Each day for Safa is the same: a race for a solution.

Her husband, a construction worker, has been without work for six months. The two now worry about how to make their nearly bare cupboard – and the $30 in their bank account – stretch to make their next month’s rent.

Her children skip one to two meals per day.

“We have no government, no services, no electricity, no currency, no hope,” says Safa, who did not wish to use her full name. “Who can we even turn to?”

It is a question being faced by many Lebanese: What happens when a state fails, and no one is there to help?

In Lebanon – in the midst of what the World Bank is calling the worst economic collapse the world has seen since 1850, and in the aftermath of the third-largest nonnuclear explosion in human history – people are finding hope as scarce as the medicines and baby formula disappearing from store shelves.

Yet some are finding solace in leaning on one another, and, thanks to civil society groups that are refusing to give up, strength to make it through another day.

“It is like we are all waiting for someone to make a move, but no one is making one. No one is coming to save us,” says Beirut resident Rayan Khatoun.

Her response, starting two years ago, was to help found a grassroots network that identifies the needs of vulnerable Lebanese families and launches fundraising appeals on social media.

With support from the Lebanese diaspora abroad, the network, called All of Us, has helped hundreds of families, providing rent money to keep some off the streets, and providing others with dry food staples whose shelf life is unaffected by electricity cuts.

“We can’t make up for the lack of a functioning state; the hardest lesson to learn is that you can’t help everyone in need,” says Ms. Khatoun. “But it is also impossible to turn a blind eye to people.”

The spiral down

The collapse of Lebanon’s economy and the decline of government services have been a work in progress for years, the product of worsening political gridlock and corruption among competing sectarian elites.

What began as a very visible failure to deliver basic services, such as trash collection, worsened as the country defaulted on its international debt and the economy crumbled. A grassroots protest movement two years ago sprang up to demand systemic political change, even before the pandemic and the devastating blast at the Port of Beirut destroyed for many Lebanese the last shreds of government function or accountability.

Hussein Malla/AP

Lebanese depositors protest outside a bank in Beirut, Sept. 24, 2021. They were demanding access to their deposits, which have been blocked under informal capital controls since the country's financial and economic crisis began in late 2019.

Once a country of glitz and glamour, a financial and shopping hub for the Levant where even a brutal civil war in the 1970s and ’80s failed to slow daily life or mute rocking nightclubs, Lebanon has now become unrecognizable to its people. 

Beirut and most of Lebanon are in darkness. Out of cash, the national electricity provider turned off its generators completely this month. In the best of times, it provides one to two hours of electricity per day.

Supermarkets, confronted with wildly fluctuating black-market exchange rates, no longer place prices on items.

Meat, chicken, and cheese are luxuries. Manaqeesh, a thick bready pastry that is a staple working-class breakfast, is out of reach for many. So too, even, are eggs.

As the Lebanese say, “The surprises just keep coming.”

Last Wednesday, the government announced it was lifting fuel subsidies, leading to an immediate jump in the prices of gasoline, diesel needed for generators, and gas cylinders used for cooking and heating.

It now costs more than 300,000 Lebanese pounds – nearly half the monthly minimum wage – for 20 liters (5.3 gallons) of gasoline.

Wary Lebanese responded with a collective shrug, memes, and jokes on social media.

“Our coping mechanism is to make fun of the situation, slave the next day just to survive, come back home and rest a little,” says Ms. Khatoun. “People just don’t have the energy to be angry.”

Economic costs

The economic crisis is felt by all classes, but is crushing the working class.

• Since 2019, the collapse of Lebanon’s currency has meant Lebanese have lost 80% of the value of their savings. Institutions, businesses, and citizens are desperate for fresh dollars from outside to keep the import-reliant country going.
• With the electric grid down, it costs a family around 1.5 million pounds per month to run a diesel generator for 12 hours a day.
• Fares for buses, taxis, and shared taxis have shot up to the point where for many, the commute to work costs more than a day’s salary.
• The shuttering of the national water company has left 2.7 million Lebanese without running water, forcing many to fetch water from unsanitary wells.

