Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

A family visits the graves of relatives, as Syrians return to rubble and a smashed cemetery in the Jobar district on the southeast edge of Damascus, the capital, Dec. 15, 2024. Beginning in 2013, Syrian forces used airstrikes, barrel bombs, and artillery fire to defeat anti-government rebels in the area.

Ghalia al-Asaali stands tall in prayer over the grave of her son, while her husband fights back tears.

This moment of private mourning, eight years after their son died fighting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, was made possible only because rebels seized the capital, Damascus, less than a week before.

The roads leading to the local cemetery where Ms. Asaali’s son is buried were sealed off until now.

Mr. Assad’s ouster is reopening the country for Syrians to visit from outside and for internal travel. The reopening extends to the mourning of fallen rebels, who typically used a nom de guerre to avoid government acts of revenge against loved ones.

“This is the first time that I can say my son is a martyr, that I can say his full name, that I am his mother,” Ms. Asaali, dressed in a black coat, says behind sunglasses.

With pride, she recounts how her son kept fighting in the Jobar district even after being wounded three times, until a mortar round killed him in November 2016. It was a battle that brought rebels to the gates of Damascus.

Before the civil war, Syria had a population of approximately 23 million. More than half were displaced within the country in a search for safety, an experience that tens of thousands of families repeated multiple times.

Seven million Syrians became refugees. A burning question for host nations in Europe and the Middle East now is whether they will return. For Syrians, the question is still: Can we?

Dominique Soguel

Ghalia al-Asaali stands in the ruins of Jobar, outside Damascus, where her son is buried, Dec. 15, 2024. He was killed in combat, fighting forces loyal to then-President Bashar al-Assad in November 2016.

Revisiting homes, and families

With the collapse of the Assad regime, roads that many Syrians considered impassable due to checkpoints, which represented the risk of arbitrary arrest or forced conscription, are now clear.

The power shift has opened an opportunity for Syrians to return to their homes – if they have one left standing – and to hug long-lost relatives. Displaced Syrians are rushing to meet young relatives born during the war and to pay respects to those who died.

Reunited families are comparing life in areas held by Mr. Assad’s forces with those controlled by armed groups who opposed him.

The possibility of returning home marks a momentous change.

Adnan Shaaban, a London-based Syrian businessman, raced to Syria via Lebanon to get a first taste of freedom in Syria. He believes millions will return to rebuild the country, drawing on entrepreneurial skills honed abroad.

Mr. Shaaban says he finally feels safe in Syria now that Mr. Assad and his security apparatus are gone.

To pray on his first Friday back, he deliberately chose a mosque in Kafr Susa, a Damascus neighborhood that witnessed some of the first anti-government demonstrations in the capital in 2011, as well as attacks on worshippers by Syria’s security services. The mood was joyful as volunteers rolled out carpets and sprayed them with jasmine.

“I think within a few weeks we are going to see a lot of changes,” Mr. Shaaban says. “Within three years, we are going to improve. Within five years, we are going to have a great country.”

A community’s bleak remains

But in many regions, return is simply impossible. That’s the case in eastern Ghouta, a district in rural Damascus that experienced years of punishing siege between 2013 and 2018. Agreements allowing for the wartime evacuation of armed Islamist fighters and their families contributed to the emptying out of the enclave, which Mr. Assad said was in the hands of foreign-backed terrorists.

Today, few buildings are intact in the eastern Ghouta section of Jobar, a quick drive from the capital’s center. Entire blocks are cement silhouettes, like a child’s sketch if the sky were paper. The interiors of the three-to-five-story buildings have long been stripped clean of usable metal.

Craters and crushed tombstones at the local cemetery speak to the intensity of bombardment.

Bassam Khabieh/Reuters/File

A man walks on the rubble of damaged buildings in what was then the rebel-controlled area of Jobar, in the eastern Ghouta district outside Damascus, Syria, March 2, 2016.

Residents recall that the first mortars hit Jobar in June 2011, only a few months after pro-democracy Arab Spring protests kicked off across the region. They say demonstrations retained a peaceful character for two years even though the crackdowns were increasingly heavy-handed. Tank shelling replaced gunfire, turning a trickle of death into a steady stream.

One factor that pushed the community’s young men to arm themselves, residents say, was the violation of the sanctity of the home by regime agents conducting searches. Homes were shattered by airstrikes and barrel bombs.

The physical and psychological damage from the five years of siege is both vast and apolitical.

Mohammed Majid, an electrician, never took part in demonstrations and was forcibly conscripted to fight for the Assad regime. His home is destroyed, so he now rents a flat in a nearby suburb. But he is helping in the cleanup efforts of a local charity funded by Jobar natives in Syria and beyond.

