes in Mexico.

“I couldn’t believe it when they brought her into the courtroom,” the agent said. “You could barely lift the gun yourself. It’s a two-person deal! And that’s legitimately sold in the United States. Shoots out to a mile. It’s outrageous.”

Follow @monica_campbell

Here in San Francisco, like many places that immigrants call home, what’s on the table for Thanksgiving can vary pretty widely. Many stick to the usual: turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, but not everyone. Just ask Lea Nicolaides, from Brazil.

“The turkey is not our favorite. So, I like to have a good chicken, roasted. All the greens, you know, all the condiments. That’s the way we celebrate Thanksgiving.”

At an Asian seafood market, Mai Lam watches her customers inspect crabs and lobster from massive water tanks. Chinese cod and black bass are laid out on beds of ice. Lam is gearing up for her own 70-person feast. She is from Vietnam, but she’s doing seafood, Cajun style.

“A friend of mine lives in New Orleans and sent me a recipe and all the ingredients for the Cajun,” she said. She said she will mix like crab, clam, corn and potato. “And then some other appetizers like bacon wrapped with scallop, bacon wrapped with oyster. And for the kids menu we have mac and cheese.”

Not far away, on San Francisco’s Mission Street, there’s the go-to Middle Eastern shop, Samiramis. It sells everything from food to small rugs and hookahs. And its young, new manager, Wadee Imseeh, arrived a year and a half ago from the West Bank city of Ramallah. People from throughout San Francisco shop here, including immigrants from Egypt and Syria, Greece and Latin America.

“They buy the spices, they buy the nuts,” said Imseeh. “They buy Turkish delight, figs, apricots, and all the dried fruit, and the baklava, and they buy the phyllo dough.”

Wadee Imseeh is the manager at Samiramis, a popular Middle Eastern market in San Francisco's Mission District. (Photo: Monica Campbell)

Customer Kay Kostopoulos is shopping with her son, Andre.

“I’ve been coming here forever,” Kostopoulos said. “I used to be a belly dancer when I was young. And this is where we’d come to get our finger symbols.”

But today, she’s picking up stacks of phyllo dough for Thanksgiving.

Turkish Delight for sale at Samiramis, a popular Middle Eastern market in San Francisco's Mission District. (Photo: Monica Campbell)

“We’re making spanakopita,” she said. “We’re Greek-Americans, and we’re also making some pastitsio, which is kind of a Greek lasagna.”

“We always do turkey, but we always try to throw in some Greek elements with it as well. So the Greek stuffing has sausage in it and celery and always oregano, which some people aren’t used to with a turkey. And sometimes we have dolmades as an appetizer also.”

Down the street is the Mission District’s Fish and Poultry market. After a long wait in line, Maria Estella Escobar puts in her Thanksgiving order: three chickens for tamales. Typical Salvadoran food. She has already bought the banana leaves that she’ll use to wrap the masa, chicken, and potato. Escobar and her husband are here in the United States alone. They send their earnings home to support their kids back in El Salvador. Still, Escobar will cook for a big group anyway. She says Tamales are too much effort to only make a few.

“I’ll make about 100 tamales, she says, and share them with my neighbors.”

“When I found out about the LDS faith, it just felt like I’d come home,” Packard said.

Today, Packard lives in Saratoga Springs, Utah and feels even more at home. She’s near a Spanish-speaking Mormon church, with its towering steeple and manicured gardens. And there are others like it here, and across the US, as Latinos become the church’s fastest rising flock. The church’s focus on family unity resonates with immigrants.

Miguel Antonio López, a Mexican-American and Mormon who lives in Utah, at home with his new son and wife, Laura, also from Mexico. (Photo: Monica Campbell)

It’s an issue that for many here hits home.

Just south of Salt Lake City, in Provo, Miguel Antonio López, a new father, is home from work. He’s a US citizen from Mexico City and has always voted Republican. But then he met his wife, Laura, also in Utah and from Mexico City. Serving as Spanish interpreters for the church, they connected and started dating. “It got to the point where I knew I wouldn’t be the same person if I didn’t marry her,” López said.

