Ayman Al-Sahili/Reuters

Military vehicles belonging to Libya's United Nations-recognized government forces head out to the front line from Misurata, Libya, Feb. 3, 2020.

Each day flights pour into Libya from across the region: soldiers from Sudan, fighters from Syria, advisers from Turkey, tanks and drones from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan.

Over the past three months, the overwhelming influx of fighters and weapons has internationalized a conflict between Libyan factions for control of the oil-rich North African country that has simmered since the 2011 ouster of dictator Muammar Qaddafi.

But as regional powers line up behind the factions to vie for economic and political gain, Libyans are caught in a deeper struggle between competing political visions for their country and other states across the Arab world: an illiberal democracy versus an autocracy led by a military strongman.

“Before, the conflict was mainly Libyan, with some outside interference,” says Mohamed Eljarh, a Libyan analyst and researcher based in the eastern port of Tobruk. 

“Now the conflict is less Libyan and more external – we have regional powers sending foreign fighters to settle scores on Libyan soil using Libyan money and Libyan factions.”

The West, since leading a 2011 NATO campaign that removed a Qaddafi regime that was massacring its own citizens, has largely abandoned the country and the United Nations-recognized government in Tripoli, restricting its involvement to fighting Islamic State (ISIS) remnants or stopping migrant flows to Europe.

Arab Spring coda

The vacuum has led to the resurgence of the two Middle East axes that competed to shape the Arab world following the 2011 Arab Spring and are returning to face off once again in Libya to write the final chapter of that regional uprising.

On one side are Qatar and Turkey, who threw their weight behind popular protests and bankrolled political Islamist groups to fill the voids left by dictators toppled in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya.

On the other, Gulf monarchies led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE who, sensing their own thrones under threat, sought to suppress democracy by supporting military strongmen and cracking down on political activity.

Now they’re backing two rival Libya factions: the U.N.-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) led by Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj in Tripoli to the West; and the Qaddafi-era general and warlord Field Marshall Khalifa Haftar, whose self-styled Libyan National Army controls the East and is in the midst of a 10-month siege of Tripoli.

When General Haftar threatened to take Tripoli, Turkey stepped in to save the GNA in December, dispatching military advisers, air defense systems, and now an estimated 2,000 Syrian fighters.

The UAE, which has long sent military hardware to General Haftar and is allegedly operating a fleet of drones from their own military base, has sent Sudanese fighters and Russian mercenaries.

Both are violating arms embargoes, cease-fire agreements, and a pact last week in Berlin to halt hostilities that the Turkish and Emirati governments each signed.

The U.N. Mission to Libya condemned the violations, which it said “risk plunging the country into a renewed and intensified round of fighting.”

“These are the unresolved fissures and continuing proxy struggle for influence that started from the Arab Spring,” says Frederic Wehrey, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“The vacuum left behind by the West, the paralysis of the Europeans, and the ambivalence of the Americans has allowed the space for Arab states and Russia to step in and reopen them.”

Multiple interests

The web of foreign interests is vast and tangled.

Turkey, desperate for a foothold in the Arab world after seeing Islamist groups across the region repressed or defeated at the ballot box, and having faced setbacks in its neighbor Syria, sees an opening in Libya.

Esam Omran Al-Fetori/Reuters

Supporters of Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar hold posters denouncing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as they celebrate on top of a Turkish armored vehicle that they said was captured in clashes near Tripoli, in Benghazi, Libya, Jan. 28, 2020.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE, through backing General Haftar, seek to protect their growing military and economic influence in the Horn of Africa and North Africa, while also preventing the rise of an Islamist-friendly government.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi fears a Turkey-friendly government in Libya will lead to a resurgence of the Muslim Brotherhood movement he toppled and stir up dissent at home. And he sees General Haftar – a military man like himself – as the best way to restore stability, crack down on terrorism, and secure the countries’ shared 695-mile border.

Silently, Jordan has emerged as one of General Haftar’s biggest backers, ramping up airlifts of military support for the Libyan warlord in the past three months.

The monarchy in Jordan is wary that a Turkish foothold in North Africa may create a terrorist hotbed, citing Ankara’s track record of turning a blind eye to the flood of jihadists that flowed from Turkey into Syria, enabling the rise of ISIS. 

Sensing economic opportunities and a desire to stem migrant flows to Europe, France has thrown its support behind General Haftar, while Italy has backed Prime Minister Sarraj, rekindling a colonial rivalry.

Russia, looking for economic opportunities and diplomatic leverage to use elsewhere in the region, has supported Mr. Haftar since 2015, but is finding its influence over the general limited compared with the Gulf.

