On a lazy October afternoon, the air crisp with autumn, Ler Bweh, a 25-year-old Karen refugee from Burma, lay on his stomach in his apartment, assembling a map-of-the-world puzzle. Slight and almost ethereal, with moist caramel skin and a diffident demeanor, Ler Bweh had been a geography teacher in the Mae La refugee camp on [...]

Waterbury and the muslin gray sky has yielded to a pale, hopeful blue. It has been hot this week, which, coupled with a cottony humidity, has lured apartment dwellers outdoors, where they sit on cement stoops, nursing fussy infants and slurping down plastic cups of cool ice water. At the corner of Central Avenue and [...]

Patty Tanksley and her husband were fed up with borrowing money from friends and relatives in order to put food on the table.
Eventually she turned to the Smyrna/La Vergne Food Bank for help. She was “a little embarrassed” to do so because she volunteered there when it first opened in the 1980s.
“We had to or [...]

Waterbury and the muslin gray sky has yielded to a pale, hopeful blue. It has been hot this week, which, coupled with a cottony humidity, has lured apartment dwellers outdoors, where they sit on cement stoops, nursing fussy infants and slurping down plastic cups of cool ice water. At the corner of Central Avenue and [...]