Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Dairyman Raymond Reignen stands near the cows of Kibbutz Nahal Oz, south of Sderot, Israel, March 21, 2024. A wave of “looters” that followed Hamas fighters damaged several systems on the collective farm Oct. 7, setting the milk barn ablaze. But the dairy is once again operational.

The paint is not yet dry and a large outdoor sign has yet to be hung at the newly expanded facilities of BionicHIVE, a warehouse-automation startup.

The company is part of an upstart tech hub in this southern Israeli city, just minutes from the northeast border of the Gaza Strip.

Like the rest of Sderot and nearby farms and kibbutzim, BionicHIVE was hit hard when Hamas fighters poured across the border Oct. 7, killing 50 Sderot residents and abducting others, destroying infrastructure, and leaving an emptied region in their wake.

Half the company’s 30 employees and their families evacuated the area and scattered around Israel. About a third were called to reserve duty to join the war effort.

But now in BionicHIVE’s test lab, a smiling orange-and-black robot named SqUID is back to plying the tracks along towering storage shelves, placing and retrieving packages based on QR Codes and a lab engineer’s commands.

SqUID’s return to work three weeks ago – along with many of the engineers and other employees in quadruple the workspace of the previous location – is one sign of life and economic activity returning gradually to an area devastated both physically and psychologically.

A government report last week said about half the estimated 120,000 Israelis who evacuated from southern Israel have returned.

In Sderot, where the population had plunged overnight from 31,000 to fewer than 5,000, families are returning and strip malls reopening. Red and yellow snapdragons brighten roundabouts.

Indeed, the hum of activity at BionicHIVE is testament to the rebuilding of confidence that life – families, jobs, schools, public activities – can resume and flourish, securely, once again.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

At Carrar, a thermal management systems startup in Sderot, Israel, engineering and testing manager Dor Peretz explains the company’s immersion cooling system for electric vehicle batteries. Citing safety concerns, he says his family still lives 40 miles away.

“It’s been a challenge to convince people that they can come back in safety and build our work community together, but we’re getting there,” says Yoram Ilan, BionicHIVE’s vice president of operations.

To enhance a sense of security, the company added a hardened shelter to every floor of the new facility. To rebuild a sense of community, an ice cream “happy hour” was added to the workweek.

Yet while more employees are ready to return to the building to work, what remains more difficult is what Mr. Ilan calls “that next step”: bringing families back to live here.

“Families need safety,” he adds, “but also an ecosystem of schools, all kinds of services and activities for the kids, and many don’t see that happening yet.”

Distrust of government

A bigger challenge still, he says, is overcoming the traumatic sense of abandonment that people felt on Oct. 7 – and are still experiencing.

“On a higher level, the country, the government has not yet rebuilt the trust of the people,” Mr. Ilan says. “That is going to take some time.”

Fifteen minutes south of Sderot, at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, Amir Adler checks out his avocado orchard and banana plantation as he offers a similar assessment of prospects for southern Israel.

“I have full trust in the army and what they are doing over in Gaza,” the farmer says, motioning to buildings visible to the west. The collective farm’s crop rows stretch right up to the border, less than a kilometer away. “But I haven’t got any trust back in the government and what they are saying about the ‘day after’ here,” he adds. “Their plan for our return is not in any way sufficient in my eyes.”

The tidy kibbutz neighborhood of new whitewashed homes where Mr. Adler’s family had lived for only nine months is silent. For now, only the army and a few returned Thai farmworkers live on Nahal Oz. When a boom and distant gunfire pierce the calm, Mr. Adler gazes skyward and says that this is why his family remains at a temporary home two hours north, near Haifa.

“You see what is still happening,” he says. “Could you bring your family back to that?”

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Farmer Amir Adler, in a potato field on Kibbutz Nahal Oz, says, “I haven’t got any trust back in the government and what they are saying about the ‘day after’ here.” The buildings in the distance are in Gaza.

The sounds of war are an unnerving reminder that across Gaza, fighting has returned to some areas that the Israeli military said it had cleared of organized Hamas forces.

“Trust we had in working together is gone”

Indeed, like many people in the Sderot area, the kibbutznik is keen to point out that something else shattered Oct. 7: a nascent trust in the people of “the other side” – before the attack 20 Palestinians from Gaza worked on Nahal Oz’s farms – and a sense that two different communities separated by a border could live and work together after all.

“After Oct. 7 we realized that this was an attack on agriculture as well, that a big part of their plan was to push us off this land,” he says.

