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Capitalizing on the island’s strategic location on routes between Asia, Africa and the Middle East, drug traffickers use the island as a transit point to get heroin from Asia to Europe. And with that trade, heroin addiction has become widespread. Mahmoud Moussa, who works in the health ministry’s substance abuse division, says that the problem is so massive that there is an addict in just about every family. “There’s no family in Zanzibar, particularly in Stone Town, not being touched by this problem substance abuse,” says Moussa.

Government and society tried to find effective strategies to fight the epidemic of addiction, but the problem only grew. In the last few years, however, addicts have taken it upon themselves to help get clean. They set up a system of sober houses—part rehab, part support group—and are showing the community that addicts can not only recover, but that they might be the best option for battling addiction.

In this documentary, KALW’s Christopher Connelly takes an inside look at the devastating effects of the heroin trade in Africa.

That shift is the result of a Supreme Court decision ordering the state to reduce its prison population and fix the dire inmate healthcare system. Without prison realignment, California would have had to build up to nine prisons. So, last week state officials announced they would halt the planned prison construction, saving the state 1.5 billion dollars.

But county officials are concerned with this massive criminal justice transformation. The state has not guaranteed the money to pay for increasing populations in jails and under county supervision in the long-run. Gov. Jerry Brown has plans to place that guarantee in the state Constitution as part of a tax-hike initiative he is proposing for the November ballot. But, until that happens, counties are having to figure out how to do more with less money.

KALW’s Nicole Jones reports on one Bay Area county is handling the transition.

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Not too long ago, the men now sitting around a table at the Contra Costa Probation Office were in prison. “I want to ask how long have you been in prison,” Chief Adult Probation Officer Philip Kader asks them. They respond with three, six and even 12 times.

But now they’re getting a taste of their newly found freedom. Thanks to realignment, they’re here under a new program called post-release community supervision. They’re having dinner with the probation officers that are responsible for them. Sharing a meal together is how they start their weekly class called “Thinking for a Change.”

In a role-playing scenario, case manager Yuri Seqoquian explains how to do active listening and how to have successful interactions with probation officers – in other words, how to stay out of jail.

“And it’s not just chit-chat,” Kader says. “We’re not trying to build relationships so we go have barbeque dinner and go to the Giants game together, although I’m not against either of those things.”

Kader is in charge of making realignment work in Contra Costa County and says his first goal is public safety. Part of that is reducing recidivism. Before realignment, nearly two-thirds of state parolees were back in custody within three years. Now that these lower level offenders are the county’s domain, officers want to make sure they don’t end up back behind bars.

“The idea of them believing that we want them to have success, and that is something several of these guys that have been to prison, two, three, four times have told us, they’re just not used to,” Kader says. “They’re just not accustomed to feeling as if the people that are dealing with them are really rooting for them.”

And that’s one of the really new things happening in Contra Costa County. Probation officers are now called case managers; they’re building relationships and trying to anticipate problems before they escalate.

“The thing that they have us on right now, I think it’s way better then the way it was before,” says Damien Livingston, who’s been in prison six times for receiving stolen property and grand theft auto. He’s been out since December and decided to sign up for this 26-week class, which also cuts time off his supervision.

“Now you have probation officers you can talk to, right. And when they come to your house they don’t come to your house like you’re a member of the Taliban or something,” he says, “five or six, seven police surrounding your house. Your neighbors look at you like you are really a criminal even if you’re trying to get it together.”

Livingston’s been on state parole before. He says it’s like someone’s just waiting for you to mess up to send you back to prison. “I couldn’t do parole. But this probation stuff is working,” he says. “I like it. I’m here, because if it was parole, I wouldn’t even be here. So I’m thankful for it. They’re trying to do something different. They ain’t just throwing you back in jail, and that’s a plus.”

Chief Kader says this kind of program gives hope to guys like Livingston. But without guaranteed funding, it may not continue. Since realignment began last October, counties are absorbing 2-3 times more offenders than the state projected. “But, no county government official will tell you they’re surprised that the state may have underestimated or under funded something,” Kader says. “The difficulty we’re having in this county is not so much our will, or even or infrastructure to support it, but it is funding, which we believe is based on a flawed formula.”

That formula the state uses to decide how much money each county gets for realignment is based mainly on how many people it sent to prison prior to realignment. “Where the formula is flawed,” Kader says, “is we have been avoiding sending people to prison for many years. We’re right in the middle of the state average arrest rate, yet, we are the lowest per capita of people that are being sent to prison.”

That means that if a county was sending offenders to programs instead of prison, now they have less money to spend on programs. For realignment, Contra Costa, with one million residents was given $4.6 million, while Tulare County – with about half the population – got $5.7 million. Both counties have a similar crime rate. Kader says the funding model doesn’t make sense intuitively. “The formula is set up that way that doesn’t give us the added benefit of tools to use that we think could expand the service delivery options to our clients,” he says.

Contra Costa County’s jails under realignment are facing their own challenges.

Commander Matt Schuler and Captain Jeff Nelson take me on a tour of the West County jail in Richmond. It’s an open campus setting. Birds are chirping over a beautiful yard the inmates created in a landscaping class. It’s peaceful.

“It does kind of have a bucolic feel,” Nelson says, “but it lends to that because I worked out here in 1993, this was dirt, you know having some trees and flowers out here gave them the opportunity to learn that stuff but it also gives a better vibe to the whole place.”

Nelson says Contra Costa has always been a reform-oriented county. It was the first in the country to use direct supervision. It’s a kind of jail model that lets inmates move freely amongst the deputy staff. They offer GED classes, anger management and other services. Nelson says inmate morale is typically better in this set-up.

“Probably not surprising it goes without saying, if you lock somebody up in a room and they’re in there for the majority of the day and they can’t move around in a day room atmosphere like this, they get testy,” he says. “So this provides us with actually in the long-run a more secure environment because it’s better for the deputies, it’s better for the inmates, without sounding too touchy feely, they all get along a lot better.”

And unlike other counties, many of which have overcrowded facilities, Contra Costa has kept its jail population pretty low, mostly by expanding the use of electronic monitoring. Schuler says the county also expanded the maximum security facility Marsh Creek. What’s been tough, Schuler says, is figuring out what to do with inmates who require special custody, like gang members.

“It’s going to be tough for the inmates that are going to be staying with us for long-term,” he says, adding that “it’s always going to be tough because these facilities weren’t built for that.”

Before realignment, the state paid the county $77 for housing parole violators. Now the county is only getting reimbursed at about $25 a day. Regardless of its struggles with realignment, Contra Costa County has had some success. Since October, the county’s recidivism rate is only about 15 percent, which is much lower than it was at the state level.

And, there may be some relief with regard to funding. County officials like those in Contra Costa will continue to lobby the state to consider a new and what they say is a more fair funding formula.

KALW’s Nicole Jones has the story.

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In a conference room at the BART police headquarters in downtown Oakland, a DVD plays a scenario. The screen shows a woman, and she’s really angry. She’s just been locked out of her house after finding out her husband is cheating on her.

“Goddamn it, this is my house, let me in bitch, are you cheating on me?” the woman yells “I hate you! Why are you doing this to me?”

Her aggression grows, quickly turning violent. She kicks one officer, and he falls to the ground. An officer in the DVD tells the woman to drop the shovel, but the woman continues to yell.

Using this standard police training video, a handful of members of BART’s Citizen Review Board are trying to walk in the shoes of the police officers they monitor. BART Sergeant Marlon Dixon starts the discussion.

“You’re the officer on the scene, you went through that scenario, what do you think?” she asks. No one says anything. “Speechless?”

The Board debates and agrees, for the most part, that they wouldn’t really know what to do with someone so out of control.

“What about shooting her if she continued to approach?” Dixon asks. “This is happening like this. He’s got his officer. The officer could be seriously injured. What do you think?”

Some of the Board members say they would shoot. Citizen Review Board Member Bob White isn’t so sure. After all, the board emerged from public pressure to create greater oversight on the BART police after an officer fatally shot Oscar Grant in 2009.

“Although I know she has martial art experience and I know the right answer would be shooting her, because she can use deadly force, she was unarmed, I couldn’t justify,” White says. “If he had a taser, I would use that first instead of using deadly force.”

BART police policies say that in this kind of situation, use of lethal force is legal. But Sergeant Dixon explains that there is more to it than just reading from the rule book.