But Laura López is undocumented. She crossed Mexico’s desert by foot with her family when she was 12 years old. Under a Romney presidency, they are unsure whether she would be deported.

“That’s scary,” López’s husband said. “It’s threatening our family.” He added: “Even when we mention our case to just friends they say, ‘Oh, well, she’s married to you. Doesn’t that help?’ And to our surprise and to their surprise, it doesn’t help. For somebody that crossed the border without any proper documentation, it’s very difficult. President Obama seems a lot more open and supportive of us as a community.”

López represents the growing number of Latinos here backing Obama. But it is still Republican-heavy Utah. There are plenty of Latinos for Romney who say his immigration views fit the Mormon emphasis on rule of law.

Marco Díaz, born in Peru and a Mormon and Republican living in Utah, stands near the Salt Lake Tabernacle. (Photo: Monica Campbell)

But Díaz may be a more lone voice as Latino Mormons—and Democrats—win political seats here.

Luz Robles is a Utah state senator and Democrat running for a second term. She was also born as a Mormon in Mexico and is backed by a sizable Latino bloc. In office, she has pushed through immigration policies here, including guest worker permits, drivers licenses and tuition breaks for immigrants, that contrast hard-line policies in neighboring Arizona. Policies that risk separating families don’t fly as easily here, Robles said.

“I’ve heard people calling me, crying on the phone, saying, ‘Help my neighbor. I didn’t realize how much of a nightmare there is behind this immigration system.’ And how much we would only be hurting families. That’s totally against what we believe as members of the LDS Church,” she said.

The Mormon church is outspoken on this too. Although church officials declined an interview, saying they avoid politics, they sent their statement on immigration. It’s a clear love-thy-neighbor, anti-deportation stance. Ignacio García, a history professor at Brigham Young University, explains what’s driving the church’s position.

Utah State Senator Luz Robles is a Mexican-American and Mormon representing District 1 in Salt Lake City. (Photo: Monica Campbell)

And he adds another reality for the church: conversion rates among white Americans are down. “Most churches are growing through immigrants,” he said. “As I like to say, white folks don’t like to convert anymore.”

No longer a homogeneous religion, the Mormon church must distance itself from Romney’s immigration policies, García says, or risk decimating a growing Latino flock.

Mitt Romney’s presidential run has brought attention to the Mormon church. But there is a side to the religion that breaks from mainstream references like Broadway’s “The Book of Mormon” or HBO’s “Big Love” series. It’s the church’s international mix, especially fueled by its presence in Latin America and, especially, Mexico, which ties to Mitt Romney’s own family ancestry.

In Provo, Utah, one man, Fernando Rogelio Gómez, has created a small museum solely dedicated to this small Mexican slice of Mormon history. It started when he found a trunk full of documents buried inside his aunt’s house in Mexico. Old books, relics and photographs.

“These are some of the early members,” Gómez says, pointing to weathered black-and-white photographs, now displayed in the museum. One features a man named Narcizo Sandoval, who Gómez called one of the “most prolific missionaries that Mexico has produced.”

What Gómez discovered at his aunt’s house, and what he has collected over the years, is now a trove of history about the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Days Saints in Mexico. It has convinced Gómez, a 72-year-old retired engineer and devout Mormon from Mexico, to create two museums dedicated to Mexican Mormon History, one in Mexico City and a new one here in Provo, Utah, Mormon heartland.

Mormon missionary work in 1887 among the Papago Indians living in the northern Mexican state of Sonora. (Photo: Museum of Mormon Mexican History)

Also on display, maps tracing the Mormons’ fast rise in Mexico. Gómez points to a map showing where some of the first branches were organized. The map also shows the church’s presence today, with nearly 30 missions, more than 220 stakes and 12 temples, with a new building under construction in Tijuana. “You can see it from that picture, that was the whole of Mexico back in 1946,” said Gómez. “In 60 years we have over a million members. So it’s really a fantastic history.”