“There is no hope for us to come back,” he says, broom in hand. “It would take $20,000 or $30,000 for any family to repair their homes. We don’t have such sums in our pockets. Life was beautiful before [2011]. Now we have nothing.”

Emotional returns

Residents say there is no chance for the community to return without massive international investment. Jobar, which encompasses an area of approximately 18 square miles, requires a complete overhaul of its infrastructure. So do vast chunks of territory in larger cities like Homs and Aleppo, which experienced similar levels of destruction since 2011.

For those who can return home, it is a moment of overpowering emotion.

Mamdouh al-Khansour says he wanted to bring his family home for years to Douma, also in eastern Ghouta, which he left in 2014. The intensity of that desire sparked recurring nightmares that he would do so, only to find himself stuck and hunted by the security services in the streets of a community that was a target of the Assad regime’s infamous chemical attacks.

Dominique Soguel

Mamdouh al-Khansour and his son Abdullah sit together in the living room of their family home in eastern Ghouta, near Damascus, Dec. 14, 2024. They were able to return from northwest Syria after rebels toppled the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

“It’s like a dream to be sitting here next to my sister,” he says. “This is the first time she meets my wife and my children.”

When Mr. Khansour left Douma, bread was a dream, fresh food nonexistent, and fuel unavailable. His family rationed pickled vegetables to survive, taking turns going hungry. Relatives sold their homes and wedding gold just to buy flour.

Mr. Khansour, an electrical infrastructure engineer, fled taking a desert road to the rebel-held region of Idlib in the north.

Life there, he says, was wonderful in comparison. It improved in recent years as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the hard-line Sunni group that is now the de facto rulers of the country, focused on restoring services and a sense of law and order.

He moved freely, worked, and treated his family to an occasional restaurant outing or food delivery. But the fear in their bellies never left, because Assad forces bombed Idlib, too.

“Every day our bags were packed because we lived with the fear of being bombed to death until the last days of the Assad regime,” Mr. Khansour says. “My son Abdullah would turn yellow with fright.”

Eight-year-old Abdullah, lying on his father’s lap, pipes up with pride because he didn’t even flinch at the crackle of assault rifles on the street moments earlier. “I was not afraid just now,” he quips. He can tell that the shooting by neighbors across the street, also reuniting after years of separation, is driven by joy rather than by murderous intent.

Electricity coming back

The family is debating whether to move back to the outskirts of Damascus, but is in wait-and-see mode. The boy only wants to if he can bring his classmates along.

Dominique Soguel

Muslim cleric Abdulrahman Abuqafah stands at the entrance of the Al-Shukr Mosque in eastern Ghouta, Syria, a former stronghold for rebels fighting to oust President Bashar al-Assad, Dec. 15, 2024. “Slowly we will repair by the grace of God,” he says.

Residents’ quality of life has not improved overnight thanks to the new rulers, but there is a sense that burdens are more evenly distributed.

Electricity, for example, that had been available for just one hour per day or every other day under Mr. Assad is on every six hours. The family counts on batteries and generators for lights.

There are still many repairs to be made. The living room window that was blasted open is now an exit for the pet cats.

But it could be worse. The apartment across the street was bombed. The nearby Al-Shukr Mosque is nothing but a burnt shell.

“When the regime entered here, they burned all our homes, and whatever was left was stolen,” explains Imam Abdulrahman Abuqafah, gazing at the mosque’s remains.

There is no labor or funds to rebuild, but he is a man of unshakable faith.

“Slowly we will repair by the grace of God,” he says.

The impeachment of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol for his aborted martial law decree risks creating a leadership void and deeper political division in a key U.S. treaty partner.

South Korea’s National Assembly voted 204 to 85 on Saturday to pass a motion to impeach Mr. Yoon, who was immediately stripped of his presidential powers. Prime Minister Han Duck-soo has assumed the duties of acting president.

The Constitutional Court now has 180 days to decide whether Mr. Yoon should be removed from office, with its first public hearing set for Dec. 27. An affirmative ruling would trigger an election to choose a new president within two months.

Meanwhile, China’s increasing military assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific and growing threats from North Korean missiles has made South Korean security cooperation more important than ever. The leadership shakeup in Seoul spells disruption for America’s most consequential security alliance in the region – the tripartite U.S.-Japan-South Korea partnership that gained significant momentum under Mr. Yoon’s tenure – just as the new Trump administration takes office.

“Come January, when Trump takes power, there will be no effective leadership in South Korea,” says Eun A Jo, fellow in International Security at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College and an expert in East Asian politics. “That’s a big worry.”

A prolonged political battle

Mr. Yoon has defended his Dec. 3 martial law bid as justified to overcome political gridlock created by the opposition Democratic Party, which holds the majority in parliament.

Ahn Young-joon/AP

The impeachment case now goes to the Constitutional Court in Seoul, South Korea, which has 180 days to decide whether the president should be removed from office.