“There’s a term that we use, ‘lawful, but awful.’” Dixon says. “It might be lawful per policy, per the law, but the public is going to tear into you because perception is everything.”

BART knows this first hand after two fatal officer involved shootings in the last few years. A civilian oversight board is now responsible for hearing a wide range of alleged police misconduct at their meetings every month. With the help of a new, independent police auditor they can recommend disciplinary action to the BART Board of Directors. The Citizen Review Board was created last March, but didn’t have its first meeting until after last July’s fatal officer involved shooting of Charles Hill. The Hill case has been brought up at Citizen Review Board meetings, but they’re still far from having the investigation completed.

BART Officer Trainer Caroline Perea says having these training sessions for the Citizen Review Board should help them understand this and future incidents.

“We all thought that it was very important that they understand how we train and why we train and where we get our authority,” she says.

This training is just one on a long list of recommendations from an audit report by the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement, or NOBLE. Along with civilian oversight, the 2010 report made recommendations on BART Police Department policies, tactics, hiring and investigations by comparing it to international law enforcement standards.

Community Service Officer Lauren LaPlante works in the department’s community oriented policing unit.

“Any way that we are making the community more accessible to the police department,” she says, “whether it be the civilian review board, whether it be us going out to community meetings, I think we need to be engaging in all those practices.”

Community policing encourages law enforcement to partner with residents, businesses and local groups. She says community policing in the BART Police Department started in the mid-90s. But now they’re implementing a new model called zone policing. Zone policing breaks the current BART zones into five smaller areas. LaPlante says this makes it easier for lieutenants to manage crime trends and for police officers to get to know stations.

“This is a semi-new concept,” LaPlante says. “In terms of the community policing philosophy, it’s going to bring more accountability.”

On a recent Thursday morning, Officer Rick Martinez took up his zone assignment. That would be Zone 1, which includes the Rockridge and MacArthur BART stations.

Martinez has been with the agency for six years. “In my time, we’ve gone from an agency that essentially had no community relations,” he says. “There wasn’t that transparency.”

Before, Martinez says, people didn’t understand BART police’s mission. “We come into our station and take a look at who’s around and people stick out that are hanging out here because our stations are designed for a specific reason, we’re here to move people,” he says.

BART officers spend a lot of time walking around and being part of the community, Martinez says. They’re also there to help. As he walks, a man approaches Martinez and asks for directions to the DMV. Martinez points him in the right direction.

“So that’s another hat, directions,” he says. “I don’t like that hat. It’s really hard to know where everything is,” he laughs. “And just because you’re a cop, doesn’t mean you know where everything is.”

There are also the tougher situations, like a fight between a station agent and an unhappy patron. The man had wanted to exit to smoke a cigarette and then re-enter the paid area. The station agent, he says, said “no” in a disrespectful way and now he’s angry and cussing a bit. “Okay look, we’re in a public place and you can’t be cussing,” Martinez tells him. Martinez talks to him quietly in between listening to his problem.

“It’s just an argument, essentially,” Martinez says afterwards. “People are allowed to argue and vent their frustration. There’s not a crime for being mad, essentially.”

If the encounter was to turn violent and Martinez handled it differently, it may have ended up on the Citizen Review Board’s desk. Martinez says he’s okay with this kind of oversight.

“I don’t mind it,” he says. “It’s part of the job. It’s another check and balance that goes with police enforcement. Our agency hasn’t had it and to fall in line with every other agency in the modern time, it’s expected.”

The BART Citizen Review Board, along with the new community policing strategies, is still in development. But with recent incidents of questionable tactics still fresh in riders’ minds, their work is going to be under heavy scrutiny.

KALW’s Nicole Jones reports.

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Santa Cruz Deputy Chief Steve Clark has been with the Police Department for 25 years. But there are some things that even experience doesn’t teach. Up until now, he’s been trained to respond to incidents.

“Back in the day, you would ask any police officer what does it take to make your city safe, and the pat answer was, ‘More cops,’” Clark says. “And really, I’ve described that as kind of primal policing because it’s a primal response. There’s not a lot of thought to it. There’s not a lot of analysis. You’re just going out there and hoping that you get lucky just by sheer numbers.”

These days, Clark is trying to predict what will happen on any given workday. A year ago, he hardly knew what “predictive policing zones” were, but today, they’re an integral part of his job. Clark, like every officer, carries a list of the day’s top 10 “hot spots.”

“What we do is we list those in terms of the highest probability on down,” Clark says. “It’s kind of like our version of Letterman’s Top Ten list, if you will.”

Next to each location is a percentage, based on recent statistics, showing whether a crime is more likely to happen in a car or in a house. That helps officers know where to focus their attention: scanning driveways; watching for open windows on houses; or on people hovering near cars.

At the top of today’s list, is a downtown triple-decker. “Not an ice cream cone,” Clark clarifies, but a parking garage – one that has actually “visited the list quite a bit.” Some residential areas near the boardwalk are also high on the list.

Predictive policing came from an unlikely place. George Mohler, a mathematician at Santa Clara University, and a team of UCLA professors created an algorithm to predict the location of earthquake aftershocks. They used patterns to see how an earthquake originating along one fault will cause additional earthquakes in connected faults. As it turns out, crime waves follow similar patterns to earthquake aftershocks. So they shared the concept with the Los Angeles Police Department.

“There’s nothing quite like getting a team of mathematicians in with a team of police officers and trying to see what you can do,” says Zach Friend, a crime analyst for the Santa Cruz Police Department. He says, usually, cops and stats don’t mix.

They found remarkable results. “Looking at Los Angeles data, they found that certain neighborhoods had characteristics that led to either lower or higher than average crime rates,” Friend explains. “When they boiled that down even further, they found that those crimes clustered not just by neighborhood, but even by time, so that if you had a crime on a certain day, you were much more likely to have other crimes occur within a couple of days or within a couple of hours of when that crime occurred.”

Time, place and type of crime are all that’s factored into the equation. Unlike “hot spot” policing, which is popular in many departments, predictive policing is calibrated on a daily basis. Santa Cruz first implemented predictive policing in the summer of 2011.

“It took quite some time for us to get it set up, and there’s a few reasons why,” Friend says. The department wanted to get officers familiar with the type of data they would be using to inform their patrols. They also felt an obligation to make sure officers knew that the new patrol model was meant to supplement, not replace their talents and intuition. Rather, says Deputy Chief Clark, the model pulls them into areas they might not otherwise spend time in.

“I know that if I go out on a main thoroughfare, I can probably arrest somebody and find somebody who’s doing something,” Clark says. That approach makes sense considering statistics show that’s where many crimes and arrests happen. “But they’re not always the ones that are impacting the quality of life in the neighborhoods where people are living or where their businesses are,” Clark says.

Since predictive policing has been implemented, Santa Cruz cops have adjusted their patrols. The model has shown quick and promising results for something police departments usually don’t do: prevent crime. Remarkably, they’ve done so in a time of dwindling city budgets.

“Last year we set a record for the number of calls for service we’ve had in the 160 years of our agency,” Clark says. “We did that with 20 percent less sworn staff, and nearly 30 percent less non-sworn staff, such as the crime analyst, to help out with that system.”

Also last year, the department released an iPhone app for residents to view real-time crime maps, provide crime tips and view photos of wanted suspects. New technology, Friend says, is changing the landscape that law enforcement agencies are operating in.

“Quite frankly, everybody’s cutting police officer positions right now,” Friend says. “So what do you do with less? And I think that using technology like this, leveraging technology is essential to do exactly that.”

Santa Cruz was the first department in the world to implement a predictive policing program. Since last fall, the department has been contacted by about 150 police agencies in the country and law enforcement agencies and news outlets from Brazil, Mexico, Japan, France, Germany and Denmark.

To young women looking to do good – and make a few thousand dollars – egg donation is an attractive idea. But not much is known about the procedure’s long-term health effects. With this intimate look, reporter Teresa Chin takes us inside the American egg trade.

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TERESA CHIN: Angela Rogers is a tall, attractive 27-year-old, with short brown hair and the kind of wide blue eyes you usually only see in Disney movies. She recently graduated with a Masters degree in marriage and family therapy, and lives in a small house in Portland, Oregon with her husband, Steven, who’s also finishing school. But Angela – AJ to her friends – has another life too. In her cozy, colorful kitchen, she gives me a brief lesson in the tools of her trade: refrigerated alcohol wipes, bottles of drugs with vaguely feminine-sounding name and a set of medical syringes with slender plastic bodies and fine, half-inch needles.

