Mar/100
Area’s unemployed say they’ll believe there’ll be jobs when they see them
AMANDA PALLESCHI
Of the Patriot-News
Hours before President Barack Obama tried to reassure the millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans that they haven't been forgotten, Jason Leininger signed in at Cumberland County CareerLink Center and listed "Job assistance" as the reason for his visit.
He was one of 77 people who signed in before 1 p.m. Wednesday, listing either job search or enrollment in a state re-employment assistance program as reasons for dropping by.
At the Capital Region CareerLink office on Wiconisco Street in Harrisburg, that number was 121 before 2 p.m.
With most counties with unemployment rates hovering around 7 percent -- compared to the 8.9 percent statewide and 10 percent nationwide rates -- the midstate might not be the epicenter of the populist discontent that many national political experts say Obama has failed to tap.
Leininger, 34, was making his second trip to the CareerLink office in Carlisle looking for any kind of paving or excavation work.
Those who find themselves out of work or out of luck said they will only believe it when they see it.
It's the work Leininger has done all his life. His father owned a company that did excavating and paving. He graduated from Northern York County High School in the mid-1990s. He said he wishes he'd have tried college, but at $20 an hour, the work always paid the bills.
He credited federal stimulus projects for keeping him well employed through the Hummelstown-based Handwerk Contractors, until he injured his back while paving a Wormleysburg street in the fall. He's used to being laid off from the end of Christmas until the end of March: It's the nature of the construction business, he said.
"It's always been my life, and I make enough in the summer," he said.
But Cumberland County in particular might be one place where job-loss discontent is felt acutely and Obama's words watched closely Wednesday night.
There's a laundry list of employers who have left hundreds of jobs in their wake as they've closed shop or relocated: Tyco, Williams-Sonoma, Carlisle Tire & Wheel.
The unemployment rate has plunged steeper than any other county in the midstate -- from 3.2 percent in 2007 to 7.1 percent by the end of 2009.
Those tuning in to the president's address expected to find him offering up examples of small, locally based hopes, similar to the infusion of federal stimulus dollars expected to help invest in business and idled redevelopment properties, like the closed IAC plant in Carlisle.
"In this state, there's become a distrust of many politicians. I'm not sure anybody can say anything that's going to catch somebody's attention," Jeff Palm said.
Palm, the executive director of the Mechanicsburg Chamber of Commerce, works with many businesses in the county that keep a close watch on proposed initiatives for small businesses at the state and federal levels that are meant to spur job growth.
Karen Bordner, 69, of Lemoyne, might agree. She has a resume that includes more than 42 years at an insurance agency and a memory that includes the intricacies of licensed property and casualty insurance. She can also tell you the day she blew out her hip getting out of her car after a long commute home -- Feb. 12, 2007 -- and the day three months later when her employer let her go from a job she loved because of it.
Her Social Security payments are too high to qualify her for other federal and state entitlement programs for housing and prescription drugs.
Bordner, whose husband died in 2002, has called U.S. Sens. Bob Casey Jr. and Arlen Specter to voice her opinions on the stimulus and health care.
She planned to watch the State of the Union address. "I wouldn't miss it for the world," she said, adding that she wanted to hear Obama talk about job creation first, but doubted she'd be impressed.
"They're not looking at the bigger picture. They aren't thinking far enough," she said. "If you want to fix a balloon, you don't put a patch on it."
Bordner dreams about going back to the field she loved, where she made $35,000 plus $12,000 to $15,000 in commission a year.
She spent Wednesday answering phones at the Mechanicsburg offices of Experience Works, a national nonprofit training and employment organization for older workers.
There, she gets $7.25 an hour at the part-time job.
She needs a real job, she said.
"And I don't know which czar to go to."
Staff writer Matt Miller contributed to this report.
Jan/100
The Krux guides teens at a crossroads: With guitars, computers, billiards and espresso, a hangout aims to keep youths and the town clean and safe.
AMANDA PALLESCHI
Of the Patriot-News
A group of teenage girls spent a recent Friday evening under the glow of new laptops at the Krux Youth Center just off Dillsburg's town square, doing the sort of things teens mostly do on the Internet: Facebook, MySpace and some Yahoo chatting about cute boys and mean girls.
