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On problems with Wikipedia

Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

ACCORDING to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, John Seigenthaler Sr. is 78 years old and the former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville. But is that information, or anything else in Mr. Seigenthaler's biography, true?

The question arises because Mr. Seigenthaler recently read about himself on Wikipedia and was shocked to learn that he "was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John and his brother Bobby."

"Nothing was ever proven," the biography added.

Mr. Seigenthaler discovered that the false information had been on the site for several months and that an unknown number of people had read it, and possibly posted it on or linked it to other sites.

If any assassination was going on, Mr. Seigenthaler (who is 78 and did edit The Tennessean) wrote last week in an op-ed article in USA Today, it was of his character.

The case triggered extensive deng Tinged With Sadder Ceremony
By GLENN COLLINS

They will light the lights on Park Avenue tomorrow evening, in the familiar, cheery annual public ceremony that has been a staple of the holiday season for 60 years. The children's choir will be 40 voices strong. Some 5,000 onlookers abate on the Internet over the value and reliability of Wikipedia, and more broadly, over the nature of online information.

Wikipedia is a kind of collective brain, a repository of knowledge, maintained on servers in various countries and built by anyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection who wants to share knowledge about a subject. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have written Wikipedia entries.

Mistakes are expected to be caught and corrected by later contributors and users.

The whole nonprofit enterprise began in January 2001, the brainchild of Jimmy Wales, 39, a former futures and options trader who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla. He said he had hoped to advance the promise of the Internet as a place for sharing information.

It has, by most measures, been a spectacular success. Wikipedia is now the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the world. As of Friday, it was receiving 2.5 billion page views a month, and offering at least 1,000 articles in 82 languages. The number of articles, already close to two million, is growing by 7 percent a month. And Mr. Wales said that traffic doubles every four months.

Still, the question of Wikipedia, as of so much of what you find online, is: Can you trust it?

And beyond reliability, there is the question of accountability. Mr. Seigenthaler, after discovering that he had been defamed, found that his "biographer" was anonymous. He learned that the writer was a customer of BellSouth Internet, but that federal privacy laws shield the identity of Internet customers, even if they disseminate defamatory material. And the laws protect online corporations from libel suits.

He could have filed a lawsuit against BellSouth, he wrote, but only a subpoena would compel BellSouth to reveal the name.

In the end, Mr. Seigenthaler decided against going to court, instead alerting the public, through his article, "that Wikipedia is a flawed and irresponsible research tool."

Mr. Wales said in an interview that he was troubled by the Seigenthaler episode, and noted that Wikipedia was essentially in the same boat. "We have constant problems where we have people who are trying to repeatedly abuse our sites," he said.

Still, he said, he was trying to make Wikipedia less vulnerable to tampering. He said he was starting a review mechanism by which readers and experts could rate the value of various articles. The reviews, which he said he expected to start in January, would show the site's strengths and weaknesses and perhaps reveal patterns to help them address the problems.

In addition, he said, Wikipedia may start blocking unregistered users from creating new pages, though they would still be able to edit them.

The real problem, he said, was the volume of new material coming in; it is so overwhelming that screeners cannot keep up with it.

All of this struck close to home for librarians and researchers. On an electronic mailing list for them, J. Stephen Bolhafner, a news researcher at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote, "The best defense of the Wikipedia, frankly, is to point out how much bad information is available from supposedly reliable sources."

Jessica Baumgart, a news researcher at Harvard University, wrote that there were librarians voluntarily working behind the scenes to check information on Wikipedia. "But, honestly," she added, "in some ways, we're just as fallible as everyone else in some areas because our own knowledge is limited and we can't possibly fact-check everything."

In an interview, she said that her rule of thumb was to double-check everything and to consider Wikipedia as only one source.

"Instead of figuring out how to 'fix' Wikipedia - something that cannot be done to our satisfaction," wrote Derek Willis, a research database manager at The Washington Post, who was speaking for himself and not The Post, "we should focus our energies on educating the Wikipedia users among our colleagues."

Some cyberexperts said Wikipedia already had a good system of checks and balances. Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford and an expert in the laws of cyberspace, said that contrary to popular belief, true defamation was easily pursued through the courts because almost everything on the Internet was traceable and subpoenas were not that hard to obtain. (For real anonymity, he advised, use a pay phone.)

"People will be defamed," he said. "But that's the way free speech is. Think about the gossip world. It spreads. There's no way to correct it, period. Wikipedia is not immune from that kind of maliciousness, but it is, relative to other features of life, more easily corrected."

Indeed, Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0 and a longtime Internet analyst, said Wikipedia may, in that sense, be better than real life.

"The Internet has done a lot more for truth by making things easier to discuss," she said. "Transparency and sunlight are better than a single point of view that can't be questioned."

For Mr. Seigenthaler, whose biography on Wikipedia has since been corrected, the lesson is simple: "We live in a universe of new media with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research, but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects."

On poems at Angel Island

Poetic Justice for a Feared Immigrant Stop
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

ANGEL ISLAND, Calif., Dec. 1 - It was known, simply, as "the wooden building." For 30 years, from 1910 to 1940, the barren walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station gave mute testimony to the experiences of roughly 175,000 Chinese immigrants who were detained and exhaustively interrogated on this island in San Francisco Bay, the West Coast's insidious version of Ellis Island.

"Today is the last day of winter," begins one of nearly 300 poems surreptitiously carved in Chinese characters by detainees on the walls.

"Tomorrow morning is the vernal equinox/ One year's prospects have changed to another/ Sadness kills the person in the wooden building."

On Thursday, this little-spoken-about place, the physical embodiment of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was intended to prevent Chinese laborers from entering the country, received long-awaited recognition when President Bush signed into law the Angel Island Immigration Station Restoration and Preservation Act.

The legislation, a result of a 35-year effort by the nonprofit Angel Island Immigration Foundation, authorizes up to $15 million to establish a museum and genealogical research center on the island and to help preserve two original structures, including barracks with chicken-wire clerestories and melancholy graffiti - eloquent poems carved on wooden walls and routinely puttied and painted over by the authorities. The immigration station, nestled in a eucalyptus grove on the largest island in the bay, is a national historic landmark, though it is closed to the public.

The facility was the point of entry for roughly 75 percent of Chinese immigrants to the West Coast, and its preservation has underscored the story of the "paper sons and daughters" who used false identities to circumvent the Exclusion Act, the first legislation in United States history to ban a specific ethnic group. For Chinese-Americans like Li Keng Wong, now 79, who was detained with her family as a 7-year-old in 1933, it has been an emotional journey.