Then, of course, there’s oil. Libya has the largest reserves in Africa and ninth-largest in the world, in addition to potential natural gas and other minerals. Reconstruction contracts in Libya, which is flush with cash, would be lucrative.

As part of its November security pact, Turkey signed a maritime demarcation agreement with the GNA giving Ankara exclusive rights for exploration of Libya’s resource-abundant seabed and coastline.

What model for Mideast?

A deeper battle is raging over what the future of the Arab world should look like.

Libyans’ choice is between a democracy of weak institutions overrun by political Islamists, à la Turkey, and a de facto one-party state where the military dominates, the Egypt model.

The U.N.-recognized GNA, on the side of illiberal, Islamist-dominated democracy, insists that state institutions must be established first in order to create stability, while General Haftar maintains that only once a unified army extends control over every inch of Libya could a state be established.

“On one side you have the GNA claiming that security and stability is another word for dictatorship and monopoly over the state,” says Mr. Eljarh, the Tobruk-based analyst.

“On the other side, Khalifa Haftar is quite clear: Libya is not ready for democracy. We cannot have democracy unless there is a monopoly of use of force and this must be established by armed forces,” he says.

“But there is no guarantee that armed forces would surrender that dominance once attained.”

Indeed, General Haftar has recently formed a “military investments arm” to run a centralized economy in territory under its control. In western Libya, Islamist rhetoric on radio and satellite networks echo Mr. Erdogan’s talking points, while the GNA insists it is the only option for a “democratic, civilian” Libya.

“The perception of GNA as the only guarantor of civilian rule overshadows the fact that there has been no progress on elections, no parliamentary oversight, and there is rampant cronyism and embezzlement,” says Claudia Gazzini, senior Libya analyst for the International Crisis Group.

The two sides even have differing views on Islamist activity.

The GNA is aligned with political Islamist groups that believe in participatory democracy and influencing – or dominating – a country through elections, civil society, and advocacy, as well as via the pulpit.

General Haftar relies on ultra-orthodox Salafis linked to Saudi Arabia who eschew politics, disregard democracy, and in return for their dominance over the religious sphere, demand their followers’ unquestionable fealty to his leadership and Gulf monarchs.

But there is a pervasive feeling among Libyans that their future is being decided for them.

“We fought a revolution to save our country from tyranny,” says Mohamed, a Libyan activist who did not wish to use his full name, “and now it is being cut up and divided by strangers at a barbecue we are not invited to.”

The gusting wind and the passersby shouting their congratulations make it difficult to hear the Spanish-language ceremony.

Even on this sunny weekend morning, the Progreso International Bridge is not ideal for a wedding. But for José, the groom – who fled his native Honduras and was granted asylum in the U.S. in November – it is one of the happiest days he’s had in years.

Damaris, his bride, wears a pink satin dress. She holds their daughter, Angelica, a garland of daisies in the little girl’s hair. Today is one of just a handful the family has spent together since José left Honduras in 2017.

Damaris and Angelica are also seeking asylum in America, but for the past four months they’ve been living in Matamoros, Mexico, just across the border from Brownsville, Texas. They are among tens of thousands of migrants in the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), a policy implemented last year that requires migrants to stay in Mexico while their cases proceed.

José and Damaris have been together for 12 years but never married – a common practice in Honduras. Today’s ceremony, José hopes, will help his family’s asylum cases. “There’s no immediate benefit” legally, says Elissa Steglich at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law immigration clinic, which represented them in their first hearings. But “we’re hoping that U.S. authorities will recognize the sincerity of the family unit.”

Whether they do or not is another question. All asylum claims “are handled on a case-by-case basis,” an official with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) told the Monitor in an email.

“Individuals from vulnerable populations may be excluded on a case-by-case basis,” added the official. But ultimately the goal of MPP is “to reduce the extraordinary strain on our border security and immigration system by freeing up personnel and resources to better protect U.S. sovereignty and the rule of law.”

Following the rules

José, who did not want his last name published, met Damaris when they were in school – right before a military coup threw their country into chaos.

By 2017, José was an activist in the Yoro state in northern Honduras, campaigning against the president. That year, after he says he was captured by police and tortured, he fled to the U.S.

A few months later, unbeknownst to José, Damaris and Angelica (their names have been changed because their cases are pending) fled north as well.

“They [had] started threatening her,” says José. “She knew that I would immediately leave and try to find her and help them come. ... That’s why she didn’t tell me.”

He is sitting in the Brownsville bus terminal alongside his attorney, and he doesn’t want to discuss their cases too specifically while they’re still pending. But what happened next is difficult to recount anyway, he says, and his voice softens. Damaris reached Mexico, and sought asylum there. But “frankly, they were abusing her,” José says. “That’s when she decided not to apply for asylum” there and instead apply in America.