Mexican Mormons migrating north brought their faith with them. Gómez compares being a Spanish-speaking Mormon in Utah in 1964 to today. “It has exploded,” he said. “There was only one small branch, but today there’s probably 35, 40 units just in Utah county.”

Across the road from the museum, at Brigham Young University, Ignacio García is a history professor and a Mexican-American who has also served as a Mormon bishop. He explains that Latinos are drawn to Mormonism for it’s tight-knit culture, a contrast to an increasingly distant Catholic Church. And he adds another reason why Latinos are drawn to Mormonism. “They still catch on to the pioneer

stories, the meaning of a people leaving, escaping from a place in which they are oppressed. It’s a way to escape mob violence,” García said. “In the Book of Mormon, there’s a mention where people come to this land through the hand of God. I hear it often, you know, we’re here because God wants us to be here. This is home.”

And there was a time when more American Mormons considered Mexico home, to proselytize, create colonies and practice polygamy, outlawed in the US And here is where Mitt Romney’s heritage enters the scene, when his forefathers helped set up colonies in northern Mexico.

Gómez hauls out two large books on US Mormon genealogy in Mexico. He points to an entry about Miles Park Romney, who lived from 1843 to 1904, and then to a map of Chihuahua state in northern Mexico . “This is Colonia Juárez, where the Romneys were as early as 1884. Educated and hard-working people.”

Romney’s dad, George, was born in northern Mexico in 1907. Romney’s grandparents were polygamists who fled the US government and its ban on plural marriage. But in 1913, Mexico’s Revolution and its violence drove many of the Romneys back to the US.

But not all left. Several of Romney’s distant relatives still live in northern Mexico today. “And they’re still there, there’s still a presence of the Romneys in the colonies.” If another path had been taken, if Romney’s father decided not to leave Mexico, life might’ve been far different for Mitt Romney. As novelist Héctor Tobar wrote recently in Smithsonian magazine, he might have “been born in Mexico, and might be living there today raising apples and peaches.”

Follow @monica_campbell

It’s week one at Oakland International High School. First, there is orientation. One small class formed a circle and a student volunteered to say her classmates’ names: Hamid, Santos, al-Abbas, Hoàng, Ricardo.

A diversity of names typical at urban schools, until you realize that every student here is from somewhere else: Guatemala and Burma, Nepal, El Salvador and Iraq, most rejoining relatives who emigrated to California years ago.

“Students come here from about 32 countries,” said Carmelita Reyes, the principal, who who started Oakland International High School in 2007. “But each country has a different educational philosophy, has maybe no educational opportunities. So we have kids that come to us very beautifully educated, don’t speak a lot of English. Or they may have not been in school for the last six years because there’s no secondary school in their village in Guatemala.”

Reyes started the school after visiting a place like it in New York, a public charter school catering only to new immigrants. There are now 300-plus students here, and the graduation rate is above the national average for immigrants.

“When you come into this country and you’re 15 or 16 and you don’t speak English, the chances of graduating are abysmally small,” Reyes said.

Here, there’s an effort to have students make up missing credits. And for students new to the U.S. and English, the first year here can start with the basics.

English teacher Lorraine Woodard ensures that students from different countries mix and make friends–in English, without fear of being
laughed at.

Arelia Martínez, 15, moved this summer from rural Guatemala, after getting the visa to join her mom here. In a recent class, she spent time practicing basic greetings in English with fellow students from Vietnam, El Salvador and China.

“I’m happy because I’m going to learn English,” Martínez said. She added that she also wants to become a doctor or a singer.

And while the new students ease in, older students push hard to graduate, even if it takes extra classes, an extra year.

Tekleweini Habte, who goes by T.K., is 18 years old and from Eritrea. He rejoined his parents in California, who came here years ago because of war. Staying in Eritrea meant years of obligatory military service.

