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Common 'Grounds': Screening for Cancer in Coffee Regions
In June 2012, nurse practitioner Ellen Starr arrived at the foothills of the Mount Kilimanjaro region in Tanzania, exhausted after a bumpy, two-hour car ride. She and a colleague from Williston-based...
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Vision Quest: A Waterbury-Based Project Brings Eyesight to the Blind
Eyesight for the blind was once a messianic promise. This week, assembly-line cataract surgeries will restore the vision of 1,200 Ethiopians over eight days, courtesy of Waterbury's Himalayan Cataract...
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A Rutland Nonprofit Purifies Water in Haiti and Honduras
Hurricane Matthew brought destructive winds and rain to Haiti when it hit the island nation in early October. The second punch was an outbreak of cholera, spread by contaminated water, which continues...
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Motherland: A New American Helps Women in the Congo
Cleophace Mukeba is a self-confessed "mother's boy" and feminist. Growing up in the South Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he helped his mother with household chores. "I wanted...
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North End Studios Seeks to Expand Into St. Joseph's School
Old posters advertising the Vermont International Festival fill a notice board in Ben Bergstein and April Werner's office in Burlington's North End Studio A. Rows of whiteboards have been converted...
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A Buddhist Monk Is Driving the Bus
Damber Gurung learned how to be a better human being in the company of the dead. When the Bhutanese man was 16, he spent a winter in a cemetery deep in a jungle near the Khudunabari refugee camp in...
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Who's On the Cover?
For Seven Days' year-end cover, illustrator Jeff Drew assembled a memorial to 34 notable celebrities who passed away this year. Careful readers will notice that this version of the cover features two...
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Remembering Vermonters Who Died in 2016
Paij Wadley-Bailey was the kind of fearless and charismatic person who could win over an audience. Seven Days creative director Don Eggert remembers gatherings in the late 1990s where the exuberant...
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A Refugee's Journey From Disability to Independence
Three months after he arrived in Vermont from Nepal in the summer of 2015, Bidur Rai couldn't help thinking it would be better if he were dead. While his family members were adjusting to their new...
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Do Good, Feel Good: 20 Ways Families Can Give Back to Their Communities
November isn't just for giving thanks — it's also the beginning of the giving season, when nonprofits mail their end-of-year fundraising letters and adults write checks to support their work. Most...
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Parting Ways: Navigating Family After Parents Separate
The decision to leave my partner didn't come after one massive fight. And if our separation was waiting in the wings, I wasn't aware of it. Just last year we were raising a then-2-year-old, all...
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Language Lessons: A Montréal-Born Mom Reflects on Learning — and Teaching Her...
Last year, my oldest daughter, Dahlia, dared me to take her to Paris, suggesting we leave her three younger sisters behind. After years of resisting, she'd developed an interest in learning French,...
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Dennis Wygmans, Nightclub Owner to State's Attorney
Dennis Wygmans is a believer in second chances. He's also a fan of finding alternative solutions to problems. For example, one night in the mid-1990s, a skinny punk-rock singer from Ukraine was...
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Vermonters Who Run With the Big Dogs at Westminster
Fred has quite a head on his shoulders. It's as big and blocky as a toaster oven, with a wrinkled, velvety brow, brown and droopy Abe Vigoda eyes and a broad, jowly smile —all breed standards for an...
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Tara Lynn Bridal Designs Eco-Friendly Dresses
When eco-couture designer Tara Lynn Scheidet boasts, "Each dress has a story," she means it has a fairy tale. Like the one in which bride-to-be Kellee Wagner and her mother lit out across the...
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DIY Wedding? Caitlin Frauton Has Some Advice
From Martin Short's Franck Eggelhoffer in Father of the Bride to Nathan Lane's Pepper Saltzman on "Modern Family," the wedding-coordinator shtick is about as old as love itself. A highfalutin...
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Local Love Brigade Sends Cards to Victims of Hate
Ann Bedichek Braden, a Brattleboro-based grassroots organizer, was heartbroken by the result of November's presidential election. But she hasn't taken it lying down. In early December, Braden was...
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Good News and Bad: Vermonters Affected by Travel Ban
According to Middlebury College student Mohammed Babeker, "In Sudan, we idealize the democracy of the U.S., the freedom of speech in America." But for several days recently, the Sudanese national...
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Lucky Bums: How a Generation of Skiers Shaped Vermont
Charlie Brown remembers the first time he stepped into the Blue Tooth, a tavern on the Sugarbush Access Road in Warren. It was 53 years ago, and he was a 28-year-old from Philadelphia up for a ski...
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Burlington-Area New Americans Find Gathering Spaces
On a nippy Sunday evening in mid-January, about 20 people filled the pews of St. Joseph's Co-Cathedral lower chapel in Burlington as Reverend Lance Harlow performed mass in French. White fluorescent...
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