Salinas Hospital Trains Interpreters to Serve Immigrant Population

Aired on The California Report Magazine on February 8, 2013.

http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201302081630/b

and on NPR's Latino USA on February 22, 2013.

http://www.futuromediagroup.org/lusa/2013/02/22/the-languages-of-natividad/

In the Salinas Valley, small farm towns like Soledad and Greenfield dot highway 101. Most farmworkers here are from Mexico, and an increasing number are indigenous people from Oaxaca and other Mexican states. In fact, almost one quarter of all indigenous Mexicans in California live in this region. They speak languages like Mixteco, Zapoteco, and Triqui. If they speak Spanish at all it's as a second language. That can create complex language barriers in work, school, and healthcare.  In Salinas, one hospital is trying to serve them.

From Soldier to Activist

Aired on The California Report Magazine on December 28, 2012.

http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201212281630/b

A lot of us are multitasking these days. But Emily Yates takes it to a new level. The 30-year-old U.C. Berkeley student is also a musician, a writer, a photographer and an activist. All of these parts of her identity developed out of the intense experiences she had after answering a fateful phone call when she was just 19.

A Traci Des Jardins Thanksgiving

Aired on The California Report Magazine, November 16, 2012.

http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201211161630/a

And on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, November 17, 2012.

http://www.npr.org/2012/11/17/165345521/for-calif-family-its-not-thanksgiving-without-rice

I asked two-time James Beard Award-winner Traci Des Jardins to demonstrate one favorite Thanksgiving dish for this story, but when I walk into her home kitchen in San Francisco she's making four. One of those dishes is her grandmother's rice. Des Jardins was raised in a family of rice farmers in California's Central Valley and, every day as a child, she ate this short grain white rice they grew.

Violins for Vets

Aired on The California Report Magazine November 9th, 2012.

http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201211091630/c

For this Veteran's Day piece I got to team up with the The Kitchen Sisters as part of the KQED Radio series "The Making Of..." -- stories about what people make and why. Ninety-two-year-old Remo del Tredici donates his hand-carved violins to veterans in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Siskiyou County pre-election road trip

Aired on The California Report Magazine on October 26, 2012.

http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201210260850/a

Up in Siskiyou County, on the Oregon border, people say anyone who calls San Francisco "Northern California" has it wrong. They live in the real Northern California. This sprawling county, home to the Klamath River and Mt. Shasta, has barely 45,000 residents. So the answer to the question "What's Government For?" comes back to people's relationship with the land.

Political Switchers

Aired on KQED News October 31 and Nov 1, and on The California Report Magazine

KQED wrote:

We don’t need to tell you the American electorate is polarized these days. You just have to tune in to any call-in show or even make an injudicious casual remark at Thanksgiving dinner to realize how personal our political identities are and how emotional discussing the issues and values surrounding them can be. So we decided it would be interesting to ask one Republican and one Democrat why they did what is unthinkable to so many: switch parties. Two portraits of political discontent…

A Republican since childhood leaves the party on the last day of the RNC:

http://blogs.kqed.org/election2012/2012/10/31/political-switchers-republican-since-childhood/






A life-long Democrat has a 9-11 conversion:

http://blogs.kqed.org/election2012/2012/10/31/political-switchers-raised-a-democrat/


The California Report mash-up:

http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201211021630/b

Fiddletown Fiddler's Jam

Aired on The California Report Magazine on September 21, 2012.

http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201209211630/c

Last year I was driving through Amador County on my way to do a story about a tiny Gold Country theater's performance of Grapes of Wrath:

http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201110281630/b

My GPS had no idea how to handle the little back roads, and I ended up driving through Fiddletown, and pulled over when I saw the 20-foot fiddle on its community center.  I heard they had a yearly Fiddler's Jam, so I had to go back.

PS -- my recorder pooped out on me this day so the whole thing was captured on iPhone.  Terrifying.