A prosecutor and political newcomer prior to his victory in a photo-finish election in 2022, Mr. Yoon’s popularity has plummeted to about 11% since early December. On Saturday, an estimated 200,000 people showed up at a rally outside the National Assembly to call for his removal, many of them cheering and dancing when the impeachment motion passed.

Nevertheless, Mr. Yoon has vowed to “never give up” his efforts to thwart his ouster. He reportedly did not respond to summons for questioning Sunday regarding a separate, criminal investigation into whether his martial law decree constituted an insurrection. His desire to pursue a vigorous defense threatens to prolong the impeachment proceedings, with the 180-day clock ticking on a ruling.

“The wild card this time is Yoon may put up a really good fight and delay the process,” says Ethan Hee-Seok Shin, a researcher at the Institute for Legal Studies at Yonsei University. He contrasts Mr. Yoon’s defiance with the relative silence of former President Park Geun-hye, who was impeached on less serious charges in 2016 and sentenced to over 20 years in prison for abusing her power. She was pardoned in 2021.

And even if removed from office by the court, Mr. Yoon may continue to try to mobilize his dwindling base of conservative-leaning supporters, who consider the impeachment unfair. This could worsen the polarization in South Korea’s electoral politics, now dominated by Mr. Yoon’s People Power Party, and the main opposition Democratic Party.

Kim Soo-hyeon/Reuters

Protesters take part in a massive rally calling for the impeachment of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol in Seoul, South Korea, Dec. 13, 2024.

“The polarization of South Korean politics has gotten deeper, and that’s made it more difficult to govern,” says Daniel Sneider, an international policy and East Asian studies lecturer at Stanford University and a fellow with the Korea Economic Institute of America. “There has been a drift toward illiberalism and authoritarianism ... not only on the right but on the left.”

“When people come to power there is this purge,” he adds, “and it seems like almost every South Korean president gets either impeached or put in jail.”

Foreign policy shake-up?

Should Mr. Yoon be forced out, Lee Jae-myung, standard-bearer of the center-left Democratic Party, is best positioned to win the ensuing presidential election, experts say. This is true despite Mr. Lee’s multiple charges of corruption. He was convicted last month by a Seoul court for violating election laws, a ruling he says he’ll appeal.

If South Korea’s progressives return to power, it would likely spell a foreign policy shift away from Mr. Yoon’s initiative to improve relations with Japan after years of bitter estrangement rooted in historical disputes. “Japan policy is where we would see the more dramatic shift,” says Dr. Jo.

A win by Mr. Lee or another progressive candidate could also lead to a less pro-American policy than that championed by Mr. Yoon.

On her way to a recent pro-impeachment rally, college sophomore Lee Eum Kyong says she regularly protests against the U.S.-South Korea alliance. “Breaking the alliance is the main goal,” says Ms. Lee, an international politics student at Seoul National University. South Korea is “powerful and independent enough to defend itself,” she says.

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

Lee Eun Kyoung, a sophomore studying international politics at Seoul National University, says the main goal of her frequent protests is to sever the U.S.-South Korean military alliance.

Still, experts say Ms. Lee’s views are not widespread in South Korea today.

“Progressives come out of a certain tradition of Korean nationalism that definitely has an anti-American streak to it,” says Mr. Sneider, but this is “always tempered by a certain amount of pragmatism and realism.”

Overall, he says, “Korean public opinion overwhelmingly supports the [U.S.] security alliance because … of the dangers of the world that they live in.”

Indeed, Mr. Sneider believes the larger challenge for the alliance lies not in Seoul, but in Washington.

“The greatest danger is that Donald Trump thinks the United States can do without South Korea,” he says. “It’s American isolationism.”

Seth Wenig/AP/File

A drone operator helps to retrieve a drone after photographing over Hart Island in New York April 29, 2018.

Last month, drones flying over two military installations on the East Coast prompted “thousands” of phone calls to report them, raising the latest in a series of questions that have swirled for months around mysterious drones spotted above U.S. military bases and other sensitive locations throughout the country.

The most recent were in New Jersey, including over a Defense Department research center, Picatinny Arsenal, specializing in developing weapons, some secret, for future wars. 

This comes on the heels of reports of drones that loitered over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia off and on for nearly two weeks. There were more sightings earlier this month at Ramstein, the Pentagon’s premiere hub in Germany, and at U.S. military facilities in the United Kingdom late last month.

Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a New Jersey Republican, theorized that the drones at U.S. sites were being deployed by an Iranian “mothership” in the Atlantic, prompting some eye rolls and a denial by the Pentagon. But the concern is bipartisan, with some Democrats pointing to the possibility of Chinese meddling. 

