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World Humanitarian Day

maggie soladay — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 19:13:13 +0000

World Humanitarian Day is August 19, 2010

The 2010 World Humanitarian Day project is a collaborative film shot in over 40 countries in under 9 weeks, on a shoestring budget – with the goal of showing the enormous diversity of places, faces and endeavors of humanitarian aid workers in 2010.

It was filmed by humanitarian staff and freelance filmmakers from around the globe (over 50 contributors in total) with all time donated.

www.worldhumanitarianday.info

See you all again in August 2011!

In Ethiopia: Birthing Injuries, Infant Mortality, and what we are going to do about it.

maggie soladay — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 03:11:49 +0000

In November 2010, SalaamGarage is bringing a team of humanitarian media makers to Ethiopia. The stories we will be creating will tell of the work being done to repair, prevent, and treat obstetric fistulas at the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital. Fistula is a terrible but preventable birthing injury that renders the woman incontinent, leaking feces or urine from the vaginal canal. Untreated, the woman becomes a pariah, sometimes abandoned by their husbands and banished by their families. A fistula can be caused by obstructed labor, still births, and when a physically underdeveloped girl’s pelvis is too narrow for child birth causing labors sometimes as long as 10 days.

Below is a slideshow that was produced for NPR in 2007 that explains obstetric fistula and explores some of the causes. At the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital lives and livelihoods are saved every day. Every woman who comes to them with child birth injuries is treated completely free.

Hospital Gives Ethiopian Women a Chance at Care
by Brenda Wilson

The Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital performs about 3000 surgeries per year. That number can and will go down. As you read this and listen to the attached programs, the Fistula Hospital is opening mini hospitals throughout the Ethiopian countryside. The hospital trains midwives and doctors, educates women on their rights, cures the injured, and supports the incurable. Like so many problems women face in the developing world, this one is hard to solve with one big action. Malnutrition, child brides, women’s health inequalities and status, poverty, and other situations makes this a persistent but solvable problem.

Join us in Ethiopia November 21-Dec 2, 2010 for a 13 day itinerary from Addis Ababa to Lalibela, Ethiopia. Create stories to raise awareness and inspire change. What are you going to do to eradicate obstetric fistulas and the inequalities and suffering that come with it?

Deadline August 21, 2010

Required viewing for all participants: The NOVA Documentary A Walk to Beautiful: “The award winning feature-length documentary A Walk to Beautiful tells the stories of five Ethiopian women who suffer from devastating childbirth injuries and embark on a journey to reclaim their lost dignity. Rejected by their husbands and ostracized by their communities, these women are left to spend the rest of their lives in loneliness and shame. They make the choice to take the long and arduous journey to the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in search of a cure and a new life.” (available at Netflix instantly & by mail)

Click here for more from Brenda Wilson for NPR’s All Things Considered

Selam. Peace. Salaam. Shalom.

Daysha Eaton and Janat Horn published in Vietnam

maggie soladay — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 02:37:48 +0000

http://www.thanhniennews.com/features/?catid=10&newsid=55297

Photographer Janat Horn and Journalist Daysha Eaton’s Vietnam landmines story published at Vietnamese English Language paper Thanh Nie News. Congrats you two!

Exerpt:

50-year-old Cuc lives in Dong Ha, just west of Hue. She has called the dusty town of less than twenty thousand people home for most of her life.

She survived the war years unharmed. But about ten years later a remnant of the war changed her life forever.

“It was an afternoon in 1986. I was cleaning the garden with my father. There was a landmine and I was severely injured. I just lay there in the garden for about an hour and then my family took me to hospital.”

It all happened so fast that she doesn’t remember much about the accident, only that people said it was a cluster bomb.

However, she does recall the despair she felt when she woke up in the hospital. “When I woke up the next day, I found out I had lost parts of my body… people were frightened when they saw me. When my family brought my son in, he was one year old then, he was scared and cried and he just wanted to go home. I was downhearted and I didn’t want to go back to my family.”

Unfortunately, Cuc’s story is not uncommon in Quang Tri. Since the war ended in 1975 more than seven thousand people have been killed or injured by unexploded ordnance, or UXO, in the province.