Tekleweini Habte, an 18-year-old from Eritrea, is a freshman at Oakland International High School, a public school catering to newly arrived immigrants. (Photo: Monica Campbell)

“But here you have full freedom,” T.K. said. “You have choices what you want to do.”

In Eritrea, emigration is illegal. T.K. crossed the border at night into Sudan. He’d stuffed his school transcripts in his bag.

“I had them, but when we were running,” he said. “We had to escape from the border guards. We just run and throw all our stuff. If they catch you, they’ll put you in jail.”

Principal Reyes cobbled together a plan for T.K.

“He had no credits, no papers, whatsoever,” Reyes said. “So how do you treat him? Is he a ninth grader? Not really. He clearly had education so we decided to put him in eleventh grade and see what happens and he did very well.”

T.K. has pulled all-nighters. He’s taken summer courses.

“Very hard work. I finished though,” he said. “I can graduate this year.”

Principal Reyes is proud of achievers. An article about Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is taped to her office door. But she’s also realistic
and knows life in the U.S. means daily hurdles, big and small.

“You know, we had a kid who brought a machete to school,” Reyes recalled. “Well, in America that’s an expellable offense. And, well, he had a melon for lunch and in his country, if you have a melon for lunch, you bring your machete, you cut it up and split it.”

And there are far bigger challenges: culture shock triggering depression, the pull to work instead of study, the lure of Oakland’s street gangs. Reyes keeps a stash of white shoelaces and T-shirts in her office if students are wearing gang red and blue clothing.

Overall, Reyes said that the best intervention is keeping kids in school,
around other immigrants like them. That, she said, is the surest path to a diploma and a brighter future in the United States.

“I live in Jerusalem in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood,” Mohammad says. “This is my father. This is my library. I have lots of books.”

It’s a peaceful introduction. And then Mohammad’s life is upended.

Soon, we hear Mohammad’s grandmother shouting at Israeli settlers in 2009. They’d won the legal right to evict Mohammad’s family and his neighbors from homes they’ve lived in since 1956, part of an ongoing push by Jewish settlers for more control over Palestinian areas.

The film’s distinction is its focus on Mohammad, a bewildered 11-year-old living through it all. It’s a rare respective amid Israeli-Palestinian headlines.

In San Francisco, the film stirred complex feelings. Lois Jacobs, a nurse, was in the audience.

“I guess I have been more partial to the Israelis that are doing the occupying,” Jacobs said. “But after seeing this particular film it gives me a very painful feeling because I know that these families are being evicted from their home with all their possessions. And where do they go? What do they do? And it hurts me.”

It’s a response that Just Vision, the filmmaking group behind “My Neighbourhood,” hopes to elicit.

“You hear so often about this conflict but it’s translated into these broad political processes that people can’t really think of in tangible terms,” said Nadav Greenberg, the film’s associate producer. “Seeing someone kicked out of their home in the middle of the day, and then other families moving in in front of their very eyes is something that’s very difficult to remain indifferent to.”

In East Jerusalem, the film’s affected Mohammad, too. He’s 14 now, wants to become a human rights lawyer, and recently went to the documentary’s screening at the European Parliament in Brussels. In a phone interview from Jerusalem, he told me that it was a surreal, surprising journey.

Mohammad El Kurd and filmmaker Julia Bacha at a screening of the documentary "My Neighbourhood" in June at the European Parliament in Brussels. (Photo: Emily Smith/Just Vision)

“It’s my first time out of Middle East,” he said. “Also, when I went to the European Parliament, I thought it’s going to be really hard because I always think, I don’t know, they’re like politicians and what we see in the news, those mad faces and stuff. I just imagined they would all be, like, mad.”

The film does include claims by the Israeli settlers, sentiments held by an increasingly vocal and politically influential minority of Jews. In the film, a leader of the Jewish settlement movement said, “The Bible says that this area and this country belongs to the Jewish people. All this area will be a Jewish neighborhood.”

