The World and Everything in It - August 24, 2021

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

A federal investigation into boarding schools for Native American children is underway.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Also the latest from Afghanistan. WORLD’s senior editor Mindy Belz is here.

Plus a tribute to overcomers: specifically, athletes with disabilities.

And WORLD commentator Kim Henderson on sweet summertimes gone by.

REICHARD: It’s Tuesday, August 24th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: Up next, Kent Covington has the news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: U.S. troops surge evacuations out of Kabul but threats persist » The U.S. military reported its biggest day of evacuation flights out of Afghanistan on Monday. National security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters at the White House…

SULLIVAN: In the last 24 hours alone, 28 U.S. military flights have evacuated approximately 10,400 people from Kabul.

Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, said the faster pace of evacuation was due in part to coordination with Taliban commanders on getting evacuees into the airport.

But deadly violence continues to block many desperate evacuees. Seven people died in a stampede of people trying to get into the airport earlier this week.

And Kirby on Monday confirmed limited helicopter rescue missions in Kabul. He said American troops are leaving the airport “on occasion” to carry out rescue missions, delivering civilians to the airport.

He also said the White House has not ruled out extending the evacuation mission beyond the August 31st deadline.

KIRBY: If there needs to be a discussion about extending that timeline, then we absolutely will have that discussion at the appropriate time with the commander in chief.

But the Taliban are warning of a response if  U.S. forces extend their stay in Kabul.

Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine wins full U.S. approval » The FDA has granted its full approval to the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine.

Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock said to make vaccines available soon, government officials cut red tape, but they did not cut corners.

WOODCOCK: The public can be confident that this vaccine meets the FDA’s gold standard for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality that we require for an approved product.

Healthcare workers have administered more than 200 million doses of the Pfizer shots under an emergency use authorization. But the vaccine now has the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s strongest endorsement.

That makes the United States the first country to give it full approval. The authorization covers the two-dose regimen for people age 16 or older.

It comes as COVID-19 cases continue to surge, and hospitalizations increase, mostly among the unvaccinated.

Pfizer CEO Dr. Albert Bourla said he’s hopeful that the FDA’s announcement will give some unvaccinated Americans more confidence in the shots.

BOURLA: I think that is why this is an important milestone that I think will unlock some of the more skeptical minds to do the vaccine.

After the number of people getting shots hit a low in July, the vaccination rate is rising again. More than half of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated, as well as more than 60 percent of those older than 18.

Officials continue search for the missing after Tennessee flood » Search crews in Tennessee are still digging through shattered homes and tangled debris, looking for about a dozen people still missing in a flood-ravaged part of the state.

Record-breaking rain over the weekend sent floodwaters gushing through rural Tennessee, killing at least 22 people.

Grant Gillespie is the police and fire chief of Waverly, Tennessee.

GILLESPIE: Our search efforts are still underway. We have crews the last couple of days that have been working along the banks and in the neighborhoods looking for victims.

Rainfall more than tripled forecasts and shattered the state record for one-day rainfall, triggering flash floods on Saturday.

The Humphreys County Sheriff Office Facebook page filled with people looking for missing friends and family. GoFundMe pages asked for help for funeral expenses for the dead, including 7-month-old twins swept from their father’s arms as they tried to escape.

Death toll rises; relief crawls forward in Haiti » The death toll in Haiti continues to rise as relief crawls forward. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin reports.

KRISTEN FLAVIN, REPORTER: Haiti’s Civil Protection Agency has upped the death toll from a powerful earthquake to more than 2,200. And nearly 350 people remain missing.

Relief supplies are still taking a very long time to reach those in need. Part of the problem: Gang roadblocks and vehicle hijacking have forced aid groups to deliver supplies by helicopter.

This week, Haitian gang leader Jimmy Cherizier made a Facebook video offering a truce and aid to the parts of the country hardest hit by the 7.2 magnitude quake.

Cherizier said in the video—quoting here—“The G9 Revolutionary Forces and allies ... will participate in the relief by bringing them help. We invite all compatriots to show solidarity with the victims by trying to share what little there is with them.”

But his is only one of many Haitian gangs, and a previously reported gang truce produced little impact.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

Cuomo officially resigns, Hochul steps in as NY gov. » New York now has a new governor. Andrew Cuomo officially resigned his office just before midnight last night.

Cuomo’s Democratic Lt. Governor, Kathy Hochul, is now the Governor of New York.

On the way out the door, Cuomo took one last swipe at the state investigation that led to his ouster.

CUOMO: When government politicizes allegations and the headlines condemn without facts, you undermine the justice system. And that doesn’t serve women, and it doesn’t serve men or society.