The fact that Lebanese’s misery is caused by financial and government mismanagement, rather than by earthquakes or war, makes it a tough sell to donor countries, many of whom insist that Lebanon stand on its own feet.

“For the U.N., no matter the source of the overall crisis, the outcome is a humanitarian crisis affecting every aspect of life,” says UNICEF Lebanon Representative Yukie Mokuo.

“Let’s face it: There are severe humanitarian consequences to these economic and governance crises and unless we act now, things can go even worse.”

Marwan Naamani/picture alliance/Getty Images

People walk out of a bakery after grabbing packs of bread in the midst of severe fuel shortages and power cuts that are afflicting Lebanon, in Beirut, Aug. 14, 2021.

To help compensate for a failing government social safety net, the World Food Program is providing food parcels to 100,000 of the most vulnerable families across Lebanon, and modest cash assistance to 1.6 million people.

UNICEF is providing $40 monthly emergency cash assistance to 80,000 families to provide for children’s food, clothing, and transport to schools.

One in 6 people in Lebanon now rely on the United Nations for their daily needs.

UNICEF is campaigning to raise $40 million to secure the supplies and maintenance needed to prevent a water crisis from escalating to a health crisis.

Stepping up

But, unlike in previous crises, wealthy Gulf Arab states, the international community, and even Iran are not coming to Lebanon’s rescue with big-ticket bailouts. Instead, Lebanese are stepping up themselves, trying to do good where they can with rapidly dwindling resources.

The crisis has been transformative for Hani Nassar, founder and director of the Barbara Nassar Association, a small association he founded with his late wife during her battle with cancer to provide moral support and guidance for adult cancer patients.  

The association, now the voice of Lebanon’s 30,000 cancer patients, most of whom have been cut off from treatment and medications for months, is helping patients purchase generic cancer medications and immunotherapy drugs from India. The medications are shipped to Lebanese expatriates residing in the United Arab Emirates and are then transported in suitcases with the next person flying to Beirut.

Each day, Mr. Nassar shuttles to an office with no running water and an hour of electricity per day to distribute donated medications to patients. It can take him days to respond to an email.

He is meeting with ambassadors, U.N. officials, and business leaders, seeking to enable the charitable association to act as an intermediary for donor governments and individuals unwilling to channel donations through the corruption-tainted Lebanese government.

The government is failing, he says, in one of its basic functions: to help save lives. “It is tiring, but we have to find our own solutions,” he says.

The struggle for hope

Volunteers soldier on also at Embrace, a mental health care group whose emotional support and suicide prevention hotline, Lifeline, has become a critical service in the wake of last year’s port blast. 

This year Lifeline has seen a jump in calls from 500 calls per month to 1,200 – a rise that Embrace attributes to greater awareness of mental health.

In August, fuel shortages forced Embrace to shut down Lifeline for an entire month. It now has a private generator and Lifeline is back, but electricity cuts across the country wreak havoc on the phone lines. Transportation costs prevent many from attending its free, psychiatrist-staffed clinic for at-risk persons in Beirut.

Dozens of Embrace’s volunteers have left Lebanon because they too, exhausted, can no longer afford life in the country. Embrace is already training the next batch of staff.

“The main struggle is helping people have hope when there is none,” says Rêve Romanos, a clinical supervisor and psychotherapist at Embrace. “Hopelessness is a recurrent theme for all of us.”

But small things can help people cope, Dr. Romanos says. “Sometimes, just being able to vent, talk it out, and have someone listen can make a difference.”

Rick Bowmer/AP/File

Former Oregon Secretaries of State Phil Keisling and Norma Paulus are shown as they drop their ballots at a ballot drop site in Portland, May 15, 2006. Mr. Kiesling has been called “the Johnny Appleseed of mail-in ballots.”