After a first wave of fighters raced through the kibbutz, killing and abducting residents, a second wave of what Mr. Adler calls “looters” arrived.

“They destroyed the irrigation systems, dismantled the water pumps. They burned the milking barn and the hay for the cows. They even killed a Thai worker with a shovel,” he says.

Pointing out recent deliveries of new irrigation pipes and the return of milking operations at the dairy, Mr. Adler adds, “Physically we can repair the damage, but any trust we had in working together is gone.”

For now the only goal is to reestablish the community’s hold on the land, he says, so that someday its people – including his own family – can decide if they want to return.

“The way I see it, we’re doing what we can to make a future possible here. We’re rebuilding; we’re planning for new crops to keep the place alive,” Mr. Adler says. “But whether or not the people will decide they can come back, today I would say that is unknown.”

Across the region, the sense Mr. Adler articulates of dashed hopes for some kind of peaceful coexistence with Gaza is never far from the surface. So are worries over the impact that lingering feelings of an unsafe and even hostile environment might have on southern Israel’s development.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

At BionicHIVE in Sderot, Vice President of Operations Yoram Ilan (left) and Oleg Gorokhov, integration and quality assurance manager, show off SqUID, the robot at the core of the company’s warehouse-automation system.

At Carrar, a thermal management systems startup tucked into Sderot’s Sapirim industrial park, engineering and testing manager Dor Peretz proudly displays a cutting-edge immersion cooling system designed to address the problem of heat generation in electric vehicle batteries. Some of the world’s biggest names in EV manufacturing are invested in Carrar.

Mr. Peretz, who is from the Sderot area, is proud that Carrar is part of southern Israel’s fledgling tech hub. But he says there is no doubt that Oct. 7 and the war mere kilometers away have set back development goals.

“We have to keep going”

The government has a plan, called SouthUp, to encourage high-tech development, he notes, while a new program provides subsidies to families willing to return to their homes.

But Mr. Peretz says the only real solution for securing southern Israel’s future will be victory in the war to wipe out a hostile military and governing force in Gaza. Until then, people will live and work here because of their attachment to the land, he says, not because they are confident of their safety.

“We will stay here because this is who we are and this is what we do,” says Mr. Peretz, whose family now lives 40 miles away. “We are not feeling safe,” he adds, “but we have to keep going. That’s it.”

Back at BionicHIVE, Mr. Ilan describes with enthusiasm the many ways his little company is really an international enterprise. The rails SqUID runs on are made in Kentucky, and Amazon is a key investor. The system’s biggest market will almost certainly be North America.

But those high hopes turn bleak when he considers Sderot’s closer international neighborhood. Any sense that the proximity of a border is an asset has vanished.

“I never trusted Hamas in any way, but I was trusting the people of Gaza, that they could behave in a different way and we could be a benefit to each other,” he says.

Noting that before Oct. 7, some 50,000 Palestinians regularly crossed the border for work, he adds, “After what we experienced, it will be 20 or 30 years before we might get back to something like that.”

In the meantime, Mr. Ilan says he and others in Sderot are working hard to reestablish a sense of normalcy. And every day he sees evidence that the revival is happening, from a reopened favorite lunch spot to reports from employees that they are feeling more secure about returning.

“Just yesterday,” he says with a smile, “one [employee] told me, ‘I’m starting to feel like Oct. 6 again.’”

Simon Montlake/The Christian Science Monitor

A paraprofessional teacher assists a student with a writing assignment at Kinsey Elementary School in Sioux Center, Iowa, Feb. 13, 2024.

In 2006, Iowa’s governor, Tom Vilsack, made a pitch to young Iowans who had moved away, leaving behind a shrinking, aging workforce. His “Come back to Iowa, please” campaign targeted college graduates living in cities like New York and Los Angeles, where Mr. Vilsack hosted cocktail parties and promised that Iowa offered more than “hogs, acres of corn, and old people.”

The campaign fizzled out as young Iowans continued to seek bright lights elsewhere after college, part of a perennial brain drain still facing this and other Midwestern states. 

But Iowa has had far greater success attracting another group: immigrants from Mexico and Central America. 

In the 2020 census, Sioux County was one of the only nonmetropolitan counties in Iowa that grew its population. Sioux Center, the largest town, has nearly 9,000 residents today, up from 7,000 in 2010. Its rural industries and services are drawing in foreign and U.S.-born workers who slaughter pigs, milk cows, collect eggs, and build houses and schools for a growing population. 