Eleven women accused him of sexual harassment and the state probe found those complaints to be well founded. Cuomo continues to refute the findings of the investigation.

He announced his resignation earlier this month after state lawmakers made clear that they would impeach him unless he stepped down.

I’m Kent Covington. Straight ahead: documenting abuse at government schools for Native-American children.

Plus, an ode to the childhood joys of summer.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 24th of August, 2021.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. First up: acknowledging the past.

For about eight decades, beginning back in the late 19th Century, the governments of Canada and the United States sent Native American children away from their families to boarding schools. Officials believed separating children from their tribes would help to assimilate them into the respective national cultures.

REICHARD: The schools were often poorly built, poorly heated, and unsanitary.

This past summer, several Canadian tribes began looking for the remains of children who died while attending these schools. They found three sites with unmarked graves. More than a thousand graves.

EICHER: The discoveries have spurred some American tribes to begin their own search for remains. And the U.S. government says it will help. WORLD’s Sarah Schweinsberg reports.

SARAH SCHWEINSBERG, REPORTER: Jeff Yellow Owl grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation in Northwestern Montana. He had a big family, but he loved spending time with his two grandmothers more than anyone else.

YELLOW OWL: I used to think to myself, I need to die before them because I don't know if I could live if they’re not in my life.

One day, when he was about 10, he sat with one grandmother in her living room. She was poor. Her house didn’t have a foundation or electricity. She asked him for a foot massage.

YELLOW OWL: And so I start pressing her feet. I was like, What are these? And she goes, those are bunions. When I was in boarding school in Genoa, there were some that were trying to run away. And what they did was they took shoes that were too small for us, and forced us to wear them. So we couldn't run. And so she goes my feet ended up getting these big bunions with that.

Federal authorities sent Jeff Yellow Owl’s grandmother to a federal boarding school in Genoa, Nebraska when she was just a little girl.

His other grandmother also went away to a boarding school, along with her brothers and sisters.

She died nearly 30 years ago, and Yellow Owl isn’t sure which school she attended. But she had vivid memories.

YELLOW OWL: She would say they would wait by the door and we would be whispering to each other and they would, they would come in and beat us if we're speaking in our own language.

Deb Haaland heads the Department of the Interior. She’s the first Native American to lead the department. In June, Haaland ordered an investigation into the lasting consequences of residential boarding schools. It will also identify the locations of student burial sites.

Some burial locations are already known. This summer, the remains of nine Native children at a boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania returned to the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota.

Samantha Williams is a historian who specializes in Native American boarding schools. She says starting in the 1860s, the federal government opened about 70 boarding schools across the country.

WILLIAMS: The guiding idea was kill the Indian to save the man, which is to basically remove anything indigenous about these children, and force them to accept the type of white culture and customs and values that were being taught to them.

Day-to-day life at the schools was regimented. Students learned English, attended religious services, and got vocational training.

Chris Granberry leads Sacred Road Ministries on the Yakima Reservation in Washington state. He says trauma from the boarding schools still affects Native American communities today.

GRANBERRY: I think that the boarding school movement was part of a one-two punch that decimated native people in the U.S., and probably Canada, too.

The first punch was being confined to reservations. The second punch was having their children taken away.

GRANBERRY: And so now they didn't know their family members...They didn't speak their language. They didn't know their culture. And it created, in my opinion, an identity crisis.

Some former boarding schools are now doing what they can to help Native American children and communities heal. St. Joseph’s Indian School opened in 1927 in Chamberlain, South Dakota. A Catholic order operated it outside the federal boarding school system, but the school used similar assimilation techniques until the 1950s.

Paul Omodt handles public relations for the school. He says today the school provides a free education for nearly 200 Native American students. And now, Omodt says the school is trying to teach children their native Lakota language.

OMODT: So we do language classes, you know, in the native tongue, and we encourage, you know, all that type of thing.

Omodt says the school had already started to publicize its sometimes difficult history. And it welcomes the federal probe as another opportunity to dig into its past.

OMODT: And so we want to be very honest with our history, but also allow for the nuance of what the truth is. And so we're starting to kind of address it more fully.

Huron Claus heads CHIEF, a Native American evangelism outreach ministry. His paternal grandparents both attended a boarding school in Ontario, Canada. Claus says the federal investigation is a chance to acknowledge the past on a broad scale. But he says the church needs to be at the front of leading reconciliation.

CLAUS: As we begin to acknowledge it, as we begin to learn, it stirs our heart, it stirs my heart, because I, it affects my family, it affects my people. It can stir up a lot of emotion, a lot of anger. There is a lot of bitterness towards the past. It's not just learning by the past or being educated by the past. But now, let's bring healing in the present.