AJ: And my biohazard container – that’s fun to travel with.

When she injects herself with these needles each day, AJ joins thousands of young, healthy, fertile women across the country doing the same thing. They’re voluntarily pumping themselves full of hormones, enduring intimate prodding and poking, and eventually, undergoing minor surgery – all for the explicit purpose of helping a complete stranger have a baby. The reasons why are not always straightforward: maybe it’s altruism, or maybe it’s empathy, or maybe it’s the $5-10,000 paycheck that comes with most donation cycles. But what is clear is that more and more women are signing up to share their ovaries.

Including me. Maybe.

It all started a few months ago, when I got a call from my best friend, Matt Fellows. He wanted to tell me that he and his long-term boyfriend, Chris, were thinking about having kids. My first thought was, “That’s awesome.” Matt and I have been best friends since college. I adore the two of them, and there’s no doubt in my mind that they’d make fantastic parents. My second thought, though, was something like: Oh shit. I guess it’s finally time for us to have this conversation. I called Matt recently to talk about it.

TERESA: I’m trying to think how this came up. I don’t remember exactly when we started joking about me being your egg donor.

MATT: It was definitely after we started living together. I don’t remember exactly when we started talking about it probably because at that time, it was, I don’t want to say a joke, but so far away as a possibility it didn’t see real.

TERESA: I remember sometimes we would say goodbye and you would give me a big hug, and then you would give me a pat on my belly and you would say…

MATT: “…Yeah, protect those ovaries!” (laughs) I don’t want to say it was ever a joke, it was more like, “Gosh, maybe this is something that someday would happen.”

TERESA: And it’s funny now that we’re talking about this because I feel like all of a sudden we stopped joking.

MATT: Yeah, it was kind of a sudden transition. I became in a stable, long-term relationship where all of a sudden we’re talking about the possibility of having children together, and the next question comes up: Well how are we going to have children together? And I said, “Well I kinda sorta have an egg donor.”

Kinda sorta. Maybe it was never exactly a joke, but until that moment I had never given the idea of egg donation any serious thought. Once I started, I realized there’s a lot to think about.

On the one hand, it’s a cool concept. Here’s a person, you say to yourself, who thinks highly enough of you to want to make babies together – babies who might have your eyes, your hair, your quirks. And sure it’s going to require a little discomfort, but it’s not like we’re talking about a kidney – just a couple of dozen cells you’re not using anyway. So, why not do it?

But then you think about yourself. And your body. You’re 29 years old, and you don’t have any babies of your own yet. You think about the short-term discomfort, and the long-term risks. You think about the needles.

Back in Portland, I watch AJ as she does her nightly hormone injections.

AJ: So I just pinch up some of my fat here on my thigh, try to avoid the same place I shot into recently so I don’t get too bruised up. And just release the pinch and pull it out.

TERESA: Did that hurt?

AJ: Nope.

AJ makes it look easy. But then again, she’s kind of a pro. This is AJ’S sixth time donating her eggs. That’s the maximum clinics recommend a woman go through any fertility cycle. And she’s done it all within the last three years. It’s pretty amazing, considering what the donation process involves.

Here’s how it works: Every month, a typical woman releases one mature follicle – that’s another word for egg cell – from her ovary. That’s when her body has a chance to get pregnant.

But with egg donation, that same woman can take a combination of hormones that cause her body to produce lots of mature follicles: Usually between 10 and 12, but sometimes as many as 30 or 40. Doctors retrieve these cells surgically, fertilize them, then implant them into the mom-to-be.

Now, if you’re the one getting them, making more mature follicles is a good thing because it means more chances for mom to get pregnant. But if you’re the one giving the eggs, the process is kind of hard on your body. So you don’t want to produce more than 25 or so. Above that number, donors run the risk of what’s called ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, meaning the ovaries don’t shut down properly and can swell and leak fluid into your body.

It seems like a lot, but 25 eggs don’t stretch as far as you might think. Only a fraction will be healthy enough to get fertilized, and even fewer will go on to develop into usable embryos. In the end, the majority of donor cycles don’t result in a pregnancy.

Yet in AJ’s case, every woman she has donated to has conceived and carried the babies to term, including two sets of twins. It’s a feat that’s earned her a reputation for success at the clinic, including a new nickname.

AJ: That’s what the doctor says – I was their superstar. The goose with the golden eggs.

Two weeks before her egg retrieval surgery, AJ lets me tag along on her medical appointments.

AJ: So the plan for today is to first drive to Oregon Reproductive Medicine, which is in North West Portland to get my ultrasound and blood drawn. Make sure everything is looking good, that I don’t have any cysts and everything.

We arrive at a red brick medical building in a nice area in Portland. AJ has been here before, but it’s the first time I’ve ever visited a fertility clinic.

TERESA: This is the nicest doctor’s office I have ever been in.

AJ: I know, it’s like, swanky. I think fertility is a lot of money. Like the procedures are very expensive and people are willing to pay a lot

There is a lot of money in this industry. Women trying to get pregnant with donor eggs typically spend around $30,000 per attempt. Egg donors themselves are paid only a fraction of these fees: about $7,000 for six weeks of work plus recovery time. Repeat donors like AJ can earn slightly more per cycle – about $7,500. But most clinics say money isn’t supposed to be the point. And AJ agrees.

AJ: Helping people feels really, really good. Like, while I’m in the process, gives me a really strong sense of purpose and responsibility. Like a good kind of responsibility. So why not do it as many times as I can?

Which isn’t to say the money can’t be helpful.

AJ: Oh yeah, well, the very first one I used to pay off a credit card I had in college, and that was awesome. I was able to just cut that up and pay it down and really freeing feeling. The second and third ones I used to pay for our wedding and honeymoon.

And AJ isn’t alone. A high percentage of egg donors are students trying to pay off their loans. The American Society of Reproductive Medicine officially discourages fertility agencies from recruiting on college campuses – the thinking is that there is too much pressure on students to pay back loans, and they might be too eager to overlook the risks associated with egg donation. But back at the clinic waiting room, I see a number of young women in college sweatshirts. I can guess why they’re here. Like AJ, they sit quietly and flip through magazines as they wait for their names to be called.

There’s also a definite air of secrecy around egg donation, and it’s not just in the clinic. Many egg donors don’t even tell their families about their procedures. Some families who have gotten pregnant with donor eggs don’t tell their kids. As a person trying to decide whether or not to be an egg donor, it drives me a little crazy that not many people are open to talking about this. Except AJ, of course.

The first time AJ donated her eggs, she gave 33. Too many. She hyperstimulated. Her ovaries swelled, and she had to go to the hospital to get rehydrated and prevent infection. She wasn’t going to donate again, but then she found out her recipient got pregnant with her eggs. A few months later, AJ signed up for her second donor cycle.

AJ: Yeah, for me helping people kind of trumps everything. Going through something and not feeling well is worth it if it means making a family’s dreams come true. Having a family, that’s kind of a big deal.

The fertility clinic said they could decrease AJ’s future hormone doses to decrease her chances of hyperstimulating again. She agreed. And after that, it was fine. Her second donation produced 13 eggs. Her third produced 23; her fourth, 25; and her fifth, most recently, 26 eggs.

AJ: The scariest thing about being a donor for, not just for me, is that they don’t know the long-term effects of a lot of these drugs that are going into our system. Like maybe in 10 years a bunch of donors are going to get cancer, but who’s going to know about that unless they make a big fuss about it in the news and you know.

It’s a little mind-boggling, but in the 25-year history of egg donation, there hasn’t been a single large, long-term group study of former donors. One of the reasons is because right now, the government doesn’t regulate egg donation. Instead, it operates on a set of recommendations created by the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, a member-based medical non-profit. Standard guidelines, like limiting egg donors to six lifetime cycles, are based on studies of infertile women who use similar fertility treatments like IVF. There’s a problem with doing things this way. As it turns out, egg donors tend to be a lot different from their infertile counterparts. They’re younger, thinner, poorer. And no one knows what will happen to them down the road.

JENNIFER LAHL: It’s exploitive. Rich wealthy women aren’t selling their eggs. Even if the risks are fully disclosed, you’ll still say, “Yeah yeah yeah – where do I sign?” You’ll take more risk if you have more need.

Jennifer Lahl is a former nurse and one of the most outspoken critics of egg donation. She recently made a short film about her concerns called, “Eggsploitation.”