But the film focuses on the Palestinian experience and that included the shock of seeing Israelis from West Jerusalem also protest the evictions. When Mohammad first saw the protesters, he asked himself, ‘These are Jews?’”

“I was shocked,” he said. “I thought they’re Jews and Jews are bad and stuff. But no, I found out like most of the Jews are good.”

Greenberg, the film’s associate producer, who is from Jerusalem, was also there in 2009 and joined other Israelis defending the Palestinians. He says that “My Neighbourhood” also highlights a moment of Israeli-Palestinian solidarity, especially now.

“Things like evictions of families in East Jerusalem, things like growing settlements in East Jerusalem are pushing the city to the brink,” Greenberg said. “And if things explode in Jerusalem, things explode around the region.”

Zvi Benninga, an Israeli activist who protested against the eviction of Palestinian families in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, a movement highlighted in the documentary "My Neighbourhood." (Photo: Emily Smith/Just Vision)

Since the evictions, Mohammad’s family, more than 10 relatives in all, have lived in a cramped annex. Bizarrely, it’s in the back of their former home, where settlers now live. Relations are poisoned. Mohammad said that he and his new neighbors never talk.

“Never,” he said. “When people say, ‘How’s your new neighbors?’ Like, they’re not neighbors. You know, when a virus comes to the body, they are just like small cancer and I know someday they will just go away.”

For now, Mohammad says he’s glad that a wider public can see his life and also know the story of the Israelis who came to his family’s side. It gives him strength, he says, when a resolution to his home life now still seems far away.

Recently in Lisbon, Luís Tinoco, a well-known classical music composer, talked about surviving the economic crisis and one of the financial lifelines he sought out.

Tinoco was in his studio, filled with large composition books of minute, penciled-in notations: symphonies inspired by poets like Walt Whitman and Portugal’s Fernando Pessoa. A recent piece, he said, “took me, I would say, about four or five months to write, because I like to think things over and over and rewrite. It’s really hard work.”

But as Tinoco prepared his first CD, Portugal’s economy crashed – hard.

Key arts supporters, including the culture ministry, dissolved. Major foundations and commissioners retreated.

“It was always a mission impossible. All the doors closing,” he said. “I tried private companies, I tried state funding. I was really in a big stress, waking up in the middle of the night.”

Refusing to quit, Tinoco, like other artists here, improvised. In his case, he tested Portugal’s first ever internet crowdfunding company to raise the final 3,000 euros needed to finish his orchestral work.

“It worked,” he said.

In 30 days, Tinoco reached and surpassed his fundraising goal. But he was nervous, too. While Kickstarter made crowdfunding mainstream in the US, it’s still new to Portugal. That’s because artists here are used to institutional funding. Panhandling directly from the public is unheard of.

“I was a bit fearful because when you ask the public to be involved in the process like this, if that fails you are also failing in front of the public,” he said.

Tinoco did get some pushback. Fellow composers feared that Kickstarter-style funding would let the government off the hook. Perhaps. But Tinoco and others argue that they need money now, and that the government doesn’t have it in this weak economy.

“What happens as well is that government, and namely in this current day and age, they don’t unlimited funds and they don’t have the ability to fund every single piece of work that is out there,” said Paulo Pereira, co-founder of PPL, Portugal’s first crowdfunding company It’s a tiny start-up, in an office at a Lisbon business university. But it met its first-year goal of raising 73,000 euros for projects, including Tinoco’s CD.

Pereira says investments have come in from Australia, Asia, the US, Portugal, and elsewhere. He admits this may sound run of the mill to Americans, but the Portuguese are still pretty wary of giving online .

“People had some skepticism for example regarding online payments. And so these things take a little longer to catch on,” said Pereira.

“You need to build a lot of credibility on a platform like ours before people really start understanding that they can trust us, that the projects are good.”

Tinoco also talks about his risks: if his CD fails, the public will unlikely fund him again. And meantime, overall economic uncertainty lingers.

