Right away the kids hit on familiar themes: fights, robberies, drug deals, sex, and AIDS. Okay, sure, that's all important to talk about - but the puppet masters seemed to have a hard time disassociating the characters from themselves.

"Uh, uh, I didn't do that," one would protest when a peer suggested a bit of action.

"The character is not you," I kept interjecting, in vain.

Thinking it might be a little easier to get some distance if we treated less immediate topics, I tried to inject a bit of fantasy.

"What if, when these two guys fight, instead of just shooting at each other, something magical happens? What if the bullets turn into butterflies or one of the guys suddenly flies away?"

Maybe not the best idea, but I was trying to get them to come up with something fantastic.

One young man started to talk about some of the characters in his neighborhood.

"There's this crackhead named Frog who hangs out behind Miss Betty's store," he said, eliciting cries of recognition from others who lived nearby.

"And then there's Mike who plays the violin," someone else added. (I'm changing people's real names, but the nicknames are the same.)

"Then there's a guy in my neighborhood, Stevie, who's always dancing," said another.

"But he's not a crackhead," corrected the first young man. "People think he's a crackhead, cuz he's always dancing, but he's just dancing, just to dance."

This seemed to me like the makings of something marvelous, a kind of Brementown Musicians fairy tale in Miami's Liberty City.

"What if these guys had an adventure?" I asked.

"Naw, they just crackheads," the group protested.

"But what if they weren't crackheads?" I kept on. "What if Frog was really a big, magical frog. And Mike's violin had magical powers? And the dancer, well, what could the dancer do?"

To humor me, the teens started to act out a play. They still found it difficult to disassociate actor from character, making the puppet masters holding Frog and Mike feel uncomfortable about being cast as crackheads.

I tried to draw in one of the girls by inviting her to invite a little girl character, who wanders into this magical world.  Almost immediately she was assaulted, raped, sent to foster care, impregnated, and infected with HIV. A young man from a neighborhood far from Miss Betty's store, who had not participated in the earlier discussion about the violinist, the dancer, and the frog, jumped in, taking over the story to tell the tragic tale of two young, HIV-positive lovers and their many trips to the hospital trying to care for their infant.

Try as I might, I could not conjure any magic for this tale.

Celeste Fraser Delgado is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Worthy Causes. Her Do-Gooder blog appears Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission biologist Adam Warwick just couldn't let the bear drown, so he took off his shirt and dove in after it. The 375 lb black bear had been spotted in a residential area, obviously looking for food, and was shot with a tranquilizer dart. Unfortunately, before it went under, it jumped in the water of the Gulf of Mexico.

mzungus meandering around downtown, fingers pointing, and heads on swivels.  With stomachs full of matooke and rice, we took our time digesting as we strolled along the broken sidewalk.  Shopkeepers called out, hoping that their wares could draw our attention.  Boda-boda drivers offered us rides on their bicycles or mopeds.  A third group called us too.  Three small children, around five or seven years old, quietly implored, "Sirs, 100?"  They were asking for a meager 100 shillings, and we had just spent 8,000 on lunch.  Surely we could spare the equivalent of 6 American cents.

Before we could respond, our program director shooed them away in their native language.  Many of the interns were heartbroken.  I know I was.  Here is a little kid, malnourished and poorly clothed, and all he wanted was a nickel.  That's not too much to ask.  I could have tossed him the coin and moved on.