The following post first appeared on the Cover America Tour website, the Consumer Reports Health project I’m producing video for.

ELKHART, Indiana - The kids are on state-assisted medical benefits, and her husband’s fully covered through his job. Jessica, a 32-year-old stay-at-home mom, is the only one in this Elkhart, Indiana family of six who doesn’t have health insurance.

In recent years when Jessica came back from a doctor’s visit with a diagnosis of relatively minor ailments such as strep throat, her husband would make pencil drawings in their trailer home. He sketched fantasy scenes, populated with moons and star-gazers. By selling his art to supportive community members, the couple was able to offset a portion of medical costs.

But when Jessica was told last March that she needed gall-bladder surgery – immediately – she knew just being crafty would be a hard way of working off medical debt.

Initially, she was told the cost of her surgery alone would be $12,000. The family took the savings set aside in hopes of one day buying a home and put it towards the down payment for the surgeon. The family was cut a break when they got a bank loan and her bill was cut in half by sympathetic providers. They’re paying it all off in monthly installments, but Jessica says, it’s still a struggle to pay up to $300 a month when they have six mouths to feed.

Jessica says she’s looked into putting herself on her husband’s insurance, but the family wouldn’t be able to pay an additional $375 a month on one take-home income of $25,000/year. Nor could they afford, she says, giving up the 2-5% of their income that would go towards a state program designed for the uninsured.

Since her surgery, Jessica’s looking for supplemental income to knock back some of her medical debt. Meantime, she’s become crafty herself, weaving dream catchers from hemp twine and leather. It will be years before the family can pay off the costs of her surgery, and many more before they can begin to realize the classic American dream of owning their own home.

San Francisco is losing thousands of rentals a year, and this 75-year-old grandmother is not putting up with it.

Luz Moran is resisting eviction from the Mission-district home she’s lived in for 35 years.

Here she looks through two years of paperwork from her landlord, who wants to turn her place into Tenancy in Common apartments. Because TICs are unregulated and unregistered, more and more of the middle class are turning to the homeownership model to avoid a move out of the expensive city.

I wrote about the phenomenon for the San Francisco Bay Guardian this week. For weeks, I poured through city documents and housing reports. I snapped the top photo at a rally for Jose Morales, another elderly tenant who is resisting an Ellis Act eviction.

It’s just a self portrait of me in the bathroom of an Egyptian restaurant in upstate New York! I was on my way to a Muslim midday prayer service with a 22-year old convert and first wife in a polygamous religious marriage.

The Qur’an says a man may marry up to four wives, and some American converts are practicing the prophet’s lifestyle. So I decided to do a print and radio piece about how it’s done in the United States.

Reporting this story blew all my preconceived notions about Islam and the human heart out of the water. Many of the polygamous wives I interviewed either considered themselves feminists or said their love of God prevented them from feeling jealousy. They were some of the strongest and wisest women I’ve met.

Read the San Francisco Chronicle piece (and comments) here. Or, the slightly longer version on the News21 site.

For a new media journalist, I was pretty damned skeptical of the digital world Second Life. I was one of those who called it a video game (if you’re a new media geek, your hand is probably covering your dropped jaw right about now).

Well, I still don’t think it’s the most ethical of platforms to display journalism, but through my summer religion reporting fellowship, we decided to experiment with it. Multimedia extraordinaire and tech-geek Kara Andrade headed up the project. She produced a panel discussion about faith practices in the virtual world. Avatars were invited to cruise around the tent city we created to show off our religion-oriented stories. My tent, “Plural Living, God Willing,” resembled more of a mosque than a movie theatre mainly because we were holding content so as not to get scooped.

So, despite my initial grumblings about the projet, I wrote about my encounter with one of the avatars in the “Plural Living, God Willing” tent. It reads like a conversation, and if you continue reading on the “Faces of Faith” page, be sure to turn on the virtual soundtrack:

After the panel discussion and a little celebration on the dance floor, I retreated to the “Plural Living, God Willing” tent for a little alone time. I wanted to see if any participants were milling about ripe with questions about Islam and polygamy. Instead, I found Germi Runo in front of the tent pointing a long gun at me. It instantly turned into a sword, which swooped towards ClayW Winkler’s head, shaped like a fox.

“PB: what are you doing there?
PB: what is that gun?”…

read the rest of the story here.