The Biden administration has tried to assuage fears. “I think there has been a slight overreaction,” an official with the FBI said in a background call with reporters Saturday.

But the inability of the federal government to provide definitive explanations and solutions has generated annoyance, suspicion, and calls for action.

“Let the public know, and now,” President-elect Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social media platform. “Otherwise, shoot them down!!!” 

Shooting down drones is illegal, the Federal Aviation Administration has been quick to note, unless they pose an immediate threat to national security, but the lack of options short of that has led to growing questions about whether oversight of U.S. skies is too lax – and just what can be done about it. 

There is legislation in the works to give state and local officials more power to track and counter drones – a move the FBI “strongly supports,” Robert Wheeler Jr., assistant director of the bureau’s Critical Incident Response Group, told lawmakers earlier this month.

For now, a Pentagon official said on the weekend background call, “We don’t know what the activity is. We don’t know ... if it’s criminal. But I will tell you that it is irresponsible.”

It’s legal to fly a drone below 400 feet in most places. There are just a few “simple rules” that those “flying for fun” should follow, the FAA noted in an informational post it published online Friday. 

Trisha Bushey/AP

The evening sky and points of light near in Lebanon Township, New Jersey, Dec. 5, 2024.

These include “keeping the drone in sight, avoiding all other aircraft, and not causing a hazard to any people or property.” 

Hobbyists must also be at least 16 years old and pass a free online “basic safety knowledge test,” which can be taken through FAA-approved test administrators such as the Boy Scouts. There’s another set of regulations to fly drones commercially.

In all cases, “Flying near airports usually requires authorization from the FAA,” the post notes. 

These rules – and provisos like “usually” – have led some lawmakers to call U.S. drone laws lax.

There are more stringent rules for people who want to fly drones near U.S. military bases, which are generally designated “no drone zones,” and other sites deemed critical for national security.

Chinese national Yinpiao Zhou ran afoul of these regulations last month when a drone he appeared to be piloting loitered for an hour at nearly 5,000 feet above Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

When authorities tracked down and confronted Mr. Zhou in a nearby park, he tried to hide the drone – later found to contain sensitive photos of the base – under his jacket. He was arrested prior to boarding a flight to China with a one-way ticket.

Chasing down drone pilots is tricky, however – some said by way of Mr. Zhou’s defense that he would have to be the “worst spy ever” to have been caught.

More reliable will be developing a system of sensors to detect and track drones above military bases and secret government installations, says Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington.

Such systems exist in Ukraine for its war against Russia, but “The U.S. military doesn’t have many of them – they need to acquire a lot more,” Dr. Pettyjohn says. The Pentagon is working on putting them in place. 

Most radars are instead focused on faster, high-flying objects – missiles or jets, say, rather than slow and low-flying drones. 

And even when they pose a threat, “We don’t want to be shooting things out of the sky,” Dr. Pettyjohn says. There’s the problem of shrapnel from drones exploding and crashing, causing injuries on the ground.

Better to put in place GPS jamming or spoofing so that defenders can, for example, hijack control of a drone and land it.

The Pentagon has limited authority to take military actions in the United States, however – there are even privacy considerations when it comes to tracking drones – so federal agencies will have to work together to better determine the threshold for deeming a flying vehicle suspicious, and for determining intent, Dr. Pettyjohn says. 

Kevin Wolf/AP

Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder speaks during a press briefing at the Pentagon, Dec. 3, 2024, in Washington.

For now, defense officials have been working to tamp down what is being referred to in some quarters as drone hysteria. 

Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, told reporters at a news conference about a close relative of his who “flies his drone all over and does amateur photography.”

Wind can blow a drone “too close to a facility,” he noted. “And is that a drone incident, or are we talking about something more serious, like the Langley incident, where there’s multiple drones operating over a facility for multiple days?” 

It’s a balancing act, Major General Ryder added. He said that “many case sightings” are actually of crewed aircraft. “How do we make sure that we’re responsibly protecting our assets while at the same time not assuming every single aircraft is going to be a threat?”

Jose Luis Magana/AP

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (front, left), walks with Vivek Ramaswamy (center) and Elon Musk, who is carrying his son X Æ A-Xii, as they arrive for a roundtable meeting to discuss President-elect Donald Trump's planned Department of Government Efficiency, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Dec. 5, 2024.

Soon after winning the U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency. Spearheaded by businessmen Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, DOGE will have the job of spurring a downsizing of government by recommending where to cut waste, slash regulations, and trim the federal workforce.

Some Republicans say this is long overdue, while some Democrats and civil servants worry it would gut the institutional expertise crucial for effective government services.

The word “department” is a misnomer – the DOGE will be an advisory body, lacking direct power. The plan is for it to work with the Office of Management and Budget, and to make recommendations to the president and possibly to Congress. But its two co-chairs appear to have ambitious plans: Mr. Ramaswamy said that if the department had a mascot, it would be a chain saw.