Phil Keisling has been called “the Johnny Appleseed of mail-in ballots” and “the patron saint of vote by mail.” As Oregon’s secretary of state from 1991 to 1998, he pushed for the adoption of a then-unique system in which all active registered voters receive ballots through the postal system for all elections.

Oregon’s vote by mail began as an experiment at the local level when a county clerk asked a simple question: Since they were already paying to print and mail sample ballots to voters, why not just send the real thing? It turned out doing so saved money – while also boosting turnout and making voters happy, says Mr. Keisling.

Former President Donald Trump has denounced mail-in balloting, with no evidence, as rife with fraud. “Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country,” he said prior to last year’s election.

Some states expanded all-mail voting for the 2020 presidential election during the pandemic. Eight states have now adopted the method, including California, where Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed universal mail-ballot legislation into law on Sept. 27.

More than 1 in 5 U.S. voters will receive their ballot for the 2022 midterms in their mailbox, automatically. 

This interview is part of a periodic series of conversations with thinkers and workers in the field of democracy – looking at what’s wrong with it, what’s right, and what we can do in the United States to strengthen it. The transcript has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. 

When you were secretary of state, Oregon was one of the first states to adopt extensive mail-in balloting at all levels of elections. How did that come about?

Actually, as a state legislator in 1989, I voted against expanding mail-in ballots to primary elections. I didn’t know much about the issue, didn’t give it a whole lot of thought. I said, “You know, I like going to the polls.” You know, that Norman Rockwell-ish crunch of autumn leaves under crisp blue skies, seeing neighbors, going into the curtained booth. The ritual of it.

Then when I got appointed secretary of state, I soon realized that I was confusing a particularly well-known and, to some, beloved ritual of democracy with what its essence is. The essence is participation. And I saw the evidence of how big an impact it had on increasing voter turnout, on giving voters a better sense of control over their ballots. They could look at what was on it and not be rushed.

We were evolving a whole new ritual of democracy, which is voting around our kitchen and dining room tables, talking with our kids or parents or others. And so I pushed hard for it.

Oregon’s Democratic governor at the time – a member of your own party – vetoed the first state bill allowing wide mail-in ballot use. In the mid-1990s, why did Democrats oppose this?

One of the reasons the Democrats opposed expansion of vote by mail – which I now call “vote at home” – during my tenure in the 1990s was fear that it would give more power to the anti-government tax-cutting conservatives. They worried it would mean the defeat of funding measures for schools, where before you would get approval because if only 5% or 10% of the people showed up, well, at least they were the people that most wanted to fund the schools.

But for those of us who have embraced this method of connecting ballots to voters, we have to ask ourselves a very important question. And that question is: Even if we profoundly disagree with the outcome of an election in which a lot more people participate, don’t we think that in the long term that makes for a healthier small “d” democracy?

We had to take an initiative petition to the ballot, and in 1998 it was approved by a 70% to 30% margin by voters across Oregon, with approval in every single county. It was not seen as helping one party or the other; it was seen as a better way to run elections. And since 2000, Oregon started running every election this way.

As you well know, former President Trump has denounced any expansion of the use of mail-in ballots as dangerous to the country. Has Oregon experienced fraud?

Hundreds of millions of ballots have been mailed out. The amount of any kind of fraud or mischief is probably a two-digit number over all of those elections. In the end, you can’t say fraud doesn’t exist. You can’t say that people won’t do stupid things. You can’t say that people will never try to get away with something. But none of it has even come within a whisker of a possibility of affecting any kind of election outcome.

Why isn’t there more fraud, do you think?

A county clerk once put it to me this way: Have you ever asked why counterfeiters don’t bother counterfeiting pennies? If you’re going to do the crime, risk the time, you’re going to do $20s and $100s. You don’t have voter fraud because who wants to risk jail for one vote? 

Every time you do it [submit a fraudulent vote], it’s a different felony. One hundred ballots would be 100 felonies. And are 100 ballots out of 4 million ballots cast going to make a difference? It’s a simple math issue. You’d have to be incredibly stupid to think you could get away with it. But even if you could get away with it, it’s stupid to think that you’d make a material difference.