John Parzyszek, 50, the father of three teenagers who go to Northern York County schools, opened the Krux in September. He walks by to say hello to the girls and scan their activities.
The chair in front of the third computer, the one with the Confederate flag for a desktop pattern, remains vacant.
Parzyszek, known to most who frequent the Krux as John P., rolls his eyes and shrugs this off.
"It can have different meanings, so they say. I don't know. You have to pick your battles," he said.
When it comes to the Krux's computers, the battles he's picked in the three months since he opened the place have included putting blockers on the Web browsers -- blockers that have seen searches for "Bloods," "Crips" and "Lords."
Churches, schools and YMCAs have long been trying to think of ways to guide youths.
Often, it involves some attempt to speak their language, engage their interests and provide them with mentors to whom they can relate. Such programs, including Bethesda Mission's youth program and Harrisburg's Center for Champions, have been in the midstate for years. Denise Wendle has been running the Center for Champions in Allison Hill for 12 years. The nonprofit program stays afloat with the help of church donations and some money from Dauphin County, she said. Over the years, Wendle has been able to bring on paid staffers to help run after-school programs -- such as Christian-based hip-hop, basketball and baseball -- for Harrisburg city youths in grades 1-12.
Parzyszek has started the effort in more suburban and rural communities, in hopes that the Krux will be a model for similar spaces throughout the region.
He sees a rural youth culture on the verge of delving into classically urban problems: the steady stream of drugs from surrounding big cities into the area, petty crime and bullying.
He named the center the Krux because "Krux ... is a crossroads, the decisions they make at this stage in their lives determine if they'll stand on a corner or not," he said.
"Chicago, New York and Philly didn't start out bad, but too many people turned a blind eye."
Parzyszek grew up in Chicago, and moved away from the city to clean up his act after a few brushes with the law as a teen. He sees his adopted hometown at a crossroads, too.
"This town is small, but it don't take long to heat it up," he said.
Things usually get going at the Krux around 4 p.m., when the Northern High School students have made the trek down Baltimore Street, past Dillsburg's town square to the Krux.
The Krux was run with a different name by the Rev. Mike Hammer of Dillsburg's Celebration Community Church for two years.
It closed for 14 months after that, and has been under the direction of Parzyszek in a freestanding building across from Dillsburg's town square. It's an established nonprofit organization, complete with an espresso bar, pool table, a professional 18-channel soundboard and Parzyszek's white Dodge Caravan, always parked outside.
Donations and concession sales keep the place going. Parzyszek and church and parent volunteers are an after-school, and even weekend, presence.
Tom Kibler, a Carroll Twp. police officer, said many teens in the community need it. On a recent Friday evening, Kibler brought his homeschooled son Dakota, 13, to the Krux to plug his guitar into the soundboard.
"It might sound silly, but they're putting a lot of love into kids who might not have that at home," Kibler said. "These rural parents will drop [their kids] off, come back six to eight hours later because they didn't want to deal with them at home, and then they get into mischief."
The Kiblers eventually went home for dinner that Friday evening, but Austin Hartwell, 15, stuck around.
Hartwell said he's getting over his bad habits of skipping school and stealing from neighbors. His mother, Ida Hartwell, 31, a single mom living in Dillsburg, said it was hard to get through to Austin. Sending him to live with his father didn't help.
"He never really had a relationship with him, so it didn't work," she said.
The Hartwell home is within walking distance from the Krux, so when it first opened in September, Austin Hartwell started stopping in after school. "He would come home and talk about John. He really bonded with him," she said.
"On weekends, he is there from open to close," said Ida Hartwell, who works as a bartender on weekends. "I don't look at it like a teenage day care center, but it's constructive, and it's totally believable that it's a good time."
Jan/100
Emily Yanich-Fithian will meet the baby she found on a doorstep 20 years ago
AMANDA PALLESCHI
Of the Patriot-News
Emily Yanich-Fithian was befriended on Facebook by Mia Fleming on Dec. 1.
Yanich-Fithian, 35, a Lewisberry mom who recently started driving school buses for the West Shore School District, wrote a quick note back: "I’m sorry, I don’t know who you are," she told Mia Fleming.
"And then I just went about my day," she said.
