HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — This summer, two Boston College professors are leading a group of students to volunteer at a clinic for HIV patients who are at the end of their lives in a society where the illness carries significant stigma.

A mile from my hotel, the taxi driver looks at the instructions again, does a U-turn and then speeds down the city's main avenue. A good 45 minutes later we are on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, which most people around here still refer to as Saigon. The driver does a zig and a zag past stores selling pots and portable stoves and through an intersection crowded with commuters on motorbikes. Then tucked away on a side street that meanders past several industrial sites we arrive at an HIV clinic run by the Catholic Church, where I’m met by a woman who calls herself Vee, who tells me the name of the facility, Tieng Vong, is pronounced "Tan Vaughn" and means “Hopeful Voice.”

I’m also met at the gate of the “Hopeful Voice” clinic by Boston College professors Thanh Tran and Rosanna DeMarco. They’re leading a group of BC undergraduates on an eye-opening medical mission to help dying HIV patients at the ends of their lives: learning, relating, struggling with it all and then returning to Boston to make a difference back home.

How the Boston team got involved

“I am an expert in the area. I have been working with black women who are living with HIV who are aging with the disease,” says DeMarco.

DeMarco, a professor of nursing, is far from the HIV clinics of Blue Hill Avenue and the African American and Hispanic women she counsels in Boston. But HIV cuts through boundaries and knows no borders. “I partnered with Dr. Tran and we got five other students interested. All of us came together to try to learn. And see how the health care system works for these patients and what it’s like for them.”

Six students, with plenty of choices for a carefree summer, choose Vietnam instead, a place where HIV carries with it a stigma and a personal and cultural challenge. Says DeMarco:

“Vietnam, although stable in a sense, the rising rates among women and men who have sex with men is very significant. Thus the stigma in the Vietnamese culture. When you are perceived as doing something wrong, like IV drugs or sex working or doing something related to the usual connotation of why people get HIV, then you become ostracized and how painful that is in this culture because there’s so much value on family and connection.”

The students' motivation and the scope of the problem

In the doorway of a one-story suntanned brick building, Pauline Tran of Worcester extends her hand. She is one of five Vietnamese-American students at BC who’ve returned — if you will — to a country they have never known.

“I’ve always had an attachment to my background, to my culture. I’ve always been interested in helping the vulnerable, especially for my family who came from something like this,” she says. Her family escaped to the U.S. after the war. She and the other Vietnamese American students were born in the U.S. They say they have also come to this HIV clinic as a way of giving back to the country of their heritage. And everyone on this trip has a role. For instance, Nguyet Chau, a native of Worcester, helped translate the documents the team uses for the HIV prevention program.

They can use all the help they can get. Vietnam has very limited human resources. In a country of nearly 89 million people, about 300,000 have been diagnosed with HIV. But there are only 1,300 health workers assigned to this population, and many of them are volunteers.

Still, stigma is probably the greatest obstacle to controlling the epidemic, says clinic director Co Vinh, speaking in Vietnamese. “About 13 years ago when we founded this clinic there was no treatment for HIV here in Vietnam and most people had no knowledge about the disease. So their own families discriminated against patients and many of them were thrown out in the streets. Some live in the park under the benches and in the bushes.”

The scene at the clinic

We take a tour of the clinic: There are eight beds, a needle cleaning machine, photos of Jesus and Saigon’s archbishop on the wall; clothing, food and medicine are piled in one corner, medical charts in another. Local volunteers bathe patients, hand out supplies, chart their progress or lack thereof and offer moral support. BC nursing student Mary Gerardo is the only non-Vietnamese student among the six from the U.S.

“I’m from Richmond, Virginia. I don’t travel very much," she says. "They contacted me and I said that would be a great opportunity. Professor DeMarco, after meeting her, I said, 'I can do this.'”

Most local volunteers here are congregants at the Catholic Church that sits on these grounds in Ho Chi Minh City. One is a former clinic patient with HIV who seems amazed by his own survival. “They gave me free medicine starting in 2004,” he says, and that has stabilized his medical condition.

IV drug use in Vietnam is on the rise, as is voluntary and forced prostitution, according to the United Nations. Vinh tells me about a patient who was sold by her own mother into sexual slavery across the border in Cambodia and ended up with HIV.

She says, “The young woman ended up in critical condition with tuberculosis and I met her in a local hospital. I got her address from the hospital and later I was looking for her but the address wasn’t clear. So one rainy afternoon I was looking for her and found her sitting on the streets; coughing on the streets by herself. And when I saw her like that I just could not stand it and I used my own money to rent her a small room.”

To listen and to learn

While most of the Boston College team are visitors to this faraway land, Professor Thanh Tran knows Vietnam well and struggles — perhaps more than we can ever know.

“I was born and raised up here until I finished high school and came to the U.S. at the end of the war," he says. "I’m always very hesitant to return to Vietnam because I belong to a different generation and a member of the Vietnamese community in the United States that’s extremely anti- this government. But I came here with Dr. DeMarco and a group of students to learn about the health care system; how these people find resources [to take care of patients] under very limited conditions.”