But former President Trump and his supporters have talked about alleged conspiracies that manufactured votes on a large enough scale to “flip” elections.

You know, people like us [past and current election officials] struggle about whether we should even respond to such delusional nonsense. That’s exactly what it is: delusional nonsense.

As Exhibit A, the Arizona partisan review. We should never even call these things [forensic audits]. These are fishing expeditions performed by incompetent, unqualified, partisan people hoping for a result – and they still can’t manufacture it!

When you automatically give all active registered voters a ballot, whether they want it or expect it or not, you will increase turnout. Shouldn’t we be asking the question, why are we afraid of increased turnout? I’m not afraid. I tell my Democratic friends that if Donald Trump had been reelected in an 80% turnout election in 2020, that, in the long term, would have been healthier for our democratic small “d” system than having Joe Biden, my preferred candidate, win in an election with just 60% turnout. 

You prefer to call an Oregon-style election system “vote at home” instead of “mail-in voting.” Why? What’s the difference?

Basically, we say elections ought to be an opt-out system, not an opt-in. We start from the premise that this is the most fundamental of our small “d” democratic constitutional rights, that it’s the government’s obligation to send voters their ballots, not voters’ obligation to go find their ballots by either physically traveling to a polling place or applying for an absentee ballot, if they qualify.

Actually, most people in Oregon do not “vote by mail.” The vast majority of Oregonians return their ballots in person. Over 70% of them, even with return postage paid, take it physically to a drop box or county election offices.  

Some of us want to make certain it gets in. Some of us do it because it’s more convenient. Some of it is to see other people that I know at City Hall where I dropped my ballot off. So that’s why we call it “vote at home” – it’s the least inaccurate term.

Even the confusion about what to call this system is revealing about how people haven’t grasped what the profound power of it is. In a sense, you’ve removed that last set of barriers, the logistical barriers that people often experience in their lives. 

As a former secretary of state, what do you make of the physical threats that election officials across the U.S. are receiving?

It’s terrible. The amount of threats is unconscionable. It’s even worse at the local level. It’s incredibly dismaying.

I do worry about that. I temper that with what I got to know in my time, the incredible dedication and commitment [of election officials] to do the right thing – this bipartisan commitment that I worked with, honored, and respected. 

When Gica Winsent realized that the man thought to have the best shot at ousting nationalist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was addressing crowds near her home in the Hungarian capital, she hopped on her red bike and pedaled furiously to get there.

“I just wanted to see him in action,” she says, watching as Péter Márki-Zay stops to shake hands and take selfies with supporters. He “seems to be telling the truth,” she adds. “Not just blah blah blah. And he is a calm person.”

Mr. Márki-Zay, a conservative, independent, small-town mayor, is the freshly chosen candidate to lead a disparate group of six opposition political parties in the campaign for elections expected in April. Speaking on the anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian uprising as sunset draped the monuments of Heroes’ Square in gold, Mr. Márki-Zay acknowledged the magnitude of the challenge ahead.

He stressed the importance of unity. It was that quality, he recalled, that gave Hungarians the strength to challenge Soviet rule 65 years ago. “This is how we are going to win: We are going to unite for a free Hungary,” he said. “Let’s not look at who is standing next to us. Let’s look at who we must stand against. It’s going to be a gigantic fight.”

That strategy, analysts say, was forged by necessity because the ruling right-wing Fidesz party has used its two-thirds majority in parliament to change the constitution and electoral law in its favor. It won’t be easy for the opposition to take down Europe’s standard-bearer of illiberal democracy, but analysts believe it’s more possible now than at any time in the past decade. 

Opinion surveys put the ruling Fidesz party and the opposition coalition neck and neck, polling at 37% each, according to the firm Median.

A rift in social values

A message of unity was the strategy that helped Mr. Márki-Zay break into politics in 2018. That’s when he became the mayor of rural Hódmezővásárhely, a Fidesz stronghold. It was also the opposition’s message in 2019 municipal elections that delivered them surprise victories in Budapest and other key cities.

