Hina Syed has volunteered at the Islamic Center of Central Missouri (ICCM) for the entirety of her 14 years in this community—teaching youth and providing food for the needy. Each Ramadan, she looked forward to organizing and cooking shared meals for single Muslims in Columbia. “What we used to do is we would bring food to the Mosque, and there would be a set up for dinner, breaking of the fast,” she said. The meal is called Iftar, and in Columbia, it’s a shared celebration at the mosque.

For hundreds of elderly and disabled residents in Missouri, personal care attendants, or PCAs, are a lifeline that stave off isolation and help them stay out of nursing homes. The field was already facing a shortage of workers before the COVID-19 pandemic began, but now, things are even worse. PCAs are a lifeline for their clients, according to Melinda Cardone, the executive director of Independent Living Resource Center in Jefferson City.

On any given weekday, University of Missouri student Jack Hale is working six to eight hours and dashing to class in between. “I wake up a little after five and I do not stop until 11 p.m. most days,” Hale says. Between a full load of classes and two jobs taking up nearly 40 hours a week, he barely gets enough sleep. “My body is just so accustomed to getting like, five or six hours, sometimes less, that when I sleep a normal amount, it does not do me any good,” he says.

You’re standing on the corner of West Burnside and Broadway when it happens: The Cascadia Subduction fault line snaps. The fault has been straining underneath the Pacific Ocean for hundreds of years—and now centuries of geologic force are rumbling towards Portland. The ground starts rolling. Cars swerve into nearby buildings as you stumble across the splintering sidewalk. Dust from lurching buildings rises into the air. You grab a telephone pole and watch as bricks rain down from the Stewart Apartments building. The façade of Bailey’s Taproom falls onto the street, crushing several pedestrians below. You hear a tremendous crash as the Burnside Bridge collapses into the Willamette. After five agonizing minutes of the ground shaking, some of the buildings around you have completely collapsed.

Joining the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) is a bit like going through the five stages of grief. You start, of course, with denial: There won’t be an earthquake in my lifetime! And, if there is, it won’t actually be that bad. And if it’s bad, I’ll probably just die and it’ll be fine (says the cynic).

Beneath the surface of liberal Eugene, there’s a war brewing. And both sides are recruiting. The two sides say they consider it a war for the very soul of this nation. They both track their opponents and sometimes participate in violent protests. They’re both grassroots, and while the issue is national in scale, both sides are very, very local. Propaganda is being plastered on telephone poles around town, marking territory — safe spaces for fascists or anti-fascists respectively.

When you don’t live in a place, but visit it often, it becomes a symbol of so much more than it would ever be to a local. Ketchikan is just home to my grandma, but to me, it’s familial love itself. So yes, you should visit Ketchikan. Look for the mural my aunt Halli painted on the wall of the New York Cafe with her good friend, Ray Troll. Look at the fishing boats and look for eagles and bears. But also visit the town that means the same things to you. I’ve never regretted it.

It’s like something out of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 — firefighters set trees ablaze and fan flames across the grassland. This is the cutting edge in wildfire management and forest ecology: prescribing fires as medicine for sick forests.

When last surveyed by DHS on Feb. 9, River Grove was out of compliance with more than a dozen Oregon Administrative Rules. The facility was understaffed, the staff was undertrained, and diet and hydration programs did not meet standards of frequency, nor did the facility meet sanitation standards. Retirement homes are meant to be places where the elderly can live comfortably. But many facilities in Oregon are rife with abuse and neglect. Severe understaffing can set up caregivers for failure, and all it takes is one mistake to kill a member of this vulnerable community.

The stereotype of a disaster prepper is that of a man alone in the woods, hoarding cans of baked beans and bullets to fend off neighbors after the apocalypse. Few may know, however, that the best chances a community has for survival come from working together and looking after each other.

It’s ten minutes before the doors open and more than 30 people have gathered in the entry garden of Eugene’s downtown public library. They are reading books, looking at their phones and chatting about movies. Some buy coffee at the Novella Café. They are in wheelchairs, in camo, in beanies. Some carry bags, one has a didgeridoo. There are fathers with babies, retirees, young professionals and sleepy-eyed women carrying crafting supplies. A number of them are homeless.

Heika Wilson controlled her bipolar disorder for years with medication and regular visits to a therapist. When her husband developed his 3D printing business, she was there to help. But then Wilson’s medications stopped working. She struggled to get off the couch and stopped cooking, driving and sleeping. When she begged her local clinic in Klamath Falls for a mental health appointment, they told her she would have to wait three months -- which Wilson said could have killed her if she hadn’t seen a private provider -- at a cost of $175.