What is it like growing up in the areas of Africa that have been ravaged by the AIDS epidemic? A traveling exhibit visiting Santa Rosa this week supplies some first-hand answers.

To reserve times and tickets for the free exhibit while it is in Santa Rosa, click here. Reservations are not required, but they are strongly encouraged. Mike Griffin explains that’s for more than one reason.

The organization behind the exhibit, World Vision, is hardly a household name, but Griffin believes that they do good work.

Use this link for more background information on the  the Experience AIDS tour. The phorograph below is an overhead view of the walk-through display area.

Sebastopol’s Enmanji Temple, a cornerstone of the area’s Japanese culture, is the subject of a short documentary film that reveals a key episode in the preservation of the historic structure.

There is a strong element of autobiography in many of Lina Hoshino’s films, and Leap of Faith grew out of her curiosity about her new surroundings after she moved North from San Francisco to the small town of Penngrove, north of Petaluma.

As she leanred more about the multi-cultural history of her new home, Lina discovered a trove of recordings made by the local Japanese-American Citizens League, which led her to the subject for her film.

Leap of Faith will have its  World premiere on KRCB Public Television on Monday, May 3 at 9, pm with a repeat broadcast Tuesday, May 18 at 11:30pm.

One little-reported consequence of the war in Iraq has been the displacement of an estimated 2 million former citizens who have fled to neighboring nations or even further. Their story is the subject of Eclipse of the Sunnis,  a new book by NPR Mideast correspondent Deborah Amos.

Amos began covering the Middle East for NPR more than 20 years ago, and renewed her interest in the region following the 9/11 attacks. Even though she sees the Iraqi Sunnis as complicit in their own downfall, as instigators of the sectarian insurgency, she also believes their situation as an enormous population of displaced professional and middle class families is an important story, one she felt could best be told by presenting the human faces of some of those involved.

The split between Sunni and Shiite Muslims may appear to be the result of religious differences between two factions within Islam, but Deborah Amos cautions that this interpretation is a simplistic misreading of the complex geopolitics of the Middle East.

It’s a convenient shorthand to speak of the displaced Iraqis as “refugees,” but that, too, is an over implication, in Amos’s view. Because these are mostly middle class households, they are able to monitor events and their situation in ways that are completely unknown to most poverty-stricken refugees. But their circumstances leave them vulnerable to an eroding standard of living that may take generations to recover.

Amos writes about the significance of the Iraqi general election here.

The wave of home foreclosures that swept California in 2008 and 2009 has not gone away. In some ways, it may be getting worse.

Last year, says Brian O’Callahan, who directs the three-person Foreclosure Prevention program for Catholic Charities in Santa Rosa, his agency was contacted by roughly 3500 people seeking help with home loans gone bad. Out of that number, about 600 met the criteria for his HUD-funded program (first mortgages only, primary residence of the borrower). And only a quarter of those 600 were able to get significant assistance. For many of the rest, the best they could offer was sympathy and someone to listen.