When she reached the U.S. border, José was living in Austin, Texas, waiting for a ruling on his asylum claim. MPP had just been implemented.

Six months earlier the Trump administration had ended its “zero tolerance” policy at the southern border. That policy provoked major public criticism for separating more than 5,400 migrant children from their families.

But MPP was pitched as a way to deter unmeritorious asylum claims, “getting immigration court results at a much faster pace … while keeping families together,” then-Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan told the Council on Foreign Relations in September 2019.

At the time, Damaris and Angelica were in Matamoros, looking for somewhere to sleep. They spent eight days living on the streets, José says. They both got sick.

“There was rain, there was cold, there was no place to bathe, to go to the bathroom,” he says. “She couldn’t wash their clothes. They didn’t know what they were going to eat the next day.”

At José’s court hearing in December, it was the first time he’d seen his family in two years.

“I could only be with them for 20 minutes, during the time that I could meet with my attorneys,” he says. “I couldn’t give [Angelica] a hug. I couldn’t play with her.”

“It’s very difficult, the way this government is dividing families,” he adds. “We’re trying to do things the right way, asking legally for them, and it’s hard.”

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

Damaris and José have been together for 12 years, but were married Feb. 1. Since José left Honduras in 2017, he rarely sees his family. Damaris and daughter, Angelica, are staying in Mexico because of the U.S. policy which requires asylees with pending cases to wait there.

Success rate of 0.3%

His family is still in Mexico, and still in MPP, but they at least have legal representation (only 3% of asylum-seekers do). And they are no longer in Honduras. For this, José is grateful.

“I went through a legal process. I went in front of a judge, I defended myself, I was heard,” he adds. “In my country, with the position I had as an activist, you only have two things: one, you’re assassinated; or two, you’re locked up.”

Asylum into the U.S. is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain, however.

A goal of MPP “is to discourage the abuse of U.S. laws as well as non-meritorious or false asylum claims,” the CBP official wrote. “This allows the United States to more effectively administer its laws, including assisting legitimate asylum seekers and individuals fleeing persecution.”

The Trump administration restricted asylum further in 2018 by eliminating fears of gang and domestic violence as credible grounds for asylum. Persecution based on political beliefs is still a valid basis, however. In that context José’s asylum case was straightforward – relatively speaking, at least.

“It was a very strong and compelling case, but in this climate nothing can be taken for granted,” says Professor Steglich.

About 60,000 migrants are in MPP deportation proceedings, and through December 2019 just 187 cases, or 0.3%, had been successful, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Many of the successful asylum cases are Venezuelan and Cuban migrants fleeing political persecution, adds Professor Steglich, but Central American claims are often more complicated.

“The factual complexities of the cases require experts, require a more intimate understanding of their stories, and MPP does not allow for that at all,” she continues. “MPP has been crushing. It has truly made a mockery of the immigration court system.”

Wedding season

Damaris and Angelica can both request asylum based on “imputed political opinion” – that in Honduras they faced the same political persecution José claims he faced.

Getting married will make their case that little bit stronger, they hope – and they’re not alone.

Sallie Gonzalez, the local justice of the peace who officiated their wedding last weekend, says she has done several.

“I have actually probably two or three more in my calendar for [February]. I love seeing happy families together,” she adds. “I don’t know the actual process of [asylum], but if it helps them then I’m all for it.”

So far, the marriage hasn’t helped Damaris and Angelica get out of Matamoros. Two days after the wedding, CBP denied their request to be paroled or removed from MPP. For privacy reasons, CBP is precluded from discussing individual cases.

At the bus terminal last week, José’s eyes well with tears. “If my family goes back [to Honduras], it’s certain my wife will be murdered,” he says.

Angelica is “already getting her own personality. I don’t even know her, and she doesn’t even know who I am,” he adds.

“I want to create a life, a future, with our daughter – things that in Honduras just wouldn’t happen,” he continues. “We’re just going to get back that time we lost, and do the best we can as a family, as human beings, so we can contribute to this country.”

Martin Kuz/The Christian Science Monitor

Cultural fire practitioner Noel Webster, shown on Jan. 24, 2020, kneels where a bushfire died out in a forest near the town of Nowra in southeastern Australia. The land to his right was scorched; the land to his left survived with the aid of a "cool burn" he conducted earlier.

Noel Webster pointed at a sinuous line where the forest floor turned from black to green, from dead to alive. Barren eucalyptus trees the color of coal stood to the north, scorched by a bushfire last month. To the south, beyond the line where the flames had stopped, tree leaves and tufts of grass shone green in the morning light.