Mexicans have long moved to Iowa for work, beginning in the 1880s with railroad and farm laborers, though their numbers remained small. That changed in the 1990s as meat packers began to recruit more migrants and refugees. By 2022, Hispanics or Latinos comprised 6.9% of Iowa’s population, or 221,805 people, of which around three-quarters were Mexican, up from less than 20,000 in 1970.

Some of the newcomers had work permits. Others didn’t. In rural towns, they began arriving in larger numbers to work on farms and in factories. Migrants joined and founded churches, set up small businesses, and started families. “They come here to get a job, to earn money, and to live better,” says Carlos Perez, a Venezuelan-born evangelical pastor who moved to Iowa in 2019.

Simon Montlake/The Christian Science Monitor

A grain storage facility is seen in Sioux Center, Iowa, Feb. 13, 2024. The population of Sioux Center has grown rapidly in recent decades, led by immigrants from Mexico and Central America moving to work in agricultural and manufacturing industries.

To some, Sioux County offers a vision of immigration as a growth engine in an era of falling fertility throughout the United States. Having peaked in 2007 at 4.3 million per year, births began falling in 2008. They hit a new low last year at 3.7 million.

Without immigrants, the U.S. working-age population will soon begin shrinking as fewer young adults replace millions of retiring boomers. Migrants skew younger and are more likely to bear children of their own. For rural counties that have long struggled to retain young people, migration can be a force multiplier. 

“Even by adding just a few hundred immigrants a year, it can make a dramatic change over a decade in reversing population decline,” says Phillip Connor, senior demographer at Fwd.us, a pro-immigration advocacy group in Washington, who authored a 2023 report on the impact of immigration on rural counties, including Sioux County. 

Countries like Canada and Australia have already embraced this strategy to mitigate similar demographic challenges, welcoming higher numbers of foreign-born workers to offset falling birthrates. In the U.S., overall deaths are now forecast to exceed births by 2038, according to Census Bureau projections. Immigration, in fact, is making the difference between many states’ population growth and contraction. 

The math may add up, but mass immigration to offset population decline faces stiff political, social, and cultural resistance.

SOURCE:

Migration Policy Institute, USA Facts

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Under President Joe Biden, a post-pandemic surge of crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border has splintered pro-immigration Democrats, including leaders in cities that are hubs for migration. In February, Republicans in Congress killed a bipartisan border bill that would have restricted crossings by asylum-seekers and ramped up border security. Notably, the bill offered no legal pathways for millions of unauthorized migrants, including foreign-born children raised in the U.S. and known as “Dreamers,” who once commanded bipartisan sympathy. 

Many Republicans have hardened in their opposition to mass immigration. Among Republicans, around half favor a decrease in legal immigration, a share that rose to two-thirds among pro-Donald Trump Republicans, according to a Chicago Council poll taken last September. Only 25% of poll respondents said legal immigration to the U.S. should be increased. 

In Iowa, a poll of GOP presidential caucusgoers in January found that 40% picked immigration as the nation’s top issue, ahead of the economy. Three-quarters said that immigrants “do more to hurt the country” than to help it. 

Other polling shows more support for migrants. In a February poll by The Wall Street Journal, three-quarters of respondents said unauthorized immigrants who have been in the U.S. for many years and pass background checks should be given a path to citizenship. One in 5 said immigration was their top issue. And a majority supported an increase in legal immigration. 

Building for the future 

Immigrants, numbering roughly 46 million people, are estimated to make up 14% of the current U.S. population. In 2022, 1 in 4 school-age children had at least one immigrant parent. 

In Sioux Center, a town of modest, well-kept houses hemmed by cropland and industrial plants, the public school system has expanded to serve an increasingly diverse population. It currently enrolls 1,641 students, up from around 1,100 a decade ago, of which nearly half are nonwhite. To meet rising demand, the town has built a preschool, rejiggered its middle school grades, and opened a brand-new high school in 2021 with over 500 students and capacity to serve up to 800. “We’ve built for the future,” says Gary McEldowney, the Sioux Center Community School District superintendent. 

Simon Montlake/The Christian Science Monitor

Children straddle a climbing structure at recess at Kinsey Elementary School in Sioux Center, Iowa, Feb. 13, 2024. Public school enrollment in Sioux Center has grown rapidly as more immigrants from Mexico and Central America move to the town for work. Nearly half the student body is nonwhite.

That expansion bucks a national trend of shrinking high school classes as smaller birth cohorts move up the K-12 ladder. The overall number of high school seniors in 2028 is projected to be 3.6 million, down 14% from 2008, when the U.S. fertility rate began its vertiginous slide.