“Eggsploitation” is a scary film. It features five women, all former donors, who have had serious health problems since they gave away their eggs. Breast cancer, colon cancer, unexplained infertility. Ovarian hyperstimulation, like what happened to AJ, where your ovaries fill up with fluid. In the worst cases, they can burst like water balloons.

But the big question is, did their health issues come from their egg donation? Lahl thinks it’s a distinct possibility.

LAHL: We know there’s risks because women take drugs, and have surgery and use anesthesia. We’re not fooling ourselves to think we can do this risk-free. And do we want women in their prime fertility years assume risk? And for what? So someone can have a baby. No one is going to die if they can’t have a baby.

A lot of what Lahl was saying made sense to me, but I had also talked to several donors who had gone through their cycles without any problems. And what about couples like Matt and Chris who couldn’t have biological children? As an egg donor, I could give them that chance to experience the joy of parenthood. How did that measure up to the possible risks? I found myself utterly confused, as you can hear in this audio diary I recorded after my conversation with Lahl.

TERESA (in audio diary): Teresa here. I have a cold, if it’s not completely obvious by now. I feel like I got a lot of insight in this trip. I talked Matt; he called me. I haven’t talked to him in a while about this story, and I was a little nervous talking to him because the stuff I’ve been researching has been pretty negative on egg donors, especially that “Eggsploitation” documentary which it made me really think like, I spent so much of my life being healthy. And here I am considering doing something that could very well increase my chances of breast cancer; it could very well decrease my ability to have children in the future. I was kind of this close to saying I made up my mind. But how do you bring this up to someone you really care about… I feel like a terrible friend to do this kind of thing to him. And we are family. And we’re going to have a relationship together no matter what. As much as I know he wants a kid someday, he’s not willing to risk our relationship. Ironically, isn’t that exactly the kind of person you think should have kids?

Two weeks later, I meet up with AJ Rogers again, this time in San Francisco for her egg retrieval. The night before the surgery, we sit on the bed in her hotel room in Fisherman’s Wharf, where she and Steven are staying. Her belly is a lot bigger than the last time I saw her, and she seems a little uncomfortable.

AJ: Yeah, physically I’m not feeling great. I’m feeling worn down. I have a pillow here because my pants are undone because they’re too tight with my belly being so big right now. And it just seemed inappropriate getting interviewed with my pants undone. So I have the pillow there to make it seem like I’m still appropriate.

By her doctor’s most recent estimates, AJ’S normally almond-sized ovaries have stretched to accommodate almost 20 mature egg follicles, several of which are up to an inch across.

AJ: I feel like all my internal organs lift and crunch against me, like against my lungs. Hard to describe. Like it’s not like the first time when I donated my eggs and I was having a hard time breathing. It just definitely feels like there’s a lot more jam-packed into my abdomen than normal.

Usually, the body only makes one of these mature eggs each month, but the hormones that AJ has been taking have made her ovaries temporarily go into overdrive. AJ’s doctors say she’s doing a great job, though she’s says she’s not entirely sure what that means.

AJ: I still wish I knew more about what was actually going on inside my body. But it seems like there are so many different things to understand, and I should probably be concentrating on keeping myself healthy instead of reading too much about what’s going on inside my body. I might freak myself out that way.

One way AJ comforts herself is by reading the letters she gets from women who’ve had babies thanks to her – and the women who are hoping to have them.

“Dear Angela. I’ve been thinking of you often recently as we get closer to the egg retrieval, and hoping you’re getting through the final phase without too much discomfort.”

“Hi Angela, we just want you to know that for us, family has and always will be everything that is important in the world.”

“Hello Angela, I’m very glad to meet you and your genes. When I was your age I never imagined I would have a child in this manner, but here we are, and thank you for being interested in helping me realize a life long dream.”

AJ: Just reading these letters makes me think about my own fertility.

TERESA: When do you think you want to have kids?

AJ: I’m pretty ready now.

A little after 7am the day of the surgery, I pick up AJ and her husband from their hotel and drive them to the fertility clinic. We’re the first patients to arrive. The nurses take AJ into the back room for surgery prep.

Here’s how the operation works: Doctors will put AJ under anesthesia, then use a long, thin needle to take the mature follicles, which will later be fertilized and transferred to her recipient. The entire process only takes about 20 minutes.

I sit in the waiting room with AJ’s husband.

TERESA: So you’re not nervous or anything?

STEVEN: I get a little nervous. But, I don’t know. I think I was more nervous the first and second time for sure.

TERESA: She seems really enthusiastic about it.

STEVEN: Yeah it’s kind of not even a big deal to her anymore. Like as far as the process she has to go through, she kind of has it down. And they all acknowledge that. Like, “Oh yeah you know how to do this. This is easy for you.” (laughs) “You got it.” Maybe I forget… it’s still a surgery though.

After a short wait, the nurses came back give us an update on AJ’s surgery. The doctors had been able to retrieve 27 eggs – 10 more than they had expected. AJ’s recipient didn’t come to the surgery, since she was prepping for her own procedures. But she sent AJ a thank-you basket containing boxes of coconut water, a hand-made journal, and a brand new iPad.

The next day, I asked AJ if she wanted to celebrate. After all, she was about to start a new chapter in her life. No more scheduling her evenings around injections, or skipping her morning coffee. No more blood draws or ultrasounds or IVs. She was free to do whatever she wanted. And as it happened, she had precisely the thing in mind: an evening of karaoke

Angela seemed happy, her husband Steven was relieved, and it seemed like all was well.

A few weeks after the surgery, I got a call from AJ

AJ: So when I got back to Portland my belly started expanding. Like getting bigger and bigger, and I started feeling worse and worse. When it got to the point that I couldn’t put on my own shoes I thought, “Yeah this is a problem.”

AJ called the fertility clinic doctors in San Francisco, who told her that she was showing signs of hyperstimulating. They said she should go to the hospital right away.

AJ: I went to the ER. They didn’t know what to do with me. I told them I had had that a couple of years ago, and what I needed to be monitored and get some sort of ultrasound to make sure that there wasn’t any severe complications like that my ovaries weren’t twisting. Because ovarian torsion is like your ovaries are a water balloon and your ovaries are being twisted, and you know, you twist a water balloon it’s going to pop.

And the seriousness of it hit me. Like, I am also closer now to wanting to have kids than I was when I started my egg donation. What if this ruins my ability to have children? What if I do lose my ovary because of this? What if this is giving me permanent damage? We don’t know. No one knows.

The next day AJ left the ER and went to a fertility specialist who knew more about egg donation.

AJ: They gave me an ultrasound and I got to see my ovaries on the screen, and they were gigantic. Each of them were almost the size of grapefruits. And there was fluid all around my entire abdomen that had leaked out of my ovaries and was surrounded all of my organs.

The doctor told her she needed surgery right away.

AJ: It was horrible. They took this giant needle, and inserted it in vaginally. It had to go through my cervix. No anesthesia or anything. I was awake for the entire thing. And it was this needle that sucked out the liquid and just took out a liter and half of fluid.

The surgery worked – AJ would not lose her ovaries. And afterwards, she felt physically better. But she was still weak. And she still had a lot of unanswered questions.

AJ: I’m hoping in a few weeks to go get my ovaries checked and that they’ll be cyst-free and normal sized, and that everything will be fine. That’s what I’m hoping. But I’m a little nervous. No one really knows if that will affect me long-term until it does or it doesn’t.

AJ’s getting sick hit me pretty hard. She had seemed so positive about the entire egg donation experience, so confident that it would turn out alright for everyone, and I had been there imaging myself in her place every step of the way. And now, looking at pictures of her distended abdomen over Facebook, it just didn’t seem worth it. Not for a couple of thousand dollars. Not for the good feelings. Not if something like this could happen to me.

AJ: And you know, maybe that’s a good thing. And I don’t think I would have said that in the past but I don’t want my friends to have to go through this same thing.

A few weeks later, I heard from AJ again. She was feeling better, and had just found out that her recipient was pregnant. The goose with the golden eggs had done it again. And she sounded really happy. So happy that it was almost as if she had forgotten our last conversation. I couldn’t forget it though. And so I called Matt and told him AJ’s entire story. I told him I wasn’t sure the risk was worth it.

MATT: You’re right. You’re absolutely right. The question is, well first of all if you go through with it we’re not going to let any of the sort go down.