The expanse of healthy land survived with the aid of a different kind of fire set 18 months earlier by Mr. Webster. A member of the Yuin Aboriginal group and a cultural fire practitioner, he had overseen a “cool burn” on this tract of private bushland outside Nowra, a tourist town in Australia’s South Coast region.

Mr. Webster and a team of fellow indigenous fire practitioners lit low-intensity fires in small sections of forest each day for two weeks. They thinned the dead grass, leaves, and branches that elsewhere fed the recent bushfire, while sparing patches of grass and brush, most saplings, and adult trees that provide the forest’s canopy – enough habitat to sustain wildlife.

The black-green divide told him the blaze had died out for lack of surface fuel in the area they treated, a minor victory in a bushfire season that has claimed 33 lives, destroyed some 3,000 homes, and burned more than 27 million acres.

“We talk about fighting fire. But to heal country, we need to be working with fire,” Mr. Webster says. His reference to “country” invokes the Aboriginal idea of land as a physical and spiritual space to which human beings belong. “People only know about ‘bad’ fire that destroys homes. We want them to know about good fire.”

The magnitude of this summer’s bushfires has exposed the inadequacy of Australia’s efforts to clear forest overgrowth, including its reliance on high-intensity, large-scale prescribed burns carried out by public agencies. 

The toll of the infernos since September has brought renewed attention to the indigenous practice of cultural burning. Advocates suggest that Aboriginal fire methods, paired with prescribed burns, could help forests mend and ease the effect of climate change in a country that recorded its hottest and driest year in 2019.

“It’s unfortunate that it takes devastation on this scale to open people’s eyes,” says Oliver Costello, co-founder of Firesticks Alliance, an indigenous fire network based in New South Wales. “But we’re hopeful some good can come from it.”

“Read the land”

The advent of Western colonialism in Australia in the late 1700s began pushing Aboriginal people and their cultural traditions to the country’s fringes. The ancient method among indigenous groups of working with fire to cleanse and revitalize the land bewildered European settlers, who perceived wildfire only as a destructive force.

Little has changed two centuries later. Aboriginal fire programs receive scarce public funding, and cultural burns remain small in scope and restricted by law to private land.

Linda Carlson, who runs the Aboriginal land council in Mogo, a coastal town of 300 residents south of Nowra, links the bushfire cataclysm to the country abandoning indigenous fire practices. 

“This could have been prevented,” she says. A fire that ripped through the community on New Year’s Eve incinerated the council’s office and the homes of Ms. Carlson and four colleagues. “Cultural burns could have helped restore balance to our land and kept these fires from raging out of control.”

Australia’s long-held policy of fire suppression – attempting to extinguish bushfires as soon as they start – has resulted in forests choked with trees and underbrush that state and federal agencies seek to thin with controlled burns. Last fire season, bushland crews in New South Wales burned 395,000 acres, or less than 3% of the total area torched by bushfires across the state this summer.

Most prescribed fires leave behind sparse habitat for wildlife. The high heat can decimate native plants and grasses and, in turn, accelerate the growth of invasive species more vulnerable to bushfires.

Cultural burning involves a slower, gentler process. The selective burning by fire practitioners nurtures a habitat mosaic that protects flora and fauna, allows soil to retain moisture, and forms gaps in the terrain that act as firebreaks.

Mr. Webster, an Aboriginal community support officer in the South Coast region, quit his previous job as a national parks ranger in protest against its controlled burn program. He explains that indigenous practitioners “read the land, not spreadsheets.”

“The public officials say they’re working off data. But the data is right here,” he says, holding his palms up toward the canopy. “You have to feel country.” 

In the view of Jessica Weir, a senior research fellow at Western Sydney University who has studied Aboriginal fire practices, cultural burns at once heal forests and represent a vital reconnection with country. “It’s a move toward understanding that we live within nature, that we have reciprocal responsibilities with nature,” she says. “We need this as a societal shift, including public-sector funding for land management.”

In Canada and the United States, the onset of “megafires” intensified by climate change and forest mismanagement has revived interest in Native American burning practices. In New South Wales, Firesticks Alliance, one of Australia’s few indigenous fire programs, hosts workshops to teach cultural burning to landowners, farmers, and community officials.

Mr. Webster has conducted a couple of demonstration burns for local fire crews. He recalls their initial surprise at his disregard for safety gear – cultural practitioners will wear T-shirts and shorts and walk barefoot to better gauge the heat of the flames and direction of the wind. But their skepticism evolved into appreciation as they observed the burn, and he sensed the possibility for future collaboration.