Even today, she can ruefully recite from memory the description from her investigation file assembled by the authorities: "Female of the Chinese race. Faint pit near outer corner right eye. Height, in socks, 2 ft 11½ in." The faint pit, a scar from a childhood infection, is still visible beneath her bangs. The artifice and fear with which Mrs. Wong and her family lived, even as they prospered, was repeated by thousands of immigrants. In contrast to Ellis Island, where millions of European immigrants were processed largely with swift industrial efficiency, the Angel Island station was designed for exclusion.

Upon a ship's arrival, officials would separate the immigrants on board, with those bearing first-class paperwork allowed to disembark in San Francisco, while those remaining - mostly Chinese, but also a smattering of Japanese, Filipino, Indian, Russian and other groups - ferried to Angel Island.

"Ellis Island was created to let Europeans in," said Robert E. Barde, deputy director of the Institute of Business and Economic Research at the University of California, Berkeley, who is writing a book on immigration. "Angel Island was created to keep the Chinese out." The Exclusion Act, repealed in 1943 when China became America's ally in World War II, was the culmination of decades of anti-Chinese sentiment in the aftermath of an economic depression that resulted in mob violence and lynching.

Chinese laborers had been coming to America since the Gold Rush, bearing "a harsh purse with a reverence for copper coins," in the words of one poem on the barracks walls. They worked for 12 cents an hour laying the tracks of the Central Pacific Railroad and erecting levees in the swamps of the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta. The law was intended to end the arrival of Chinese laborers and to bar Chinese from becoming citizens. At Angel Island, this meant grueling interrogations and humiliating physical examinations.

In 1906, the San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed municipal and birth records, creating an opportunity for the city's Chinese residents to claim citizenship and to try to bring friends, family and fellow villagers, often with false identities, to "Gam Saan" - the Gold Mountain - or America.

Like the poems on the walls, Mrs. Wong's five days on the island as a little girl remain deeply etched. Her father, or "Baba, " Soew Hong Gee, came to the United States from a small village in the Pearl River delta as a 16-year-old in 1912, presumably as a "paper son."

Sipping green tea in her kitchen in a suburb overlooking the bay, Mrs. Wong recalled the ruse that brought her family to San Francisco. Because wives were prohibited from entering, it was decided that her mother, Suey Ting Gee, then 28, Mr. Gee's second wife, would pose as her "yee," or aunt. Blood relatives were allowed to emigrate.

"Baba could not bring Mama as his wife, only as his sister," she recalled. "He gave us coaching papers. Mama and Baba said if we made a mistake, the white officers would deport us."

Even her 3-year-old sister, Lai Wah, was required to remember. "She was always saying, 'Yee, yee, yee, yee,'" Mrs. Wong, a retired teacher, said. "But whenever we were in a corner together, we would whisper 'Mama.' "

In a recently completed memoir, "Good Fortune: My Journey to Gold Mountain," to be published later this month by Peachtree Publishers, Mrs. Wong recalls the intense interrogations, to be corroborated by family members - questions like "What is your living room floor made of?" and "What direction does your house in China face?" "I was praying 'Don't let me trip up, 'Don't let me trip up,' " Mrs. Wong recalled, her girlhood anxiety palpable 72 years later.

Until recently, Mrs. Wong refused to set foot on the island and never spoke about her experience, even to her own children. Her parents, like many of their generation, never mentioned Angel Island. She eventually made the trip, a mile's ferry ride from Tiburon, in neighboring Marin County, at the encouragement of a writing teacher.

"I saw the place where I was incarcerated," she said. "It was just like a liberation. At last I could talk about it."

The station closed in 1940. Its history was largely swept aside until 1970, when a park ranger noticed Chinese characters chiseled on the vacant barracks walls, which were scheduled for demolition. Since then, the revitalization has been a grass-roots movement, aided by $15 million in state bond money as well as support from Asian-American politicians.

The site, to be opened on a limited basis in 2007, will include refurbished barracks in which the poems on the walls will literally be brought to light.

Their presence has already given young people like Erika Gee, 33, the foundation's educational director, whose grandparents came through Angel Island, a chance to retrieve their own powerful, not-so-distant history.

"It is just a wooden building," Ms. Gee said, softly. "Yet there are so many voices that still speak."

On traditional insecticides and remedies which are toxic

It's Traditional. It's Religious. It's Poison.
By ANTHONY DePALMA

When Venice Levy had a problem with roaches, she looked for the strongest insecticide she could find. A friend told her about a mystery powder called Tempo.

"When it first came out I bought it. Sure," said Ms. Levy, who runs Botanica Oggun in East Harlem and sells herbs and ornaments used in Hispanic spiritual and religious ceremonies.

She applied Tempo and the pests disappeared. But then her dog, a Shih Tzu named Chi Chi, sniffed the powder and began to foam at the mouth. Tempo contains cyfluthrin, a potent insecticide that can be lethal to dogs, cats and humans. It is legal for licensed applicators to use but illegal when sold on the streets in part because people use it at 200 to 400 times the recommended quantity, figuring that if using a little works well, using a lot will work better.

After a visit to the animal hospital, Chi Chi recovered and went on to live to a ripe old age. Ms. Levy stopped using Tempo.

But Tempo can still be found in parts of New York, despite efforts by city officials to go after the peddlers who sell it. And despite numerous health warnings, surveys done by the city show that Hispanics are much more likely than any other group to use it.

Getting people in the city's ethnic and immigrant communities to reject harmful products like Tempo is a complex and delicate task, touching on culture, language and sometimes religion.

Officials try to balance the benefits of strict enforcement against the danger of offending a large group that is already under economic and social pressures. Sometimes, a ban simply drives hazardous products underground, where they can be even harder to regulate.

Part of what makes this such a daunting environmental and health problem is that the people who are most affected are those who are introducing the hazardous materials into their own homes, usually because they believe that using them will take care of a visible and immediate problem.

That is why Miguel Gomez's family followed a peculiar ritual before sitting down to supper in their basement apartment in the Bronx. His mother, Myrtha, would crawl under the dinner table and draw a line around its underside with a piece of special white chalk.