But the opposition coalition will have to continue to rally around Mr. Márki-Zay, who won an unprecedented joint primary this month, despite conservative social values that many opposition voters disdain. 

Dominique Soguel

Réka Nagy (right) attended an opposition event in Budapest on Oct. 23 with her mother and two small children. She says she is very “motivated” by a possibility of a change in government thanks to a united opposition and likes Péter Márki-Zay because of his conservative, right-wing views.

“It’s very tricky because he is a conservative guy,” says Róbert László, an election specialist at think tank Political Capital. “Ten years ago, he voted for Fidesz. He lives in the countryside and is the very proud father of seven children. He couldn’t be further from the political taste of downtown liberals and intelligentsia. However, he doesn’t say that everybody should think the way he does, so in this sense, he can be regarded a liberal.”

Mr. Márki-Zay says he is open to all viewpoints but that the most important question for Hungary is returning to democratic norms. “The question is do we want to belong to the Western European, Christianity-based culture?” he says in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor. “Do we want to stay in the European Union? Do we want to be a loyal member of NATO? Or do we want to be a rogue state doing business against the nation’s interest with communist China and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and the Islamists.”

Tackling corruption, he says, sits at the top of his agenda. “What we see is that corruption is so strong in Hungary that it overrides all other national interests.”

And that message resonates among voters, especially since it comes from an independent. “There is a big demand … within opposition voters that finally there should be consequences, at least political consequences … for corruption,” says Mr. László. “This is the most relevant promise he makes.”

“Most of the Hungarian opposition voters are left-wing and liberal voters,” says Andrew Bíró Nagy, director of Policy Solutions, a research institute. But many concluded that the best candidate to take on what he calls a radical-right-wing regime is someone who is culturally close to Orbán but unstained by corruption.

A rival “peace march”

On the Oct. 23 uprising anniversary, Mr. Orbán too called a rally, using the opportunity to thunder against his enemies in the West, accusing the United States and the European Union of meddling in Hungarian politics. Tens of thousands of Hungarians gathered to hear him warn that “the left wing, however they disguise themselves, are still the same left wing,” quoting a passage on false prophets from the Gospel of Matthew.

Dominique Soguel

Thousands of pro-government Hungarians took part in a "peace march" on Oct. 23, the anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian revolution.

His supporters marched along the banks of the Danube and crossed Liberty Bridge, many carrying signs bearing the names of their rural towns, or equating European Union membership with living under a dictatorship.

“Our biggest fear is that all the [international] media and all the EU leaders are against our Christian government,” says Judit Lamboy, a Budapest native who joined Mr. Orbán’s march. “They say this government is totalitarian. That is not true. This is an elected government and hopefully it will be elected again.”

Mr. Márki-Zay says the next six months will be nothing but hard work. His heroes include Winston Churchill as well as nonviolence crusaders Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. He admires both former American presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, but also holds up Lyndon B. Johnson for his Great Society program, which focused on eradicating poverty and racial injustice.

His willingness to dole out criticism of both the government and opposition has earned him the label “anti-establishment.” Analysts say he may have more in common with a 1980s or early 1990s Republican.

The six parties are drafting a joint manifesto that also reflects the priorities of left-wing, liberal, and green parties, says Mr. Bíró Nagy. “Another hope of the opposition is that this conservative, small-town mayor is willing to make compromise in terms of policy,” says the analyst. The current draft suggests a focus on social justice, democracy, and a reorientation of foreign policy in favor of the EU and U.S.

The time he spent living in the U.S. and Canada, Mr. Márki-Zay says, shaped his views on how to manage migration, among other issues. He sees the border fence erected under Mr. Orbán as a “legitimate tool of migration control” but says migrants should not be the object of hate campaigns that undermine their integration into society. “It is not about the number of migrants,” he says. “It is about screening and selecting them.” 

He may not be a fan of gay marriage or abortion but considers them a private matter and says he wouldn’t legislate against them.