How much has the government grown in recent decades?

The number of people employed by the federal government hasn’t changed much since World War II, although federal contract- and grant-funded employment has grown. Congress has also created a swath of new agencies since then, and the Federal Code of Regulations has swelled from just under 10,000 pages in 1950 to 185,984 in 2019.

The national debt has nearly doubled since 2015 and now sits at $35 trillion, or 122% of the United States’ gross domestic product. Debt grew by about $7.8 trillion in Mr. Trump’s first term, and it is projected to have grown by a slightly higher number by the time President Joe Biden finishes his term. Experts caution, however, that these numbers can reflect preexisting laws and circumstances outside a president’s control.

Many federal workers have not returned to their offices since the pandemic, and as of summer 2023, the government still was paying for 17 agency headquarters that were at 25% capacity or less, according to a Government Accountability Office report. Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy argue that unelected bureaucrats, and the government’s size, make federal spending unaccountable to voters – a situation they called “antithetical to the Founders’ vision” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

What does DOGE hope to do?

Mr. Musk has suggested that $2 trillion could be cut from the nearly $7 trillion federal annual budget. He and his co-chair would have less than two years to complete their work: The department has a cutoff date of July 4, 2026, so as not to become another example of bloated government. The DOGE’s proposed cut is ambitious enough that even many of Mr. Musk’s supporters question if that’s within reach.

The plans to attack government spending are broad. DOGE’s X account has highlighted spending on items it views as irresponsible, such as holograms of dead comedians and the construction of an IHOP in Washington. The co-chairs have also suggested ideas for slimming the number of federal workers, with Mr. Ramaswamy saying that he expects certain agencies to be “deleted outright.” Other stated targets range from Medicare payments to Planned Parenthood funding.

Politicians have their own suggestions for cuts. Republican Sen. Joni Ernst sent the co-chairs a detailed “menu” ahead of Thanksgiving that included cuts to government leasing for vacant office buildings and money spent creating money (she found it costs the government three cents to make a single penny). Democrats California Rep. Ro Khanna and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders expressed hope that the DOGE could help thin defense spending.

What do Musk and Ramaswamy bring to this initiative?

Mr. Musk’s businesses have a mixed track record of efficiency. His social media platform X has seen a 75% decrease in value since he laid off 6,000 workers, or roughly 80% of the staff, two years ago. His electric vehicle company Tesla’s profits have been up and down recently. Mr. Musk has gone toe-to-toe with the Federal Aviation Administration over regulations on rocket launches at his company SpaceX, which has received nearly $20 billion in federal government contracts since 2008.

Mr. Ramaswamy founded a pharmaceutical company that earned him a fortune. He advocates for libertarian values, and he pledged during the 2023 campaign to cut over 75% of the federal workforce.

“We are entrepreneurs, not politicians,” the two men wrote in their op-ed. But working with the federal government will present challenges. Given that the DOGE’s role is advisory, the co-leaders won’t be able to make the kinds of direct changes they did as CEOs. If they want to work with Congress, they’ll have to win over members who may balk at spending cuts in their districts.

Still, supporters say these two executives shouldn’t be underestimated. Mr. Musk appears to have the ear of Mr. Trump, which will be crucial in converting the advisory body’s recommendations into practical change. The president-elect has invited Mr. Musk to attend high-level meetings, and he praised him during his 2024 victory speech.

How feasible are Musk and Ramaswamy’s plans?

Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy say they will present Mr. Trump with a list of regulations for the chopping block. Mr. Trump could then use executive action to order an agency to start the process to overturn that regulation. That can take over a year, involving a required analysis of the proposed change’s impact and public comment. If the change is approved, people who benefited from the regulation are likely to sue. The two co-chairs will need to “do their homework” to avoid protracted legal battles, says Susan Dudley, founder of the George Washington Regulatory Studies Center.

The co-chairs say that they are relying heavily on two recent Supreme Court decisions that limit agencies’ ability to create and interpret regulations, which are based on statutes passed by Congress. The DOGE co-chairs hope courts will rule that regulations they target don’t have a basis in law.

The two men could try to work with Congress, which can pass laws to overturn regulations, or to change or slow down the way regulations are created. But Republicans have a slim majority in Congress, so Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy might have to develop a strategy to garner bipartisan support.

That isn’t an exhaustive list of options. For example, Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy could recommend that Mr. Trump implement a mandatory in-person, five-day workweek that could push federal employees, many of whom are still working from home, to resign. They could also move various agency headquarters out of the Capitol. Both are ideas that the co-chairs have recently proposed.