"She wanted to make sure that cockroaches didn't crawl up the table while we were eating," said Mr. Gomez, now 18. "It worked." It sure did. Although it looked like ordinary blackboard chalk, Mrs. Gomez was actually using a powerful unlicensed insecticide called Chinese Chalk or Miraculous Chalk. Imported in small orange boxes, it sold for about a dollar in Chinatown, East Harlem and the South Bronx.

It was toxic to bugs that crossed it, and was widely used in China and Latin America because it was so effective. But it was not approved for use in homes here because it contained deltamethrin, which is highly toxic. Two years ago the New York police arrested a number of people for selling Chinese Chalk and warnings about its dangers went up throughout the city.

The efforts appear to have been successful. Mr. Gomez has not seen Chinese Chalk in his neighborhood for a few years, and a recent afternoon spent looking for it in Chinatown proved futile.

But many other hazardous products are still out there. Warnings have gone out in recent years about a pesticide from Mexico called Tres Pasitos, which means three little steps in Spanish. It contains aldicard, which is highly toxic to pests and humans. Rats that nibble on it are said to take three steps and die.

Nine cases of Tres Pasitos poisoning were reported to the New York City Poison Control Center in the last year. Most of the incidents are believed to involve young children who touched the powder on the floor of their homes and then ingested it.

Families living in substandard housing are tempted to use the strongest product they can find. Jessica Leighton, deputy commissioner of New York's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said the city often has to enlist a local group that has already established special bonds with a community to help get the word out about risky products.

A few years ago, small plastic bags containing a peach-colored powder called litargirio began showing up on city streets. It was made in the Dominican Republic, where it has been used for years as an underarm deodorant and burn remedy. Samples of it contained up to 80 percent lead. It cannot be absorbed through the skin, but any that gets on the hands can be ingested.

City officials asked the Alianza Dominicana, a large advocacy and social services group representing Dominicans, to spread the word about the risks of using litargirio. But Moises Perez, executive director of the Alianza, said getting people to stop using it took a lot of effort, even among his own staff.

"They said to me, 'Moises, I grew up with that stuff. My mother used it all the time,' " Mr. Perez said. The organization's workers had to be convinced that something as familiar to them as litargirio was dangerous before they would tell other people not to use it.

No hazard has stirred more sustained controversy than the ritualistic use of mercury in some Afro-Caribbean religions. The practice was first publicized by Arnold P. Wendroff, a former public school teacher, who in 1989 asked his junior high school students in Brooklyn how mercury was used.

One student answered that his mother sprinkled mercury on their apartment floor to ward off bad spirits. Mercury vapors can cause developmental problems.

"The government has known about this for a long time," said Dr. Wendroff, 64, who has a Ph.D. in the sociology of medicine. "There needs to be a response plan and there isn't one."

It is not illegal to sell mercury in New York, but packages have to be properly labeled. In response to Dr. Wendroff's urging, the city has monitored mercury sales in botanicas, conducted air sampling in the shops, and distributed pamphlets about the dangers of mercury, known on the street as azogue (ah-ZOH-gay).

No one knows with certainty how great a threat ritual mercury represents. In one of the most comprehensive investigations, Dr. Philip O. Ozuah of Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx found that 38 of 41 botanicas he checked in 1995 sold mercury in small vials without warning labels, suggesting that the metal was widely available in the borough.

But tests on a large group of children from the Bronx a few years later showed that only 3 percent of them had elevated mercury levels in their urine, where elemental mercury exposure would be detected.

Dr. Ozuah, now interim chairman of pediatrics at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore, said he had to conclude at this point that ritual mercury was not a serious problem. He said the most common way it was used - contained in a good luck amulet - posed no harm.

Mercury can be hard to find now. Ms. Levy, the botanica owner in East Harlem, said she had never sold mercury, but she is certain that those who use it can find other places to buy it, or bring it in from another country.

Eric Canales, an ordained Santeria priest, said that even if some sects used mercury in rituals, their numbers were too small to warrant the aggressive crackdown that Dr. Wendroff advocated.

"To blatantly say that because you have a huge Latino population you think there is a huge problem with mercury is prejudiced, inflammatory and ignorant," Mr. Canales said.

Dr. Wendroff says there is nothing pejorative about making sure that mercury is sold with the proper labeling. Leaders in the Latino community reject his ideas, he says, "because they are embarrassed about the bad name it gives to the community."

On prostitution and the spread of AIDS in India

On India's Roads, Cargo and a Deadly Passenger
By AMY WALDMAN

NELAMANGALA, India - Hot water: 10 rupees. Cold water: 8 rupees. Toilet: 5 rupees.

Sex: no price specified on the bathhouse wall, but, as the condom painted there suggests, safe.

Sangeetha Hamam, a bathhouse, sits on the national highway near this gritty truck stop about nine miles north of Bangalore. Its mistress is Ranjeetha, a 28-year-old eunuch who lives as a woman. Her lipstick and black dress provide a touch of glamour in the small dark shack.

Her clients are not only truckers, but also Bangalore college students and other city residents. They know to look for sex at highway establishments geared toward truckers. Her customers - as many as 100 on Sundays for her and five other eunuchs - come for a "massage" and the anal sex that follows, but also for the anonymity the location confers.

Ranjeetha knows men will pay more for unprotected sex, but she calculates that the extra money is not worth the risk to her livelihood and life. She knows they can go elsewhere; there are some 45 bathhouses doubling as brothels near this truck stop. She also knows several eunuchs who have died of AIDS.

India has at least 5.1 million people living with H.I.V., the second highest number after South Africa. It is, by all accounts, at a critical stage: it can either prevent the further spread of infection, or watch a more generalized epidemic take hold. Global experts worry that India is both underspending on AIDS and undercounting its H.I.V. cases.

Its national highways are a conduit for the virus, passed by prostitutes and the truckers, migrants and locals who pay them, and brought home to unsuspecting wives in towns or villages. In its largest infrastructure project since independence, India is in the process of widening and upgrading those highways into a true interstate system. The effort will allow the roads to carry more traffic and freight than ever before. But some things are better left uncarried.

The national highways between New Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai, formerly Madras, and Mumbai run through at least six districts where H.I.V. prevalence is above 2.5 percent. Earlier this year, a New York Times reporter and a photographer drove the route, which has been nicknamed the Golden Quadrilateral.

To drive it is to peel back a nation's secret, or not so secret, sex life, and the potent mix of desire, denial and stigma that is helping spread the disease.