His supporters say they find his messages of love and unity a refreshing contrast to the anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ “hate campaigns” of Mr. Orbán. They also feel confident that, since he is a devout Roman Catholic with a large family, it will be tough for Fidesz to best him on “values.”

“He is everything Fidesz represents,” says Réka Nagy, a supporter of the former far-right Jobbik party, who came to Mr. Márki-Zay’s meeting with a baby and toddler in tow. “As long as he doesn’t get into a fight with the [left-wing] opposition then he can succeed.

“We don’t care who wins against Orbán,” she adds. “The point is that finally somebody does.”

Dorottya Czuk contributed reporting to this article.

On a recent Monday evening at the Veronica Robles Cultural Center in East Boston, a group of 10 children practices circle dances for Día de los Muertos, the Mexican holiday that honors deceased friends and family. The girls hold out the edges of their long, black skirts, trimmed in green and orange, like sails as they stomp to the beat. In their midst is Veronica Robles herself – smiling and encouraging the tiniest timid dancer. 

Afterward Ms. Robles asks what they’ve learned. “Don’t break the circle,” comes one answer. “Don’t stop dancing, even if you don’t know what you are doing,” comes another.

They are the very lessons Ms. Robles had to learn herself, at the lowest time in her life after the death of her only child and then, two years later, a cancer diagnosis. Now the founder and director of the cultural center that bears her name leans in on her own resilience to uplift and inspire others through arts – not just in a joyous celebration of Latino culture but as a building block for an immigrant community that is often underprivileged and undervalued.

“When we are dancing, I teach them structure, I teach them how to think fast, I teach them how to get over something that didn’t work as planned, how to be resourceful,” she says. “If you really think positively and you find ways to make things better, you can do it – everybody can do it.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Veronica Robles lets a young dancer use her skirt in a folkloric dance class at her cultural center in East Boston.

The Veronica Robles Cultural Center, which opened in 2013, today offers classes and events that draw more than 5,000 people each year. Ms. Robles also leads New England’s first all-female mariachi band, provides small grants to developing artists of color, and hosts a weekly arts radio show, all the while continuously performing in Spanish and English. Her efforts have drawn local and international accolades. 

“Veronica is consistent, and ... she can cross all kinds of lines unapologetically and capture all different kinds of audiences, which is just rare,” says Catherine Morris, director of arts and culture for The Boston Foundation, which awarded Ms. Robles $15,000 in 2018 to establish her all-female band.

Ms. Robles points to her grandmother, “Mama Coco,” as the force behind her international success as a mariachi singer. It was Mama Coco who taught her traditional Mexican songs and pushed her to join a band looking for a substitute singer in her native Mexico City. The teenage Ms. Robles was an almost instant hit, discovering she had a knack for connecting with audiences and drawing them into a circle of joy and warmth that is evident at any of her performances.

Ms. Robles began traveling internationally and met her husband, Willy Lopez, a music producer from Peru, in New York City in 1993. The couple settled near Boston and helped to create arts programming across the city, laying the foundation for the center.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Ms. Robles (in red sombrero) performs with her all-female mariachi quartet at the 2021 Boston University Global Music Festival in Boston, Sept. 18.

Despite its broad reach today, the cultural center almost didn’t happen. What it took was a profound period of personal loss and grief after the death of her daughter, Kithzia, in 2008.  

“When we lost her, I just didn’t want to do anything else. I didn’t want to go back to anything. I was very depressed,” says Ms. Robles. But one day she forced herself to keep a school performance on her schedule. As part of the act, she randomly selected a boy from the audience to dance on stage. Afterward he came backstage to thank her and asked if he could give her a hug.

“It was a sign to me that I must keep doing what I do,” recalls Ms. Robles. His teacher later told her the boy was going through a hard time at home and how much that interaction meant. “I said, Veronica, you know what? You are probably not as important as other people, but you might be important to someone. I need to continue doing this in the spirit of my daughter, in memory of her [and to see] her in all these children.”