TERESA: I know, but this industry is not set up to handle anything when something goes wrong. That’s the reality. That’s kind of the take-home point. When things go right, it’s great for everyone. A lot of people are positive, refer family members. But when shit goes down, everyone is woefully unprepared.

MATT: It’s like you said, this investigation is more an audition of the industry.

TERESA: It is ‘cause this is not me saying, “Would you guys be great parents.” You guys would be fantastic parents. You guys would be amazing. And one way or another you will be.

MATT: Well, if it turns out this is not something we pursue, then so be it. Because I’d much rather this be a harder decision than going into this not knowing the consequences and having a bad outcome.

TERESA: We’re talking about your life, though, we’re talking about your ability to have biological children…

MATT: Well life doesn’t always happen exactly how you would have it done or planned. There are wrenches thrown into the mix and we deal with them. I had grand plans of marrying a woman (laughs), and that turned out just fine.

For Matt and me, there isn’t a happy ending. Until we can find some answers, or a clinic willing to work with us to minimize the health risks, I can’t be his egg donor. I hope we can work it out. Because I do think Matt would be a great father. I wish it were as simple as just laying a golden egg.

In San Francisco, I’m Teresa Chin.

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NICOLE JONES: A handful of prison inmates who are also mothers came home last month. They’re not done with their sentences. But they have qualified for the Alternative Custody Program. It’s a new program that could help California both meet its court-ordered prison reduction, and help struggling families.

VELDA DOPSON-DAVIS: Normally the female is the primary caregiver before being sent to prison and actually, they continue to parent from behind the wall.

Velda Dopson-Davis is Chief Deputy Warden at Valley State Prison for Women. She’s also the team leader for the Alternative Custody Program. There are over 8,000 women in prison in California. And about 6,400 of them are parents.

DOPSON-DAVIS: This was a goal to get them back into the community and allow them an opportunity to interact with their children and reenter society more easily.

The program was designed by the legislature to help struggling families break the cycle of generational incarceration. It allows primary caregivers, mainly mothers, to serve only a portion of their sentence. Once released, they serve out the rest of their time on state parole.

Karen Shain is the policy director at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children based in San Francisco. She says the program is a smart move for the state.

KAREN SHAIN: The vast majority of women in prison are there for non-violent crimes, mainly drug-related crimes. Most women, 60-80% of women in prison, had custody of their children before they went in. They’re mothers of dependent children, so sending a woman to prison – it may be a great punishment, but it doesn’t look at what the impact is on a community.

Based on the bill’s language, 4,000 inmates were supposed to qualify for early release in 2011. In reality, CDCR released 10. The state says it hopes to release 500 by the end of next year. But for Shain, that’s way too slow.

SHAIN: There are a lot of problems and the Alternative Custody Program is really not equipped to deal with those.

Inmates must meet specific criteria to participate, like being non-violent, non-serious, non-sex offenders. They must have a home or program to go to once released. But with no funding attached to the bill, qualified inmates are required to find their own transitional housing. Shain says those requirements are so strict the program has come to a standstill.

SHAIN: People can say they want to do it. They totally qualify and there’s nothing for them to do. Some of them don’t have housing or homes and they are trying to get into drug treatment programs, halfway houses, which are very few and far between. Basically what happens is women who have a husband at home, who have so-called stable household – they’re much more likely to qualify.

But Shain says those families that already have stable parents at home, aren’t the ones the state should be most concerned about.

SHAIN: And it’s not really fair for the vast majority of women who are in prison, who have multiple convictions, who don’t have the kind of houses that the Department of Corrections would necessarily want them to be in.

Realignment, one of the biggest changes in the state’s criminal justice system, transferred the custody of thousands of inmates, and in only a couple months. Medical parole, on the other hand, which only affected 40 inmates, took almost a year to roll out. CDCR’s Velda Dopson-Davis says the state is doing its best to implement the new Alternative Custody Program, but it’s been difficult.

DOPSON-DAVIS: This was very new and unique for us and to train the staff to realign duties. We all were loaned to this project, not assigned as a position, which means our work behind us continued. And then it’s quite a lengthy process to get to where you begin to implement something even though it is law, there are steps into getting into the books.

Realignment is already straining parolee services. And with the lack of funding for things like transitional housing and rehabilitation programs, CDCR staff has to be more cautious about the rate of inmates it releases early.

DOPSON-DAVIS: We have to make sure we are putting eligible participants out that are going to be successful, that desire to work toward that goal, that families are willing to work with them, that parole is able to supervise them, and that there are resources available to them to support their needs.

Despite delays, Dopson-Davis says there’s much excitement in prisons about the new program.

DOPSON-DAVIS: My team and I went out to Valley and talked to over 250 women and they were all ready to go right there: “Hook ‘em up, put my bracelet on, I can go home.” And that excitement remains.

It remains to be seen whether that excitement leads to more parents coming home.

In 2009, California outlawed a technique known as suction dredge mining, which makes finding gold a bit easier than shaking a pan. Officials wanted to study potential damage to the Klamath River, an area where there was lots of dredging. KALW’S Hadley Robinson has the story about a struggle for power along the river.

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HADLEY ROBINSON: On the swift-flowing Klamath River, at the base of steep forested mountains, sits Happy Camp, California – a town of just over 1,000 people. Yes, it’s called Happy Camp. It’s a quirky place – part of the Jefferson County that once tried to secede from California. Nearly a quarter of residents are members of the Karuk tribe. The tribe is also one of the top employers in town. There are just a few other businesses and Happy Camp prides itself on having more Bigfoot sightings than anywhere else. It’s also a place where you can find something else: gold.

MYRNA KARNS: When you find a piece of gold, you’re the first person in history to see that. God put it there how many thousands of years ago and you’re the first person to see it…

Myrna Karns spends her weekdays working at the local gold mining equipment store. It’s run by a club called the New 49ers – a reference to the old 49ers who first found California gold. Over the years, the club has acquired hundreds of federal mining claims along 60 miles of the Klamath River. There are 1,200 members, but anyone can pay a fee to try to find their very own sparkles of gold in the water.

KARNS: It’s just the thrill. It’s like back in the old days, in the old West days, you know.

People interested in gold have been here since Happy Camp was the old West. They started coming in 1851, when gold was first discovered in the area. Then they stayed around – Happy Camp was a logging town for most of the 20th century. The last mill closed in 1994. Since then, the town’s businesses have survived the summer months in thanks to the tourists who come seeking increasingly valuable gold. Myrna Karns says it’s not really a way to make a living.

KARNS: It’s more of a hobby. To make a living, you’d probably have to work 10 to 12 hours. And I mean hard hours, not going out in the water for an hour and taking a four hour break.

Still, in a depressed economy, even a little money helps.

KARNS: I have seen a man just working up on shore panning and he’d come in with about $40 worth of gold for the day so he was able to go buy some groceries.

Starting in the early 2000s, gold prices soared and more and more people made their way to Happy Camp. The founder of the New 49ers called it a new gold rush. People joined the club, set up RVs, campers, and port-a-potties along the river, and spent weeks searching for gold. Most of the miners used a machine known as a suction dredge. It’s about the size of a small raft, with a loud motor that sits on two pontoons. Miners swim alongside wearing scuba gear, diving to the bottom to dig holes for a large hose. The hose acts as a vacuum, and sucks up sediment into a box on top of the dredge. Then the miners sift through it, looking for gold.

LEAF HILLMAN: There was basically a wholesale invasion of the Salmon River. And all of a sudden instantly it was over run by suction dredge miners.

Leaf Hillman is a Karuk and one of the leading opponents of suction dredging.

HILLMAN: It looked very ugly and, quickly, there were conflicts with our tribal membership, for sure.

Swimming holes that people were used to splashing in were suddenly filled with dredges. Formerly pristine shores were covered with trash. Hillman says the tension led to physical fights. But a bigger issue was fish. Hillman says that even though the river’s fish populations are no longer big enough to feed people consistently, fish still play an important spiritual role in Karuk culture.

HILLMAN: We are a fishing people. We live along the river and the river has sustained us forever.

In 2005, the tribe sued California Fish and Game for allowing suction dredge mining in areas where there were endangered fish populations. A court ordered the agency to do a comprehensive review and update regulations. In 2009, the state temporarily banned suction dredges. Last summer the ban was extended until 2016, pending more environmental review.

HILLMAN: When you talk about, well maybe it’s just a small impact… But when you have an invasion of a place like the Salmon River that houses remnant populations that don’t exist anywhere else on the Pacific Coast, that’s a pretty important place. And the last thing we ought to be doing is allowing mechanized, motorized intensive mining activities in that habitat.

