In 2000, the Clinton administration enacted Plan Colombia, the $1.3 billion aid package to help Colombia in efforts to reduce drug production. Profits from the drug trade have fueled various actors in Colombia’s ongoing guerilla warfare, which began in 1964. In the first ten years of Plan Colombia alone, the U.S. provided more than $8 billion with nearly 80 percent of funding going towards military and police assistance, according to Amnesty International. This militaristic approach continued well past the Plan’s ten year anniversary as the U.S. continues to pour money into Colombian military and police forces and ineffective aerial fumigation […]

Editor’s Note: Michelle Sinclair is the daughter of columnist Melodie Davis; she is married and works in Washington, D.C. She and her husband have a toddler son. It was a long, bitterly cold winter where we live. Every night, we fell asleep to the sound of our furnace humming to life. Next, we’d hear the gas jets ignite, and then, a few seconds later, the blower pushing heat through the vents of our home to keep us warm. In spite of the ensuing hassles—staying with friends and family for nearly two weeks while our home warranty company took its sweet time […]

I gave my two daughters and my niece a pen and a pad as we entered the movie theater to see Monkey Kingdom, Disneynature’s latest documentary. “I need help writing my review,” I said.  The underdog story of Maya drives the film, and she is perhaps the strongest female protagonist in a Disney film in recent memory. When we exited the theater, I received back two whole sentences, the most complete being, “This was a really good movie,” from my 9-year-old niece, who also noticed that there were “a few parts of monkeys fighting.” In retrospect, it was an unfair […]

Ah, stuff. There’s nothing quite like moving a household to spark thoughts on what it means in our culture and our tradition to have possessions and try to live faithfully with them. Perhaps the most poignant moment was finding two comic books given to my husband by a man who was homeless to whom we provided some companionship in the final months of his life. Except this time my husband and I now can count a house among what we own. It’s hard to wrap my mind around. When we were negotiating the price with the owners and signing the […]

What can one woman do to halt the sad practice of children as young as 9 or 10 working long hours in roasting or freezing factories in countries around the world where few rules and regulations prevent it? Adults, as well, work in inhumane conditions all around the globe, sometimes even in North America, where production demands mean getting up at 3 a.m. and working 12 days straight. No weekend off. Eleanor learned early on about buying gifts which helped women and children have more opportunities for schooling because of fair trade. Eleanor Held is one young woman who, as […]

Noah Baumbach’s new film, While We’re Young, is his most mature (no pun intended) and funny film to date. Each of his films (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg and Frances Ha) combine funny dialogue with the painful drama of relationships. Serious subjects, but the director handles them with such a light touch that we find ourselves laughing at these characters before we realize how much we may resemble them. While We’re Young opens with a middle-age couple, Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts), watching over their friends’ baby, trying to calm it by telling […]

Editor’s Note: Jodi Nisly Hertzler writes occasionally for Another Way and is a college counselor, tutor, and freelance proofreader. Jodi and her husband have three children. There are four women at the table. Only two share a blood tie, but we’re all family. I’m in the seat tucked closest to the wall. Across from me is my mother. That connection is molecularly deep and eternal—I feel it almost physically, an elastic cord that links us together, expanding and contracting as needed, but never torn. To my right is my sister-in-law. We’re different in so many ways (she’s a vivacious Latina with eternal […]

In a quiet farming hamlet in the northern part of Haiti, farmers were forcibly removed from fertile land to make way for a new industrial park in 2012. They were poorly compensated for their land, making it nearly impossible to continue their agricultural livelihoods. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), financers of the Caracol Industrial Park, promised that the investment would yield some 65,000 jobs. To date roughly 5,000 jobs have been created. Workers earn $5-$7 per day and spend one-third on transportation and lunch costs alone. The government of Haiti is aggressively […]

The Divergent series began with last year’s Divergent, a film based on the first novel of a poorly written dystopian trilogy aimed at teenagers and young adults. The series was made to cash in on the phenomenal box office success of The Hunger Games. Both series are made by Lionsgate, a major non-Hollywood studio, which gives them a distinct non-Hollywood flavor, though obviously does not guarantee the avoidance of typical Hollywood flaws. Insurgent also suggests that nonconformity and challenging the status quo are positive attributes and should be encouraged among the young. The Divergent series is set in a future version […]

I was maybe six or seven when I broke the bathroom scales in the home of my parents’ friends when we visited them out of state for an overnight stay. I moved the adjustment mechanism too far and the scales stopped working. The story of the adult David’s sexual sin strikes us as so low, so despicable, and so unbelievable that it is a wonder it is even included in the Bible. I was mortified, but couldn’t bring myself to tell my parents or our hosts. I always assumed they wondered how their scales broke—perhaps they blamed their own children. […]