Jeff Yellow Owl, who is also a Christian, says that healing won’t happen easily. Forgiveness and then rebuilding trust may take generations. But his grandmother showed him the way forward.

YELLOW OWL: And she said don't hold unforgiveness in your heart. She said, It's not good for you. She goes, what I read in the Bible, and what happened to our people are two separate things. We've got to do our, you know, our part. We heal, we take care of ourselves, take care of our family. What I learned through her was, you know, the pain, anything we've gone through always drove her to Christ.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Sarah Schweinsberg.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: The latest on Afghanistan.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: The White House says evacuations from Afghanistan are pickup up pace. But still, thousands of American citizens and U.S. allies remain caught behind enemy lines, stuck in a city and a country that are once again in the clutches of the Taliban.

WORLD Senior Editor Mindy Belz has reported on the situation on the ground in Kabul and she joins us now to provide more insight. Mindy, good morning!

MINDY BELZ, SENIOR EDITOR: Good morning, Mary.

REICHARD: The Pentagon has been in talks with Taliban commanders, and the Taliban has pledged not to interfere with people trying to leave the country, at least through the end of this month. But is that what we’re actually seeing?

BELZ: That's not the full story. We have heard reports pretty consistently that the Taliban is allowing people with U.S. passports to get through that outer perimeter of security, but it's very iffy. And the real issue is the number of Afghans. And keep in mind, there are a number of Afghans in Afghanistan, who are actually U.S. citizens. For a country 30 years at war, many people have been back here and have applied and been granted U.S. citizenship. So, the Afghans are facing a whole different issue when they confront these security parameters, because it is the very ones who are most in need of getting out who have the most to fear from the Taliban. So there are two issues. One, that getting the Afghans to feel confident confronting these checkpoints and confident that they'll get through them is huge. They face really a life and death decision. Do I risk a Taliban checkpoint in order to get to the airport? Or do I stay in my home and risk particularly being taken by the Taliban while I'm in my home? And so this continues to be just a really difficult, scary situation for them.

REICHARD: The Taliban has also been engaged in a charm offensive, striking a more moderate tone, and even vowing to be more accommodating to women. How much stock should we put into this idea of a gentler Taliban?

BELZ: We have to be watching what the Taliban does, not what the Taliban says. I have been interviewing people, even going back months ago, but day and night, really for this past week. And the people that I've talked to, none of them believe that this is a gentler Taliban. And one example I'll give you is that one of the first directives that the Taliban Cultural Commission issued as it started retaking the provincial capitals a couple of weeks ago, it was a directive to the local imams, the local mullahs, the local Islamic leaders saying “Please identify and send to us the girls aged 15, and widows up to age 45, so that they can be married to Taliban fighters.” I've seen the actual order itself, and it's kind of uncontroversial that what they were trying to do is take single women and take older widows to be married off as a kind of sex slavery that, you know, we saw happen under ISIS in Iraq, and in Syria. It's a terrible thing. And that is what the women in Afghanistan are going on. They are all trying to get out. And I even am aware of a group of girls who were able to get out overnight. And it's just because of these orders and because of the kind of fear and the actual reality of what the Taliban is doing on the ground.

REICHARD: What is next for the Afghan citizens who are able to get on a plane and make it out of that country?

BELZ: Well, I feel like a broken record here, but this is a plan that should have been in place months ago and clearly it wasn't. And the Biden administration does seem to be grappling with what to do with these tens of thousands of Afghans. We now have them in Qatar at an airbase there. They’re in Dubai. They're in other countries around the region.

And we also on the positive side, we have seen thousands of them, those who hold valid special immigration visas—those are the Afghan interpreters and people who've worked with the the U.S. military—they're starting to show up with their families. They've arrived in Virginia. We've seen some arriving in Texas, I believe, and in other parts of the country. And that's a good thing, because this is something that should have been in motion a long time ago. And so it's good just to see that some of them are getting out. But the ones who are en route, the ones who are stuck in transit, we're going to have to watch and and really pray over, I think. There are some Afghan Christians who got out to Iran and to Pakistan last week and their hope was to get to Turkey over land. And today Turkey closed its border and said it was not going to be taking Afghan refugees. And so those are the kinds of problems that we're going to begin to see. And without a good overall plan and the kind of diplomacy that should have preceded this evacuation, we're just going to be watching it unfold before our eyes along with the U.S. officials.

REICHARD: WORLD Senior Editor Mindy Belz has been our guest. Mindy, thank you.

