Our Work

Jamie Reno weighs in on the Aubrey Sacco story

This is unusual for us. Two of our members have now written about the same topic - the sad story of Aubrey Sacco, who has gone missing in Nepal, and the efforts of her family - including brother Morgan Sacco, a San Diego State University soccer player - to find her. Robyn Norwood wrote about it a couple of weeks ago for USA Today. Now we have Jamie Reno's take on it for ESPNW:

SAN DIEGO -- Aubrey Sacco, an accomplished athlete, scholar, musician and artist, is the brightest star in her family's universe.

"Aubrey lights up a room when she enters it," said her younger brother, Morgan Sacco. "She's an effervescent person, full of life, and she totally loves glitter -- it reflects her personality."

But a year and a half ago, the "Glitter Girl," as her family and friends call her, mysteriously disappeared.

Aubrey, then 23, was nearing the end of a five-month journey of self-discovery through India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. She graduated from the University of Colorado in 2009, with a double major in art and psychology. She taught yoga, studied meditation and volunteered to teach children in one of the region's poorest schools on this trip.

Aubrey, who'd been everywhere from Costa Rica to Greece to Thailand, took a 45-hour train trip to Katmandu, Nepal, followed by a 10-hour bus trip to Syabrubesi to get to the western tip of Nepal's Langtang National Park. But she may have made a big, perhaps even fatal, mistake when she left her laptop and other items at a hotel and headed out on the popular Langtang Trek trail alone. It was the end of the trekking season and very few other backpackers were in the area.

That was in April 2010.

 

Robyn Norwood with a story of sadness, and hope

Our Robyn Norwood has this compelling piece in USA Today about a San Diego college soccer player and his family's quest to find his sister missing in Nepal. From her story:

SAN DIEGO – In the days before the San Diego State men's soccer team started readying for the season with drills and corner kicks, midfielder Morgan Sacco was 8,000 miles away in Nepal, hiking through terrain marked by landslides, leeches and snakes.

He was searching for his sister Aubrey, a 2009 University of Colorado graduate, world traveler and yoga instructor who disappeared in April 2010, while trekking alone in the Himalayas.

The family still has no answers, despite an earlier trip by Sacco's father and older brother to search for her, as well as the involvement of the U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu, the FBI and the Nepali army and police.

"It was really emotional for all of us, but it was really good to see the terrain she had walked, the lodges she had stayed at," Sacco said. "But it was, again, really frustrating. We didn't find as many answers as we had hoped."

David Warner on Pennsylvania's Amish population boom

David Warner, one of The Journalism Shop's new members, recently had this piece in the Harrisburg Patriot-News on the growth of Amish people in Pennsylvania, and some of the people who work with them. From the story:

Chubby drives his extended-cab truck, pulling a big metal trailer, down the rural road at a pace that even a horse and buggy could match. He winds up through the hills and past the cornfields, wondering about the health of the rain-parched corn as he goes.

His first mission: driving a farmer the several miles to Klinger Lumber in Elizabethville to pick up a big box of screws and other supplies. The farmer, 32, and a father of five, is building an extension on his barn for his Holstein herd, which grazes on pasture land on the 120-acre farm.

Susan Brink on one doctor's evolution

Our Susan Brink has a piece in On Wisconson, the alumni magazine for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, on what can only be described as a physician's path of enlightenment that began with a dying man's case of the hiccups. From her story:

The hiccups wouldn’t stop. It was August of 1996, and an elderly stroke victim lay dying in his home in the small town of Driggs, Idaho. But he could have no rest. He was stricken with a relentless case of hiccups, robbing him of comfort. The episode gave David Rakel, the man’s physician and neighbor, a memorable lesson in the importance of watching, listening, and heeding the desires of his patients. Drugs, the main weapon in Rakel’s medical arsenal, made the dying man groggy and unaware, and still the hiccups continued. Family members suggested acupuncture. Like many conventional, or allopathic, Western physicians, Rakel was skeptical. But he figured acupuncture would do no harm. “I humored them. I said, ‘Sure. Why not?’ ” It worked. The acupuncturist came. The hiccups went away without sedation. “He was able to die with loving family around him and a sense of peace. It was a beautiful death,” says Rakel, now a UW-Madison professor of family medicine.

Rick Schmitt on Twitter in Iran

Our Rick Schmitt has a piece in the new Stanford alumni magazine on a grad who played a crucial role in keeping Twitter online during the Iranian street protests, which allowed organizers to keep spreading the word outside the eyes and ears of the secret police. From his story:

 [Jared]Cohen read that the microblogging service was about to shut down its operations for maintenance. Although the shutdown would be routine and brief (and in the middle of the night in U.S. time zones), the prospect chilled the dissidents' leaders. Because the government was blocking cell phone texting, Twitter had become a lifeline. The protests were reaching a crescendo: What might happen if Twitter went silent in the middle of a turbulent day?

So Cohen emailed his friend Jack Dorsey, Twitter's co-founder and chairman. Dorsey had been part of a Silicon Valley delegation that Cohen had led to the Middle East earlier that spring to explore prospects for rebuilding Iraq. In a series of emails, Cohen asked Dorsey if the company was aware of the suddenly prominent role that it was playing on the international stage. 

 The rest—more or less—is history.