India's entry into the global economy over the past 15 years may also be furthering the spread of AIDS. With rising incomes, men have more money for sex; poor women see selling sex as their only access to the new prosperity. Cities are drawing more migrants and prostitutes, and Western influences are liberalizing Indian sexual mores. In response, cultural protectionists are refusing to allow even the national conversation about AIDS to reflect this changing reality.

The notion of a sexually chaste India is a "complete myth," said Ashok Alexander, the director of Avahan, the India AIDS Initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its preservation hurts prevention: "You say it's not a big problem, only 'those people' are doing that."

Driving the highway also shows the complications in reaching the various constituencies along it. India's AIDS epidemic is as variegated as the country itself, with a multiplicity of high-risk groups. Intravenous drug users concentrate in northeastern states. Devadasis - poor, lower-caste women consecrated to gods as young girls and then consigned to prostitution - live in the south.

Many of the groups are deeply fragmented and in perpetual motion, making them difficult for educators to reach: the man who owns a single truck; the woman who works at night out of a thatched hut; the lone migrant who shuttles back and forth between his village and urban work.

But a number of AIDS prevention groups have come to see working along the highway as the best hope for targeted interventions.

Avahan is pouring much of its $200 million into efforts along the highway. Another group, Project Concern International, sent young men to walk the Golden Quadrilateral - 3,625 miles long - over the course of a year to raise awareness about AIDS.

They met truckers, villagers, road workers and migrants, and in some places were cheered as heroes. In others, they were chased out for daring to discuss condoms and H.I.V., accused of spreading promiscuity and disease.

Sometimes, construction on the highway blocked the workers' way. But the deeper obstacles were culture, politics and history. The puritanical values of British colonialists repressed sexual expression in this country - essentially criminalizing homosexuality - and stigmatized it in many Indians' eyes as well. Some of the socially conservative Hindu nationalists who governed until 2004 tried to pretend no one was having sex, at least outside marriage.

In truth, sex work has flourished in independent India. Red-light districts operate openly in cities like Mumbai, formerly Bombay, and in its new suburbs and industrial areas. Hundreds of girls and women parade the streets at night near "pharmacies" where quacks peddle fake AIDS remedies.

And advocates battling the spread of AIDS say they have learned that men having sex with men, then with their wives, is surprisingly common, but veiled by stigma.

Ranjeetha, the bathhouse mistress, believes the real danger is not open eunuchs like her, but the men in denial, who work in offices by day and dress in saris at night. "People who lead double lives don't use condoms," she said.

Awareness and Denial

At least 1,000 trucks a day pass through Nelamangala's trans-shipment point, often waiting hours or days for a new load. In the interim, drivers and their helpers patronize bathhouses like Sangeetha, although many of the sex establishments do not paint condoms on the outside, and use none inside.

There are three million to four million trucks on India's roads, at least one million of them traveling long distances. If truckers cannot find sex at trans-shipment points, they can buy it on the roadside, where women signal potential clients with flashlights.

As many as 11 percent of truckers may be H.I.V. positive. In some parts of the country, like Tamil Nadu, the stigma around truckers has grown so strong that fathers forbid their daughters to marry them.

Yet no one has figured out a comprehensive system for education or testing. There are perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 regional transport companies, but most trucks are owner-driven or run by small companies.

The major stopping points, or trans-shipment yards, see so many truckers each day that even if truckers take an AIDS test, there is no way to follow up - an "amnesiac system" in one advocate's words.

In a dusty parking lot at this truck trans-shipment point, an AIDS educator wielded a black dildo and a condom, encircled by truckers who stifled mirth and curiosity.

"Why are you targeting us?" a trucker asked the educator.

Truckers asked if AIDS could be transmitted by mosquito bites. They made ribald jokes about their sex lives, and boasted about not using condoms.

One trucker interrupted to say he knew people who used condoms and still got AIDS.

"Check the expiration date," the educator said.

"We are illiterate, we can't read," the trucker replied.

In the country's north, some drivers say they have never heard of AIDS, although their facial expressions may suggest otherwise. In the south, where AIDS is much more common, denial is trickier. Truckers have heard of AIDS, and often know someone who died from it, and word is starting to travel along with the virus.

But awareness does not always translate to protection. Bhagwan Singh, 47, a trucker who was halting at the Gujarat-Rajasthan border, said he did not use condoms, because he had paid for sex only a few times.

"What happens if I just go once, twice, thrice?" he said. "Only if I'm a regular fellow I might contract such things."

Bringing H.I.V. Home

Once, twice, thrice or more often, whatever the truckers do on the road, or migrants do in cities, is coming home to oblivious wives. Here, the danger of a culture that is simultaneously licentious and conservative, of seasoned husbands and sheltered wives, becomes clear.

This has become especially apparent in India's southern states, which are prospering economically, but have been hit the hardest by AIDS, along with pockets of the isolated northeast.

The states the highway runs through in the south all have H.I.V. infection rates of 1 percent or higher.

In the government hospital in Guntur, a district with a 2.5 percent H.I.V. infection rate, Sambra Ja Lakshmi, 27, a mother of two, was being counseled.

Her husband, a 33-year-old trucker, had done "thousands of kilometers on the national highway," as she put it. Where he got H.I.V. is unknown, but he was so sick he could no longer move. She, a homemaker and mother who barely left her village about 15 miles off the highway, was H.I.V. positive, too.

The counselor, Sunita Murugudu, had heard it before, and knew she would hear it again.

Some 80 percent of truckers' wives who came in for voluntary testing and counseling tested positive, she said, usually because by the time they came in their husbands were on their deathbeds, and denial could no longer be sustained.

G. Karuna, 24, was another woman who fell prey to the peregrinations of her husband, a long-distance driver from a family of truckers. When they both sought treatment for tuberculosis or opportunistic infections at hospitals, they hid his occupation, since many private hospitals now turn truckers away.

After her husband died, his family blamed her, a cruel vengeance some in-laws inflict on the widows. They have made treatment and prevention that much harder.

She was forced to sleep on the path outside; the family refused to share even a loaf of bread that she had touched. Soon their whole village had ostracized her.

Ms. Karuna cried as she told her story, but that story also conveyed an uncommon strength. She had left her husband's family and her village to start a new life on her own. She became an activist with the Social Educational and Economic Development Society, an advocacy group in Guntur, trying to save other truckers' wives.

She showed women pictures of her handsome husband before he sickened, and after.

She told the wives to know what their husbands were doing outside the home, to negotiate the use of condoms with them, to get treated for sexually transmitted diseases. Her husband's relatives still teased her: "Why are you working so hard? You also will die."