The center has since become a refuge for those who teach and learn inside its walls. “It is everybody’s cultural center,” explains Sonia Castillo, who teaches weekly Chilean dance classes. “We all have access to the center to practice. We trust each other. We help each other. We take care of the center like it is our own home.”

In April 2020, as the implications of the pandemic became clearer, the center unexpectedly found a new purpose as a community resilience hub – first distributing meals donated by local restaurants, later serving as a vaccination site, and then resuming its classes and performances on Zoom to keep people connected during long days of isolation. Ms. Robles was the engine behind it, says Ms. Castillo. “Veronica did all of that day and night, and I don’t know how she slept.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Masks made by students decorate the Veronica Robles Cultural Center. A Puerto Rican artist taught the children how to make these mini vejigantes, clown-like creatures portrayed in Puerto Rican carnival celebrations.

The center has grown as the city around it has changed. If Boston was once better known for its sports championships, Irish American politicians, and Revolutionary War re-enactors, in the past 20 years it has become a minority-majority city. Nearly 19% of the city’s population identifies as Hispanic or Latino. In the East Boston neighborhood, 58% of the population identifies as Hispanic or Latino.   

“I saw an opportunity not only to help my community, but also to show the other faces of Latin America ... not changing people’s minds, but conquering their hearts through the colors and sounds of our beautiful Latin American culture,” says Ms. Robles, whose space is decorated with brightly painted masks and flags of Central and South America.

That makes her an ambassador of sorts to the wider community. “When you think about Boston being a melting pot, the more exposure we have to all these different cultures, the more enlightened and tolerant we will be of celebrating other people’s holidays and traditions,” says Robin Baker, the associate director of community engagement for the Celebrity Series of Boston, which has featured Ms. Robles and her mariachi band. “We just love her charisma and the way she connects with the audience. She gets them to get up and move.” 

It also makes her a key figure for the immigrant community. For the past three years, Claudia Basulto, who was born in Mexico but moved to East Boston with her family when she was 5, has watched her 9-year-old daughter, Valentina, blossom from a shy girl to one who radiates confidence through Ms. Robles’ dance classes. “I wish that there was something like this growing up in the ’90s,” says Ms. Basulto, who is helping to organize the center’s eighth annual Día de los Muertos celebration on Oct. 30.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Ms. Robles (in red) poses with members of her all-female mariachi quartet, (in black, from left) Bengisu Gokce, Cassandra McDonald, and Nicole Edgecomb, after performing at the 2021 Boston University Global Music Festival in Boston.

For Ms. Robles, being an internationally known mariachi performer was never the goal, she explains. “I thought that I had more responsibility not only to bring joy, but also to make sure that people know about the important things in life, which is love each other, help each other, support each other.” 

Those values seem to be her most consistent message. During the Boston University Global Music Festival this fall, her band just finishes their final song when a small girl wearing a brightly striped dress with a cascade of dark curls down her back darts up to the stage. She shyly offers Ms. Robles a single daisy. Without hesitating, Ms. Robles, vibrant in a bright red mariachi outfit, swoops down and embraces the girl beneath her broad hat.

Celadon Books

Imagine long leisurely evenings alongside Jane Goodall, perhaps on the veranda of her house in Tanzania. As the sun slowly sets, she recounts stories, experiences, and insights from a lifetime as one of the world’s most renowned primatologists and an impassioned climate activist.

That’s a bit how “The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times” reads. Goodall’s new book, with writer Douglas Abrams as the reader’s inquisitive stand-in, unfurls as a series of engaging conversations and fascinating stories that Goodall hopes will touch the heart as well as the mind, with Abrams teasing out her thoughts and ideas. Through substantive interviews, we get a sense of a lively woman of brilliant intellect, keen insight, and impish humor, soft-spoken and empathetic yet passionate. The book also clearly demonstrates that Goodall’s urgency surrounding the issue of climate change is allied with hope.   