“Of course, we all try to think positive. And there is an expectation that this a kind of a journey of two, three, four years that we need to go through and something might start refreshing and recovering,” Tinoco said. “The worst thing is that we don’t know how more serious it’s going to get.”

Grim talk from an artist determined to survive, seek out alternatives and resist heading for the exits.

Listen to Luís Tinoco’s songs

Round

Sunset

That’s celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay on British television aghast at a stockpile in China of small, grey shark fins. They are used in shark fin soup, an ancient Asian delicacy found worldwide, traditionally at special occasions. The fin is actually tasteless, but when boiled down it adds a stringy, chewy texture to a delicate broth. A bowl of it can run up to $50—or $350 for a pound of dried shark fin.

But there’s growing worry about the shark business and what’s known as finning.

“What it means is that the fins of the shark are removed at sea and the body is dumped at sea,” said Peter Knights, who runs WildAid, a San Francisco-based group out to protect the tens of millions of sharks killed yearly. He helped get China to ban shark fin soup from its government banquets, and persuaded California lawmakers to ban the shark fin trade altogether. Other states are doing the same.

“The shark fin trade is a huge multinational business,” Knights said. “It’s devastated shark populations and something’s got to change otherwise there will be no sharks left.”

But Michael Kwong, manager at San Francisco’s Hop Woo Shark’s Fin Company, which distributes thousands of fins to restaurants and stores throughout America, says he already follows US federal laws. Those laws let Kwong bring ashore a whole shark to sell its meat, skin—and fins.

But California’s new law, in a move to stop the fin trade cold, makes it illegal for Kwong to possess the profitable fin.

“You’re talking to me, I’m one small entrepreneur in the city and county of San Francisco,” said Kwong. “There are lots of people out there who will flout the law. This law has forced the shark fin industry to go underground.”

That remains to be seen. But one thing for certain is that the anti-finning chorus in the U.S. is growing. Celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and basketball’s Yao Ming are trumpeting the need to save sharks.

Yet some say California’s law is biased.

Sitting at a Chinatown cafe, Taylor Chow, a seafood dealer, said the law discriminates. It’s too easy to target shark fins because only a minority in America connects with the food, he said.

“My memory with shark fin soup is the family gathering. Good times,” he said. “When you say, ‘You people are uncivilized, barbarian,’ I cannot accept that. We don’t want to be the scapegoat for the problems of the world.”

It’s about conservation, not race, says Paul Fong, the Chinese-American assemblyman behind the ban.

“We had to treat it like ivory,” Fong said. “It’s impossible to track it. It’s just easier to ban it. I mean, it’s like foot binding. That was outgrown and we can outgrow this as well.”

Dried shark fins for sale in San Francisco’s Chinatown. (Photo: Monica Campbell)

And some chefs are offering one solution: fake fin.

Meet Corey Lee, the young chef owner of San Francisco’s exclusive Benu restaurant. His dish?

“It’s a variation on a traditional Cantonese version of a shark fin soup,” Lee said. “The interesting thing about what we serve is that the actual shark fin is faux. So there’s a tang, or a broth that’s made with chicken and Jinhua ham, Shaoxing wine, and it’s also served with a black truffle custard because we need to introduce that luxury back into the dish.”

Chef Lee’s faux fin is part of a $180 tasting menu. Maybe it’s these chefs, creating alternatives to endangered ingredients, who stand to make legal killings in the culinary world.

With travel restrictions easing, more Americans can go and see Cuba themselves. And for those who do venture to Havana and its colonial downtown, there is a good chance they will spot the Plaza de Armas, a leafy square with restaurants, musicians—and booksellers, peddling mostly second-hand reads on everything from Cuban ballerinas, Hemingway and Russian-Spanish dictionaries.

But one bookseller, Juan Carlos Torres, explains what dominates here. “Politics,” he said. “That’s what sells most. That’s the priority.”

He points to the book “100 Hours with Fidel,” a marathon interview with Castro. There is Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s Bolivian diary, books on Cuban-CIA history and poetry by Cuba’s José Martí.