Morality and Stigma

In the town of Nippani, outside Lafayette Hospital, a sign warned against unprotected sex, showing a blue demon on a horse slaying a healthy man.

But those who fell prey to that demon were not welcomed, explained a doctor, Sunil Sase. AIDS carried a stigma like leprosy, he said, "so we are not exactly treating the AIDS cases." They were sent to another hospital 50 miles away.

A group working to raise AIDS awareness among prostitutes had been chased from Nippani after being accused of promoting sex. Most of the devadasis and prostitutes, who had been working in the town on the highway for 50 years, had been chased out in a morality crusade. Now they were scattered along the road, impossible to reach with education or condoms.

A mob had pulled one prostitute, Reshma Sheikh, and her 7-year-old son out of her house to try to force them from town. "We have a right to live and work there, we never hurt the sentiments of the people around," she said. She had stayed, only because she had nowhere else to go.

The main group leading the crusade was the Shiv Sena, a Hindu nationalist political party. Sunil Sadashir Dalavi, 32, the local leader, boasted about their success. But he said the women were not the only cause for the spread of AIDS.

"Educated boys don't get jobs, they have extra time, they don't know what to do," he said. "They can't marry till they get a job, they have very strong desires, so they go to these women."

Once the men were married they would not do "these things," he insisted, despite government surveys showing otherwise. The answer to controlling sex was controlling the culture, he said. A lot of local men went to two nearby cinemas that screened sex movies, he said, and then to brothels. "We want to close the 'talkies' down," he said, "so people will not do this."

A Fragmented Industry

In almost every doorway in the red-light district of Chilakaluripet, in Andhra Pradesh, women drape, wearing bright clothes, garish makeup and come-hither expressions that have served to lure both men and disease.

For half a century, the town has been a center of sex work, combining its location on the national highway with women from its Domara community, which has come to specialize in prostitution. Truckers passing through know where to stop; if they do not, there are hotel boys, rickshaw pullers and others willing to guide them.

In recent years, the town and surrounding area have also become a center of H.I.V. infection, and, given the number of long-distance truckers tarrying here, a likely source for its spread elsewhere.

The sex industry has been organized in some cities, like Calcutta, but mostly it is as fragmented as the trucking industry. Chilakaluripet features brothel-based and home-based prostitutes, secret prostitutes and women who sell sex along the highway. A police crackdown on brothels in recent years has further dispersed the women.

Venkaimah, a 25-year-old widow, is part of a "highway brothel" - a small moving coterie of women who work in bushes or fields or restaurants along the road. Her workday starts when the light is gone and the truck traffic heavy. She leaves her two daughters, 10 and 2, behind, and on a good night may get 8 to 10 customers who pay 50 cents to a dollar each.

Some prostitutes now use condoms, but the disease continues to spread. One local organization, Needs Serving Society, estimated that 1,000 people had tested positive for H.I.V. in the town and nearby villages, most of them not prostitutes, but locals who may have patronized them. No one, though, had any real idea of the true number. On one narrow lane alone, 20 prostitutes were infected, said one of them, Konda, 38.

Venkaimah's children motivated her to use condoms - if she did not, she knew that sooner or later they would be orphaned. But loneliness can loosen defenses: like many prostitutes, she had "temporary husbands" - longtime boyfriends - with whom she did not use a condom at all.

Chilakaluripet, known for sex, was now marked by death.

In a courtyard, Venkateswarmma, a mother of two, as thin and brittle as a doll, sat on a cot, unable to move. Her husband, a brothel owner's son, had died 10 days before, infected after sleeping with its employees. She was near death herself, unable to walk for her husband's death ceremony. Her 2-year-old son had already died from AIDS; she would leave behind an 11-year-old boy.

A Mobile Society

For 15 years, Vilas Jaganath Kamkar had been taking the bus from his village in Maharashtra state to Mumbai, its capital, where he worked as a taxicab driver. In 1994, he had taken a wife, Manisha, but he kept working in Mumbai, with monthly visits home.

In this migrant nation, his life was not unique. Nor, in this age of AIDS, was his fate. Migrants may be the hardest group for AIDS educators to reach. As Indian society becomes more mobile, people are leaving villages for urban work at increasing rates.

In Maharashtra, new plants and factories are springing up along the revamped highway. As rural migrants come to work in the factories, poor women follow to sexually service the men. Newly rich locals patronize the abundant supply of women, spawning H.I.V. "hot spots" along the highways.

In cities, the migrants live in slums, three or more to a room, and may move often. Away from their families for months at a time, they seek the companionship not just of prostitutes but of girlfriends, with whom safe sex is often ignored.

Migrants leave home to work, but go home to die. At the hospital in Satara, a prospering city on the highway south of Mumbai, Mr. Kamkar, the taxi driver, now 32, lay breathless on a hospital bed. His luck had run out, and not just because he had contracted H.I.V. Only 25 hospitals and health centers were prescribing antiretroviral drugs. They were available in Guntur, but not 12 miles south in Chilakaluripet. They could be had in Mumbai - but not in Satara.

All Mrs. Kamkar, 25, a mother of two, could do was take her husband back to their village, try to ease his pain and nurse him until the end.

"It's a matter of his destiny," she said.

On a new children's museum in the Bronx

In the Bronx, This One's for the Children
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

THE BRONX has a zoo, a baseball stadium and acres and acres of parkland. It has a symphony orchestra, an opera company and the oldest public golf course in America. But as far as 4-year-old Tyzella King is concerned, the borough is missing something rather important: a children's museum.

The Bronx has the largest percentage of children under 14 than any other borough - 25.3 percent, according to the 2000 census - but no children's museum in its 42 square miles. That is about to change.

One evening last week, the borough president, Adolfo Carrión Jr., went to a South Bronx children's center and vowed, standing before Tyzella and nearly two dozen of his youngest constituents, to make the Bronx Children's Museum a reality.

Since the permanent museum is a long way from opening - a site has not yet been selected - Mr. Carrión helped improvise a temporary solution. Tyzella and her friends are part of what officials consider the first program of the future museum, an eight-week project led by the Children's Museum of Manhattan that teaches children about art, music and storytelling.

Mr. Carrión and other officials gathered at the children's center, run by the nonprofit East Side House Settlement, to celebrate the program and talk about their vision for the museum. The grownups wore dark suits and made speeches. The children jumped up and down, danced and imitated frogs. Then they sat on a green carpet and listened to Sonia Manzano, a Bronx native who plays Maria on "Sesame Street," read from her book, "No Dogs Allowed!"

