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!

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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

Santosh Kanwar photo by Eduardo Sciammarella

-Maggie Soladay, India 2009 trip producer

from the original post on her personal blog

passion. commitment. focus. talent. intuition. faith. trust.

many people ask me ‘how do you make your projects happen?’ what people really want to know how on earth i fund them. well, with money of course. but that’s not the real question. anyone can run a credit card. i know several millionaires who are miserable, lost, spent it all, searching, drunk, still working. it doesn’t take money to follow your passion.

it takes having, trusting and following your passion.

that’s the real struggle for most everyone i meet. their initial question ‘how did you/do i fund this’ isn’t the real question. their real question is ‘how do i discover my passion?… how do i know this is my real passion?’ I say if you are asking the question, you are pretty darn close.

at first i charged everything. didn’t dig credit card debt so i discovered grants. i started applying for grants, and was awarded several: The GAP grant, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and The Puffin Foundation, to name a few. i took a fund raising class and learned it’s faster to raise the money myself. i held fundraisers. raised money from my own community who wants to support me. i literally threw parties and made my intentions very clear: ‘this is a fund raising party. I am going to morocco to work on project x, and am looking for financial support. i need to raise x amount of money by x date. this is what i plan to do and this is why it is a good idea.’ then started meeting with universities and now corporations. There are also viral ways to raise money, using the social media tools we are already familiar with. it all works.

amanda working in morocco thanks to her self-taught fundraising skills

its all a collaboration in my eyes, and my work has always been about the greater good. i have found that people want to help. they want to be involved. they too want to get those orphans off the streets in to a legitimate home, put that aids orphan through school, give female, sufi muslim musicians some praise and honor. they just may not know where to start. some people, like me, choose to go to kenya an create these documentaries, these stories. others can help fund it, others can help get it published, get it on tv, in books, on gallery walls, etc. This has all happened for me.

key has been to share the project, and also ask for support. its all a collaboration and once i shared my passion i found they had it too, and were happy to collaborate. then, as if by magic, it all came together. it helps me a lot to be very clear and articulate about my intentions. not only does that help me find support, it helps me pinpoint my vision.

now with SalaamGarage trips people are emailing me asking how to work out the money part.

many of the participants have raised the money on their own, just the way i did. by raising money via blogs, twitter, Facebook, paypal, personal communities, etc., this creates the viral/social media platform and a system of accountability for participants. the people who support them to go on the trip then look forward to seeing results. in turn, this creates goal for the participant to create a project, follow through and share it upon return, which then gets the message of the NGO out there. this also creates a sense of ownership, and also the trip starts when they register vs. when they land in say, Guatemala. helps them pinpoint their vision. (see?)

to break it down it looks like this:

1. discover the passion

2. commit

3. come up with a plan

4. share the passion

5. ask for support

6. get support

7. do the work

8. share the work

9. watch the magic, the whole time.

-Amanda Koster

GroundReport
GroundReport is “hyperlocal news and opinion from around the world.”

The Ground Report website says: “GroundReport is an world news platform that combines digital reporting tools and a selective human network to power the best global citizen journalism on the web.” From wikipedia: enables anyone to publish news reports and videos and earn a share of ad revenues. With a mission statement to ‘democratize the media,’ GroundReport’s 4,000 international contributors report from the scene of world events to add local, on-the-ground insight to international news. To establish trust, GroundReport uses a Wikipedia-like model of volunteer editors and community feedback, combined with a 5-star rating system. Contributors retain rights to their work, and can choose from a range of Creative Commons licenses. The New York-based company was founded by Rachel Sterne in 2006, inspired by her work reporting on Darfur for the United Nations. Follow GroundReport on Twitter

NowPublic
NowPublic, just acquired by the Examiner.com, is called “an innovative Web site for citizen-generated media” in a NYTimes article announcing the deal by Brian Stelter from Sept 1, 2009. NowPublic’s site says that “by harnessing the wisdom of crowds and tapping into the news creating potential of the hundreds of millions of Internet users, bloggers and photography enthusiasts, NowPublic is changing the way news is made and distributed.”

Current
Current.com is the place to find and share stories and videos that are interesting to you. It connects to Current TV, a global cable and satellite TV network. “Current is about what’s going on in your world: all the things you and your friends are actually interested in — that you won’t find on any other news site or cable TV channel.”
Current.com Make TV link How-To produce your current tv show or news program.

Causecast.org
Causecast, dubbed “a one stop philanthropy shop” by TechCrunch, is a platform where media, philanthropy, social networking, entertainment and education converge to serve a greater purpose.
People want to do good, want to be inspired, and want to inspire others to join them in giving back. Causecast makes this easy by providing users with means to CONNECT with people, leaders, charities, nonprofit organizations, and brands that inspire them. Follow CauseCast on Twitter.

OhMyNews International -OhMyNews is a Korea based news organization made up entirely of citizen journalists reporting on news and issues around the world.

The Glimpse.com allows you to share your story if you are living or have lived oversees.
The Glimpse.com CORRESPONDENTS PROGRAM
is supported by National Geographic. Once accepted,Glimpse corespondent’s receive a stipend and support to tell their story. Any skilled photographer or writer can qualify if they are going to be in a place; working, studying or traveling for at least 10 weeks, are between the ages of 18-34, and have an original story to tell.

-Maggie Soladay

follow us on Twitter! @SalaamGarage @MaggieSoladay

The social networking and citizen journalism media explosion has provided plenty of avenues for participating in the creation of news.

How many times today have you updated you Twitter/blog/Facebook account?

The fact that I was late this morning because the F train was slow might not appear worthy of “breaking news” status; however, as news becomes more localized, personal accounts take on an increasingly important role.

Narrative journalism, or “new journalism”, utilizes personal, mundane details to create an intimate connection between the subject of the story and the reader. Think Studs Turkel. Or Gay Talese. Or Anne Hull. These journalists collect personal stories, spend enormous amounts of time in the field with their subjects, and ultimately provide their readers with a unique perspective and voice on larger, more complicated topics.

Maybe journalism school isn’t your thing, but you are interested in learning how to tell a compelling story. There are a few great graduate-level certificate programs that promote the documentary approach to storytelling and arm their students with skills in reporting, ethics, and production.

The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, in Portland, Maine offers an intensive semester program in documentary radio, writing, and photography. Students choose a story and spend their four months reporting and work-shopping their pieces with their peers. Graduates have gone on to work for NPR, National Geographic, and The Christian Science Monitor.

The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University offers continuing education classes in fields of documentary photography, videography, and audio documentary, culminating in a Certificate in Documentary Arts. They also offer individual workshops in topics ranging from Oral History Fundamentals, Documentary Narrative, Audio Postcards, and Literacy through Photography.

If going back to school isn’t an option at the moment, pick up a copy of Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. The quick-read is a compilation of essays and advice from some of the best nonfiction writers out there.

- Emily True is a graduate of the Salt Institute.
www.emilytrue.com