“We don’t only want to help our community but the wider community,” he says. “We want to share the journey together.”

Thomas Peter/Reuters

Oliver Costello of Firesticks Alliance (left) and Jacob Morris, who are indigenous Australians, demonstrate cultural burning in a forest in Illaroo, New South Wales, Australia, Jan. 22, 2020.

“Start the healing”

Leanne Brook’s property resembles an emerald mirage within the charred landscape west of the town of Ulladulla. A massive bushfire ravaged this area between Nowra and Mogo in early December and returned four more times over the next five weeks, devouring hundreds of thousands of acres and the properties of nearby residents.

Last June, after meeting Mr. Webster at a Firesticks Alliance workshop, Ms. Brook and her husband asked him to perform a burn on their 7-acre lot. At the time, the couple saw the decision as a way to deepen their indigenous roots. In retrospect, they credit him with saving their home, and they regard cultural burning as a potential remedy to the country’s bushfire crisis.

“Prescribed burning isn’t working,” says Ms. Brook, a project manager with Ulladulla’s Aboriginal land council. “What’s the other option? The one that worked for thousands of years.”

Indigenous practitioners resist that either-or framing, in part because cultural burns require more time and tend to cover less ground than prescribed burns. Fire researchers suggest that interlacing the two approaches offers the most pragmatic strategy for taming bushfires.

New South Wales spends about $100 million (Australian; U.S.$67 million) on prescribed burning. An expected increase in public funding for hazard reduction efforts – a response to a bushfire season that scientists describe as the worst on record – could give a boost to cultural burning that advocates call long overdue. 

As acrid smoke coats the skies above Canberra, the nation’s capital, lawmakers are weighing funding proposals to mitigate bushfire disasters, including indigenous fire programs. Ms. Weir asserts that the evidence in support of expanding cultural burning lies in the vast destruction across the country.

“These fires have been so extraordinary in their scale – and so many people have been affected – that I hope it can bring about a commitment for long-term change,” she says.

Mr. Costello has requested $100 million in public funding for a four-year program to train and support 100 cultural fire practitioners and assist with bushfire recovery in indigenous areas. He hopes policymakers will consider that investment in the context of the billions spent on firefighting, insurance claims, and rebuilding communities.

“I think we have to ask whether Australia can afford to keep doing what we’ve been doing,” he says. “The land is sick. We have to start the healing now.”

Edwin Remsberg / VWPics/AP/File

An urban-rural divide has grown particularly stark in Virginia, as population centers around Washington, D.C., have swelled, tipping the state government toward more liberal values. Seen here, a country pasture in Middleburg, Virginia.

A drive between Fairfax and Frederick counties is, in Virginia terms, like a trip back in time. As the highway pushes west, parking lots fade into pastures, workspaces into woodlands, suburbs into the vast Shenandoah Valley. Just an hour’s drive apart, the two counties feel like different states.

If West Virginia gets its way, they could be.

West Virginia’s governor and Senate have invited Frederick, a county of about 90,000 on Virginia’s northern border, to switch state lines. The invitation comes as many in the largely conservative county feel disaffected with Virginia’s first Democratic government in decades, elected in part thanks to demographic shifts in the state’s population centers.

Few Frederickians actually favor a redrawn border, but the proposal speaks to the intensity of Virginia’s current polarization. As in many states experiencing rapid urban and suburban growth, residents in parts of rural, conservative Virginia seem to inhabit an increasingly different daily reality. 

Amid fiercely partisan debates over abortion and gun control in Virginia’s capital of Richmond, some now wonder whether those two realities are reconcilable – or if the gap in political identities has grown too far to bridge.

“I feel a very strong affection toward Virginia,” says Douglas McCarthy, a member of the Frederick County Board of Supervisors and a lifelong county resident. “But because of what’s happening in Richmond and Northern Virginia, it does make me question what options do we have if things continue to go down a road that doesn’t seem to be very Virginian.”

Many, though, are now asking what “Virginian” even means, or who gets to decide.

A demographic wave

In northern Virginia, colloquially known as NoVa, demographics have been changing for decades, as people moved there for work in Washington. In the 2010s, says Qian Cai, director of the Demographics Research Group at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, two-thirds of Virginia’s population growth happened in the region. By 2040 it’s projected to contain half of the state’s population.

Those moving into the area are likely to be younger, more racially diverse, and more liberal than people in the rest of the state, she says. This younger, more cosmopolitan Virginia represents a growing power base and is the reason why Democrats now have complete control over state government for the first time in 26 years.

“It’s increasingly harder to say NoVa is not Virginia,” says Ms. Cai. “NoVa has actually become the defining part of Virginia.”