And the commitment to reducing HIV infections and the stigma of AIDS outweighs any ideological tug of war between Vietnamese Americans and Vietnam, between heritage and politics, says Professor Tran.

DeMarco agrees and says being here offers an invaluable lesson: “No matter what the care is, whatever level it is, whatever is here or isn’t here, when people come here — they come with their family members and they don’t feel any stigma, they feel respect. When they come here they don’t have people not listening to them. They have people listening to them.”

And that’s perhaps the most important lesson here. These professors and their students are not missionaries. They’re not here to tell Vietnamese clinicians, caregivers and patients what to do and how to do it, but instead they listen and learn, says DeMarco. “As professors we’re interested in helping students not understand research like they are reading it out of a book but understanding that it’s a relationship with people who have real experiences and in order to ask good questions and to figure out the answers to those questions you really have to get to know the problem, up close and personal.” 

And “up close and personal,” says DeMarco, is a step nearer to addressing the stigma of AIDS that keeps many from admitting a problem that is worldwide in scope — from Ho Chi Minh City to Boston.
 

Part 2:

What comes to mind with you think of Indian slums?

For many Americans, it’s the Oscar-winning film “Slumdog Millionaire.”

But for one scholar, India’s mega slums — places so big they could be cities by themselves — represent innovation. Innovation so remarkable that it may have lessons to teach the world.

Guest:

• Bhaskar Chakravorti, senior associate dean, Fletcher School at Tufts University

The Irish president meets with Boston mayor Thomas Menino on May 4. (Isabel Leon, Mayor's Office)

 
BOSTON — Each year Ireland chooses one American city to help commemorate the Great Potato Famine. This year, Boston received that honor … and President Michael Higgins of Ireland visited the weekend of May 4 to observe the event. WGBH's Jordan Weinstein talked with Higgins during his Boston trip.
 
The famine led to the emigration of millions of Irish — many of whom came to the Bay State. In 1850, the Irish made up a quarter of the city's population. "Boston is particularly important, of course, because such a very large wave of Irish came in different periods," Higgins said.

He noted that those different waves of emigration represented "different Irishnesses." The arrivals of 1848 were "poor Catholics that have nothing. They are in fact poor, ragged, they're carrying disease," Higgins said — and that caused some tensions.
 

BOSTON — “The doors will open on the left side. The signs will point to the Red Line on the upper level.” A regular announcement over the subway loudspeaker guided commuters through the crowded underground at rush hour. I was on the Orange Line trying to get to Arlington and commuters were talking about their ride home. One woman said, “It’s better than driving.” Another commuter volunteered, “I ride the Blue to the Orange on to work and then back.” And another said, “It’s fairly efficient. It gets me home quickly.”

But this Orange Line is not the one you’re thinking about. This one is in Washington, D.C., where I recently paid a visit.

“The Washington Metro is one of my favorites,” said John Sterman of MIT. “It is even now, after 30 years, remarkably clean, well maintained. There is essentially no graffiti. There’s a strong norm among the riders — all over the city — that you don’t leave trash on the train. You don’t leave your old newspaper. You don’t litter with your food container, your coffee cup. It’s a pleasure to ride the Washington Metro.”

The problems at home

And that is just one way that the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority contrasts with public transit in other U.S. cities, said Sterman, a professor in the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of MIT's System Dynamics Group. He is also part of MIT’s Transportation Initiative, tasked with figuring out better ways of getting Americans from point A to B without spending money we don’t have on gas.

“We need a lot more transit and fewer cars," he said. "More and better commuter lines with more frequent service; more up-to-date rolling stock for subways, for streetcars; a denser transit network; more bike lanes. During rush hour it’s just as fast and sometimes faster on the bike than it is in a car. I actually bike to Alewife, lock it up and take the T.”

That’s common practice in world-class cities like Paris and Amsterdam. Urban planners believe that a so-called world-class city must have at least two things to deserve that title: class and a good subway system. But Bostonians can take comfort in knowing that that their subway ranks high up—at least in the U.S.— on some lists of indicators. For example, according to the American Public Transportation Association, the T is fourth in terms of ridership behind Chicago, D.C. and New York.

Grading the T

So on a scale from A to C, how do Boston commuters grade their own transit system? On the Red Line one day, three passengers gave it three different grades: an A-, a B- and a C.

The MBTA got an average grade from MIT’s Cynthia Barnhart, who heads the new transportation initiative. Barnhart is the associate dean for academic affairs for the MIT School of Engineering and professor of civil and environmental engineering and engineering systems. But her grade came from experience.

Given the amount of time it takes to get from MIT to Logan Airport, “I would have to give that a B-,” she said. And if there were one standard to strive for, she recommended Singapore, where the university is running a big project. "We're looking at future mobility and we’re using Singapore as our playground, our experimental playground,” Barnhart said.

A model in the East

Singapore is a half a world away and far from a perfect comparison to Boston. Both have plenty of cars clogging roads. But Singapore is different. It is investing time and lots of money in modern, technologically advanced public transit. As part of that initiative, the city-state has been working with MIT to better integrate subway and bus routes in ways that connect disparate Chinese, Malay and Tamil neighborhoods.