Later, she was shopping at the Target on Carlisle Pike with her two children — Braydon, 8; Victoria, 4 — when she got a call from a friend, Chris Astle.
"Are you sitting down?" Astle asked her. Yanich-Fithian thought Astle, who is also 35, was about to tell her that he and his wife were expecting a baby.
Instead, the news was about another baby: the one she and Astle had found on the doorstep of a Vienna, Va., townhouse 20 years ago, the one they’d called each other about every Sept. 6.
What’s followed since that has been a blur: happy tears, network television interviews, a front page story in The Washington Post, and well-wishes from all over the country and from friends who’ve seen the story.
The baby from the doorstep is now Mia Fleming, 20, an art student at the Ringling College of Art & Design in Sarasota, Fla. Her adoptive family lives in northern Virginia and this month, all families — Astle’s, Yanich-Fithian’s and Fleming’s — will finally meet.
"I can’t wait to hug her," Yanich-Fithian said.
"I was so tongue-tied. I told her that a piece of my heart is not filled," she said.
Coming full circle
Yanich-Fithian and Astle, of South Riding, Va., were 15-year-olds who took a walk to a 7-Eleven to buy cigarettes one fall day in 1989, and came across a newborn wrapped in towels on the front doorstep of a townhouse.
Authorities would later tell them that the baby girl was born just 12 hours earlier. Her umbilical cord was still attached.
The teens brought the baby inside to Yanich-Fithian’s stepfather, Bill DeLancey.
"When they came up the driveway, I thought they had puppies or kittens," DeLancey said.
Within about 20 minutes, an ambulance arrived. “They swooped in and swooped out in seconds,” DeLancey said. “They were doing their jobs, but it was very impersonal.”
But it wasn’t the last Astle and Yanich-Fithian would see of Mia. They tried sneaking into the hospital to visit her days later. Then, a few weeks later, a cousin of Yanich-Fithian’s working at a grocery store in northern Virginia told her she’d been chatting with customers with a cute child. The customer turned out to be Mia’s foster parents.
Somehow, they made the connection that the baby was the one Yanich-Fithian and Astle had found. The foster parents had named the baby Emily.
Not long after that, Yanich-Fithian and Astle received a baby photo in the mail from the baby’s adoptive parents, who renamed her Mia Fleming.
After that, there’d been other attempts, Yanich-Fithian said. Though she and her family moved to Pennsylvania, Chris Astle has remained in northern Virginia. Over the years, he’d tried contacting the Department of Welfare to reach Mia. Two or three years ago, Yanich-Fithian said, they even reached out to Oprah Winfrey, hoping she could help.
Mia Fleming tried contacting Yanich-Fithian and Astle before, without much luck.
She found out about the incident by accident at age 9. According to The Washington Post, she used social networking sites in search of a Chris Astle. But it wasn’t until she’d found an Emily Yanich-Fithian on Facebook that Mia knew she had the right match.
Until recently, there’d always been curiosity, a feeling of emptiness and a sort of anger, Yanich-Fithian said. “I was angry for a long time that someone would leave their child like that,” she said. “I’m so happy she’s happy, and I want her to stay in our lives.”
She said she expects the upcoming meeting of the three families, near Fleming’s adoptive parents’ home in northern Virginia, will bring closure to that anger.
Her stepfather, husband and children will be with her on the journey. She told 8-year-old Braydon the story.
"He said, 'Mia can have some of our family, too'."
Jan/102
CYBERTENSION: Attendance at online schools is booming, but there’s sometimes friction with brick-and-mortar schools, administrators say.
AMANDA PALLESCHI
Of the Patriot-News
A regular school day at the school on Crums Mill Road in Lower Paxton Twp. has first-grade teacher Janae Cardel logging into a computer screen and employing hats, puppets and "special guest characters" to teach her students things such as how to count in tens.
In a nearby cubicle, Keith Howard might be corresponding with members of the robotics club he started at Commonwealth Connections Academy. They are scattered throughout the state.
Lora Bueno might be updating her archived Spanish lessons or making a house call to a student struggling with the prickly subjunctive mood. And their boss, Greg Gettle, will be feeling misunderstood by former colleagues working in brick-and-mortar schools.
"Perception is everything. We've come a long way, but a cyber school being accepted by administrators [at local schools] has a long way to go," Gettle said.