Goodall is no glib Pollyanna. She writes in the opening chapter, “Probably the question I am asked more often than any other is: Do you honestly believe there is hope for our world?” She is unflinching in her assessment of the dire state of our planet. Yet she maintains that there is a window of time in which we can still repair much of the harm inflicted on the natural world – but in addition to hope, there is a need for action, engagement, even anger. Not new ideas, of course. But even for this initially cynical reader, Goodall’s eloquent reflections prove strikingly persuasive and often profoundly moving.

Goodall defines hope as a survival mechanism that “enables us to keep going in the face of adversity.” She points to four main reasons for hope, which form the book’s chapter titles: “the amazing human intellect, the resilience of nature, the power of youth, and the indomitable human spirit.” She illuminates the interconnected tapestry of life with extraordinary tales of animals and plants brought back from the brink. “I truly believe nature has a fantastic ability to restore itself after being destroyed, whether by us or by natural disasters. Sometimes it restores itself slowly, over time. But now, because of the terrible harm we are causing on a daily basis, we often need to step in and help in the restoration,” she says. 

Throughout, the book is seeded with captivating photos that bring people and places to life. We get glimpses of Goodall’s remarkable life, from a shy, sickly child dreaming of studying animals in Africa to a trailblazing researcher whose time in the wild with chimpanzees led to challenging the reductive notion that human beings are different from and superior to all other animals. A popular speaker and gifted communicator, she now travels the world to “wake people up,” trying to inspire respect for all life and a commitment to preserve it.

At times, the book’s digressions and repetitions impede the flow, and the conversational tone can get a bit cloying. The meat of Goodall’s wisdom could have made for a slimmer, pithier read. But Abrams is especially effective as devil’s advocate when his skepticism kicks in and he challenges, pushing for clarity. And Goodall never fails to rise to the occasion. One fascinating exchange delves into – with a thoughtfulness totally devoid of didacticism – the convergence of science, religion, and spirituality, referencing Shakespeare, philosophers, and Einstein’s “harmony of natural law.”

The book ends with a direct “Message of Hope from Jane,” which broaches the topic of new human diseases that researchers say come from our interactions with animals (like COVID-19). She says that in addition to defeating these diseases, we must fight against “stupidity, greed, and selfishness.” And she assures us that “the cumulative effect of millions of small ethical actions will truly make a difference.”  

AP

Pro-democracy protesters flash the victory sign as they take to the streets against a takeover by they military officials in Khartoum, Sudan, Oct. 25.

During his two years as Sudan’s civilian leader, Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok often justified reforms as “preserving” the dignity of the people. The inherent worth of women, for example, gave them rights and freedoms over their types of clothing in a largely Muslim country.

On Oct. 25, the British-trained economist expressed a similar dignity after the military took full power and put him under house arrest. The generals asked him to issue a statement in support of the coup. He refused.

Mr. Hamdok’s act of integrity might now help bolster the protesters who have taken to the streets to save their democratic revolution of 2019. They are again in a battle with autocratic generals who believe dignity is something granted from outside rather than an innate quality of each individual.

One of Sudan’s main pro-democratic groups, the Sudanese Professionals Association, has long advised protesters to “protect the ... remaining dignity” of each person by acting with peaceful courage. The demonstrations will again be challenged by coup leaders who rely on guns to rule.

The 2019 revolution was successful in part because of the integrity of protesters. Their mental freedom and embrace of equality in Sudan’s diverse society helped lead to the downfall of dictator Omar al-Bashir and the creation of a temporary sharing of power between the military and civilians. As the deadline neared in November for the military to hand over power, the generals panicked and led a coup.

Yet their attempt to roll back Sudan’s progress will be difficult. “Justice and accountability are a solid foundation of the new, rule of law-based Sudan we’re striving to build,” said Mr. Hamdok soon after taking office two years ago.

That “striving” has lost some ground with the coup. But Sudan’s 45 million people, now far more aware of acting out of dignity rather than pleading for it, may refuse to go along with the military, much like Mr. Hamdok did.