One spring day, I was 9,400 miles from Park Street — in Singapore heading into a subway with my guide, Tanny Lee. We were going to Chinatown, which Lee said was only two stops away. The train moved smoothly and quietly along the track at almost twice the speed as Boston’s Red Line. We covered the two miles within minutes.  

Charlie on the … bus?

Back on a city street in Boston, I saw the MBTA’s system of connectivity working well, on the surface; subways, trolleys, commuter rail and buses are integrated. They connect. But Sterman said our city’s bus system is problematic. “The problem is we don’t have dedicated bus lanes in Boston and the buses are stuck in traffic like everybody else,” he said. So it takes a long time to get where you need to go.

The question is: What else can Boston do to become a world-class transit city? Geographer Andrew Lynch thought we needed to expand.

“I had gone to high school in Arlington and I heard all the stories about them extending the Red Line and possibly extending it into Arlington, and ultimately shot down by the people of Arlington, but that sort of got my mind going and I wanted to know what that would look like on a map,” he said.

A few years ago Lynch, a member of the Boston-based Association for Public Transportation, grabbed an original MBTA map from 1945 and started mapping out new lines to connect the suburbs not easily accessible without a car. He not only looked at what the Red Line would look like into Arlington and beyond, but he mapped out other lines too.

“In the '70s when the Orange Line was being reconstructed north of Haymarket Square, the plan was to continue that all the way to Reading,” said Lynch. “In my plan, I take it to Reading, but I also insert a couple of stations into Medford and I also add a spur to Medford Center. A lot of this was just building off of existing rights of way.”

On Lynch’s website, the Blue Line extends way beyond Wonderland. “There’s been a plan to extend the Blue Line out to Lynn for 50 to 60 years," he said. "I continue that, but I also added a branch through Chelsea and into Everett” — communities that have never had decent rail service into the city.

A need for speed

A world-class transit system also requires faster trains; something Sterman said the U.S. has tried to address with Amtrak's faster Acela.

“Of course there’s been attempts over the years to fund development of high-speed rail in the United States," he said. "I think we should get it going truly in the Northeast Corridor first. The Acela is a big improvement, but of course it has to go much slower than it can because of the condition of the track. We need to fix that problem first.”

How much is the success of high speed tied to Boston’s struggling transit? In two worldwide surveys most of the best subway systems also linked to high-speed trains.

“A high-speed rail link between Boston and Worcester would take an awful lot of traffic off the Mass. Pike,” said Sterman. “And you can imagine that it would then be a big driver of economic development along that corridor. And the Worcester Airport, as Logan reaches capacity, could then be a viable option for a lot of people rather than driving to T.F. Green or up to Manchester.”

Andrew Lynch said he brought his idea for mapping out an elongated MBTA to T officials, but he’s a realist. It will never see the light of day. But then there’s the reality that when talking about ways to make the T world-class, "right now it’s so saddled with debt any serious consideration of massive expansion on this level is something that can’t really be taken seriously,” he said.

A crumbling system and crushing debt

And this is the discouraging picture facing Boston’s future. Richard A. Dimino is the president and CEO of the Boston-based nonprofit organization A Better City. He said you cannot be a world-class city if you shortchange public transportation.

The state is facing a $20 billion gap in transportation and a $3 billion gap in transit, he said. "That means that things are starting to break down. The transit system is going to become unreliable. We estimated that if people decide to get on the highways [it costs] about $65 million. Transportation is no free ride. And all of us, both in the business community and the community at large, residents of this state, need to work with our legislators to define the kind of transportation system that we want. And then find a way to pay for it.”

And if we don’t find a way to pay for it — what happens? Boston will be at a disadvantage to grow, compete and attract people, talent and businesses. Marilyn Swartz-Lloyd is president and chief executive officer of MASCO, a group representing medical and academic institutions in Boston’s Longwood area.

“The glass right now is really half empty," she said — but thought it was crucial to maintain hope.

"You need to look out for what you want in 20 years. You want some more routes that are underground. You may want some people-movers that are aboveground. I think it’s really important that in spite of the difficulty that we’re in, you’ve got to keep in mind what the ultimate transportation plan should be, and what’s the very best, because even if you only get 25 percent of it, you never stop thinking ahead and planning ahead and dreaming a little bit,” she said.

And those dreams are key to creating a robust transit system that brings growth to a metropolitan area, connects its suburbs and marginalized areas and creates more economic opportunities. For many, an expanded, faster and better-integrated transit system is the essence of a true cosmopolitan center: a world-class city.
 

In 2006, a social entrepreneur named Muhammad Yunus, the so-called "banker to the poor" who pioneered microfinance, won a Nobel Peace Prize. And ever since, the concept of doing good — while still making a profit — has been a hot topic in business schools and industry.

We talk to experts about the rising tide of social entrepreneurship. Does it have the power to address some of the fundamental problems in society — hunger, health, poverty? And we check in with local companies who are trying to change their communities and the world.

Understanding Social Enterprise

First, we delve into the background and theory behind the movement with two expert professors.

