BY JESSICA BERNSTEIN-WAX, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

[an earlier version of this story was published by the Associated Press in February 2007, and ran in dozens of news outlets around the world, including the International Herald Tribune]

Milagros Vacas Arlandis had three biological children of her own and a demanding job as a medical doctor, but something was missing.

For 10 years, she and her husband, Jose Antonio Revilla, had wanted to adopt a child, but long waits and complicated legal maneuverings made adopting within their native Spain virtually impossible.

"My husband and I always wanted to provide a home for a child who didn't have a family," Vacas Arlandis said. "We tried to adopt in Spain, but after waiting for years and hearing nothing, we decided to take a different route."

So in 2002 the couple attended an informational meeting and initiated the paperwork to bring a little girl from China to their home in the northern city of Santander.

As once-homogenous Spain digests a newly diverse population, enriched by an influx of some 4 million immigrants over the last decade, it also has one of the world's highest per capita international adoption rates in the world. More than half the adopted children come from China.

BY MAKIKO KITAMURA, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

Click on picture to enlarge

Momar Ba is back where he began, with little more than a harrowing story to share. He is alive but still desperate. He has traveled from his native Senegal to Germany, Switzerland, Tunisia, and most recently, Spain's Canary Islands, each time hungry for work.

The father of eight children, Ba saved up $1,200, selling used refrigerators to pay a smuggler. That allowed him to join about 20 other Senegalese in early September on an eight-day boat trip from Dakar to the Canary Islands.

"I was willing to sacrifice my life to get on that boat to go to Spain," the 34-year-old Ba said in his apartment in the working-class Dakar suburb of Parcelles Assainies.

BY KATHERINE BOYLE & SARA GOODMAN, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

This game is being played entirely in a foreign language, one that isn't familiar to most Americans. They're speaking Euskara, a language with no known ties to any other language around the world.

The cowboys are Basque-Americans and they are part of a thriving community in the western United States. They come from the Basque Country: seven provinces in the Pyrenees of western Europe that make up the northwest corner of Spain and the southwest section of France. In Buffalo, most Basques are of French descent, and their relatives immigrated here in the early 1900s, seeking political freedom and economic advantage. At a time where many immigrant groups are wrestling with questions of nationality and identity, the Basque culture is flourishing.