Sioux Center’s growth has been propelled by immigrants and their children, primarily from Spanish-speaking countries. Its schools have hired or trained bilingual staff and send out school communications in Spanish and English. One in 4 students is an English learner. Both the high school and middle school now have soccer teams for boys and girls, reflecting the sport’s popularity among Hispanics in particular. Conversations on the playground are mostly in English as laughing children race around in the frosty morning air with beanie hats pulled low.

Troy Lentell, the principal of Kinsey Elementary School, previously worked as a principal in another rural district in Iowa that struggled with low and declining school enrollment. “The conversation was how to get creative to keep the doors open,” he says. By contrast, Sioux Center “has to be creative to have enough schools and space for our kids.”  

The high school’s construction was funded with a $25 million bond that passed with 76% approval in 2019. A significant number of those voters, many of whom work in farming and manufacturing, will send their own children to private Christian schools, which have deep roots in the community, notes Mr. McEldowney. “We have been very blessed with our building projects,” he says. 

Churches play a big role in Sioux Center. The town was settled by Dutch farmers in the 19th century, as was Orange City, the county seat. Both towns have private, church-affiliated colleges. Orange City plays up its Dutch roots with decorative windmills, Dutch-style gables on storefronts, and an annual tulip festival in May. Virtually all stores in both towns close on Sundays, when it’s also verboten to mow your lawn, a source of confusion for newcomers.

Residents take pride in Sioux Center’s safety. “I don’t know where my house keys are,” says John Lee, the pastor of Bethel Christian Reformed Church, which occupies a striking A-frame building that evokes praying hands to drivers on the town’s main road. 

A former missionary in Nicaragua, Mr. Lee has welcomed Sioux Center’s newest wave of Hispanic immigrants and encouraged his 800 or so regular worshippers to do the same. Church members have sponsored over 100 Ukrainian refugees to resettle in the community, he notes. But he also stands with immigrants who don’t have legal status, a stance less popular among his mostly Republican-voting congregation. 

“As Christians, there’s an obligation to our neighbors,” he says, “whether those neighbors have papers or not.”

Simon Montlake/The Christian Science Monitor

Titus Landegent, a teacher at Kinsey Elementary School in Sioux Center, Iowa, greets students returning from recess Feb. 13, 2024. Mr. Landegent runs a bilingual gifted and talented program at the elementary school.

That many of the recent Central American newcomers are Christian, both Catholic and, increasingly, Evangelicals, helps smooth their path in Sioux Center. A newly rebuilt Catholic church overflows on Sundays during Spanish-language services. Mr. Perez, the evangelical pastor, moved to Sioux Center with his wife so that his church could reach more immigrants. “We feel very welcome in this community,” he says. 

But the growing Hispanic presence in this rural corner of Iowa has also met nativist resistance.

Race-based fears  

Sioux County is in Iowa’s 4th Congressional District, which until 2020 was held by nine-term Rep. Steve King. Mr. King, a Republican, gained national notoriety for a series of racist remarks that eventually led GOP leaders to remove him from House committees. 

In 2017, Mr. King wrote on Twitter, now called X, in support of far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who, he said, “understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”  

His tweet surfaced a far-right conspiracy theory that elites in Europe and the U.S. are leveraging immigration to make white people into minorities in their countries. Known as the “Great Replacement,” the theory has been widely promoted by pro-Trump media outlets. In September, Mr. Trump, who is seeking a second term as president, said that migrants living in the U.S. illegally were “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing language used by fascist dictatorships in Europe. 

Mr. King wasn’t alone in his race-based views on mass migration in rural Iowa, says Mark Grey, an anthropologist at the University of Northern Iowa who has studied migration trends in the area. Many older white voters see migrants not as an answer to rural depopulation but as a cultural threat. Mr. King “was just saying out loud what a lot of his voters believed,” he says.

Fears over the country’s “racial stock” were common a century ago, when a wave of immigration from southern Europe and Eastern Europe fueled widespread nativism, says Nancy Foner, a sociologist at Hunter College. President Theodore Roosevelt warned that white Anglo-Saxons risked “race suicide” if the newcomers outbred them. These nativist reactions led Congress to restrict the admission of racial and religious minorities, culminating in an immigration bill passed in 1924. “Those were the arguments used to justify the 1924 Act,” says Professor Foner, author of “One Quarter of the Nation: Immigration and the Transformation of America.”