Cyber charter school enrollment in the state is on the rise.
Last year, Commonwealth Connections had just under 3,000 students enrolled in Pennsylvania. This year, it has more than 4,000. PA Cyber Charter -- the state's largest and oldest cyber charter school -- has seen its enrollment rise from 505 Pennsylvania students in kindergarten through 12th grade in 2000 to more than 8,000 this school year.
While the state Department of Education does not closely track trends in cyber charter education, cyber charter administrations and some estimates show higher numbers in more rural areas. In the midstate, however, the growth is seen throughout urban, rural and suburban districts.
Gettle, the school's high school principal and a founding employee of Commonwealth, a cyber charter school that opened in Pennsylvania in 2005, is not the only one not feeling respect from traditional school administrators. Cyber-academy teachers, administrators and parents say they've a long way to go toward building a credible reputation in the local education community.
One source of tension, they say, seems to be whether cyber charter students can participate in extracurricular activities.
The lines are usually clear, Gettle said. Cyber charter students, by state regulation, have to be given the same extracurricular opportunities as students who attend the brick-and-mortar school.
The question becomes -- how do you define extracurricular activities? The problems, Gettle said, are usually with activities such as driver education, musical groups that do not practice solely outside school hours -- and school dances.
Last month, Connections Academy student and Mechanicsburg Area High School cheerleader Adrianah McGee, 15, was told she could not enter the Mechanicsburg homecoming dance because she did not follow procedures for cyber charter students.
"There are things some districts will do [for a cyber charter student] but they may not do it with open arms," Gettle said. "More and more schools are cooperating and understanding and accepting, but there's quite a lot of them that don't."
Hope Frick, 17, an Elizabethtown native and senior at Commonwealth Connections, admits she's missing out on having a football team, a yearbook and occasionally passing notes to girlfriends in the hallway. But she said she hasn't encountered problems or been given much of a hard time from her home district or administrators at the colleges she's applying to.
"Cyberschooling is totally different from home schooling, but [college] administrators look at it as the new wave of home schooling. They've all been accepting," Frick said.
Another source of friction is finances. About 70 percent to 75 percent of what a cyber student's home district gets from the state to educate that student goes to the cyberschool.
Fred Miller, a spokesman for PA Cyber Charter, said he believes it is this scenario that poses natural tension between brick-and-mortar administrations and cyber charter administrators.
"They've fought us, they've complained, they think we're taking their money," he said. "There's a lot of animosity."
According to Mechanicsburg Area School Board President Dawn Merris, that animosity isn't unwarranted.
It exists, she said, due to those who "appreciate the district for what they can do for them, but yet we're getting charged these fees that some would call exorbitant to schoolchildren outside of our means at a cyber charter school."
"It's a concern in these tight economic times, when we're getting berated for even thinking about raising taxes," Merris said.
This spring, the Capital Area Intermediate Unit launched its own efforts for high-schoolers to take online courses in the summer or fall that fit into their school curricula.
Many midstate districts, including Mechanicsburg, signed on through their program to offer online courses to their full-time brick-and-mortar students.
When the Mechanicsburg district approved $24,000 to buy into the CAIU's contract for online courses, Superintendent Joe Hood said he believed the future will exist partly in brick-and-mortar schools and partly online -- something he, Gettle and Miller all agree on.
"It's competition," Gettle said of district-directed efforts at cyber-education. "It can only make us all better."
Emily Opilo contributed to this report.
Jan/100
Workers’ growing fear shows at job fair: A father who lost his job six months ago puts in two or three applications a day with no luck
AMANDA PALLESCHI
Of the Patriot-News
Look no further than Julio Portillo's application to work as a forklift operator at a temp agency for proof the economic recession is still here and its pain still felt in the midstate.
The hosts of the second job fair held this year in a Mechanicsburg church say there's less hope among job seekers amid the highest midstate unemployment rate in 26 years and recent layoffs at nearby employers such as Carlisle Tire & Wheel and Tyco Electronics.
Portillo, 35, a Mechanicsburg father of four, was one of 150 midstate residents to fill out job applications Monday:
"Can you lift 50 pounds?"
He can.
"Have you been charged with any crimes?"
Short of a 1999 traffic violation, he has not.
"Can you legally work in the United States?"