In the South Bronx neighborhoods where many of the children live, it is easy to find a place to get a flat tire fixed or buy a pack of cigarettes, but hard to find a place to play.

"The Bronx doesn't have too much to offer for the children," said Soraida Perez, 31, whose two children participate in the program. "It's good to see something like this in the Bronx."

The world's first museum for children opened in Brooklyn in December 1899. Today, that museum, the Brooklyn Children's Museum, is host to 250,000 visitors annually. It is one of about 300 museums of its kind in the nation, according to the Association of Children's Museums.

Mr. Carrión said his office, which has committed $500,000 to the museum so far, was securing public and private financing for a bus that will serve as a museum on wheels while a permanent site is found and developed.

The borough president was not the only one eager to see the museum open. "I want to go there," said Tyzella, who was ready to head there at a moment's notice, lunchbox in hand.

On outsourcing gameplaying to China

Ogre to Slay? Outsource It to Chinese
By DAVID BARBOZA

FUZHOU, China - One of China's newest factories operates here in the basement of an old warehouse. Posters of World of Warcraft and Magic Land hang above a corps of young people glued to their computer screens, pounding away at their keyboards in the latest hustle for money.

The people working at this clandestine locale are "gold farmers." Every day, in 12-hour shifts, they "play" computer games by killing onscreen monsters and winning battles, harvesting artificial gold coins and other virtual goods as rewards that, as it turns out, can be transformed into real cash.

That is because, from Seoul to San Francisco, affluent online gamers who lack the time and patience to work their way up to the higher levels of gamedom are willing to pay the young Chinese here to play the early rounds for them.

"For 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, my colleagues and I are killing monsters," said a 23-year-old gamer who works here in this makeshift factory and goes by the online code name Wandering. "I make about $250 a month, which is pretty good compared with the other jobs I've had. And I can play games all day."

He and his comrades have created yet another new business out of cheap Chinese labor. They are tapping into the fast-growing world of "massively multiplayer online games," which involve role playing and often revolve around fantasy or warfare in medieval kingdoms or distant galaxies.

With more than 100 million people worldwide logging on every month to play interactive computer games, game companies are already generating revenues of $3.6 billion a year from subscriptions, according to DFC Intelligence, which tracks the computer gaming market.

For the Chinese in game-playing factories like these, though, it is not all fun and games. These workers have strict quotas and are supervised by bosses who equip them with computers, software and Internet connections to thrash online trolls, gnomes and ogres.

As they grind through the games, they accumulate virtual currency that is valuable to game players around the world. The games allow players to trade currency to other players, who can then use it to buy better armor, amulets, magic spells and other accoutrements to climb to higher levels or create more powerful characters.

The Internet is now filled with classified advertisements from small companies - many of them here in China - auctioning for real money their powerful figures, called avatars. These ventures join individual gamers who started marketing such virtual weapons and wares a few years ago to help support their hobby.

"I'm selling an account with a level-60 Shaman," says one ad from a player code-named Silver Fire, who uses QQ, the popular Chinese instant messaging service here in China. "If you want to know more details, let's chat on QQ."

This virtual economy is blurring the line between fantasy and reality. A few years ago, online subscribers started competing with other players from around the world. And before long, many casual gamers started asking other people to baby-sit for their accounts, or play while they were away.

That has spawned the creation of hundreds - perhaps thousands - of online gaming factories here in China. By some estimates, there are well over 100,000 young people working in China as full-time gamers, toiling away in dark Internet cafes, abandoned warehouses, small offices and private homes.

Most of the players here actually make less than a quarter an hour, but they often get room, board and free computer game play in these "virtual sweatshops."

"It's unimaginable how big this is," says Chen Yu, 27, who employs 20 full-time gamers here in Fuzhou. "They say that in some of these popular games, 40 or 50 percent of the players are actually Chinese farmers."

For many online gamers, the point is no longer simply to play. Instead they hunt for the fanciest sword or the most potent charm, or seek a shortcut to the thrill of sparring at the highest level. And all of that is available - for a price.

"What we're seeing here is the emergence of virtual currencies and virtual economies," says Peter Ludlow, a longtime gamer and a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "People are making real money here, so these games are becoming like real economies."

The Chinese government estimates that there are 24 million online gamers in China, meaning that nearly one in four Internet users here play online games.

And many online gaming factories have come to resemble the thousands of textile mills and toy factories that have moved here from Taiwan, Hong Kong and other parts of the world to take advantage of China's vast pool of cheap labor.

"They're exploiting the wage difference between the U.S. and China for unskilled labor," says Edward Castronova, a professor of telecommunications at Indiana University and the author of "Synthetic Worlds," a study of the economy of online games. "The cost of someone's time is much bigger in America than in China."

But gold farming is controversial. Many hard-core gamers say the factories are distorting the games. What is more, the big gaming companies say the factories are violating the terms of use of the games, which forbid players to sell their virtual goods for real money. They have vowed to crack down on those suspected of being small businesses rather than individual gamers.

"We know that such business exists, and we are against it," says Guolong Jin, a spokesman for N-Sina, a Chinese joint venture with NC Soft, the Korean creator of Lineage, one of the most popular online games. "Playing games should be fun and entertaining. It's not a way to trade and make money."

Blizzard Entertainment, a division of Vivendi Universal and the creator of World of Warcraft, one of the world's most popular games with more than 4.5 million online subscribers, has also called the trading illegal.

But little has been done to halt the mushrooming black market in virtual goods, many available for sale on eBay, Yahoo and other online sites.

On eBay, for example, 100 grams of World of Warcraft gold is available for $9.99 or two über characters from EverQuest for $35.50. It costs $269 to be transported to Level 60 in Warcraft, and it typically takes 15 days to get the account back at the higher level.

In fact, the trading of virtual property is so lucrative that some big online gaming companies have jumped into the business, creating their own online marketplaces.

Sony Online Entertainment, the creator of EverQuest, a popular medieval war and fantasy game, recently created Station Exchange. Sony calls the site an alternative to "crooked sellers in unsanctioned auctions."

Other start-up companies are also rushing in, acting as international brokers to match buyers and sellers in different countries, and contracting out business to Chinese gold-farming factories.