BELZ: Thank you, Mary.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, August 24th. You’re listening to WORLD Radio and we’re so glad you are!

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: The Paralympics. Those games start today. They run through September 5 in Japan.

But the Olympic & Paralympic Museum is in the United States. Continuing with our summer Destinations series, WORLD correspondent Jenny Rough takes us on a tour of that museum.

JENNY ROUGH, REPORTER: Colorado Springs, Colorado. Olympic city USA. It’s home to three Olympic pillars: The Olympic and Paralympic Committee. The Olympic Training Center. And, as of July 2020, the Olympic and Paralympic Museum. A futuristic-looking building. Sleek. Lots of glass. And very oddly shaped.

GARY HEASTON: Elizabeth Diller herself was the lead architect, she wanted this building to look like an athlete in motion. So when you look at it, it looks twisted. It’s actually designed to resemble a discus thrower.

Tour guide Gary Heaston tells us to put on our track shoes—today’s tour is fast-paced.

STAFF MEMBER: Have a great time, guys. Gary’s the best.

We whiz by an ice skate signed by Kristi Yamaguchi. The last wooden skies to be used in the Olympics. And the first gold medal anyone ever won in the modern Games, which is actually made of silver. We see the hockey scoreboard from the Lake Placid 1980 Winter Games where the U.S. team beat the Soviets in possibly the biggest upset in Olympic history.

AL MICHAELS: Do you believe in miracles? Yes! Unbelievable!

The stories behind the Olympic artifacts inspire. But even more so the stories behind the Paralympics. Men and women who have not only trained long and hard but have done so under life’s most challenging circumstances. Like Randy Snow.

HEASTON: He was working on the family ranch. He was 16 years old. Somebody was operating a front-end loader. And they dropped a bale of hay. It crushed Randy. The bale of hay was half a ton. But Randy started doing wheelchair racing. Then he switched over and he started doing wheelchair tennis. In 1992, Randy wins gold in singles and in doubles.

And Tatyana McFadden, from St. Petersburg, Russia. Born with spina bifida.

HEASTON: This is Tatyana’s wheelchair when she was a little girl, that red wheelchair. Her mom didn’t know how to raise her, so her mom gave her up to an orphanage. Finally, she was adopted by an American diplomat by the name of Deborah McFaddan.

Tatyana has competed in both summer and winter Olympics.

HEASTON: She has won 17 Paralympic medals, 16 of them in wheelchair racing.

The start of the Paralympic movement dates to 1948.

HEASTON: Unlike the modern Games and the Ancient Games that both started in Greece, the Paralympics started in the United Kingdom, in Great Britain. The first competitors were G.I.s who had spinal cord injuries.

A doctor at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital in England saw the value sports provided to spinal patients. He organized a competition to coincide with the opening day of the 1948 London Summer Olympics.

HEASTON: And they only had one sport. It was archery.

Today, the Paralympics sanctions 28 sports. Including goalball. A sport only found in the Paralympics.

AUDIO: [Goalball ball and whistle]

HEASTON: The athletes competing in goalball are visually impaired.

When the ball rolls toward the goal, the athletes stop the ball by listening for it.

HEASTON: You might have an 85 percent vision loss. I only have 50 percent. I’d have an advantage, right? To make it fair, all the athletes wear goggles that are blacked out.

Visual impairment is one of 10 disability classes. Others include short stature, impaired muscle power, and amputees. T.C. Carter was born without a fibula, a bone in the lower leg.

T.C. CARTER: It would’ve been impossible for me to live a normal life without either an amputation or having a metal rod put in my leg to replace that.

His parents had to make that hard decision for him when Carter was 1. They decided to amputate. Carter wore a tiny prosthesis as a toddler. His leg didn’t slow him down. He loved running around and being active. But in elementary school, he began to notice other people looked different:

CARTER: I think one day I came home, and I was like, “Hey, why does everyone have two legs? Like why are they weird? Why are they the weird ones?”

At age 8, he went to a camp for kids with physical disabilities. And fell in love with skiing.

CARTER: So freeing, so fast! It was everything I didn’t know I wanted and needed.

His first race: down the bunny hill. Technically, he made the fastest time. But placed second because he didn’t quite follow the rules.

CARTER: I didn’t want to go around any of the brushes, or gates. I just went straight down the hill. And if that wasn’t an indicator of what was coming.

Eight years later, at 16, he watched the Paralympics in Vancouver. Another dream took shape. Four years later, he competed in Sochi. Today, he wears a leg made of carbon fiber, light and durable, with a Captain America shield painted on it. He’s currently training for the giant slalom and super-G in the hopes of competing in the Beijing 2022 Winter Paralympic Games.