Back when the first gold miners came to Happy Camp in 1851, they blew out mountainsides for hydraulic mining and used literally tons of mercury to process the gold.

Hillman lives and works at the tribal office 45 miles down the river from Happy Camp in a small town called Orleans. We stop along the winding road that looks down a steep drop to the roaring river. A black bear pounces around the shrubs across the river.

HILLMAN: Yeah, it’s beautiful country. People stop and look at places like this and what those people don’t see is the historic legacy of gold mining here on the Klamath.

There are a lot of environmental arguments against suction dredge mining. Gas pours out of the motors and into the water and the vacuum hoses likely suck up crucial nutrients and insects, in addition to dirt and gold. But since it’s been banned for the last three summers, it’s hard to see any remnants or damage. It’s actually easier to see the impacts from the original gold rush – areas where hydraulic mining took out mountainsides and tailings piles were thrown on riversides.

Jim Foley is a member of the New 49ers. He says suction dredge miners don’t do the river any harm.

FOLEY: We destroy nothing. We move gravel around. We take it from here and we put it right over here – and I’m talking about a distance of maybe four feet. And as we move up the stream, we drop the gravel back in.

The arguments are endless, but this battle seems to be about more than the environmental impacts.

FOLEY: I have seen that the agenda of those that are against mining is not about mining. It’s not even about fish. The real agenda behind the scenes is about control of natural resources.

These tensions run deep. Foley goes on to say it’s unfair that the tribe gets fishing privileges. He accuses them of wanting white people off the river. Hillman won’t say that, but he makes it clear that he’s bitter toward miners.

HILLMAN: The New 49ers, are a lot like the old 49ers. The first gold rush that occurred here we lost. Three-quarters of our population was murdered. They were displaced from their homes, from their lands.

Hillman is quick to point out that those conflicts weren’t that long ago. They were his direct relatives.

HILLMAN: I can take you to places and point out places that were armed conflicts – where people are buried. I know their names. I know what happened in that place. So it feels very close to us and the trauma on the culture and the people, our way of life, our religion, everything else. We still struggle with those effects today. They haven’t went away in 150 years.

So, for now, the suction dredgers are gone. Anyone who wants to look for gold has to do it the old-fashioned way. People living in Happy Camp notice the difference, but they aren’t all happy about it. The miners may have brought RVs, temporary camps and trash, but they also bought gas and groceries, and a solid bacon and egg meal before hitting the river.

Debbie Virtue is a waitress at Frontier Café. She wishes she was serving up more of those breakfasts.

DEBBIE VIRTUE: I’ve been here 24 years and the last three summers have been the slowest – this one being the slowest of those three. There’s just a lower amount of people that have been coming during the season to dredge.

When I talked with her around 9am, my friend and I were the only two people in the restaurant. When I went back for dinner at 6:45pm, it was already closed.

In this battle, there’s no tie. There’s the view of Jim Foley:

FOLEY: The only way that I see it getting resolved is through a lawsuit. Unfortunately, this is the way that all of these things get resolved in the end. Nobody can seem to come to a middle ground on anything outside of a lawsuit.

And the view of Leaf Hillman:

HILLMAN: I think you have to fight fire with fire. I don’t think that trying to talk nice or to negotiate something, I don’t think that that gets you anywhere. Not when you’re dealing with people who don’t acknowledge your right to exist.

Even after 160 years, the power struggle along the river goes on.

For Crosscurrents, I’m Hadley Robinson.

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The total enrollment for Brightworks is 30 students. They range in age from six to 12 years old. Mackenzie Rose-Price is a teacher at Brightworks, but they don’t call her that at the school. Instead, she’s a “collaborator.”

Rose-price starts her class period with a dramatic opening: “Ladies and gentlemen of Brightworks, I’d like to welcome you to this show of ‘Margie Thinks He’s a Murderer.’” It’s an introduction to the sock puppet play the students will perform today about confused, albeit murderous, animals. It’s a little different from what students in a more traditional school might be doing, but to the Brighworks co-founders, that’s the point.

“This is a kindergarten where you know your kids are going to learn how to use a drill,” says co-founder Gever Tulley. “This is a school where the answer is, ‘Yes, you can learn how to use the chop saw. Yes, you can use the laser cutter. Yes, you can apprentice yourself to this potter.’ That’s a perfectly good thing for a 12-year-old to do.”

Brightworks collaborators say they don’t ignore the three “R’s” – Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmetic – but they say they take their own approach to them. The school uses a curriculum that Tulley created called “the arc planning process.” The curriculum involves three phases: Exploration, Expression, and Exposition. The first includes bringing in experts of differing perspectives on a single topic; the second asks students to express all of the ideas learned from the first phase in a new way. And the last phase, “Exposition,” is basically show-and-tell.

Tulley’s approach to education originated at a summer camp he founded in 2004 called the Tinkering School. There, children could experiment with saws and drills, tools other adults might want to keep out of their hands, to construct anything they wanted out of available materials.

“That was the beginning of what you might call one of the pedagogical pillars,” Tulley said. “This idea that when it’s a shared exploration of the unknown, when the adults that are working with the children have as little idea as the kids do about whether or not this project is going to work – there’s something magical about it.”

The summer camp was such a success that it gave Tulley and his co-founder Bryan Welch the confidence to form Brightworks. Since its founding, the school has become a place that challenges both traditional education and modern views of childhood.

“When did we think it was crazy to let a 12-year-old drive a tractor? When did we think it was crazy to let a 12-year-old carry a pocket knife?” Tulley wonders. “What caused these changes? And was it possible that we were underestimating the nascent ability of children?”

As if to drive its mission home, even the schools location is unconventional. It’s housed in what used to be an old mayonnaise factory, where light floods the room from giant windows and skylights overhead. The floor is made of soft cork, which is conducive to the often-bare feet of students. And the building offers an arts area, electronics lab, wood workshop, and a kitchen (currently a test-kitchen for an ongoing project to develop the perfect Brightworks potato chip). The school also has a place called “Kid City” – a two-story plywood fort full of nooks and crannies.

“Kid City was designed by the children, built by the children to be their permanent sort of home within the school – their permanent home away from home,” Tulley explains. “They use it as a place for refuge when they’re mentally exhausted by some project.” The students helped build just about everything in the school, from the partition walls to pieces of furniture.

With all of its learning space in one wide-open warehouse, Brightworks is like a one-room schoolhouse. But instead of hearkening back to days on the prairie, the openness reflects Tulley’s 21st-century vision. “It’s to honor the creative impulses of the children, create an environment that provokes and engages the children in activities that they might otherwise not engage in,” says Tulley.

Ten-year-old Elizabeth Zada Hathaway is one such student. She appreciates the freedom at her new school. “At my old school you kind of had to do what the teacher told you to do and here you can kind of opt out sometimes,” Zada says. Zada has attended several schools, but she says Brightworks is her favorite so far. “We don’t have to do a lot of sitting down and listening to people because that can be kind of boring and annoying,” she confesses.

The Brightworks students aren’t the only ones who are fans of the school’s philosophy. Collaborator Rose-Price wants to create an educational atmosphere that’s “ a place where learning actually [is] fun and almost invisible.” She’s young and energetic – and it shows in her teaching style. She’s like an older, wiser friend to her students. “It’s what my mom always dreamed of for me and what I’ve always wanted for myself,” she confides.

Because Brightworks is a nonprofit, private school, it functions outside the jurisdiction of the California Department of Education. Teaching credentials are not required for Brightworks’ teachers, and students are not required to take standardized tests mandated at public schools. Without these test scores, Brightworks students could face obstacles if they attempt to transfer back into the public school system.

Tulley makes no attempt to hide the fact that he lacks a background in traditional education. “What I am is sort of a savant educator. I have a handle on a unique insight into how to create engaging learning experiences and a gift for it – in the same way I have a gift for drawing or working with computers.”

Tulley previously worked at the digital media company Adobe Systems, headquartered in San Jose. Technology is at the core of learning at Brightworks so long as it’s used as tool. When one of the students asked to bring a video game to school, Tulley’s answer was no – but it wasn’t a rejection of video games altogether. “I said, ‘Yeah, if you write a video game, you can play it,” and so that process is unfolding,” Tulley explains.