Meanwhile rural areas such as Frederick, which make up most of the state’s territory, have remained mostly the same – as have their conservative values. In part, this discontinuity has left people like Mr. McCarthy feeling left behind, particularly as state lawmakers take up progressive causes. And the recent invitation from West Virginia to switch states, effectively to move the state line created in 1863 when West Virginia seceded from the Confederacy, is not the only aspirational rebordering plan in the cards.

Chris Jackson/AP

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice shakes hands with West Virginia legislators during the State of the State address in the House Chambers at the state capitol, Jan. 8, 2020, in Charleston, West Virginia.

Joining the West Virginia governor, Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr., a prominent conservative voice in the state and nationally, has supported a state-switching referendum in his university’s home of Lynchburg – around 100 miles from the border – and elsewhere in rural Virginia. 

State Delegate David LaRock, a Republican who represents part of Frederick County, even proposed returning the populous cities of Alexandria and Arlington, which joined Virginia in the 1840s because of their support for slavery, back to Washington D.C. 

The proposal, says Mr. LaRock, was meant to open a conversation about the state’s polarization rather than an attempt to give away two prosperous locales. 

Part of what has attracted particular attention to Frederick County’s invitation, says Mr. LaRock, is the legal framework already in place for such a change. During the Civil War, three neighboring Virginia counties – Berkeley, Jefferson, and Frederick – were invited by the newly created West Virginia to rejoin the Union. While Frederick never acted on their invitation, the first two counties voted to leave. Their referendums were later upheld by a 1871 Supreme Court decision, providing a precedent for Frederick to follow suit.

The ad hoc creation of West Virginia’s border has left many deeply rooted families, such as Mr. McCarthy’s, which straddles both sides, with the impression that state lines are somewhat artificial. 

“The eastern panhandle of West Virginia is not different from Virginia,” he says.

Gun rights in legislative crosshairs

Mr. McCarthy doesn’t yet support secession, but he says he and many of his constituents want to keep their options open. The changes coming out of Richmond, to him, are much more real than a border he crosses without thought nearly every week. 

Most Frederickians aren’t interested in flipping state lines – especially given West Virginia’s worse economy. Many in Virginia also look down on its poorer neighbor. But to Blaine Dunn, another member of the county’s Board of Supervisors, the proposals show how high the political stakes have become, particularly when it comes to gun ownership.

Rural Virginia maintains a culture of “arms and farms,” he says. To limit people’s right to carry is in his opinion a threat to constitutional freedoms, and, even more, an entire way of life. 

“If one side thinks that they are now going to be made felons of, that’s more than losing,” he says. 

Mr. Dunn attended the Jan. 20 rally in Richmond, when more than 22,000 activists demonstrated their support for gun rights. People came from as far as Minnesota, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, and New York to support, as they said, their “brothers and sisters” in Virginia.  

The people he met there, Mr. Dunn says, understand his lifestyle much better than Virginia-born legislators in Richmond. “What the governor and the General Assembly are trying to do is something that radically affects people’s lives, yet they themselves are exempt from it,” says Mr. Dunn, referring to politicians such as the governor who rely on police protection for self-defense.

Gun-control legislation, meanwhile, continues to progress through the General Assembly. The House of Delegates on Jan. 30 passed a series of bills that would require universal background checks and create a “red flag” provision to temporarily remove weapons from residents considered dangerous. 

Mr. McCarthy, Mr. LaRock, and Mr. Dunn all say they feel a responsibility to get along with citizens in the rest of the state, but they also believe that Richmond has crossed a line. Frederick County was once the stage for many Civil War battles. It has a precedent for self-determination and a willingness to fight over identity.

Virginia, says Mr. McCarthy, is an idea. Like any idea, it’s malleable. 

“As other people move into Virginia and they craft Virginia to be what they want it to be, at the same time, there are other people in Virginia that want something different,” he says. 

Inside Rosie, a colorful minibus that crisscrosses the countryside here in eastern Kentucky, 4-year-old Paisley Barrett brushes her finger over the curled tail of a tiny toy in a plastic box. 

“This here’s a fox,” she declares. Her teacher, Tennant Kirk, nods encouragingly.

Paisley names a few more of the toys – blocks, locks, rocks – before arriving at one that gives her pause. Ms. Kirk turns to Paisley’s mother, Ashley Barrett. “I think a lot of children these days have never seen one of these,” she says. Ms. Kirk turns back to Paisley to reinforce an important prereading skill, demonstrating that “clocks” rhymes with the names of all the other toys in the container. 

Paisley nods, and reaches for another box. “I just love her enthusiasm,” Ms. Kirk tells Ms. Barrett. “She is so ready for kindergarten.”