Guests:

• Robert Higgins, senior lecturer, Harvard Business School; founding partner, Highland Capital Partners

• Julie Battilana, associate professor, Harvard Business School; author, "Beyond Heroic Entrepreneurs" (paper)

On The Ground: Turning Business Into Good

Part 1:

Part 2:

We talk to entrepreneurs whose companies are running online auctions for charities, selling shoes to make money for clinics and educational initiatives, helping finance small businesses and funding socially-conscious organizations.

Guests:

• Jon Carson, chairman and CEO, Bidding for Good

• Chuck Rubin, CEO, Common Soles

• Miki Akimoto, co-founder, Saffron Circle; board member, Asian-Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy

• Steve Goldberg, managing director, Social Finance

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Sometimes, to talk about the future, we need to visit the past. Remember "MacGyver," the popular TV show of the '80s? To escape deadly situations, the secret agent combined his expertise in physics and chemistry with ordinary household objects.

Today, at MIT, they’re not using MacGyver’s paper clips and duct tape to get out of risky jams. But they are turning to Legos and bike pumps to help solve problems in the developing world such as dengue fever and asthma.

The lab of the Little Devices Group on the MIT Campus resembles the garage of a hacker. At first glance, it seems pretty ordinary: tools, pipefittings, test tubes and wood spread out across the room. Upon further inspection, you see Popsicle sticks, dissected toy helicopters and boxes of Legos.  But make no mistake: the work done here is far from child’s play.

Jose Gomez-Marquez is a medical device designer at Little Devices. In a tour through the space, he points out the sections of the lab.

“Generally our lab is divided between dry and wet, mechanical and electrical with a little bit of everything in between sometime. In the mechanical side of the lab, what we have here are a lot of toys. We use a lot of toys because those are durable parts.” Gomez says.

A man, a plan, a bike pump nebulizer, Nicaragua

And where do they find those toys? Rummaging through the aisles of toy stores and dollar stores is a big part of what the Little Devices Group does, which is making MEDIKits. These kits come with devices and are designed to save lives by doing what we take for granted: check vital signs, administer drugs and perform diagnostics. For a nurse in Nicaragua, these kits can improve the quality of care she gives—and save someone a long trip to a hospital just for a quick asthma treatment.

Gomez-Marquez plugs in a compressor attached to a nebulizer. “The nebulizer works by having a compressor you connect to a wall, and all it does is blow air. So we started playing with these instead," he explains.

He then takes out a bicycle pump the team bought for $5 in a hardware store in Nicaragua. When you think about it, it does the same job as a nebulizer—blowing air—but it's powered by a human, not electricity.

The team tore out the part that connects to the bike tire valve. Add a zip tie to the tubing… and the end result is a bike pump nebulizer that is being used in remote areas of Nicaragua, where electricity can be scarce.

The kit in the field

It seems easy in an MIT lab, but what happens when a kit of tubes and doodads arrive in a poor village?

“We basically try to give them the parts in a way that’s smart— that have a language of design [so] they know how to put them together," Gomez-Marquez says. "By language of design, we mean, you never have to teach a kid how to use Legos. They just have an intrinsic snap-on quality about them. And if they want to make a car, there is just some underlying logic that allows them to make a car. We think the same should be true with a medical device.”

The Little Devices Group wants to democratize the way people fabricate medical devices and break down any class barriers between the medical communities of the developing and developed worlds. Sending simple tools allows users to develop their own prototypes to create solutions for the problems they see on a daily basis.

“It’s much more different to come up with a device here than to come up with a device out there,” Gomez-Marquez explains.

A step backward?

Some critics of the MEDIKit say the emphasis on empowering those in the developing world should be on training, not making simple devices out of toys and plumbing hardware.

“They don’t so much need instruments and tools and devices as someone who knows how to fix them and keep them working,” says Irving Bigio, a professor of biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering at Boston University.

While Bigio’s research also focuses on creating devices for poor countries, he says training and troubleshooting are the key.

For a nebulizer, he thinks the best approach is to teach people "how to simply repair it and keep it working. If nothing else, they’ll be ready to make use of the piles and crate loads of equipment that various donor organizations dump on them and they don’t know how to use."

In the meantime, the team at the Little Devices Group continues to go toy shopping. But they’re also developing more MacGyver-type fixes to problems—like a surgical tool sterilization kit using pocket-sized mirrors and a pressure cooker, or handing out free cellphone minutes as an incentive to take your medicine.

“A lot of people are going blue in the face trying to yell at us because we’re being cowboy inventors," Gomez-Marquez says. "But I think for every good idea, you’re going to get a handful of people that do that, and that means that you’re doing a good job."

BOSTON — On Monday, Italian officials announced that divers pulled two more bodies from the wrecked Costa Concordia, bringing the death toll to 15. Salvage workers began pumping fuel out of the capsized ship, hoping to avoid an ecological disaster.
 
At least 17 people remain missing. The number might be higher: over the weekend, Italian officials said it appeared unregistered passengers were on board when the ship rammed a reef 10 days ago and a rock sliced a 160-foot hole in its hull.
 
The ship’s captain Francesco Schettino is facing charges of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning ship. Many passengers claimed he left them to fend for themselves. Schettino denies the charges, saying he orchestrated the ship’s evacuation from a nearby lifeboat.
 