Wearing a safari hat against the unforgiving sun, Daniel Anyang leads the way down a single-track dirt path. His task this September afternoon is to ensure that some of the most vulnerable villagers of Panpandiar are following the disaster preparedness plans he has helped them develop. Devastating flooding – the South Sudan region’s worst in 60 years – has been forecast through at least December, and tiny Panpandiar sits in the country’s most flood-prone region.

Karen Norris/Staff

Mr. Anyang is a disability inclusion facilitator for the global nonprofit Light for the World. One of his weekly site visits on this day is with Angeth Nhial. Her 12-year-old son, Majok Garang, who has a cognitive disability, can’t feed himself and has difficulty swallowing. He sits constantly beside his mother, who has nourished him for his whole life with milk and soft foods like mashed millet and beans, or, when she can afford it, meat pounded very thin.

During record flooding four years ago, the water reached chest level in their thatched mud hut. But Ms. Nhial did not relocate – as many of her neighbors did – to the Mangalla camp run by the United Nations refugee agency. “I stayed because of my son,” she says. “I was worried about him being bullied [in the camp] or running away.”

Looking over the small plot where she grows groundnuts, she says that she’s not sure how bad the flooding will be this year. She hopes to get tarps from Light for the World to form a makeshift tent so she can move to higher ground during flooding.

Kang-Chun Cheng

Daniel Anyang surveys a path to an abandoned school in Baidit subcounty. The flooded area is now used for fishing.

Starting with a workshop hosted by Mr. Anyang in July, Ms. Nhial has been learning to prepare for flooding, including making evacuation plans. She says that it felt good to convene with other caregivers in the village and speak freely about the challenges of living with family members with disabilities.

“It felt like someone was looking out for us,” Ms. Nhial says.

“Forgotten issue”

The civil conflict that has roiled the region – within and just outside South Sudan’s borders – makes residents vulnerable during climate disasters, aid workers say. Though South Sudan’s civil war officially ended with a September 2018 peace deal, the latest conflict between military factions in neighboring Sudan has led to an exodus of more than 750,000 civilians into South Sudan since April 2023. The influx has strained the South Sudanese government’s already precarious ability to provide services.

Kang-Chun Cheng

The sun sets over the White Nile River in Kolnyang subcounty.

Many communities in South Sudan were marooned from assistance during flooding in August. As of mid-December, basic items – tarps, flashlights, blankets – were still in short supply, aid workers said.

“South Sudan has the world’s lowest coping capacity for climate disasters,” says Light for the World’s chief executive officer, Marion Lieser, over a phone call from Berlin. “And we know that when climate disasters strike, people with disabilities are at an increased risk of injury and twice as likely to die.”

Light for the World was founded in 1988 with a mandate to improve eye health care in sub-Saharan Africa, Ms. Lieser says. In the past two decades, the organization has expanded its focus to include education about disability rights.

Kang-Chun Cheng

Light for the World officers Majok John (in yellow shirt) and Amer Mabut Ajith (in motorized tricycle) talk with residents during a site visit in Anyidi village. The village is in Jonglei state, South Sudan’s most flood-prone region.

In South Sudan, at least 1 in 6 people have a disability yet are “lost and excluded” from rescue operations, a U.N. advocate has said. Globally, 84% of people with disabilities lack a personal preparedness plan for disasters, according to the U.N.

Edmund Yakani Berizilious, executive director of the Community Empowerment for Progress Organization, a human rights group based in Juba, the capital, says disability rights is a “forgotten issue” in a postconflict area like South Sudan. “People with disabilities are left out of conversations when they are the ones most in need,” he explains.

Jonglei state, home to Panpandiar, is bifurcated by the White Nile River. For some communities in Jonglei, Light for the World is their sole access to information about flooding and, at times, to mobility devices.

Recognizing last year that the government was not providing meteorological warnings to South Sudanese residents, Mr. Anyang and other workers with Light for the World started running flood evacuation workshops specifically geared toward households with people with disabilities.

“When Light for the World came in, it felt like we had a partner on the scene,” Mr. Berizilious says. “They have been really good about listening” to communities to address their needs.

Kang-Chun Cheng

Ayuen Kuol (left) gets around Panpandiar in a tricycle with one of his young children and Daniel Anyang, a worker with Light for the World.

Channeling trauma into advocacy

Mr. Anyang, who joined Light for the World in 2021, makes weekly site visits to check in with the 800 households that the organization works with across three payams, or subcounties, in South Sudan.

Ms. Lieser says that all of the organization’s disability inclusion facilitators have some form of disability themselves, which helps illustrate to communities that inclusion is possible. Mr. Anyang himself has an inspirational life story. Hailing from a Dinka cattle-
herding family in Jonglei, he defied the odds to escape from the intense conflicts that affected his home region. At age 17, he walked for a month and a half to Uganda with little more than what he was wearing. “At times, I was sleeping in the forest,” he says.