Portillo, a native of Honduras, has lived in the midstate for the last 10 years. His wife, who had a baby two months ago, is a U.S. citizen, and Julio Portillo has a visa to work here. He'd like to take his citizenship test but can't afford that in addition to rent payments, he said.
The Mexican restaurant where he'd been working in Harrisburg closed six months ago, and the two or three job applications he puts out daily have yielded a few interviews, but still no job.
"It's frustrating," he said. "This is the first time I've had this sort of trouble. When I came here in 1999, I'd apply and they'd call me back that same day."
Monday's job fair was the second the Rev. Brian Rosenbaum has held this year at Mechanicsburg's Why? at the Well, a youth community center affiliated with Landmark Baptist Church.
In March, Rosenbaum got 17 midstate employers with open positions advertised in the classifieds to set up booths in the gym of the church. About 120 people came to the fair, which began as part of Rosenbaum's outreach to local youths. Instead of the high school dropouts he'd expected, he found many adults in the Mechanicsburg area needing both work and the free meal the fair provided.
This time, the numbers and many of the employers were the same. By the end of the day, 150 people turned out to speak with 16 employers. The difference five months later was largely emotional: People are more fearful.
"They hear that unemployment is bad all over," said Mike Griffiths, who came to Monday's fair as a volunteer and representative for the UPS booth.
Recent job losses and plant closings nearby, such as the July relocation of more than 340 jobs at Carlisle Tire & Wheel, have people nervous and less hopeful than March's job seekers, Griffiths said.
"Before it was like, who cares what's going on in Texas or in California? But people are starting to see more of it around here. They hear that unemployment is bad all over."
Portillo, who also attended March's Why? at the Well job fair, said he was hopeful he'd get calls back from employers this time. They'll have to call his brother-in-law to reach him. The phone company shut off Portillo's phone recently because he was unable to pay the bills.
INFOBOX:
Jobless rates
7.6% Harrisburg-Carlisle area in July
8.6% Pennsylvania in August.
9.7% Nationwide in August.
Dec/090
Stop what you are doing and just read this…
I've never done a "blog"-like post here before, but we all know how I get about these stories...*sigh*
Nov/090
Drugs in Dillsburg: Heroin Hits Home
AMANDA PALLESCHI
Of the Patriot-News
He'd walk or hitch a ride to work at McDonald's and lived with his sister in a house on Chestnut Street.
She's the granddaughter of the founders of Baker's diner and a Northern High School graduate who once rode horses in the rural hamlets tucked behind the main drag of Route 15 in Dillsburg.
Authorities say the two would pool their money, find a car, grab a few friends and head to Philadelphia a few times a week to buy 30 bundles of heroin -- $4,000 worth in street value.
Bradley Hancock, 23, of Dillsburg, and Hillary Baker, 20, of Dover, are in York County Prison, awaiting trial on possession charges stemming from a multimillion-dollar heroin sting.
York County's location between major metro areas has long made it ideal corridor for drug trafficking. Now, heroin operations that have been run in other parts of the county are creeping into rural and suburban communities such as Dover and Dillsburg, authorities say.
The drug can be smoked, inhaled or injected.
Jack Carroll, executive director of the Cumberland/Perry Drug & Alcohol Commission, calls heroin's decade-long spread from the inner city to the suburbs and rural areas the "biggest drug trend from the late 1990s to the present."
Authorities say Hancock and Baker were among key arrests in a yearlong heroin sting that concluded recently. Both were charged with felony-possession counts. Hancock also was charged with criminal conspiracy.
The sting yielded 73 arrests, 26 vehicles, three firearms and $271,000 worth of heroin.
Brittany Jones, 20, and Shelly Heinzig, 29, both of Dillsburg, were charged with possession. They were arraigned and released on unsecured bail.
Heroin emerges
Dillsburg's neighbors, who prize their small town's nature and its proximity to several cities, are taking notice of the drug in their midst.
"We all watch each other's backs around here now. We know we need to," says Deb McClain, who lives on North Chestnut Street, a few houses down from the home where Hancock was living with his sister at the time of his arrest.
She bought the home -- it's just around the corner from Dillsburg's town square -- 10 years ago after divorcing her husband. She wanted her kids to stay in the Northern York County School District.