In the lush foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, where families in small towns like Manchester face a paucity of preschool options, Rosie bus is helping to address a deep and persistent need. Not only are there the logistical challenges of reaching young children living in poverty and isolation, but families question the value of prekindergarten programs in general. “Why should a 4-year-old go to school?” Ms. Kirk says she’s often asked. 

Some families meet income requirements for Head Start, the federally funded preschool program for low-income children, but attendance means sending small children on a bus ride that could last over an hour. Though some children qualify for local public preschool options (either by age or income), figuring out the requirements is often difficult for parents to navigate, Ms. Kirk says. 

Emily Kaplan/The Hechinger Report

Paisley Barrett, 4, sits with her mother, Ashley Barrett, on the Rosie bus outside the family's home in Manchester, Kentucky. The elder Barrett says that without the preschool bus program her daughter would likely not be ready for school.

But after Paisley participated in nearly two years of Rosie Bus lessons, her mother was able to enroll her in a local public preschool program this fall. When Ms. Kirk dropped by to check in, Ms. Barrett was pleased with her daughter’s progress.

“When she got to preschool, they said that she was so advanced,” Ms. Barrett says. “And I bring that back to the Rosie bus. I could never have brought her to where she’s at by myself.” 

“We have to serve the whole family”

After reading about a similar program in Colorado, Ms. Kirk and Dreama Gentry developed the family readiness bus program in 2016 with a Kellogg Foundation grant. Ms. Kirk is the early childhood project director at Berea College’s Partners for Education, and Ms. Gentry is executive director. Each of their two buses has two adults on board: an early childhood specialist who works with children on fundamental academic and social skills, and a “family navigator,” who works with caregivers. To bring school to where a child lives, both adults take turns driving the bus, which is small enough that it does not require a special driver’s license.

Family navigators help caregivers identify goals – improving nutrition, getting out of debt, repairing their homes, or earning a GED diploma – and the concrete steps needed to reach them. Additionally, the bus’ operators host evenings once a month when parents meet with community members who provide services such as financial planning or nutritional advice. Caregivers themselves can share struggles and child-rearing strategies. 

“If we’re going to make a significant impact on children’s learning and developing brains, we have to serve the whole family,” says Ms. Gentry. 

In the past two years, the Sunny and Rosie buses have served nearly 100 preschoolers, ages 3 and 4, and their families. The buses are now operated by two local organizations: Red Bird Mission in the town of Beverly; and Save the Children, in neighboring Perry County. The organizations may adapt the curriculum slightly – Red Bird Mission, for instance, will add a Bible story to the literacy activities. The family readiness bus “complements what we are already doing,” says Kari Collins, Red Bird’s executive director.

Trying out school  

Appalachian Kentucky, where Sunny and Rosie roam, suffers from what the U.S. government terms “persistent poverty,” meaning that it has had poverty rates at or exceeding 20% for more than 30 years. The effects play out in a number of ways. A generation ago, the biggest employers in eastern Kentucky were coal companies, which received significant incentives from local and state governments to operate in the region. When the companies left, thousands of people found themselves with no job prospects. Virtually no social services – such as job training programs, GED programs, or even food banks – eased the void left by coal’s departure.    

The counties served by the buses are also considered food deserts. Many residents share the costs of an hour-long drive to a grocery store once a month, where they use their limited funds to buy processed food that will last the longest. Many young children develop both obesity and tooth decay, giving Kentucky the third highest child obesity rate in the U.S.      

While the navigators help connect people with services, the buses most critically offer a free, low-stress way for families to check out what school for 4-year-olds is really all about. Just 29% of Kentucky’s 4-year-olds attended publicly funded preschool in 2018, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research. And only 51% of the state’s children enter kindergarten prepared to learn the curriculum. The effects of this lack of preparation can persist into adulthood.   

“Kindergarten readiness is tied to third grade reading, which has been tied to high school graduation – which is tied to college-going,” Ms. Gentry explains. 

Supporting a new view of self

In recent years, meth and opioid abuse have created a situation in which many children are being taken in by grandparents and other relatives, who may themselves be ill-equipped to care for young children. The rate of opioid deaths in Kentucky was 28 per 100,000 in 2017 – nearly double the national average of 15 per 100,000, according to the latest data available from the federal government. Statewide, 9% of Kentucky children live with relatives other than their parents, the highest proportion in the nation. Locals estimate that the percentages in the counties served by Sunny and Rosie are much higher. 

In Beverly, Kristy Roark, a kindergarten teacher who grew up in the area, says “there aren’t many intact families” and the consequences of that are manifold. 