In 2020, Mr. King was defeated in a GOP primary by Randy Feenstra, a state senator. His biggest losing margin came in Sioux County, where many cheered his downfall. “It was a clear mandate” for a different approach, says Titus Landegent, who teaches a bilingual gifted and talented program at Kinsey Elementary School.

Mr. King’s comment about “somebody else’s babies” ignores the fact that white, native-born residents are also having babies, says Mr. Lee, the pastor, who celebrated 26 baptisms at his church last year. Mixed marriages, a time-tested path to social integration in America, are starting to happen here, too, as are bilingual church services aimed at bridging divides. At the same time, some residents drive to Walmart in another town to avoid shopping in Sioux Center among immigrants.

Mr. Lee is optimistic that different cultures can coexist in Sioux County and, in time, come together. “Change can be hard. ... Fear is part of the human experience. We have to name it. But hope is part of our human experience, too.”  

Simon Montlake/The Christian Science Monitor

A construction crew works on a commercial building project in Sioux Center, Iowa, Feb. 14, 2024. The population of Sioux Center has grown rapidly in recent decades to nearly 9,000.

Need for rural workers 

In Iowa, business leaders and their political allies have long been a countervailing force in immigration policy, seeing migrants as essential to their current and future workforce, particularly in rural areas. That has become much harder in recent years, says Professor Grey, who has consulted for companies that hire migrants. National immigration debates increasingly drive Iowa’s GOP-dominated state government and its policies, while business groups that favor immigration “have really gone dormant,” he says. 

Some Republican state governors have swum against the “Make America Great Again” tide, arguing that rural America urgently needs more immigrants to fill job vacancies in agriculture, health care, and other services. They argue that states should be allowed to sponsor immigrants if the federal government won’t issue more work-based visas. Mr. Vilsack, now President Biden’s secretary of agriculture, struck a similar tone when he was Iowa’s governor, seeking exemptions from federal restrictions on foreign workers as part of a population recovery plan. 

Tiffany O’Donnell, the Republican mayor of Cedar Rapids, told Bloomberg last year that the “broken” immigration system was affecting her community, a corn-processing hub in eastern Iowa. “We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t figure out how to connect someone in Central America to the thousands of jobs we have in this state,” she says.

Critics say rural industries want to loosen visa rules so they can exploit migrants and undercut the wages of local workers. But while such labor abuses have been documented in Iowa, there’s little evidence that immigrants are displacing native-born workers. 

In his report, Mr. Connors, the demographer, studied population and labor-market data in 1,300 rural counties. In 2020, more than three-quarters had fewer working-age adults than 20 years ago, leaving behind a rapidly aging population for the available jobs. “Their unemployment rates are very low. The need for workers in almost every rural county exists,” says Mr. Connors. 

Migration into shrinking rural communities also adds to the demand for services, including those related to childbearing. Sioux Center has a hospital with a birthing center and a federally funded clinic that provides midwives for home births. But across the rest of Iowa, hospitals have shuttered birthing centers due to lower births, staffing shortages, and financial burdens. Fewer than half of Iowa’s 99 counties now have a labor and delivery center, forcing mothers to drive further to deliver in a hospital setting.  

Tracing change through one young person’s life 

Diana Vera was among the first in the latest wave of Hispanics into Sioux Center, moving here with her parents from Mexico in 2002 at age 1. The family lived four to a room in a mobile home with an aunt, and her father worked nights on a hog farm. Ms. Vera and her older brother went to school by bus because her mother was scared to drive. The family had come to the country illegally, a realization that dawned on Ms. Vera as she grew up. “It was just a risk we had to take,” she says.

At school, she was a joiner, taking part in sports and music. Most of her friends were white and would make disparaging remarks about Hispanics. Mr. Trump’s election in 2016 and his anti-immigrant rhetoric added fuel to the fire. “It’s so hard to see how, as a Christian, you’d support that,” she says. 

She was 15 when she registered for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects her from deportation but provides no path to citizenship. Her two younger siblings were born in the U.S. and are growing up in a town that has changed dramatically since Ms. Vera first arrived. “My sisters have friends who look like them,” she says. 

In 2022, Ms. Vera graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in global health studies. She’s now working as a medical assistant at the the federally funded health clinic in Sioux Center that serves many migrants, interpreting for Spanish-speaking patients. But for all the demographic change here, Ms. Vera sees limits for newcomers. “They don’t want us to have a seat at the table,” she says. 

