World issues in our own backyards.

On the streets of Dothan, a city of about sixty thousand in southeast Alabama, I occasionally encounter readers who ask what I find to be a curious question:

"Why is there so much filler in the paper?

Do you just run out of news?"

Those readers aren't talking about the list of graduates from Dothan High School or a preview of a new play at the junior college. In a local paper, that information, along with obituaries, city council reports, and the police blotter, is news.

What they consider "filler" are stories often relegated to the back pages--dispatches from far-flung reporters relaying world events to stateside readers.

Such attitudes are dismaying. How does a local newspaper urge its readers to care about international news?

Dr. Jerry E. Brown, dean of the University of Montana's School of Journalism, has a simple answer, a homespun message he gave students in the community journalism class he taught at Auburn University years ago.

You have to put the corn down where the cows can get to it.

Two years ago, I joined a group of NCEW members led by Kate Stanley of the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis on a trip to cover the world AIDS conference in Bangkok. We visited the dirty streets of Cambodia and India to examine primitive efforts to staunch the spread of the disease in poor countries. Kate later admitted, somewhat sheepishly, that she questioned the wisdom of taking along an editorial writer from a local newspaper in Alabama. She allowed me to join the group despite her reservations. Over the next three weeks, she changed her mind about the potential impact of reporting found in a comparatively small publication.

I returned to Alabama with heartbreaking stories from exotic locales. In order to make our readers care, I drew from the home front of the AIDS battle, contrasting the differences of southeast Alabama and Southeast Asia and highlighting similarities to show how our community and others face a common challenge in battling a runaway disease.

A more palpable example of localizing international stories is the intriguing history of Joe Cook. In a city of sixty thousand residents, most people assume the small Asian community is made up of Vietnamese refugees delivered to our town in the 1970s, or Asian Americans from families of military men who returned with Asian wives to retire near Fort Rucker, a military post in the next county. For most people who meet Joe, an affable chef in Dothan's only Japanese steakhouse, he seems no different from any other resident of Asian extraction.

They couldn't be more wrong. I've told Joe's story in columns over the past two years, and readers have embraced the young man and a noble mission he's taken on.

Joe is Cambodian, and was a happy five-year-old when Pol Pot's scruffy band of Khmer Rouge soldiers fanned across the country capturing, torturing, and killing anyone who didn't fit the mold for the mysterious leader's vision of a reformed agrarian nation called Kampuchea.

Joe's family literally scattered, hoping to reunite beyond the Thai border. His father, a Cambodian military officer, was killed. Joe was captured and taken to an interrogation and torture center. One of his sisters disappeared.

Almost 1.8 million were killed. But many escaped the bullet and the blade and have been attempting to rebuild their country ever since. Many more escaped entirely, crossing the border from Cambodia and creating new lives in other countries.

Joe Cook is one of them. Held captive more than a year, Joe eventually escaped the camp and reunited with his mother, brother, and a sister in Thailand. The family was later relocated to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where Joe grew up as a Southerner. He learned the art of Japanese cooking and has made a career of entertaining diners with quick, Khmer-tinged Southern patter--"How ya mamma and dee-um?"--as he whips up eight meals at a time.

Over lunch one day, Joe told me about his childhood outside his Cambodian village, where he and his playmates would entertain themselves making up games with sticks when they couldn't find errant unspent Vietnam-era ammunition to toss into pits of burning banyan branches and hide until the pits exploded. Joe's thin brown back bears the scars of shrapnel from a booby trap he set off by pulling a wire he thought might lead to a radio.

He tells these stories with a detachment that hints at the gulf between his past and present.

Two years ago, he learned his missing sister was alive in Cambodia. He flew to Phnom Penh, traveled into the countryside, and found the sibling he assumed had died three decades before. During his visit, he discovered the children of his sister's village had no knowledge of baseball, Joe's favorite sport.

Joe now makes an annual pilgrimage to Cambodia, where he has single-handedly introduced the youngsters of the province to the game of baseball. Dothan is their Cooperstown, where baseball--"throw ball" they call it--originates.

Our franchise is local news, but we cannot leave our readers to remain cloistered in their own community. They will care about the world, if we show them that the world is their own.

Bill Perkins is editorial page editor of the Dothan Eagle in Alabama. E-mail Bperkins@ dothaneagle.com