Even in the same game year, Olympic and Paralympic medals differ. Museum archive specialist Ashton Langrick shows us the Paralympic medals from Rio 2016.

ASHTON LANGRICK: This particular year is very special in that it’s the only year that they decided to make medals that make sound.

Bronze has a light, airy metallic sound with 16 ball bearings.

AUDIO: [Rio 2016 bronze Paralympic medal]

Silver a bit louder with 20 and gold 28.

LANGRICK: The silver makes a more deep, gritty metallic sound, while the gold makes a more full true ringing metallic sound.

AUDIO: [Rio 2016 silver and gold Paralympic medal]

T.C. Carter says the most memorable moment of the Paralympics isn’t the race, or crossing the finish line, or even placing in the top 20, as he did in the PyeongChang 2018 Games. It’s the parade of nations during opening ceremonies. He remembers standing in back of the stadium with Team USA, waiting.

CARTER: Then eventually we’re at this doorway where you can’t see much through the tunnel but light shining in.

Then marching out to a sea of people from all around the world, cheering.

CARTER: And it didn’t matter what country you’re from, who you were before that. The Olympics and Paralympics, they’re about more than yourself, more than your country, and more than the sport you’re doing. Because it really is a time when the entire world comes together for the spirit and sport of competition. The fact that everyone can come together and put aside their differences is a really special thing.

Let the games begin. 

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Jenny Rough in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, August 24th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

School is back in session, which means summer is officially over, no matter what the back porch thermometer says. And that has commentator Kim Henderson feeling a bit nostalgic.

KIM HENDERSON, COMMENTATOR: When I was a kid, summer was a sensory smorgasbord. It was the smell of wet pavement and the taste of tropical punch Kool-Aid. It was barefoot, and it lasted longer than summers do now.

I can remember summers when the white space of entire calendar months was left blank, except for five days of Bible School and a week-long vacation somewhere in the Ozarks. It was a magical left-alone time, and joined by friends in my subdivision, we made the most of it—on our bikes.

It was an iconic era for bicycles. Banana seats and high-rise handlebars ruled, and a two-wheel sensation called the Schwinn Sting-Ray caused many a 9-year-old to break the 10th Commandment. Dubbed as “the bike with the sports car look,” its ads encouraged young riders to accept no substitutes. I’m afraid in my case, we did. My family was more the Western Auto set.

No matter. We were all riding what would one day be retro and worth a lot of money. Too bad we put decals in places that forever ruined their resale value. Besides that, we wore our Western Flyers and Raleigh Choppers slap out, from their gravel-pelted chain guards to their missing handle grips. That’s because we rode them like Harleys, with an attitude to match, chasing heat-made mirages and memorizing the loose rock in every curve.

We flew past fields and entire soybean cycles, and witnessed the construction of a dozen ranch-style homes. All the while, we stayed true to our main task—keeping vigilant watch for the South Central Bell employee destined to bring an end to our four-way party line.

During those summers, my friends and I would pedal whole days away. Never once did we get called lazy (unless there were peas to shell). Ponytails flapped free in the breeze. “Look, no hands,” was a rite of passage.

Even so, we rough riders knew first-hand (and knee and elbow) that our greatest threat was actually a double one – road rash resulting from a nasty cocktail of tar and pea gravel, and the dabbing of Merthiolate that was sure to follow. Which was more painful would be hard to say.

Good as they were, those summers always came to an end, usually on a Saturday involving back-to-school shopping. Other things eventually ended, too. When I turned 12, I got a 10-speed for Christmas, a slick Sears model. It was then that gears started complicating biking and life started complicating the summer calendar. I suspect my fondness for two-wheeling met its real demise about the time I got a license to drive on four.

I eventually married a man who had two Peugeot racing bikes in his dorm room and a Schwinn Sting-Ray in his past. My 10-speed was left behind at the wedding altar, doomed to become word 22 of 25 in a garage sale ad. What became of my beloved banana seat bike is anybody’s guess.

And what has become of summer? Well, that’s a topic for another commentary.

I’m Kim Henderson.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: the crisis at America’s southern border. We’ll talk to a former border patrol agent about how the government is handling the surge in arrivals.

And, second chances. We’ll take you to a Mississippi courtroom where drug addicts find mercy and help.

Also, we’ll be rounding up listener feedback this week. If you have anything you want considered, please send it our way over the next few days: you can leave feedback on the listener line, 202-709-9595 or record something with your voice memo app and email the file to feedback@worldandeverything.com.

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio.

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The word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

Go now in grace and peace.

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