This is part of Cuba’s state-controlled book world. There are no independent bookshops. Foreign magazines are banned. Books are curated by the government and generally don’t test the Communist line. No exiled Cuban writers or Latin American giants like Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes.

But there is a flip side: a small literary underground, led by defiant Cubans with private libraries and books swapped on flash drives.

Meet the couple Miriam Leiva and Oscar Espinosa, both former government officials who split from the regime—and became internal dissidents. Their cramped Havana apartment is stuffed with books, from Spanish versions of bestsellers like Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat” and Barack Obama’s autobiographies to literature on post-Cold War Europe.

“They’re books that in Cuba don’t circulate, that we’ve acquired because friends have brought them,” said Leiva.

The couple, both in their 70s, have also rebuilt their library since 2003. That’s when Espinosa, who once advised Fidel Castro, was arrested for his critiques of the government.

“They arrived that night with a ton of boxes and started going through and tossing away books,” he said. “But I have friends, a lot of friends abroad and here in Cuba.”

Friends who continue bringing him books—faster than the Cuban government can take them away.

Espinosa shows a favorite: “The Feast of the Goat” by Nobel Prize winner Vargas Llosa. It’s a brutal portrait of Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican Republic’s former dictator. “Vargas Llosa is a blacklisted writer according to the Cuban government, along with other famous writers in the world,” he said.

Espinosa’s own book called “Cuba: Revolution or Regression?” is banned here. A friend from Spain sneaked in a copy.

In another part of Havana, Gisela Delgado, a computer technician, runs a private library from her small apartment. In 2003, the government cracked down and jailed 75 of the island’s dissidents, including independent librarians. Delgado was spared, but remains monitored. This year, when foreign correspondents flocked to Cuba for the Pope’s visit, her phones stopped working.

For the government, the sore spot is how books get here: through foreigners, from exiled Cubans, sympathetic diplomats.

And what the Cuban government deems inappropriate is arbitrary. When state police raided her library during the 2003 dissident crackdown, Delgado remembers asking agents how a book by Gabriel García Márquez could be confiscated. “They said, ‘The problem isn’t the title of the book. It’s you,’” she recalled.

That’s right, said Rafael Hernández, a political scientist in Havana and government-employed magazine publisher. “It’s not about all the books they have,” he said. “I think this is a part of a political opposition operation. That’s it.”

Hernández, a favored intellectual by the Cuban government, read many of the books unavailable in Cuba when he was a visiting scholar at Harvard. The problem is that these book collections are here in Cuba, breaking rules against material that could jeopardize the Revolution.

Hernández also avoids words like “censorship” or “banned.” Instead, he insists the real problem is the US embargo, which complicates Cuban publishers’ ability to export books. “Cuban publishing houses would like to have more titles,” he said. “The main problem is the money.”

Delgado, the librarian, does not buy that. Money will not put books critical of the Cuban government on the shelves, she said. At issue is what her books surely symbolize: a thorn in the government’s side, dissent—and support from the outside world.

We visited a tiny Islamic high school—a start-up, really—located in California, where high schools can house thousands of students. It’s called Averroes Institute and is perhaps one of the state’s smallest high schools.

Reem Bilbeisi is the principal of the tiny private Islamic high school in Fremont, just south of San Francisco—and the first of its kind in the area. Like so much in Silicon Valley, it’s a start-up: just nine students total, its inaugural freshman class. It’s even in an office park, an odd—yet affordable—location.

At least 250 Islamic schools like this exist in the U.S. and growth has been quick in recent years. At the university level, the first accredited Muslim college in the U.S. debuted just north of here in Berkeley.

Bilbeisi says her school combines academic and devotional rigor. She also considers it a “safe space.”

“If students aren’t comfortable in their space, then they’re not going to learn,” she said. “If they’re too concerned with people judging them or assuming they’re one way and trying proving that they’re another way, then they’re really not focused on their studies.”