Thanks to SalaamGarage partner NGO Peacetrees Vietnam for being so instrumental in clearing Quang Tri Provence of UXO’s. Please read further this powerful story reported on during January 2010 SalaamGarage Trip to Vietnam here:

http://www.thanhniennews.com/features/?catid=10&newsid=55297

Passion is the Jet Fuel

AmandaKoster — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:43:17 +0000

Q&A

“Drocolate” of in-this-economy.com wanted to ask me (Amanda Koster) a few questions about SxSW.

Drocolate: Why should I attend your core conversation at SXSW?

A.Koster: Compare the velocity of media and society’s response of Huricane Katrina vs. the Haiti Earthquake. Also, listen to: http://salaamgarage.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/AmandaKoster_podcast_sxsw2010.mp3

Drocolate: What makes you the right person to be conducting this conversation?

A.Koster: I’m an outsider. I’m not from the tech arena. When I presented at Gnomedex in 2008, I did not have an iPhone or Twitter account. Facebook did not make much sense to me. I thought FB was innovative online dating. Since then I have been able to harness storytelling, social media and passion all for social change. If I can do that, anyone can. The passion to tell a story is the jet fuel behind citizen journalism. And it has been passion, not assignments, that got me here right now. I’ve been working as a photojournalist, writer, author for about 15 years though it has been my personal projects, again not assignments, that propelled my career and life beyond where I ever thought it could go.

Citizen journalism is more powerful than I could have ever been imagined and it is growing. Because we believe in these things it makes Amanda Rose of Twestival and I the perfect people to lead this conversation.

Drocolate: What advice would you give to aspiring citizen journalists (other than attending your convo at SXSW, of course)?

A.Koster: Your personal stories and perspectives are more valuable than ever. Make GOOD content and get it out to a relevant audience. And, there’s more to it than that:

Have a plan. SalaamGarage builds relationships/projects/plans with NGOs far in advance. We do not advocate what I call ‘drive-by-shootings’ (just showing up, shooting photos, then jet).

Be authentic. We want intimacy. I think people are tired of the slick, heavily produced story. We see through it. With the wildfire of social media and intentionally constructed social communities, impersonal, glossy stories delivered by a generic, safe personality is rapidly loosing ground.

Be relevant. Not worth telling a story about t-shirts to a dog trainer. Even if it’s the most compelling t-shirt story ever. Be relevant and focused.
Know your audience. Tell them a story 1) you care about and 2)they want to hear.

Care. There are ‘hot’ stories to tell, but you outta care about it. I travel all over the world all the time with SalaamGarage and as an free-lance journalist. There are stories that resonate with me, and other that just don’t. The advantage of being a citizen journalist is that you get to choose your story, verses being assigned something that is not dear to you.

DO SOMETHING with it. Share. Everyone is sitting on a novel, but if a tree falls in the woods….. I’ll leave it at that.

I am very passionate about this and have a lot more (not big on advice) ideas around this topic, though, this is the topic of our conversation so come join the conversation.

Drocolate: Where is your dream location to take a citizen journalism project? Antarctica? Atlantis? Detroit? Where?’

A.Koster: The White House

Four Men Severely Injured by Bomb near Khe Sahn, Vietnam

maggie soladay — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 23:06:40 +0000

Last month, January 2010, Amanda Koster and the rest of the SalaamGarage team visited Khe Sanh to experience first hand the work of NGO Peacetrees Vietnam. While there, they learned about UXOs (unexploded ordnance) left from the Vietnam War and the dangers they cause to the local farmers and their families still today.

Unfortunately the event they fear most happened again this week. Four men who were weeding at a coffee plantation near the former US military base at Khe Sahn were seriously injured Sunday Feb. 7, 2010 when they accidently detonated a hidden bomb.

Landmines.org reported, “‘My hoe hit the bomb while I was removing weeds from around a coffee tree,’ Chung said. ‘My cousins were all behind me. I don’t know what the ordnance was.’ Chung said he was in severe pain because all four of his limbs were badly injured. The explosion severed his right hand’s thumb and index finger. Open wounds could be seen on his left thigh and shin, and his right foot was badly injured.