Her biggest concern then was living near a funeral home. Now, she keeps watch when she's walking her dogs. She locks her home and car doors, something that still hasn't become a habit.
"Everybody thinks this is Mayberry, definitely," McClain says.
But within the last few years, McClain said, she has noticed suspicious activity: strange cars coming and going at odd hours, people congregating in nearby alleys and parking lots, cops showing up.
"I came home one day and went, 'Oh, my god, I'm witnessing a drug deal,'" McClain said.
Detective Craig Fenstermacher of the York County district attorney's office, has witnessed the evolution of the area's drug culture, particularly the emergence of heroin as the "it" drug among teens and twentysomethings.
"When I first started working in drugs 25 years ago, heroin was an urban problem. But about 10 years ago, it really had a resurgence. It became the drug of choice for young, rural white kids to do," he said.
He mentioned Lebanon County's bout with heroin-related deaths in 2008. The county, too, is mostly rural and suburban.
Unlike the criminal drug culture in large cities such as Philadelphia, the main players in Dillsburg's heroin scene tend to be what law-enforcement officials call "user-dealers," because the criminal activity occurs solely to sustain an addiction.
It doesn't help that the heroin market in the midstate is a deadly concoction of addicting and cheap.
“It's just so addicting, people can't help themselves. Heroin just ruins," Fenstermacher said.
'The kid needs help'
Just ask Dean Baker.
The single father who owns his own business in the Dillsburg area tried everything to save his daughter, Hillary, from the addicting throes of the drug.
Hillary Baker's attorney did not return phone messages left at his home and office.
During Hillary's junior year of high school, officials from a military school in South Carolina took Hillary away. She stayed there for a year. Things seemed better for awhile after her return, Baker says. Baker says his daughter did well in school and enjoyed horseback riding.
She graduated from Northern High School in 2007, and her father helped her find jobs in town, one at a grocery store and another at a chiropractor's office.
But she had trouble getting up in the morning and couldn't seem to keep a job. He estimates that she has stolen $3,700 from him.
"It didn't matter how you helped her, once these kids get involved with that, once they are on it, they're hooked," Baker says.
Last spring, Hillary told her father she had a drug problem. Dean Baker took her to the inpatient program run by York and Adams counties.
A day later, he got a call saying she'd hitchhiked back to the home she shared with her boyfriend.
Baker says he's content that she's in jail. "I'm on the tough-love program now," he says.
From July 2008 to June 2009, more than 300 people in York and Adams counties sought treatment for heroin addiction through inpatient and outpatient programs offered through a drug and alcohol program.
In nearby Cumberland and Perry counties, 88 clients of county-provided treatment services listed heroin as their primary drug during that period. In 2006-2007, the number was 101.
Carroll said high numbers are most alarming compared to the number of residents seeking heroin addiction treatment in 1995-1996: 18.
"There are people -- I'm talking about young people -- who wouldn't consider using a needle, but start with other forms available here ... snorting and smoking. That's led to a continuous increase in heroin use outside of cities," Carroll says.
As for the midstate's role in the heroin trend, education and programming can only go so far, Fenstermacher says.
"It's how we bring up our kids, and it's all the choices they have," he says. "I don't like hearing 'There's nothing for the kids to do.' Do you have to use drugs? No. You surround yourself with good people."
That's what Baker, who runs a commercial refrigeration business between Dillsburg and Dover, hopes for his daughter.
"The kid needs help," he says. "She'll end up killing herself if she doesn't get it."
Nov/090
Under construction…
As you may have noticed, amandapalleschi.com isn't quite finished yet. If you've stumbled across it, thanks, I'm flattered. But it's not quite done yet...
Sep/090
Beyond death tolls and politics
AMANDA PALLESCHI
Of the Patriot-News
There's air conditioning at the base camp in Taji, Iraq, but it's so hot outside, it feels like someone poured a bucket of sand over your head and then stuck it in an oven. There's wireless Internet access, but the connection is spotty.
It's safer in Taji now than when the war began in 2003, safer than last year and the year before that. But the threat of homemade bombs still looms near Taji. And the members of the Pennsylvania National Guard's 56th Stryker Brigade are still very much in harm's way.