Brandon Warrick of Braintree, 22, was one of those passengers, traveling with his sister and brother.
 
The scene was "just chaos," he said. For the first 10 minutes after the ship shook and the lights went out, "they didn't do or say anything." Then, "they made the announcement that it was an electrical problem and it would be fixed in no time." And then, they heard the ship's death knell, just like an EKG flatlining in an operating room: seven beeps followed by one long beep.
 
The passengers were completely unprepared to handle an accident: There were no evacuation drills, just one emergency card, Warrick said: "It was pretty much just a free-for-all to get on the [lifeboats]." He still can't imagine how some people stayed in their cabins… where victims have since been found.
 
Warrick said he never seriously feared for his life, noting that the ship was relatively close to shore — he studies kinesiology at UMass Amherst and is a serious tennis player — and the water filled with police boats. He even said he'd go on a cruise again someday. But not, perhaps, with Concordia.

 
SOMERVILLE, Mass. — Thursday marked two years since the devastating earthquake tore apart Haiti. The quake killed 220,000 people and left at least 1.6 million homeless. Boston is home to about 100,000 Haitians, making us the fourth-largest Haitian community in the nation. Today, many are frustrated at the pace of recovery… and the flow of financial aid.
 
The Haitian Coalition operates from a small apartment in a housing project just blocks from Tufts University. Lince Semerzier, who runs the bare-bones office, said the Haitian Coalition has been struggling financially to keep up with the needs of people who moved here after the earthquake:

"You have a lot of great organizations, Haitian organizations that are doing more with less," he said. The coalition is one of a number of groups that have been instrumental in providing services — "mental health support services and also working on finding shelters for families."

On this day volunteers are taking calls from Haitians from Somerville out to Pittsfield who are frustrated about the conditions of family members and friends left behind in Haiti. Two years after the earthquake, most are still living in temporary housing built by the Red Cross and other organizations.

Semerzier was recently in Haiti. "You should see what they’re building. It's like little boxes — and they're calling them houses," he said.

Melinda Miles, a Haitian American from Northampton, works in Port-au-Prince for TransAfrica. "It’s true that there were billions of dollars pledged and also donations that came in from various NGOs," she said. "What we’ve seen is that despite that fact there were over one and a half million people displaced, very little of the money has actually gone for the construction of housing."

TransAfrica is one of several organizations monitoring how money is being spent in Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake. "One of the goals that was set in the first year… was to build 125,000 transitional shelters. Now we're at the two-year mark and there still aren't even 100,000 shelters," Miles said. That means more than half a million people are living under tarps and tents.

Michael Delaney is with Oxfam America, based in Boston’s North End. He agreed that two years after the earthquake, housing remains the most intractable problem. But, he said, non-governmental organizations, including Oxfam, are dealing with a major catch-22: Before they can move people out of the camps and help them rebuild, the government has to deal with the issues around land.

"There’s a lot of open land that can be used for new housing programs but there hasn’t been a bold action" to use it for low-cost housing, Delaney said.

Yet increasing numbers of Haitian Americans blame the slow pace of development in Haiti on the non-governmental organizations themselves. Semerzier described it as"an international mafia." He criticized groups such as Oxfam and the Red Cross for not hiring qualified Haitians and Haitian Americans for jobs in these projects.

Semerzier’s organization is competing for the same limited pot of money for development work in Haiti, and that may color his opinion. But a new investigative report by an independent journalism group, Haiti Grassroots Watch, concurred with many of Semerzier’s concerns.

Read the report.

"A foreigner will get eight times what a Haitian will get for the same work," said Jane Regan, a college professor and journalist in Port-au-Prince.

Where does the money go? Some has gone to good purposes, such as cholera treatment pills for the water supply and tarps, she said. However, "there has been little accountability and also little participation of the actual eventual beneficiaries, and therefore there has been a lot of waste."

Haitian organizations and watchdog groups also point out that a good deal of the funds earmarked for Haitian development and relief in the aftermath of the deadly earthquake have helped save lives and jumpstart an economy that had been left for dead. A few weeks from now, the Haiti Coalition of Somerville will take a delegation of medical professionals to Haiti from the Cambridge Health Alliance. They will be accompanied by Haiti Grassroots Watch. That way, Regan said, no one will have to wonder where resources go once they reach Haiti’s shores.

Britney was a communications major at Lynn University in 2010 when she joined a humanitarian mission trip to Haiti. She was distributing meals to the country’s poverty-stricken children. The experience changed her, something she shared with her parents in a text message:
 
“They love us so much and everyone is so happy. They love what they have and they work so hard to get nowhere, yet they are all so appreciative. I want to move here and start an orphanage myself.”
 
Three hours later, a devastating magnitude-7 earthquake leveled much of Haiti.
 
At first, relief: The family was told Britney had been found alive and was heading back to Florida. They packed their bags and headed down to Florida to meet her. Then, devastation: When they got to Florida, the family learned Britney was still missing.
 
“We were told our children were safe and rescued,” Britney’s father Len Gengel told reporters at the time. “And now we’re told they’re not.”

