When we think of torture survivors, we usually don’t think of the people we pass on the street, going about their lives and living in our communities, but there are 50,000 in the DC region alone according to the Torture Abolition and Survivor Support Coalition (TASSC).
Luckily, the woman wasn’t dead. But she could have been, had the car been going a little bit faster, had she fallen a little bit harder, had she hit her head on the way down.
When we arrived on the scene, she was sitting up and speaking to an officer while two more positioned their cars, blue lights flashing, at either end of the block to prevent traffic from driving through.
When a conspicuously white reporter walks into Eagles Barber Shop on lower Georgia Avenue, several guys there have a question.“You going to write a story about gentrification?”
Though some local residents feel insulted by the word gentrification, the barbers and customers at Eagles want me to hear the word.
Just west of Shaw and south of Howard University, the tiny triangular neighborhood roughly five blocks wide and seven blocks long, colloquially known as LeDroit Park, is a place defined as being “in-between.”
Occasional Lexuses, Mercedes-Benzes, and Land Rovers dot the wide, tree-lined streets, but an empty can of Schlitz malt liquor, wrapped in a brown-paper bag, lies in a landscaped planter.
Over the summer I had the opportunity to see one of my favorite DC musicians, David “Spoonboy” Combs, play a show backed by one of my favorite bands, Good Luck.
While moving with the music in the front row, I happened to look behind the musicians.
A shift away from injection heroin use and the efforts of needle exchange operations in Washington, DC, have contributed to a decrease in the number of new HIV infections in the second half of the 2000s.
But at the Kolmac Clinic Silver Spring addiction treatment program, which provides treatment for opioid addicts, there’s been a shift in the clients they serve.
Quick: name five schools in the District. Could you do it? There are some schools we naturally think of when we think about our fellow collegians in DC: our neighbors at UDC and Georgetown, our competitors at GW.
Alison Thomas is a professor in the AU Department of Literature, teaching college writing and creative writing, including a humor-centric writing colloquium for Spring 2013.
