It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the size of the refugee problem confronting the world today. According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, more than 30,000 people are forced to flee their homes every day because of conflict or persecution.

But one energetic university professor in Germany decided that bemoaning and hand-wringing wasn't solving anything, so she decided to take action.

Carmen Bachmann is a professor of tax and finance at Leipzig University. There are some 6,000 political refugees living in Leipzig, and the government is only able to supply their basic needs. She could have helped by volunteering for relief agencies that collect clothing or furniture for the refugees, but that didn't seem to her the best use of her time.

"I'm a full professor," she told me when I visited her Leipzig office. "I thought my contribution to [easing] this problem is what my profession is."

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In 1999, Jhumpa Lahiri won a Pulitzer Prize for her very first book, Interpreter of Maladies. Her 2003 novel, Namesake, was turned into a movie, and she went on to publish Unaccustomed Earth and The Lowland.

But Lahiri wasn't satisfied. "I've always been searching to arrive at a certain voice that will probably elude me forever," she tells NPR's Ari Shapiro. So Lahiri is trying something new — very new.

She wrote her new memoir, In Other Words, in Italian. "One week after moving to Rome I started writing in my diary in Italian. That was the first step I took on this road, and I haven't really stopped yet," she says.

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