Her father now holds a supervisory position at a dairy farm but lacks permanent legal status. Similarly, Ms. Vera and her brother, a software engineer who is also a DACA recipient, know their immigration status remains contingent on political winds. Perhaps she’ll have to emigrate to a country that is more receptive to migrants, she muses.  

For now, she’s applying for graduate programs and is ready to leave Sioux County behind like other educated youth before her. Ms. Vera’s father has always encouraged her ambitions. “He told me, ‘A bird can’t always stay in its nest. It has to go out,’” she says. 

This is the second in a three-part series on falling birthrates in the U.S. and the world. The first in the series, about U.S. parents having fewer children, can be found here. The third, about tumbling global birthrates and hard societal choices ahead, can be found here.

Editor's note: The original version of this story misstated where John Lee did his missionary service. 

“Key Bridge is gone!” my wife said.

She looked at her phone as we lay in bed in the early hours Tuesday. Across Baltimore, others were waking up the same way, incredulous. It was not just the dimensions of the collapse, though that was bad enough. To many residents of the Queen City of the Patapsco River, it was also the particular landmark involved.

Baltimore loves its historical artifacts, and the Key Bridge was – is – one.

You saw it all the time from neighborhoods all over. You’d drive around City College in the northeast stretches of the city, and there it was, glimmering in the distance. You’d park at Johns Hopkins across town, and suddenly it was right there. You’d walk down to the sea wall at Fort McHenry, and it was close enough to count vehicles crossing.

Arched and boxed in steel, the main span was not so much beautiful as confident. It looked like a bridge that knew its business and didn’t want any fuss. Its ethos was blue-collar, like the city. Indeed, the fatal casualties of the bridge collapse were construction workers just doing their job, filling potholes on the roadbed.

Key Bridge was not the crossing you used if you were driving through from Virginia on your way to New York. It was on the side of the Baltimore beltway where container ships dock and semitrailers rumble up to deliver to warehouses. 

Its north landing curled around the site of the former Sparrows Point steel complex, once the largest refinery in the world and a key World War II shipyard. The site was declining but still large when the bridge opened in 1977.

Now the crumpled structure lies across the Patapsco River outlet, blocking egress from the point like a kicked-over toy.

“This is an unspeakable tragedy,” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, a lifelong city resident, told CNN. “When you ... live in Baltimore, this bridge is iconic.”

Besides its place in the landscape, the bridge is famous in Baltimore for its connection to Francis Scott Key, author of the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” (Local traffic reporters sometimes referred to it as the “car-strangled spanner.”)

As many news reports have noted in recent days, the bridge is located near the spot where Key, detained on a British warship, watched the British bombard Fort McHenry during the Battle of Baltimore on Sept. 13, 1814.

But as many Baltimoreans also know, that spot is physically marked for much of the year with one of America’s most unusual patriotic memorials, the “Star-Spangled Banner” memorial buoy. This floating marker, painted to resemble a U.S. flag, was visible from part of the bridge’s span.

The Coast Guard removes the buoy in the fall each year for storage and maintenance, and then sets it again in late spring.

Will locals ever again see the buoy’s starry flash as they drive south over the bridge? Will a bridge as appealing and, yes, iconic as the old Key Bridge ever again grace workaday Baltimore?

President Joe Biden has said that the federal government will pay the entire cost of the reconstruction. Congress would have a say in that, however, and costs could be considerable. The process could be slow. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg warned on Wednesday that rebuilding the bridge will be neither quick, easy, nor cheap.

But Baltimore, for all its many real problems, is a city that keeps grinding ahead. The old Memorial Stadium is now a YMCA, but Ravens stadium and the Orioles’ Camden Yards are new downtown icons. Three years ago, the beloved neon Domino Sugar sign, a harbor companion to Key Bridge, went dark – to be replaced months later by a modern LED reconstruction.

“If you’re a betting person, don’t bet against Baltimore,” Mayor Scott told CNN. “We will build back better and stronger, and together.”

Something extraordinary happened last Sunday in a small nation on the west coast of Africa, at a time when strongman regimes and outright autocracies are on the rise around the globe.

Democracy held. Democracy prevailed.

And while the outcome of the presidential election in Senegal did not draw broad global media attention outside Africa, its implications – and potential lessons – matter more widely.

So, too, will what comes next, as the new president-elect confronts a daunting challenge: to demonstrate that democracy works, that democracy can deliver.

For Senegal is no ordinary African country, and this was no ordinary election.

Senegal is one of the minority of African states with an uninterrupted record of voting its leaders in, and out, without men in uniform seizing power. The country has done so since it won its independence from France in 1960. 

