I Live Here

Chechen refugees, Burma's sex workers, Juarez's murdered teenage girls, Malawi's AIDS orphans. While infomercials and human-rights campaigns remind Americans of the shadows within which these people live and die, the details of their everyday lives — their ambitions, hobbies, secrets — are murky and underreported, leaving them without a face. "I Live Here," a collection of four notebook-like volumes covering each of these troubled regions, is not just a rising voice, but also a vibrantly painted canvas. As a study in storytelling, the work creates, and sometimes resurrects, the three-dimensional lives of these little-known people through sketches, photos, poetry, artwork and interviews.

In Mali, the authors speak English with a 12-year-old girl who doubles as head-of-household for her parentless family of nine; in Ingushetia, they listened to the sad music of a teenage pianist, plagued by dreams and the destruction of her former home. The authors imagine the pink and white quincea — era of Claudia, a young woman believed to be murdered in crime-ridden Juarez; they record the daily routine of a 24-year-old Burmese prostitute who longs only to have a baby and a factory job. More than simple stories, these accounts are infused with the character and spirit of each person.

Upon hearing that, in Malawi, the life expectancy is 46, there are 1.6 doctors for every 100,000 people and that 550,000 children have been orphaned by AIDS, the authors admit: "(We) can't connect with any of these statistics. A statistic is forgettable. It's never going to move you in the way human contact can." Yet separated by miles and lifestyles, in the absence of human contact, readers have "I Live Here" to reveal to them with beauty and candor stories nearly too painful to bear, yet too connected to our own lives to ignore.

Books reviewed in this column are available online or at your local bookstore.