“When grandma is taking care of them, [children are] less likely to follow authority or be held accountable because they get whatever they ask for,” she says. “Grandma’s tired, and grandma’s going to give you whatever you want so she can rest. Children lose their ability to problem-solve because a lot of time they watch videos, which doesn’t stimulate the brain.” 

Ms. Roark worries about the attitude of preemptive self-defeat she often encounters. “Families face stereotyping of ‘I’m from the mountains, I’m not smart enough to go to school.’ So that becomes, ‘I can’t be successful.’” Yet the students in her classroom who were served by Rosie and Sunny bring stronger academic and social skills than those who weren’t.     

Aleah Wolsey, 5, is one of those students. “We did games, we would play with animals, we would do puzzles and stuff,” Aleah recalls.  

Among her classmates, Aleah is clearly a leader. On a recent visit, a group of girls watches admiringly as she demonstrates how to write the letter E. When a visitor, carrying a tablet, asks her how to spell her name, she takes the tablet saying, “Oh, I’ll just type it myself.”

Emily Kaplan/The Hechinger Report

Chris Morgan, who has served both as an early childhood educator and a family navigator on the Rosie bus, says that all parents can help their children gain an education when given the right tools.

Getting more kids on the same trajectory as Aleah is the goal, says Chris Morgan, who has worked as both an early childhood specialist and as a family navigator on the bus. He emphasizes that family support is crucial. “Our primary thing was to empower parents to make sure that they were their child’s advocate from the time of birth all the way through school,” he says. “They have the ability to help their child learn – they’re the first and most important teacher that the child has. You just have to help them see that.”

Back in Manchester, as Paisley sits on the floor, making her way through a small box with a picture of a cake on its lid – rake, bake, steak, snake – Ms. Barrett reflects on her family’s experience with Rosie. Her two-year-old son, Parker, sits in her lap; he will start his time on Rosie next year. She hopes the little boy will develop a love of learning like his older sister.

“Paisley didn’t ever talk about going to school until we started the bus,” Ms. Barrett says. “But once we started the bus, she begged me every day, ‘When do I get to start school?’” 

This story about preschool options was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

AP

Syrians sit in a truck as they flee the advance of government forces in the province of Idlib, Syria, towards the Turkish border, Jan. 30.

Of the world’s 25 million refugees displaced by conflict, most live in neighboring nations with a welcoming heart, such as Colombia, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia. “Countries in crisis-affected regions, in spite of limited resources, have largely kept their doors open, preserving millions of lives,” said Filippo Grandi, the United Nations refugee chief, in December.

Such neighborly hospitality, however, is not always assured. This is especially true for Turkey right now.

During the nearly nine years of Syria’s civil war, Turkey has generously hosted Syrian refugees, 3.7 million in total, more refugees than any other country in the world. The welcoming spirit has served as a moral counterpoint to the mass killing in Syria.

Yet since Dec. 1, as the last major battle of that war has escalated in Idlib province, Turkey has been faced with a difficult choice. Should it keep its borders closed to Syrians trying to flee the battle for Idlib?

The military forces of the Syrian regime, backed by Russia and Iranian-allied militias, keep advancing into the northwest province, the final stronghold of anti-regime rebels and home to 3 million people. So far 586,000 people have been uprooted. Most are women and children who already fled the war from other provinces. The battle for Idlib could result in the worst humanitarian catastrophe of the Syrian conflict, according to experts.

That prediction, however, depends on whether Turkey decides to reopen its borders and once again be a generous host. Millions of Syrian refugees already in the country have found jobs or are attending school, and have integrated well. More than 100,000 were given citizenship. Yet most Turks, according to polls, have “compassion fatigue,” resulting in the recent closing of the border. The country also has struggled to come to terms with its violent treatment of the Kurdish minority.

Like many countries hosting refugees, Turkey needs help from wealthier countries to continue its traditional hospitality.

U.N. officials often make a point of expressing gratitude to such host countries. Many refugees do the same, grateful for a safe haven. And Western countries have provided billions of dollars for refugees camps. Yet more can be done. In fact, the long conflict in Syria has inspired a shift in how the world engages with refugees.

In 2018, the U.N. General Assembly approved the Global Compact on Refugees, a proposal to better integrate refugees into host countries as long as a conflict prevents them from returning home. The plan is based on studies that show refugees can become a net positive economic contributor with the right investments in education, housing, and industry. The compact is already being applied in a dozen countries, such as Jordan and Ethiopia, helping millions of refugees and their local hosts.

Turkey deserves the same, especially with a potential humanitarian crisis across its border. Hospitality, while abundant in the hearts of the Turks, is not free. It needs generosity from the rest of the world.