Thirty-three days after the earthquake, Britney’s body was pulled from the rubble of the Hotel Montana. She was the last of six Lynn University students and professors to be recovered. The university remembers the students killed in the quake.

In their grief, the Gengels remembered Britney’s text message: “I want to move here and start an orphanage myself.”
 
In September 2010, the Gengels bought a perch of land overlooking the water for $50,000 in the southwestern town of Grande Goave. Britney was supposed to visit there with her mission group the day after the earthquake. A year after the quake, the family broke ground on a 19,000-square foot orphanage, with a medical clinic and outfitted with solar panels. The best part: The building will be earthquake-proof.
 
Shaped in the letter “B” for Britney, the building will be home to 33 boys and 33 girls. The number represents the number of days it took for Britney’s body to be recovered. The Gengels say they're not sure yet how those 66 children will be chosen — there are now roughly 2 million orphans in Haiti — but they want the orphanage to house “true” orphans: children who have lost both parents.
 
The Gengels hope to welcome 66 of them by the three-year anniversary of the earthquake that took their only daughter.

BOSTON — Was the Iraq War worth it? The attacks across Iraq on Dec. 22, just days after American troops left, has put a point on the question .
 
On Dec. 15, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta defended the cost of the war, both financial and human: “Those lives have not been lost in vain. They gave birth to an independent, free and sovereign Iraq.”
 
But not everyone agrees with him. Such as Nicholas Burns, a professor of diplomacy at Harvard and a major figure in the U.S. State Department under President George Bush. At the time, he supported the decision to go to war with Iraq. Now, he said on “The Emily Rooney Show,” he has a different opinion.
 
“We accomplished something in Iraq, in overthrowing Saddam Hussein. We’ve given the Iraqis a chance for a better future. So I don’t look upon it as an unmitigated disaster,” he said. However, “when I ask the question ‘if we rolled back the film would you do it again?’ I certainly would not support a military invasion of Iraq.”
 
Most of all, Burns wondered if we’ve lost sight of something we all give lip service to at this time of year… peace.
 
“Think about Lincoln after the Civil War, FDR and Truman after the Second World War, even Nixon in Vietnam. The ultimate national aspiration was peace. They said that,” he said. “Our political leaders in both parties are now not saying that. What they’re saying is ‘defend, protect ‘ — a very important thing but we’ve also got to think about, about in a democratic society, flying the flag for peace and having that as the ultimate aspiration.”
 

SEOUL, South Korea — Kim Jong Il, North Korea's mercurial and enigmatic leader, has died. He was 69.

Kim's death was announced Monday by the state television from the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

Kim is believed to have suffered a stroke in 2008 but appeared relatively vigorous in photos and video from recent trips to China and Russia and in numerous trips around the country carefully documented by state media. The leader, reputed to have had a taste for cigars, cognac and gourmet cuisine, was believed to have had diabetes and heart disease.

In a 2003 documentary, FRONTLINE described North Korea's relationship with its ruler:

North Korea was ruled by Kim Il Sung from the time the regime was founded in 1948 until his death in 1994, and has since been ruled by Kim's eldest son, Kim Jong Il. These are the only leaders most North Koreans alive today have ever known. The veneration of Kim Il Sung, which began in the 1940s and has grown ever since, exceeds the "cults of personality" promoted by Stalin, Mao, and perhaps any other modern leader.... It appears that most ordinary people in North Korea revere the two Kims as great heroes and leaders. They have no outside point of reference from which to criticize their leadership, and have never seen any alternative.

More about Kim Jong-Il and the country he ruled, from FRONTLINE.
 

Material from The Associated Press was used in this report.

BOSTON — Deval Patrick finishes his nine-day trade mission to South America on Friday excited by new collaborations with countries there.

Massachusetts may be smaller than some of the states that have lured foreign leaders into trade deals — California, for instance. But Patrick told WGBH News’ Jordan Weinstein on Dec. 8 that the Commonwealth’s emphasis on innovation is a big attractor for South American leaders.
 
In Brazil, the administration signed an agreement with a Brazilian agriculture research corporation, Patrick said: “They’re very interested in technology coming out of UMass that enables them to increase their yield. That’s very promising.”
 
Another agreement was signed in Chile “with a great emphasis on clean and alternative energy, which is something we can learn about from them and they can learn about from us,” he said.
 
Patrick also shared his opinion of the hot topic at home: Occupy Boston.
 
“I think the Occupy movement has been important for all of us because they’re calling attention to issues and concerns on everybody’s mind,” he said. “Issues of income inequality, questions about whether the American Dream itself is up for grabs.”
  
Despite the divide in public opinion, Patrick believed that both those in the Occupy Wall Street movement and many who themselves work on Wall Street shared the same concerns for the country.  

BOSTON — Egypt’s year of unrest gave rise to parliamentary elections on Monday, Nov. 28 — the first since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in February. The huge lines trailing out of polling stations throughout the day, in an atmosphere described as largely peaceful and celebratory, were evidence that most Egyptians felt it was the first time in their lives that their vote actually mattered.
 
In particular, women voters hoped the elections would result in a separation between church and state, and change the cultural attitudes of oppression.
 