Over the past five years, Senegalese people have watched as one nearby government after another – in a band of territory stretching right across Africa – has been toppled by soldiers, some of whom then turned to Russian forces to keep them in power.

And Senegal’s own democracy seemed in peril in the months leading up to the election.

President Macky Sall, elected in 2012 and serving the second of his permitted terms, had become increasingly authoritarian, cracking down on, and imprisoning, opponents and journalists.

He was hinting he might seek a third term. Last June, his main rival, Ousmane Sonko, was arrested, igniting demonstrations in which a number of protesters were killed.

Zohra Bensemra//Reuters

Supporters of Senegal's outgoing President Macky Sall march in support of him after he postponed the Feb. 25 presidential election, a decision later overturned by the courts.

Mr. Sall did then declare that he would step down after the election – originally set for Feb. 25.

But in early February, hours before campaigning was due to start, he announced he was delaying the vote.

All of which made Sunday’s outcome especially remarkable.

The delay turned out to last only a month.

Though Mr. Sonko was barred from running, he designated a close ally, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, to do so in his place.

With 19 candidates contesting the election, pundits expected none to secure the 50% needed to win outright and predicted that Mr. Faye would face a runoff against President Sall’s protégé, former Prime Minister Amadou Ba.

But on election day, early returns made it clear that Mr. Faye was on track to win comfortably.

Within hours, Mr. Ba conceded. So did President Sall. “I congratulate the winner,” he declared. “It is a victory for Senegalese democracy.”

So it was, but not just because millions of Senegalese wanted change and – joining the long, orderly lines at polling stations – made their voices count.

Equally important were two political bedrocks: a democratic culture built over the years since independence, and the institutional foundation of democracy – an independent judiciary.

Senegal’s highest court, the Constitutional Council, stepped in after Mr. Sall postponed the vote. It ruled that he lacked the authority to do so, and ordered the election to be held as soon as possible.

Zohra Bensemra/Reuters

Victorious opposition presidential candidate Bassirou Diomaye Faye flashes a victory sign while casting his vote.

Still, if Senegal has provided an example of how democracies can hold firm and survive, the country’s next president now faces a test with yet wider international implications.

That’s because even in some well-established democracies, such as the United States, the culture of democracy, and trust in its institutions, is being eroded by angry, partisan divisions.

And while international surveys still find that people overwhelmingly prefer democratic government, this seems to be becoming less true of younger people.

The reason? Waning faith in democracy’s ability to get things done and to make lives better.

That’s certainly true in Africa, a challenge made more pressing by the fact that some 40% of the continent’s population is under the age of 15.

In Senegal, young voters were key to Mr. Faye’s victory.

Now, his task is to meet their expectations.

In contrast to Mr. Sall, who presided over a series of giant infrastructure projects, Mr. Faye is likely to focus on the everyday economy, keeping consumer prices down, providing more and better jobs, and improving health and social provision.

A former career civil servant, he would seem well suited to handling that agenda.

He will also start with a major advantage. An offshore natural gas project, due to begin exporting to Germany this year, should give Senegal’s gross domestic product a major boost, the International Monetary Fund has forecast.

Yet he and Mr. Sonko also built their support on a populist political message, suggesting they would renegotiate the terms of the gas agreement, for instance, and move away from the CFA franc, which Senegal uses as its national currency.

Such moves could delay the gas export project, or, more generally, dent international business confidence in Senegal’s economy.

Whichever policy balance he chooses, Mr. Faye’s main concern will be to restore, and sustain, popular confidence in a democratic government’s ability to deliver results.

And the stakes are high, as experiences in Senegal’s military-ruled neighbors have made clear.

Many citizens there initially accepted the coups – and even supported them – apparently figuring that the men with guns would at least get things done.

A United Nations survey last year did find that 11% of citizens under military rule in Africa still preferred “non-democratic” rule.

But for the other 89% – unlike for the Senegalese – the choice is no longer theirs. 

My niece Elizabeth called the other day to see if I wanted to help her look for a wild Brown’s peony in the woods. It wasn’t exactly missing or anything, but she’d never seen one, and it was on her bucket list. Elizabeth is a botany geek.

I’m always up for a good scavenger hunt. The pursuit is the thing: the sharpening of the senses, the possibility of discovery! It’s about joy. It’s about seeing something wonderful for the very first time, the way a child would, before familiarity has a chance to rub off some of its shine. So yes, Elizabeth, count me in!

We drove to a refuge where the peonies had been reported and took off down a trail. “What do they look like?” I asked her. I thought that would be relevant information.