For more on this story please visit Landmines.org

photos by Amanda Koster, 2010

Vatsalya Stories: Sugan Chose Lisa

maggie soladay — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:00:22 +0000

On the SalaamGarage trip to India in September 2009, Lisa was moved like I rarely ever see. Everyone who travels with SalaamGarage gets to choose the story they are going to tell but for Lisa, it was she who was chosen.
Lisa Field-Elliot and Eduardo Sciammarella, 2 of the 10 participants on the India project, chose to report on the Women’s Self-Help Groups that Jaipur, India based Vatsalya.org runs. None of us knew how amazing and life changing this program was till we experienced it.

Lisa describes what it was like when she met Sugan: “She put her arm around me and called me sister. She gave me a beautiful Rajasthani dress, that may take her up to six months to replace, because she wanted me to wear it when I came to visit her home.” Lisa adds, “Sugan knew that we are the same. We are women. We are mothers. We are curious seekers of beauty and connection. We enjoy laughter and tea. We want only the best for our children. We care for our homes and want to be useful outside them. Our hearts are open.”

“It only took a moment, an afternoon, for Sugan and I to really see one another. To see ourselves, reflected back, in the simplicity of who we are. What I learned from my time with Sugan in the rural Indian village of Shampura, is that, at the bottom of things, we are the same. That our stories collide in a meeting. My story about Sugan is as much about myself as it is about her. It is about connection, being seen, and helping a woman, a sister, realize her potential in this world.”

For more of Lisa’s beautiful and breathtaking words, please read about her visit to the Durgah Sufi Shrine in Ajmer India at her blog entry called “Thread”

Lisa Field-Elliot’s blog Doorwaystraveler
twitter.com/doorwaystravelr

From Dong Ha to Khe Sanh Vietnam by Daysha

superstringer — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:44:39 +0000

The past few days have been a whirlwind. Before we left Dong Ha, the group traveled to the Truong Son Cemetery, the Vietnamese equivalent of Arlington National Cemetery. I lit incense and placed it before the towering monument at the entrance then proceeded to walk around the beautiful grounds. The scene was stunning and the monuments beautiful, but the reality of where I was set in as I read the names and dates of the fallen soldiers from a list on one of the walls. Than Nho, 1967, Thanh Long, 1969 … Than Duong 1970. These guys were dying at the same time my dad was over here fighting. Next we visited the Demilitarized Zone, or the DMZ. Basically this is a river that was designated a dividing line between North & South Vietnam after the first Indochina War and was made official during the Geneva Conference in 1954. We walked across a bridge and visited a replica of the building where the Post-Colonial Conference was held on that very spot. The Vietnamese are big on replicas, I’ve noticed. We stopped for lunch at a seaside restaurant where they served everything that moved in the sea – squid, crab, prawns and my standby rice and steamed morning glory vines. We ate giant grapefruits and Vietnamese Apples dipped in a hot & sour sea salt mixture for dessert. Next we went to the Vinh Moc Tunnels. This was pretty interesting and it was nice to get some physical activity rather than just riding around in van from monument to monument. Local people built the Vinh Moc Tunnels in 1966 as shelter from the constant raining of artillery on their villages. They were used until 1972. The whole village basically moved underground for six years. They had one toilet for everyone. They had a hospital and a birthing room. A generation of babies was born down there. They watched films together in a common room. But when I say room, think Hobbit-size. We are talking small spaces here. This tunnel was not made for a nearly 6-foot tall woman like me. I had to duck just to get into the entry and stay hunched over for the entire tour. I also forgot my flashlight, so I’d have to rely on others to guide me through. Water dripped down the red clay walls of the tunnel as I walked blindly down stairways carved into the earth. Down, down, down we descended into the place where these people, caught in the middle of the war, retreated to try to go about some semblance of normal life. I was most worried about a giant spider I’d seen in the museum area before I went in. It grew warmer as we descended and the tunnel grew narrower. I used my yoga breathing to overcome the spider thought and to keep claustrophobia from taking hold. Now we are in Khe Sanh. The first day was spent meeting with the PeaceTrees de-miners at nearby Cua Village. The de-miners showed us how they survey the area with metal detectors. They have about 20 of 42 hectares cleared. Mostly they’re finding rifle grenade shells (M-79’s) but they say they also find cluster munitions and bigger bombs up to 175 pounds. The de-mining unit has been lent to PeaceTrees by the Vietnamese government. The leader of the unit, clad in a metal helmet and fatigues, led us down a trail where we crossed a single wood-plank bridge over a creek toward the minefield. The other two photographers stayed back. Amanda & I crossed over. On the other side the de-miner showed us two cases which we learned were first aid kits — the larger one the size of a suitcase. Then the de-miner led us to a sign marked with skull & crossbones. This was the place I needed to go. On the other side three uniformed men scanned a grid with metal detectors. The leader of the team took us over to a pile of brush and he began uncovering a hole. Inside were somewhere between one and two dozen pieces of unexploded ordinance, or UXO. He told us that they destroy the UXO once a week on Thursdays. It was Monday, and this was what they’d found so far. As I stared at the explosives I thought of the disabled people I’d met in Dong Ha, Ms. Cuc, who’d lost both legs while gardening, Mr. Phuaung who had lost a leg and an eye while planting a tree an Li, who is now confined to a wheelchair because his injuries are so extensive. I knew I should be afraid, but somehow I wasn’t. I knew I was in the right place at the right time and that this story was important to tell. Yesterday we visited Xing village in Thuan Commune just outside Khe Sanh along the Lao border. This area is home to Vietnam’s ethnic minorities, the Van Kieu and the Paco. In Xing I heard a story from a community leader about how his brother was killed while hunting for metal. He told me he was grateful for the work PeaceTrees is doing, especially the kindergartens they’ve set up to help kids learn Vietnamese and to learn to stay away from UXO’s. His son is enrolled. He also told me that Typhoon Ketsana, which hit this fall, uncovered three 150lb bombs in his rice field. He says he called the PeaceTrees hotline to have them removed. I asked him if he thought of selling them and she said definitely not. I asked him how much he made per year on his rice field. He told me he earns about 5 million dong per year, or about $250USD. I asked him how much he could get for each bomb if he decided to sell it on the scrap metal market and told me 7 million dong EACH, more than $300 per bomb or about $1,000 for all three. Pretty big incentive. Today I’m going to see UXO’s destroyed by the de-mining unit and then I’m going to metal scrap yards to learn more about metal hunting. And so goes the freelancing life … -by Daysha Eaton, originally published at Superstringer.com