Brightworks is in its stage of infancy and what’s next for these children after they graduate seems uncertain. But Tulley sees the lack of complete structure more of an opportunity, rather than a challenge.

“If you look at one of our youngest children right now, Clementine, by the time she graduates, she will have worked on somewhere from 50 to 70 projects taken from inspiration all the way to completion,” Tulley says. “When she graduates, she’s going to have a much better idea of what it is she wants to do for a living in the classic sense of the term and the skills to back it up.”

Students will graduate with a multimedia portfolio-based diploma. Whether or not traditional high schools will see the years of work inside these portfolios as on par to other primary schools is not exactly clear.

But if Brightworks leaves you wishing you could go back to primary school well, maybe you can. In the near future they plan to offer night classes for children – and adults – in the Mission District.

JOHN ARMBRUSTER: Yongstown is an area which doesn’t have a history of earthquakes. This disposal well began operating in December of 2010. Three months later, the earthquakes begin.

Industry and government experts estimate there are hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas in various shale formations across the country. Some people think there’s enough to meet the country’s natural gas needs for the next few centuries – assuming we can actually get to it. Which is where fracking comes in.

Here’s how it works: companies drill deep into the ground, a mile or two down, into shale – a hard but porous rock with little pockets of gas or oil speckled throughout. Then they inject highly pressurized frack fluid – a combination of water, sand and chemicals – to break up the rock and release the oil and gas.

Fracking has touched off something of an energy boom in this country. But it’s controversial. Last year, the US Environmental Protection Agency found chemicals commonly used in frack fluid in a Wyoming town’s water supply.

Environmentalist Bill Allayaud says the biggest problem with fracking is that we just don’t know that much about its long-term effects – but it’s happening right now in California. KALW’s Christopher Connelly reports.

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CHRISTOPHER CONNELLY: Riding around in Chris Wrather’s golf cart, you can see about a dozen horses grazing on his ranch near Los Alamos, in northern Santa Barbara County. It’s a quiet patch of the valley, surrounded by vineyards and farmland.

CHRIS WRATHER: We have a training track up the hill.

Forty horses eat a lot of grass. And that means they need a lot of water.

WRATHER: We’re fortunate in this valley to have this wonderful supply of water and wonderful quality of water.

A few months ago, Wrather’s neighbor called him up. He had some oil wells on his land and companies had drilled there before. But lately there had been a lot of new activity. It seemed different.

WRATHER: And I, oh said, “Don’t tell me.” Even before he said, “Y’know,” I said, “Don’t tell me they’re fracking.”

They were fracking, but for oil, not natural gas. Wrather had heard about the practice. He wanted to make sure that his water would stay clean.

WRATHER: Once it’s damaged, it’s damaged. It’s game over. Without water, we don’t have a business. We don’t have a livable place to live. That would be true of everywhere that shares that water supply.

DOREEN FARR: I think it was kind of a double shock in a way.

Doreen Farr represents Los Alamos in the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors.

FARR: One was that this would happen without anybody really knowing about it – without there being some sort of notification to the county in the form of an application or whatever.

In other words, oil companies didn’t have to tell anyone they were fracking.

FARR: I think even the bigger surprise was that it was happening any place at all in Santa Barbara County – that we had the geology that would make fracking attractive to an oil company.

Farr says she and others in the county thought fracking was a natural gas thing. There’s not much gas in Santa Barbara. As it turns out, though, they are right on top of a huge shale formation that spans four counties in central California. It’s filled with oil – 15 billion barrels. That’s enough to meet the whole country’s needs for at least 2 years.

COUNTY SUPERVISOR: Item number 2 is a briefing on hydraulic fracturing…

Doreen Farr arranged for a number of hearings at the county board of supervisors. She invited residents, state officials, and oil company representatives. She wanted to find out how common fracking was in Santa Barbara, and what the risks were.

COUNTY SUPERVISOR: And I think the primary concern is had to be with any effect that it might have had on ground water, in particular in Los Alamos, all the people…

They learned that only two wells were fracked in Santa Barbara County. They also learned that state regulators don’t keep any records on where fracking happens. What’s more, the industry doesn’t have to disclose what chemicals are used in the frack fluid. They’re considered trade secrets.

FARR: Well, if we want to test for this, we don’t even know what to test for. You can’t test for everything.

BRIAN SEGEE: There’s not a clear path under California state law or federal law to figure out where fracking is happening.

Brian Segee is a staff attorney with the Environmental Defense Center in Santa Barbara. He says that when oil companies frack in California, they file the same paperwork they would for traditional oil and gas wells. Since they usually frack in wells they’ve already drilled, the state doesn’t require an extra permit.

SEGEE: And it’s hard to even piece things together afterward. But clearly there has been no prior disclosure, and that’s what we saw in northern Santa Barbara County.

A few months before all this happened, California fracking had caught the attention of a national nonprofit called the Environmental Working Group. Bill Allayaud is their California representative.

BILL ALLAYAUD: When I asked them about it, there was a pretty clear-cut answer. And it was, “We don’t frack in California for gas because we don’t need to.”

The “them” he’s referring to are the state regulators. They work under the Department of Conservation, and their official name is the Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources, but everybody calls them DOGGR. Allayaud says what they told him is technically true: gas fracking is rare in California. But that’s only half the story.

ALLAYAUD: We’ve been fracking for oil in this state for 50 years – not gas, but oil. We first fracked a well in California in 1953 in Los Angeles. The world’s record frack occurred in California in Kern County in 1994.

Allayaud says not only is fracking still happening, it’s happening all the time.

ALLAYAUD: Oil companies openly said, “Oh, we’ve been fracking for 50 years.” They’re not hiding anything. They do that as a matter of routine on at least 50 percent of the oil wells in California.

He wanted to know why DOGGR hadn’t mentioned the oil fracking.

ALLAYAUD: I could not believe how head-in-the-sand they were. Or they were outright lying. I couldn’t figure this out why are they not telling me what’s going on?

DOGGR declined to be interviewed for this report. In an email, they said they had “no verified information” about fracking in the state, but that they don’t believe it’s widely used. The Western States Petroleum Association, an industry lobby, says Californians shouldn’t be worried about fracking. Tupper Hull is a spokesperson for the group.

TUPPER HULL: There are huge amounts of regulation – and frankly a great deal of understanding built up over the years by the oil industry about how to protect that groundwater.

Hull says it’s impossible for fracking to affect the water supply because it takes place so far below it. And all oil drilling ­– fracking or not – goes through the water table.

HULL: That’s why well integrity, about which there’s a huge amount of regulation, is the key to protecting groundwater in a hydraulic fracturing circumstance or any other drilling circumstance.

Hull also defends the industry’s refusal to be specific about how they make their frack fluids. He says people don’t understand the importance of trade secrets.

HULL: Companies that develop processes and utilize very precise recipes for hydraulic fracturing have a very legitimate concern in protecting those precise recipes. You and I, as consumers of energy products, benefit from that competition. Therefore those protections are in our interests. That’s not the oil industry’s point of view. That’s the state of California and the federal government’s point of view. We happen to agree with it.

There’s still a lot of debate about fracking’s environmental effects and the EPA is still studying it. In the absence of national legislation, states have started to regulate fracking on their own. A bill pending in the California legislature would require companies to disclose what chemicals they are using and how much fracking they are doing, but they wouldn’t have to say where they’re fracking for a few years after the fact. The bill has a lot of support: Tupper Hull says the Western States Petroleum Association is behind it, as long as there are safeguards for trade secrets.

Back at his ranch in Los Alamos, Chris Wrather says that wouldn’t be enough for him.

WRATHER: It doesn’t make me feel better to know what’s gonna poison me. I want the poisoning to be stopped before it happens.

In Santa Barbara, at least, he’s got his wish. Late last year, county supervisors voted to change the zoning code. Now, if oil companies want to frack, they have to apply for a separate permit, hold a public hearing, and produce a full environmental impact report. Wrather says he’s happy with the new regulations, but he’s still suspicious of the whole fracking business.

WRATHER: We’re not anti-oil. We’re not anti-oil company. We just want to know that it’s safe before it happens here because the consequences are too high.

For Wrather, those consequences mean his whole way of life.

WRATHER: When I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat about something, it’s usually about water. Anything that has to do with water, to me, is absolutely the most important thing in our lives.

California’s Senate plans to take up the fracking disclosure bill early this year. Santa Barbara is still the only California county with any fracking regulations.

For Crosscurrents, I’m Christopher Connelly.