“Maybe this high,” she said, her hands about a foot apart, “with glabrous and glaucous leaves.”

I looked blank.

“And the flowers, if they’re in bloom, are globose,” she finished up. 

All righty then. I still had a chance to trip over her prized peony through sheer serendipity, which is a frequent companion of mine, and I’m always up for a hike. We tramped about a mile before Elizabeth started hooting. The peony had been spotted! Well, not spotted per se, but definitely glabrous and glaucous. After that first one, dozens more were seen. By Elizabeth.

Newscom/File

Known for its bold spotting, jerky gait, and loud song, an ovenbird, or Seiurus aurocapillus, forages on the forest floor.

Meanwhile, I had my own bucket to fill and binoculars to fill it with, because I like birds. That’s what birding is all about – that same delicious anticipation of joy. Because nobody’s seen all the birds, and they’re all worth seeing. We keep our antennae up for silhouettes in the sky and skittering in the brush, and around any corner on any given day we might find one we’ve never seen before: a “Life Bird”!

Maybe the pursuit of life birds is a competitive endeavor for some people, but my bad eyesight and utter lack of skill save me from all that. My list of life birds is short. That’s OK: I figure I have that much more to look forward to.

Elizabeth and I took a break from the peonies to admire a wet meadow where, according to the bird ID app on my phone, a sora was hanging out. I know what soras are supposed to look like – they’re sort of globose, if you must know – but I was unable to locate the bird in question. Which is a pity, because I could have added it to my life list.

But maybe not for the first time. That’s the other reason my list is so short. My capacity for forgetting is legendary. No sooner do I put a bird on my life list than it hops out. There’s almost no limit to the number of times I can see any given bird for the first time. 

Case in point: my first look at an ovenbird. An orange-crowned, speckled little wonder of a warbler he was, strutting importantly around the forest floor like some real estate mogul! My friends identified him for me three or four more times that morning; they pointed out his field marks; they remarked on his peculiar habit of walking through the woods. 

Same day, hours later, I locked onto a terrific little speckled number sauntering through the duff. “Ooh! What’s that one?” I chirped. They stared at me.

“That’s still an ovenbird,” they said.

Seeing my very first ovenbird, in all his tiny majesty, was an absolute thrill. All six times.

I’m not sure I will recognize a Brown’s peony if I ever see another one, either. But Elizabeth was happy. Not only did she see her target plant, but she also gets to keep it on her bucket list, because we didn’t find one in bloom, and the blooms are neat. The blooming peony means she has one more shot at glory, one more quest for joy, one more blessed ramble in a bountiful world. If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, you never want your bucket all the way empty.

Of course, it works just as well if your bucket is leaky. 

AP

People in Chisinau, Moldova, look at ballots during local elections, Nov. 5.

When the British think tank Chatham House decided last year to measure the resilience of countries to foreign interference, it chose the tiny nation of Moldova as a pilot study. The timing was perfect. In early March, Moldova’s national intelligence agency said Moscow is planning an “unprecedented” destabilization campaign to influence the Eastern European nation’s presidential election as well as a referendum on European Union membership later this year.

“Since the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, concern has grown that neighbouring Moldova would be next in Moscow’s bid to regain control over the former Soviet republics,” the think tank stated. Indeed, Russia spent more than $55 million last year to influence elections in Moldova, according to the country’s Security and Intelligence Service.

To Moldova’s credit, Chatham House found the country “is becoming more resilient to Russian interference,” especially in society’s strong support for democracy. That conclusion was based on a survey of 37 international and Moldovan experts.

Just where does such resilience lie in Moldova? To be sure, the country has a new agency to counter Russian disinformation, enlisting the “whole of society” to fight lies with the truth. For the first time, Moldova officially deemed Russia a threat. And with EU help, it is pushing social media companies to take down sites with disinformation while improving the media literacy of citizens.

Yet as President Maia Sandu often says, enacting economic reforms and curbing corruption are key antidotes to Russian meddling. She also hopes that persuading voters of the benefits of joining the EU will neutralize Moscow’s propaganda. One poll shows 54.5% would vote for joining the EU.

In the resilience survey, Moldova scored high for civil society’s efforts to counter disinformation. “We’re counting on our society ... to help us continue to build resilience [against Russia’s hybrid threat],” Moldova’s foreign minister, Mihai Popsoi, told The Associated Press.

And he added, “It’s not whether the Russians would want to come ... and violate our sovereignty – it’s a matter of whether they could.”