Village Batzchocola- Agros and SalaamGarge Summer 2010

maggie soladay — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 05:11:45 +0000

photo from Agros International

For more beauty from Agros International and the villages, like Batzchocola, they work to help throughout rural Guatemala.
www.agros.org/ag/our-villages/guatemala/batzchocola/

Join Us in Guatemala Summer 2010

Here are the stories we will be working on in Guatemala with Agros International. Choose yours!

Eduardo in India with SalaamGarage- Identity for the women of Shampura Village

maggie soladay — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:16:00 +0000

Eduardo Sciammarella, CEO of Los Angeles based Protohaus, joined the SalaamGarage India 2009 team to help make a difference for disadvantaged women and children. We asked Eduardo what stood out as he worked on his humanitarian stories in a rural village called Shampura outside Jaipur where NGO Vatsalya works.
Eduardo interviewing Santosh with the help of Manju from Vatsalya & local college student interpreter Aditi. Photo by Maggie Soladay

Eduardo said, “the woman I interviewed is Santosh Kanwar, she’s 26 with 4 little ones – Anshuman, Radha, Deepika, and Abnishiek. She touched me as deeply as it gets when she answered my question ‘what has been the biggest change for you since you joined the women’s self-help group?’ She said that she had finally learned the first names of all the women in her village. Up until then they only knew each other as so and so’s wife. Step one on the path to independence – identity.”

Santosh Kanwar photo by Eduardo Sciammarella

Eduardo’s portrait of Santosh and her kids:

Santosh Kanwar photo by Eduardo Sciammarella

-Maggie Soladay, India 2009 trip producer

Udayan Home for Children, Part of Vatsalya.org

maggie soladay — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 15:45:24 +0000

This past week the SalaamGarage team of storytellers for India 2009 have been hard at work building stories, interviewing, recording, observing and participating in so many of Vatsalya’s great projects around Jaipur, India.

Here are a few flip videos I recorded at Udayan home for children and Anoothi shop run by Vatsalya.org