Though the nation seemed on the whole optimistic, some naysayers were wary of just how much Egypt could re-establish itself in the 10 months since the Arab Spring began to unfold.
 
Overall enthusiasm remained high on the second day of voting. According to international observers, so many people continued to arrive that some polling centers ran out of ink to mark their fingers.

SALEM, Mass. — These are men ravaged by a revolution. In late October, 22 Libyan men — all rebel fighters wounded while fighting Moammar Gadhafi loyalists — were flown to Spaulding Hospital here for rehabilitation, with the transfer facilitated by the US State Department.
 
Ranging in age from 16 to 48, the men have suffered extreme trauma, said program coordinator Kevin Love: “Many of these guys have upper-body injuries, whether they relate to actual warfare gunshot wounds, or in fact in some cases guys were tortured and abused.” The injuries include orthopedic ones, involving bone, muscle and nerve damage.
 
To make the treatment process as comfortable as possible, Spaulding placed all of the men on the same floor — keeping their sense of community intact. Since none speaks fluent English, there is an omnipresent translator. Post-It notes turn a walk anywhere into an English lesson. And a room at the end of the hall has been transformed into a place of prayer.
 
A cultural transition — but maybe less unfamiliar than expected

Said Love, “It’s going very well. People here have worked really hard at that, from the most simple thing like going on Google and trying to learn what the customs are in Libya, what kind of foods people eat, what kind of music they listen to.”
 
Some of the patients’ creature comforts have surprised Spaulding staff.
 
Love said,  “The guys tell me they use Facebook, they use Skype. They watch MTV back at home in Libya. They certainly listen to a lot of American culture and see the films.”
 
Among the patients here is Salem Mohamed, a civil engineer with his own contracting company. One morning in August he joined a caravan of about 400 men, he said, to attack Gadhafi forces in Al Jawsh, a mountainous region in Southern Libya. His brother, a videographer, recorded the attack.
 
“I was surrounded by the militia of Gadhafi. We were trying to escape the trap [they] made surrounding us,” Mohamed said through a translator.
 
Manning a gun on the back of a pickup truck, Mohamed came under intense fire and was hit by shrapnel. He was carried, bloodied and unconscious, into a Libyan hospital.
 
Mohamed said, “I get injured in my hand. The injury actually led to a cut of the vessels in my hand, and also injured the nerves and the tendons of my arm.”
 
After physical and occupational therapy at Spaulding, Mohammed said much of the use of his hand has been restored. Although he has a way to go before being discharged, he was eager to return home, hoping his country would be healed as his hand has been.
 
Mohamed said, “I believe Libya is going to move to the best future. I believe [there] will be an election, [there] will be a constitution and I believe Libya will be more advanced.”

BOSTON — Lawyers and advocates for victims of Roman Catholic clergy sex abuse have welcomed news that former Boston archbishop Cardinal Bernard Law has resigned from his position in Rome.
 
The Vatican announced on Nov. 21 that the 80-year-old Law had resigned his post as archpriest of St. Mary Major basilica. Spanish Monsignor Santos Abril y Castello has been named as Law’s replacement.
 
Law stepped down as Boston's archbishop in 2002. Critics have said he did little to protect children from predatory priests. The archdiocese deferred comment to the Vatican. 
 
Mitchell Garabedian, a lawyer for many sex abuse victims, told The Associated Press that now is the time for Law to return to Boston to apologize for his "immoral actions," but acknowledged that was "highly unlikely."

Terence McKiernan of bishopaccountability.org told WGBH News, “It’s good to see the back of Cardinal Law and I think that anyone experienced his time in Boston and has seen how he’s been honored in Rome despite what he did here is happy to see him go.”
 
McKiernan read significance into the way the Vatican announced the news.

“I think it’s also important that he was removed unceremoniously — that his replacement was announced and no great trouble was taken in announcing the fact that he was no longer going to be the archpriest,” he said. “All of that indicates to me that Pope Benedict and his people are really deciding that this is the end of the Cardinal Law era, that Cardinal Law is no longer going to be a patronage boss in the Catholic Church.”
 
Material fromThe Associated Press was used in this report.

CHELSEA — Founded 6 years before Boston, Chelsea’s history is the immigrant story: First came English settlers, then the Irish escaping famine and then, in the early 1900s, Russian Jews escaping religious persecution.
 
Immigrants flocked to Chelsea through the 20th century, filling low-paying jobs in city’s many factories and shipyards. Today, the factories are gone — some converted into lofts — and there is only one shipyard left.
 
Also gone are the city’s once-thriving Irish and Russian communities, replaced again by a new wave of immigrants. Juan Vega is the president of Centro Latino, an organization that offers English classes and other services to help new immigrants get on their feet.

“Around the ‘70s you began seeing a mass movement of Central Americans, particularly from El Salvador,” said Vega. “The 1980s I would characterize as being a decade where you saw a lot more South Americans." Most recently people from Latin America have called Chelsea home.
 
According to the latest Census numbers, 62 percent of people now living in Chelsea are Hispanic or Latino, compared to just 9.6 percent statewide. And everywhere you turn, that identity is on display. From its bodegas to its taquerias, Chelsea teems with ethnic flair.