If you listen to Hummelstown native Dan Shakal talk about his experiences documenting life on the base in Taji, following the 56th Stryker Brigade -- the only Stryker brigade in the National Guard or Army Reserve -- you begin to understand: There are many paradoxes in the life of an American soldier in 2009's Iraq that casualty tallies and promises from politicians can't quite capture.
Shakal spends his days following the unit around Taji and nine surrounding support bases. The day-to-day life he sees now is much different from the life he saw on previous freelance trips, in 2003 and 2004. Missions used to involve weapons sweeps and metal detectors. Nighttime meant hearing mortar fire and suicide bombers in the distance.
Now, gunfire noise is occasional, and missions are grant ceremonies for small business owners, and political discussions with clergy members.
"It used to be: Just kick down a door and go in and throw people outside and search the house," Shakal said in an interview from a Guard satellite phone.
"Now, you pretty much go in, real quiet, knock on the door and ask politely if you can look inside."
Still, Shakal said, the threat of injury looms large for the Stryker unit, as does the soldiers expected return date in September.
"Even though they are not shooting mortars and rockets, improvised explosive devices are everywhere. They are a huge threat," Shakal said.
"A lot of the unit members just want to go," he said. "They are so close to the end. They don't want to get hurt. They just want to leave and let the Iraqi army take care of their country."
Since the 4,000-member brigade deployed in January, it's had two deaths and at least 26 injuries. While the soldiers Shakal meets seem as eager to complete their mission as they are to return to the States, the Iraqis he meets seem equally torn: "Most of them don't like us being here, but they are also afraid of us leaving," he said.
Shakal said he does this "just for fun" -- because he thinks "no one covers these guys enough."
He talks politics and plays basketball with the troops to pass the time, with a camera at the ready. He's having fun, despite the spotty Internet and the crippling heat and the threat of homemade bombs detonating beneath his boots, he said.
There are free concerts on the base, and the soldiers can use the Internet to make phone calls to people back home.
"Pretty much any way you could do stuff back home, you could do it here," Shakal said.
INFOBOX:
THE PHOTOGRAPHER Freelance photographer Daniel Shakal has been documenting the lives of the members of the 56th Stryker Brigade fromTaji, Iraq, since June 16. When the Iraq war began in 2003, Shakal bought a plane ticket to Istanbul, Turkey, and took cabs from there to Kurdistan and northern Iraq. He had no set assignment, just a desire to document the war.
"I just started meeting people and living in different hotels. I thought these guys deserved more coverage," he said. " I pay for everything myself, but it works out for me. I just do this for fun." He returned to Iraq in 2004 and was embedded with a field artillery unit. His work has previously appeared in Stuff magazine.
THE HERO: In June, 1st Lt. Reed Preece, right, received the Bronze Star with valor. Preece, 25, of Gettysburg, assisted other wounded soldiers after a Stryker vehicle was hit by an armor-piercing bomb. Preece was the last one out of the Stryker truck, and his efforts helped capture the bomb's triggerman, according to a report in the newspaper Stars and Stripes.
Two other members of Stryker Brigade received Purple Hearts: Pfc. Mitchell Baldwin, 19, of Chambersburg, and Pfc.Brian Miller of Carlisle. Both were treated atWalter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., for their injuries.
THE FALLEN: Two Stryker Brigade soldiers have been killed in Iraq: Chad Edmundson, 20, of Williamsburg, above left, was fatally wounded by a bomb while he was on walking patrol in May. The bomb wounded three other soldiers and 16 civilians.Staff Sgt. Mark C. Baum, 32, of Quakertown, Bucks County, was fatally shot Feb. 21 in Mushada while helping his unit deal with a roadside bomb.
THE BLOGGER: Capt . Ed Shank of Harrisburg, a former high school teacher, interviews an Iraqi sheik in Taji. Shank was there to see how the people in the village were doing, and he handed out toys to children. Shank blogs at PennLive.com: blog.pennlive.com/iraq
THE REPORTER: WITFFM reporter Scott Detrow, 24, arrived in Taji on July 18 to embed with the 56th Stryker Brigade. He will return to the States Aug. 3. He blogs at www.witf.org/news/impact- of-war. His next report will air on Monday onWITF's " Morning Edition," 5-9 a. m. on 89.5 or 93.3 FM.