The school is mostly one big, airy room. There are prayer rugs, and the book collection ranges from “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” to the Quran and Dave Eggers’ “Zeitoun,” about a Syrian immigrant and Hurricane Katrina.

The students’ origins are also diverse, with parents from Afghanistan, Fiji, India and Pakistan. All of this appealed to Sonya Maharaj. She’s 13, could have attended a top high school, but chose the Averroes Institute.

“I found it really fascinating,” said Maharaj. “For high school, I really wanted an experience that I could learn from—and that I wasn’t just another person, just another person that you see in the hallway. That I meant something to somebody.”

She’s also fine with the dress code, which requires a headscarf. “I feel like what you wear and, like, how you dress doesn’t really have an impact on you as long as you’re still a good person,” Maharaj said. “What you wear doesn’t define you.”

Sonya’s mom, Irum Maharaj, who is from Pakistan, did get pushback from her family. Her sister said that she was putting her daughter “in a bubble.”

“But I haven’t felt that with her,” said Maharaj. She said that she appreciates that students must volunteer within the community and that the school arranges to have speakers come in almost every week.

Principal Bilbeisi gets that students cannot live in a vacuum. Students must volunteer at non-Muslim non-profits and there are exchanges with other schools. Meantime, students are pushed academically and groomed as leaders.

“I do feel like this school has the opportunity to really blaze a trail and show that this is what it means to have an Islamic school,” said Averroes teacher Zaki Hasan.

But Islamic schools can be branded as extreme and isolationist. And on occasion they are met with intolerance. When administrators at an Islamic high school in Texas recently tried to join a private school sports league, they were asked why Muslim students would want to meet Jewish and Christian students if “the Koran tells you not to mix with infidels?”

Such prejudice will continue, says Charles Hirschkind, a scholar of religion at the University of California at Berkeley. “I think many people don’t really know how to think of those schools, whether this is the intrusion of some sort of dangerous sleeper cell of some kind into American society.”

There is one freshman who some critics of this school might fear. His name is Edrees Meskienyar and he was born and raised in America. He has also lived in Egypt and Yemen, and his parents are originally from Afghanistan.

“I’ve been doing religious studies overseas,” said Meskienyar. “It’s my number one priority. I believe we’re here for a reason. God and religion always come first.”

It disturbs Meskienyar when he hears news of the suspicions people have about Muslim students, such as when reports came out about the New York police spying on Muslim student groups. He wishes more Americans would see him as a typical teenager and tries to have a tough skin about it.

“People say stuff like that, but it doesn’t really faze me because I’m not always here,” said Meskienyar. “I’m always outside. I’m always playing basketball. I’m always going to the mall.” After high school, Meskienyar said that he wants to play college basketball.

Plus, at Averroes Institute, unlike what he has done at public schools, Meskienyar does not have to excuse himself to go pray in the bathroom, kneeling and pressing his head to the floor.

Principal Bilbeisi, who attended a large public high school, said she would have cherished this school as a teen. “When I was at home I felt like I was one person and when I was in a school I felt like I was another person,” she said. “I shut off the world and became kind of a loner. I wasn’t able to recognize how to bring the two together and I regret that.”

Bilbeisi added that gay students share a similar struggle as Muslim students “because sometimes it’s not always outward that you’re Muslim, especially if you don’t wear the hijab. So how do you kind of feel strong and feel confident that it’s okay to be that way but still fit in and have friends and still be considered cool?”

But while Bilbeisi is excited to shape what Islamic education can look like in America, the day is far off when her piece of educational turf will not come with a healthy, if not hyper, amount of scrutiny.

But as Monica Campbell reports, some Catholic priests are trying to protect the travelers by setting up shelters along the way.

A lone gunman killed seven people there on Monday – and police are still collecting evidence.

Though it’s called a university, Oikos does not have a large campus.

In fact, it’s part of an industry of small, private colleges that can often go unnoticed.

Sometimes classrooms are found in old storefronts.

Many of the students are immigrants looking for a professional foothold in the US as Monica Campbell reports.