Though he was an older student, Mr. Anyang began his primary school studies at a refugee camp in western Uganda and received a scholarship from the U.N. refugee agency to complete his secondary education in the country’s north. But his life changed in an instant when he was caught in the crossfire of a violent Ugandan political rally in September 2009. Mr. Anyang was hit by eight bullets, which shattered his right tibia and left him with a limp.

Kang-Chun Cheng

A resident fishes in Baidit subcounty, near Tong village.

He eventually went on to study business administration at Nkumba University in Entebbe, graduating with honors. To finance Mr. Anyang’s education, his father had sold five bulls each semester.

Mr. Anyang says he channels his traumatic lived experience into his work at Light for the World.

“There’s a lot of stigma in these remote places: that disabled people are useless, need charity,” he explains. “We’re trying to change that.”

Tools for coping

At the home of Ayuen Kuol in September, Mr. Anyang checks on how he and his two young children are doing. Mr. Kuol was diagnosed with polio as a child and, for his whole life, has had to crawl to get around – until he received a tricycle last year from Light for the World as part of its pilot workshop in flood preparedness.

“I learned about looking for higher ground to evacuate,” he says. “Previously, I had no other ideas.”

Kang-Chun Cheng

Basic commodities such as food, pictured in Panpandiar, are hard for most villagers, especially those with disabilities, to afford.

The hut where they sleep now was offered by his cousin after Mr. Kuol’s own home, a few hundred yards away, was inundated in August.

The flooding tends to occur at night. Because tarps and other emergency shelter materials have been difficult for villagers to find, Mr. Kuol and his neighbors look to U.N. agencies.

“It’s hard to evacuate my children with the tricycle,” Mr. Kuol says, suggesting that a motorized vehicle would be better. “It’s not good to always depend on someone else, but I have no other means.”

“When I was young, there was some flooding,” he adds. “But nothing like this.”

Kang-Chun Cheng

Residents from the village of Malual-Chot who were displaced by summer flooding collect grass to sweep their temporary campsite.

When people discover the museum set up by Francisco Valdean, they usually react with surprise and delight. After all, few expect to find a cultural center in a cardboard box.

Yet that is precisely where Mr. Valdean created the Maré Itinerant Museum of Images (MIIM), a treasure trove of pictures depicting life in Maré, a sprawling complex of 16 favelas in northern Rio de Janeiro flanked by a busy thoroughfare on one side and a pungent waterway on the other.

Rio is home to at least 800 favelas, historically low-income neighborhoods, which house more than 20% of the city’s population. Too often these neighborhoods are reduced to stereotypes around poverty and violence, and the voices of residents are frequently dismissed and overlooked.

Today there are at least 30 community-centered museums across the city’s metro area. They’re transforming narrow alleys, torn-down buildings, and even shoeboxes into museums that use the community’s own culture, art, and storytelling to draw visitors from around the globe. 

“These museums don’t ask for permission or academic backing to become museums. They define themselves as museums simply based on the recognition of the community,” says Mário Chagas, a specialist in museum studies and founder of the Rio de Janeiro network for social museology, known as Remus.

Bruna Prado/AP

Homes crowd the Rocinha favela, one of an estimated 800 historically low-income neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro, Nov. 6, 2024.

Mr. Valdean is a photographer and teacher who previously worked as a street hawker. He created the MIIM in 2019 to challenge the conventional idea people have of museums and offer a different image of the favela.

“Favelas are historically reported as places of marginalization and criminality, so we need images to deconstruct this idea,” he says, as he tinkers with a portable projector. It’s a part of the museum, along with eight small cardboard boxes he stores at home in Maré.

The MIIM has grown a collection of 3,000 pictures – some are Mr. Valdean’s own work, others are collected from various photographers, archives, and residents – showing everyday scenes of work and leisure in Maré, from the 1960s to the present. They include scenes like young girls carrying pails of water on their heads back when the favela was made of wooden planks, a game of pool in the early 2000s, and carnival troupes dancing through bare-brick houses.  

The museum’s exhibitions can take many forms: Mr. Valdean has presented photos to children in schools, projected them onto buildings, and even shown the MIIM at churches and in bars. The museum has traveled to São Paulo and Edinburgh, and it runs educational activities, too, such as community photography courses.

“A museum can be any number of things,” says Mr. Valdean, who likes the idea of triggering people’s imagination with his portable gallery.

Constance Malleret

A mural on the Museu de Favela's circuit pays tribute to Mãe Totinha, a matriarch of the Cantagalo favela who died at age 109.

Across town on a hill overlooking the beach, the communities of Pavão-Pavãozinho-Cantagalo are not just home to the Museu de Favela (MUF) – they are the museum itself.