"We're like a stock exchange. You can buy and sell with us," says Alan Qiu, a founder of the Shanghai-based Ucdao.com. "We farm out the different jobs. Some people say, 'I want to get from Level 1 to 60,' so we find someone to do that."

Now there are factories all over China. In central Henan Province, one factory has 300 computers. At another factory in western Gansu Province, the workers log up to 18 hours a day.

The operators are mostly young men like Luo Gang, a 28-year-old college graduate who borrowed $25,000 from his father to start an Internet cafe that morphed into a gold farm on the outskirts of Chongqing in central China.

Mr. Luo has 23 workers, who each earn about $75 a month.

"If they didn't work here they'd probably be working as waiters in hot pot restaurants," he said, "or go back to help their parents farm the land - or more likely, hang out on the streets with no job at all."

Here in coastal Fujian Province, several gold farm operators offered access to their underground facilities recently, on the condition that their names not be disclosed because the legal and tax status of some of the operations is in question.

One huge site here in Fuzhou has over 100 computers in a series of large, dark rooms. About 70 players could be seen playing quietly one weekday afternoon, while some players slept by the keyboard.

"We recruit through newspaper ads," said the 30-something owner, whose workers range from 18 to 25 years old. "They all know how to play online games, but they're not willing to do hard labor."

Another operation here has about 40 computers lined up in the basement of an old dilapidated building, all playing the same game. Upstairs were unkempt, closet-size dormitory rooms where several gamers slept on bunk beds; the floors were strewn with hot pots.

The owners concede that the risks are enormous. The global gaming companies regularly shut accounts they suspect are engaged in farming. And the government here is cracking down on Internet addiction now, monitoring more closely how much time each player spends online.

To survive, the factories employ sophisticated gaming strategies. They hide their identities online, hire hackers to seek out new strategies, and create automatic keys to bolster winnings.

But at some point, says Mr. Yu, the Fuzhou factory operator who started out selling computer supplies and now has an army of gamers outside his office here, he knows he will have to move on.

"My ultimate goal is to do Internet-based foreign trade," he says, sitting in a bare office with a solid steel safe under his desk. "Online games are just my first step into the business."

On how megachurches don't celebrate Sunday Christmas. WTF?

When Christmas Falls on Sunday, Megachurches Take the Day Off
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Some of the nation's most prominent megachurches have decided not to hold worship services on the Sunday that coincides with Christmas Day, a move that is generating controversy among evangelical Christians at a time when many conservative groups are battling to "put the Christ back in Christmas."

Megachurch leaders say that the decision is in keeping with their innovative and "family friendly" approach and that they are compensating in other ways. Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., always a pacesetter among megachurches, is handing out a DVD it produced for the occasion that features a heartwarming contemporary Christmas tale.

"What we're encouraging people to do is take that DVD and in the comfort of their living room, with friends and family, pop it into the player and hopefully hear a different and more personal and maybe more intimate Christmas message, that God is with us wherever we are," said Cally Parkinson, communications director at Willow Creek, which draws 20,000 people on a typical Sunday.

Megachurches have long been criticized for offering "theology lite," but some critics say that this time the churches have gone too far in the quest to make Christianity accessible to spiritual seekers.

"I see this in many ways as a capitulation to narcissism, the self-centered, me-first, I'm going to put me and my immediate family first agenda of the larger culture," said Ben Witherington III, professor of New Testament interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky. "If Christianity is an evangelistic religion, then what kind of message is this sending to the larger culture - that worship is an optional extra?"

John D. Witvliet, director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship at Calvin College, asked: "What about the people in society without strong family connections? The elderly, single people a long distance from family, or people who are simply lonely and for whom church and prayers would be a significant part of their day?"

The uproar is not only over closing the churches on Christmas Day, because some evangelical churches large and small have done that in recent years and made Christmas Eve the big draw, without attracting much criticism.

What some consider the deeper affront is in canceling services on a Sunday, which most Christian churches consider the Lord's Day, when communal worship is an obligation. The last time Christmas fell on a Sunday was in 1994. Some of these same megachurches remained open them, they say, but found attendance sparse.

Since then, the perennial culture wars over the secularization of Christmas have intensified, and this year the scuffles are especially lively. Conservative Christian groups are boycotting stores that fail to mention "Christmas" in their holiday greetings or advertising campaigns. Schools are being pressured to refer to the December vacation as "Christmas break." Even the White House came under attack this week for sending out cards with best wishes for the "holiday season."

When the office of Gov. Sonny Perdue of Georgia sent out a press release last Friday announcing plans for a "holiday tree" lighting, a half-hour later it sent out another saying, "It is in fact a Christmas tree."

For years, it has been an open secret that many mainline Protestant churches are half empty - or worse - on Christmas Day. The churches' emphasis has been instead on the days leading up to Christmas, with Christmas Eve attracting the most worshipers. Some of the megachurches closing on Christmas this year have increased the number of services in the days before.

But for the vast majority of the other churches, closing down on Christmas Sunday would be unthinkable.

"I can't even imagine not observing Christmas in an Episcopal church," said Robert Williams, a spokesman for the Episcopal Church USA. "The only thing I could think of would be a summer chapel that might be shut down anyway."

In many Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, known for their rich liturgical traditions, Christmas Day attracts far more worshippers than an average Sunday. Grown children return with their parents to the parishes they belonged to when they were young.

"From the Catholic perspective, the whole purpose of the holiday is to celebrate it as a religious holiday in the company of the community, and for Catholics that means at Mass," said Robert J. Miller, director of research and planning in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

Canceling worship on Christmas Day appears to be predominantly a megachurch phenomenon, sociologists of religion say.

"This attachment to a particular day on the calendar is just not something that megachurches have been known for," Nancy Ammerman, a sociologist of religion at Boston University, said. "They're known for being flexible and creative, and not for taking these traditions, seasons, dates and symbols really seriously."

At least eight megachurches have canceled their Christmas services. They are only a fraction of the 1,200 or so in the country, but they are influential, Scott Thumma, a sociologist of religion at Hartford Seminary, said. The trend has been reported in The Lexington Herald-Leader and in other newspapers.

Besides Willow Creek, the churches include Southland Christian Church in Nicholasville, Ky.; Crossroads Christian Church in Lexington, Ky.; Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Tex.; Redemption World Outreach Center in Greenville, S.C.; North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Ga.; First Baptist in Atlanta; and Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Mich.

Many other megachurches that are staying open on Christmas Day are holding fewer services than they would on a typical Sunday. New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, in Lithonia, Ga., with about 25,000 members, will hold only one of its usual two services this Christmas Day.