A built-in support system for newcomers
 
Vega is a lifelong resident of Chelsea and the son of immigrants. He says the things that brought people to Chelsea 100 years ago, such as its close proximity to downtown and its well-established social services, are still attractors today.
 
“There is a structure that exists here and a vibrancy that goes along with that, that allows newcomers to kind of land here and be able to really find their way in a relatively short period of time,” Vega said.

Read Chelsea data on population, homeownership and income

Mauricio Ramirez is one of those newcomers benefiting from Centro Latino’s services. He came to Chelsea 2 years ago and said that he has no intention of leaving.
 
“Wherever you go, everyone speaks Spanish here. It’s easy to get a phone. It’s easy to get shoes because you can talk to the people,” he said.
 
Ramirez left his homeland of Costa Rica only 6 years ago but said the move was something he’s dreamed about since he was a kid.
 
“That was the only thing I had on my mind: United States. America,” he said.
 
His reason for leaving was simple: He wanted his piece of the American Dream.
 
“I want to get a better education than what I have right now. I want to go to MIT. That’s my dream so far, but you have to work." He laughed. "You have to work hard.”
 
And he does.

Getting ahead, hour by hour and byte by byte

At 5:00 p.m., Ramirez was getting home from his day job as a screenprinter in Watertown. On this night his wife was working, so he waited for their 10-year-old son Edgar to come home. After a quick peanut butter and jelly sandwich, Ramirez was back out the door. He dropped Edgar at his grandmother’s then was off to Centro Latino, where he crammed into a small, stuffy room with 12 other Spanish-speaking students, all hunkering down for a long night of learning.
 
Ramirez is taking a computer certification program, and it’s intense: 4 hours a day, 4 days a week, for 6 months.
 
“We’re fixing computers, all the hardware, software and all the components of the computer — troubleshooting,” said Ramirez. 

Nestor Uribe, himself an immigrant from Columbia, is the teacher. He stood at the front of the room. Working from a Powerpoint presentation, he taught the class in half Spanish, half English.
 
“The key is to keep the computer terminology in English but explain the functions in Spanish,” said Uribe. “The whole point is to help them transition with the technology and avoid the language barrier to get in the middle of learning the computer skills that they need to pursue a job.”
 
Uribe said that when they graduate, his students will be qualified for well-paying jobs in the IT field, bringing them one step closer to the American Dream.
 
“Instead of working two jobs, now you can work one job,” he said. “Maybe after this you might be able to afford and go and complete your education. You get a college degree, eventually buy a house and start being part of the system.”

A dream deferred?
 
But despite all the hard work, many of the people living in Chelsea today still fill those low-paying jobs. The average family income tops out at $42,000 a year, making it a struggle to meet the basic benchmarks of the American Dream. In Chelsea, only 31 percent of people own their own home and just 12 percent have a college degree. 

But that’s not a deterrent for Mauricio Ramirez.
 
“Of course we want to buy a house," he said. "You know what thing I like in America? Whatever you see, you can get it." In his home country, he said, it wasn't like that.
 
Centro Latino’s Juan Vega said it’s that American ethos — the belief that freedom and hard work will pay off — that brought immigrants hundreds of years ago and keeps them coming today.
 
“A search for a better life,” he said, “and more than that, a search for a better life for our children — that similar thread that drives people to abandon a homeland, to leave something behind in search of something better.”

BOSTON — On October 26, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a historic agreement with a Russian government–sponsored foundation to build a world-class graduate school of technology, known as SkTech, just outside Moscow.

MIT Professor Ed Crawley will lead SkTech. (Courtesy of MIT)

The Skolkovo Institute of Technology is being built on farmland about 40 miles outside of Moscow. As WGBH reported several weeks ago, the project is being hailed as a watershed moment in Russia’s post–Cold War development — and MIT is taking part of the credit.
 
MIT President Susan Hockfield, in Moscow for the signing, said that MIT is committed to “bringing together Russian, U.S. and global research and technology, and in integrating teaching, research, innovation and entrepreneurship.”

Alexey Sitnikov, the foundation’s executive director of academic development, explained why another graduate university similar to MIT or CalTech is needed in Russia.
 
The country already has a technological institute — but it was founded in the middle of the last century, Sitnikov said, and since then “we haven’t created a university of a truly international caliber, competitive on the international level, [that’s] able to create and commercialize technology.”  
 
The agreement between MIT and the Skolkovo Foundation to develop SkTech will take place over three years. MIT scientists, engineers and other professionals will travel back and forth to Russia to work and conduct research. They will find the going easy: The government is relaxing visa restrictions for those associated with the project.
 
The new institution will offer master’s degrees and doctorates in five critical priority areas, Sitnikov said: “Biotechnology, information technology, space technology, communication and nuclear technology.”
 
Edward Crawley, an MIT professor of engineering, will be SkTech’s first president.
 
MIT and the Skolkovo Foundation — which was set up to spur this very kind of initiative — have also committed to building Skolkovo Innovation City on the same dry patch of land. The innovation city is being compared to both Kendall Square and Silicon Valley. One of MIT’s long-term goals is to profit from the joint venture through the development of new mass-market and industry-related products.