“We invented the technique of turning the entire territory into a museum,” explains Marcia Souza, one of eight locals who co-founded the MUF in 2008. It’s “an open-air, territorial museum, a live museum, a museum that tells the stories and memories of the people who came to live here.”

A circuit of around two dozen murals, brightly painted onto residents’ homes, invites visitors to explore the favela’s narrow alleys and breathtaking views – as well as its culture and history.

Rain didn’t deter a group of visitors on a recent Saturday, who dodged careening motorbikes and dog waste to view a series of new murals that pay tribute to a local matriarch, Afro-Brazilian music culture, and a Sunday tradition of community upkeep.

Most visitors to the MUF are foreigners venturing up from the tourist beaches below (they pay extra for a tour in English, French, Italian, or Spanish), but the museum was created “thinking about how it would impact our territory, how we involve the locals,” says Ms. Souza.

Having an outsider describe the MUF as “the coolest museum I’ve ever been to” means a lot to her, but she finds it even more fulfilling when a local stops and expresses an interest in the stories being told.  

Constance Malleret

Marcia Souza is a co-founder of the Museu de Favela (MUF), an open-air community museum in the Pavão-Pavãozinho-Cantagalo favelas overlooking Rio’s beaches, Nov. 23, 2024.

Like many of its fellow community-centered museums, the MUF is based on the precepts of “social museology,” a school of thought that embraces the idea of a grassroots museum committed to fighting injustice and representing historically marginalized populations by preserving their memory.

“Social museums are a decolonial practice,” says Dr. Chagas, the museum expert.

They can also serve as tools of resistance, he says.

Over in the city’s west zone, the Museum of Removals emerged from the struggle of the Vila Autódromo favela to resist forced relocations in the run-up to the 2016 Olympic Games.

The museum’s location on a map takes the visitor to a simple residential street surrounded by vacant land. A generic high-end hotel and the city’s Olympic Park are nearby.

But the place comes to life as museum co-founder Sandra Maria Teixeira tells of houses being bulldozed, standoffs with the police, and the victory of the 20 families who were eventually given the right to remain in the area. More than 600 other families were relocated.

With plaques highlighting significant locations, an online archive of photos and videos, and regular participation in outside events, the museum has the dual objective of supporting the community’s struggle for its land and keeping its memory alive.

Vila Autódromo has become emblematic of the fight against evictions in Rio, and “a lot of universities come to visit,” Ms. Teixeira says proudly. The museum has helped maintain a link with displaced families, many of whom moved into government housing down the road.  

Despite the inherently local aspect of each of the museums, they are also part of something bigger, says Ms. Teixeira, sitting in the shade of trees she planted after winning the fight against relocation.

“This is a revolutionary movement changing conventional museums,” she says. These institutions “now understand the need for narratives … of Afro-descendants, Indigenous peoples, the working classes,” she says.  

“And it’s changing how society views the favela.”

Reuters

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wears virtual reality (VR) goggles as he welcomes the German WorldSkills team after their championship in Berlin, Dec. 3.

A common complaint about Germany is that it lacks a “dare to fail” culture for innovation. On Monday, German politicians helped counter that perception. The country’s unpopular leader, Olaf Scholz, gladly led a vote in parliament to dissolve his government.

One reason for the downfall of his three-party coalition: The world’s fourth-largest economy has lost its competitive edge in manufacturing, reflected in Europe’s biggest carmaker, Volkswagen, planning its first factory closures in its 87-year history.

A snap election is expected Feb. 23. The campaign will provide a window on how a country struggles to make a mental shift to become more creative and more open to taking risks and developing new ideas as it addresses a new fear: deindustrialization.

Often enough, Germany’s 84 million people have heard promises on the many ways to speed up innovation, from lessening red tape to improving universities. “My goal is for Germany – and especially our industry – to be at the forefront of future technologies,” such as quantum computing, said Chancellor Scholz in October. “The reality, however, is that too little has happened for too long.”

He cited the fact that the United States invests three times as much in venture capital as does Germany. “This cannot continue,” he said. “Only with a greater affinity for risk can we tackle our major projects.”

Germany has a solid record in innovation. It re-created itself after World War II, boosted the economy of east Germany after reunification in the 1990s, and quickly reduced its dependence on Russian gas after the invasion of Ukraine. It also has nearly half of the world’s “hidden champions,” or the types of small manufacturing firms that provide well-engineered goods to big companies.

This has given hope that the next government, perhaps led by center-right leader Friedrich Merz, will make a new try for deep changes. Mr. Merz told a radio station in November that Germany needs a “new political course that tackles the root of the problems.”

Much of Europe looks to its largest economy to revive its techno-creativity. Welcoming the failure of a governing coalition to make room for a new one sets a good example for just the kind of innovative spirit that the economy needs.