Bishop Eddie L. Long, the senior pastor, said that his church was "always promoting family," and that many members of his congregation were transplants to the Atlanta area who traveled far away to be with their families on Christmas.

"We're encouraging our members to do a family worship," Bishop Long said. "They could wake up and read Scripture and pray and sometimes sing a song, and go over the true meaning of what Christmas is, before opening up their gifts. It keeps them together and not running off to get dressed up to go off to church."

His church offers streaming video of the Sunday service, and Bishop Long said he expected a spike in viewers this Christmas. "They have an option if they want to join their family around the computer and worship with us," he said.

Staff members at Willow Creek said they had had few complaints from members about the church closing on Christmas. Said the Rev. Mark Ashton, whose title is pastor of spiritual discovery: "We've always been a church that's been on the edge of innovation. We've been willing to try and experiment, so this is another one of those innovations."

The real question is not why churches are skipping Christmas, but why individual Christians are skipping church on the second holiest day on the Christian calendar next to Easter, said Mr. Thumma.

"I think these critics who decry the megachurches should really be aiming their barbs at individual Christians who are willing to stay at home around the Christmas tree instead of coming and giving at least part of that day to the meaning of the holiday," he said. "They should be facing up to the reality of that."

On religious education for toddlers

A Church Reaches Out to the Very Young
By KATIE ZEZIMA

BOSTON, Dec. 9 - "May almighty God bless the mommies and daddies and brothers and sisters," the Rev. Patrick Gray of the Episcopal Church of the Advent here said to the Sunday school class. "And us, so we continue to grow big and strong."

Ezra Gray, the pastor's 21-month-old son, started clamoring for some cookies to help him do just that, while Matthew Murphy erupted into a big, gummy smile and cooed in response to the prayer.

It was another Sunday morning at Beulah Land, the church's worship class for children under 3. The 15- to 20-minute class teaches Bible stories and Christian tenets to children using songs and stories illustrated with characters that affix to a felt board.

Father Gray and his wife, Naomi, started the group in September, after a midweek church playgroup that had no religious content exploded in popularity with neighborhood mothers. Father Gray wanted to provide the children and their parents a more spiritual way to enter into the parish community.

"When you have kids you start thinking about church again," he said. "I was thinking, What's going to make it easy to come to church? Why not have what they're used to? What they're used to is story time at the public library, where you sing a couple of songs, tell a story, sing some more and play with blocks."

Father Gray starts the group with a prayer and sings songs like "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands." He then moves onto a Bible story, which is told in a rather grown-up way, as when he recited some of the Ten Commandments for the children. All the while he illustrates the story with the felt characters. After the children sing a few songs, the toys come out of the closet.

Bible study classes for school-age children and religious educational activities for preschoolers are common. But classes for children who still have months to go in diapers are extremely rare.

Joan Lucariello, a professor of early childhood development at Boston College, does not believe that infants can process such concepts. Infants take vocabulary one word at a time, she said, but cannot comprehend a narrative story. They can relate to literal everyday routines like lunchtime by age 2. They cannot, however, grasp abstract notions of God and religion.

"It's not plausible that infants could understand that," Professor Lucariello said.

Father Gray does not make any claims about how much the children learn.

"Do they have any idea what's going on?" he asked. "I don't know. Infants pay more attention than toddlers. It's sort of evangelistic, but it's fun. We just want to have some fun with this."

Father Gray uses the Beulah Land curriculum, which was developed for children ages 3 to 10 by Gretchen Wolff Pritchard, a New Haven religious educator.

The curriculum has teachers read traditional Bible stories in adult language to the children and illustrate them with colorful characters on a felt board. About 250 churches in the United States and Canada use the curriculum, according to Beulah Enterprises, which sells the materials.

Ms. Pritchard said that she had not heard of another parish using the curriculum with such young children, and she said that the company planned to reach out to that age group in the coming year.

"The goal of it is to make the scriptural stories accessible to children through a special vocabulary of visual forms," Ms. Pritchard said.

While some biblical imagery could be considered too graphic for such small children, Ms. Pritchard believes that children should be told all of the stories from Scripture, though their perspective would change as they grow up. Ms. Pritchard believes that too many programs focus simply on the moral of a story rather than the story itself.

"I don't like the way Bible stories are prettified and cutefied for small children," she said. "It's not about the moral, it's the story, and you need to present the story so they can process the story in a way that's right for them. If you tell them a preprocessed story, when they outgrow that version you've given them, they have nothing."

Parents say their children are getting something out of Beulah Land, although they cannot quantify exactly what.

Lori Farnan, whose sons Matthew and Michael Murphy were among the half-dozen children at the Beulah Land session, said 2-year-old Michael was especially struck by the story of Noah's Ark.

"Michael plays with his toys and pairs them in twos," she said. "He definitely got it from class. It's nice and short, 15 minutes, and it's enough to keep their attention. They really do pay attention."

For Susie Maxwell, Beulah Land has been a way for their family to become involved in the church. They moved from Ithaca, N.Y., last year, and heard about the group at a local playground. Her two children, Audrey, 2, and Peter, 6 months, attend each Wednesday and love it, she said.

"It's not a long story, and Patrick doesn't dumb it down," she said. "It's a real story from the Bible, and the bright images, and I know they get something out of it."

This past Sunday, Father Gray started with a prayer and a song about how God made cows and creepy things. The story was about Moses and the Ten Commandments.

"Do you remember how Moses went out of Egypt?" Father Gray asked. Ezra picked at some cereal while Harriet Lewis-Bowen, who will turn 2 this month, stared at Father Gray from her mother's lap. "Moses led the children of Israel to the shores of the Red Sea," Father Gray said, placing blue strips that looked like waves on the felt board. To their left was a cluster of brightly colored people. Behind them was a darkly colored group of people. "The Red Sea was to the front, and the enemy was behind."

Father Gray continued with the story, and placed a felt cutout of Moses, in a brown robe, on top of a mountain. Father Gray had Moses throw stone tablets, also made of felt, onto the floor.

"Do not lie, cheat, kill or steal. Live in fairness and truth. And again Moses brought the law to the children of Israel," Father Gray said.

A father added, "Or commit adultery," to the parents' amusement. The children started to shift around a bit, and Father Gray had them sing a round where parents crouched down and lifted the kids high into the air on alternating alleluias. It was then time for cookies, juice and toys.