Without a Trace
The story of one man’s search for his brother speaks to the pain of hundreds of thousands of missing migrants’ families
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The story of one man’s search for his brother speaks to the pain of hundreds of thousands of missing migrants’ families
Each year, millions of people around the globe are displaced, and while many are able to resettle through official channels, millions more are forced to travel through unofficial, unsanctioned, often dangerous paths. When migrants vanish, whose responsibility is it to find them? In his piece for the February issue, Matthew Wolfe follows Javed Hotak as he searches for his brother Masood, who disappeared while attempting to migrate from Afghanistan to Germany. “The families of these migrants are left to mount searches—alone and with minimal resources—of staggering scope and complexity. They must attempt to defy the entropy of a progressively more disordered world—seeking, against long odds, to sew together what has been ripped apart.”
In this episode, web editor Violet Lucca talks with Wolfe, a journalist and graduate student in sociology at NYU, about the “immense, mostly hidden catastrophe” of missing migrants and the people who can’t forget them.
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At Ivanwald, men learn to be leaders by loving their leaders. “They’re so busy loving us,” a brother once explained to me, “but who’s loving them?” We were. The brothers each paid $400 per month for room and board, but we were also the caretakers of The Cedars, cleaning its gutters, mowing its lawns, whacking weeds and blowing leaves and sanding. And we were called to serve on Tuesday mornings, when The Cedars hosted a regular prayer breakfast typically presided over by Ed Meese, the former attorney general. Each week the breakfast brought together a rotating group of ambassadors, businessmen, and American politicians. Three of Ivanwald’s brothers also attended, wearing crisp shirts starched just for the occasion; one would sit at the table while the other two poured coffee.