Read DOGGR’s response to the California Senate’s Department of Conservation about the practice of hydraulic fracturing in California here.

In some ways, he’s famous: The anthropology department building at UC Berkeley is named for Alfred Kroeber, the scholar who worked closely with Ishi, and Dwinelle Hall’s outdoor enclosure is named Ishi Court. UC Berkeley’s anthropology community held a conference in September dedicated to Ishi’s memory, and the California Museum in Sacramento has a yearlong exhibit featuring some of his possessions.

So, who was Ishi? And how could Ishi have been the so-called “last Indian” when close to a million Native Americans live in California today? Reporter Terria Smith – who is also California Native American – tells us Ishi’s story.

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TERRIA SMITH: Imagine spending three years alone in the woods of California. You’ve lost your entire family, and all of your close friends, to war, disease, and starvation. Every day you fish and hunt to feed yourself, and try to avoid being spotted by other people. Then, one day, you wander into a place that’s slightly foreign. A town. And everything changes.

This is the story of Ishi, perhaps one of the world’s most famous Native Americans of California Indians. He was first found 100 years ago on August 28, 1911, near an Oroville slaughterhouse. The sheriff took Ishi to the jail, saying it was “for his own safety.” Ishi was barefoot and wearing hide and canvas clothes. It wasn’t long before curious Looky Lou’s started coming to see the “wild man.” Many years later, this episode was dramatized in a TV movie called “Ishi: The Last of His Civilization.”

There was no TV at the time, but the newspaper created a sensation. One headline, from the San Francisco Call, read, “Ishi, The Last Aboriginal Savage in America.”

CHRISTIAAN KLIEGER: Which he wasn’t of course. The story was really largely fabricated.

Christiaan Klieger is an anthropologist and the curator of an exhibit at the “California Indians Making a Difference” exhibit at the California Museum in Sacramento.

KLIEGER: Ishi was alone by the fact that he and his family had been hiding for 40 years because of the massacres of Indian people. A lot of Indian people went up into the hills and they hid, rather than stay, in town and suffer the prejudice and the difficulty of living with white society.

This was during a time when native people of North America were referred to in animal-like terms. Newspapers and military correspondence, for example, generally called men “bucks,” while women were referred to simply as “squaws.” Countless tribal people, including Ishi’s, were killed during confrontations over land and resources. But when Ishi became a public figure, white society’s desire was to marvel at him rather than destroy him. Local newspaper The Oroville Register summed up the feeling this way.

ARTICLE EXCERPT: “Not a single word of English does he know, nor a single syllable of the language of the Digger Indians, the tribe which lived around here. Where he came from is a mystery. The most plausible explanation seems to be that he is probably the surviving member of the little group of uncivilized Deer Creek Indians that were driven from their hiding place two years ago.”

Word of Ishi spread quickly. And as soon as the news hit San Francisco, it was academia to the rescue… sort of. Again Christaan Klieger.

KLIEGER: Alfred Kroeber down at Berkeley, asked the Bureau of Indian Affairs if he could take possession of Ishi and bring him to the new museum of anthropology in San Francisco.

At that time, native people weren’t considered citizens in their own homeland. Instead they were wards of the federal government and were overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal office that still exists today. The bureau granted Kroeber’s request to keep Ishi with him, rather than allow him to live on a reservation. For the next five years Ishi was measured, weighed, questioned, and recorded in an ongoing exploration of his life and culture. Beginning in September, 1911, the San Francisco Call published an article every week about what was going on with Ishi, like this one published on November 11 of that year. T.T. Waterman was a colleague and fellow scholar of Kroeber.

SAN FRANCISCO CALL ARTICLE EXCERPT: “Ishi, the last of the Yana tribe, who was brought here by Professor T. T. Waterman, curator of the museum of the affiliated colleges, San Francisco, had his first ride in an elevator today. The aborigine was the second member of the party to enter. He seemed to enjoy the ride skyward and a broad grin was on his face. In the afternoon Ishi sang an Indian song at a meeting of the Indian Association of Northern California. Professor Waterman apologetically, remarked that some Indian songs are pleasing, but that Ishi’s voice needed considerable cultivation.”

That’s how Ishi would spend the rest of his life: teaching his culture to scholars and the public – kind of like a living museum exhibit. Ishi shared traditional songs, stories, and demonstrated tool-making. He lived at the university and worked as a janitor until he died of tuberculosis in 1916 – just five years after being “discovered.” A number of newspapers, including the San Mateo Labor Index, wrote about his funeral.

SAN MATEO LABOR INDEX ARTICLE: “The body was accompanied to the cemetery by several of U. of C. scientists: Professor T. T. Waterman, E.W. Gifford, assistant curator of the anthropological museum, A.W. Warburton, L. L. Loud, and Dr. Saxton Pope of the University of California medical college.”

One of those who officiated as pallbearer made a few remarks at the cemetery, commenting upon the value Ishi had been to anthropologists in helping to complete the history of the tribe, incomplete until he was found.

Not everyone agreed on Ishi’s importance to anthropology – or on the nobility of UC Berkeley’s study of him. What follows is part of a commentary in the Chico Record written after Ishi’s death.

CHICO RECORD ARTICLE: “He furnished amusement and study to the savants at the University of California for a number of years, and doubtless much of ancient Indian lore was learned from him, but we do not believe he was the marvel that the professors would have the public believe. He was just a starved-out Indian from the wilds of Deer Creek who, by hiding in its fastness, was able to long escape the white man’s pursuit. And the white man with his food and clothing and shelter finally killed the Indian just as effectually as he would have killed him with a riffle.”

During his years at the university, there were some things Ishi kept control over – like his personal identity. Ishi is actually the Yana word for “grown man.” He never told anyone his real name. So that died with him.

But there were other things he did not have control over. Before his death, Ishi requested that his body not undergo an autopsy. He had significant spiritual fear of the practice. But after he died, the autopsy happened anyway. And that wasn’t all: Ishi’s brain was kept in formaldehyde for 83 years after his death, and passed from the university to the Smithsonian Institute before it was finally given back to his descendants to bury. In April 2000, the San Francisco Chronicle gave an account of when Ishi’s brain was returned.

SAN FRANCSICO CHRONICLE ARTICLE: “Leaders of the Redding Rancheria and Pit River tribes, which trace their bloodlines to Ishi’s extinct Yahi Nation through the Yana tribe, promise to never reveal where they buried him. They’re not saying when they will do it, either – just that they’re landing in California today and that they want to be left alone to shepherd their departed elder’s spirit away in peace.”

So what is Ishi’s legacy? For some, the study of Ishi was part of the beginning of a change in the practice of anthropology, into something more inclusive of native people. Mari Lyn Salvador is director of the Hearst Museum at UC Berkeley.

MARI LYN SALVADOR: Members of these communities are becoming anthropologists and becoming museum professors. And it mitigates against objectifying others.

Salvador oversaw a conference at UC Berkeley this past September that brought close to 300 students, anthropologists and history enthusiasts to discuss “A Century of Ishi.”

SALVADOR: We’ve changed. We’re including people as colleagues and professors and teachers, not only as museum directors who are coming from Native American communities all over the country.

But for many people, Ishi’s story represents the common tragedy of Native Americans. Jessica Valdez – whose ancestors were from the Caddo, Comanche, and Apache tribes – is a young anthropologist who recently graduated from college.

JESSICA VALDEZ: If we don’t stand together as a community and make ourselves visible, we’re going to fall victim to the people who conquered us. That’s how I feel when I think about Ishi who was exploited, he wasn’t taken seriously. His native culture was just undermined.

Today Ishi lives in the many books, films, and articles made about him. His ashes, along with his brain, have finally been buried. But it’s not simply the memory of Ishi that lives on his culture and the descendants do too. Again, Christaan Klieger.

KLIEGER: That he was the last, that there were no more. Therefore, California Native people, also must be extinct. That’s absolutely not true. People are still here.

And these days, young native anthropologists like Jessica Valdez are around to make sure those people’s cultures remain alive.

VALDEZ: Initially, I became interested in my upbringing as a native person. I just wanted that to be a part of future generations to come and I thought that would be in my best interest to perpetuate my culture.

And after 100 years, Ishi himself remains alive, in a sense. His voice, which was recorded with his permission, has been digitized from the old wax cylinders it was originally recorded on, and preserved in the Library of Congress.

In Berkeley, I’m Terria Smith for Crosscurrents.