He paused from an interview several times to assist customers.
"It's more productive out here since they came," Craig Pruitt, 16, said, pausing from a playground basketball game.
"Americans should finish the Taliban from Afghanistan," Khadin Hussain, 22, said as he paused from tacking a new sole on a worn sandal.
Inside the store, a young worker in the produce section paused from filling a bag of onions.
On the assembly line, 37-year-old Tatyana Naidyonova, an apron covering her Harley-Davidson T-shirt, paused from cleaning a machine with kerosene and agreed.
"It's good the Americans are coming, they may bring peace to Basilan," said Abdullah Sadalani, pausing from an afternoon Koran discussion group at Al Monsour, a mosque built on concrete stilts in a wooden-stilt shantytown over the wash of the harbor here.
It is as if Mr. Gates had just paused from contemplation for a few words with the camera.
— Asked what he considers the major issues in this year's midterm Congressional elections, Claude Nicolas, 24, paused from munching on a sushi roll and crisply ticked off three: jobs, the economy and immigration.
After the roar, after the first ground-trembling collapse sent clouds of pulverized matter billowing through Lower Manhattan, a man paused from his hurried retreat to take in a world now coated with the dust of uncertain gray.
BRAD FIRE CLOUD, stonecutter, paused from his toil on a recent steamy Arkansas morning as sweat streamed into his short, black beard.
