Post Tagged with: "videographer"

Unlocking Potential – Senegal

A seedling that doesn’t receive enough water and sunlight in it’s infancy cannot grow into a fruitful tree. In the same way, a child who doesn’t receive love and proper care cannot realize his full potential as an adult, should he be fortunate enough to survive into adulthood. ChildFund’s Early Childhood Development (ECD) Program in Senegal is working in immensely challenging conditions to empower parents and caregivers with the tools and knowledge they need to properly nurture their children at this crucial stage in life. This is last in a series of six videos from the same number of countries I shot and edited for ChildFund’s new iPad app which exploring the different facets and successes of the ECD program. Special thanks to ChildFund’s Christine Ennulat for the creative input here. Here’s some other fun shots from a stroll down the beach in Dakar:  

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Your Daily Dose of Vegetables

My latest video piece, which I shot for Lutheran World Relief, has given me premonitions of giving it all up and moving out to the country to be a farmer. That’s easier done than most people seeing as how I already live in Africa. Mina seems to like the idea. She used to only farm rice and corn, allowing her family to scrape by at best. LWR‘s agricultural programs in Bihar, India have allowed hers and hundreds of others’ crops to thrive in an otherwise dry and rocky environment. Hit play above and sway along with the saris and sitars.

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Chaos & Calm

Whether you’re in a rickshaw or a limousine, in a city of fourteen million no one is immune to the horrors of traffic. India’s third-largest city, Kolkata (otherwise known as Calcutta, or কলকাতা), was my base for the last two weeks during dual video assignments for Lutheran World Relief and ChildFund. During journeys in and out of the city and on not-so-leisurely strolls, I spent a great deal of time in a teeming, chaotic muddle and thought I’d share some of it with you. Hit play below for 28 seconds of the city’s hustle and bustle. While the videos are still on my editing table, I’ll share some select stills from Kolkata’s streets, as well as shots from Lutheran World Relief’s agriculture projects in the State of Bihar, where smiles are plentiful and life goes at a much slower pace. Below I give a sneak preview of footage to LWR‘s[…]

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Expressions from Madagascar

Expecting lions, lemurs, and baobab trees?  In contrast, my recent assignment in Madagascar with CARE was of a human-itarian nature. Madagascar certainly does shatter everyone’s expectations, however, mostly in a good way. This fall, CARE will hold an art exhibit in Atlanta, where the organization is based, as a fundraiser for its programs across the globe. Girls in Vatomandry District, Madagascar were recently invited to participate in the art process, and as you can see in the above video, were thrilled at the opportunity to do so. As part of my assignment in this Indian Ocean island nation off the coast of Africa, I was on hand to document some of the girls’ stories and record their messages. These messages, along with their artwork, will be presented at the Atlanta exhibit. PS.  There are NO lions in Madagascar, but there is LOTS of rice.

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Focus on Early Childhood Development

I’m currently half-way through a series of videos highlighting ChildFund’s niche-core program, its Early Childhood Development program, known as ECD. It’s an assignment that, once completed, will have taken me to six different countries on four different continents. In a country where children battle with epidemics like malaria and malnutrition, ChildFund’s ECD program in India is not just allowing kids to survive, but also to thrive. By working with parents and caregivers to target children in the first five years of life, ChildFund transforms the communities in which children grow, allowing them to reach their maximum potential in life.

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Recovering from Kony

It’s hard to believe that as much hoopla as this guy has stirred up, as much attention as he’s garnered in the media, that the problems he caused are still not yet fixed. Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army plundered Northern Uganda for over a decade. The rebels killed tens of thousands of Ugandan civilians, displaced millions, and turned the peaceful farms across the region into heaps of ashes. The war against Kony’s LRA ended in Uganda in 2006. It’s still ongoing, albeit on a smaller scale, in the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo. During the rebellion most families in Northern Uganda were forced to flee their homesteads and livelihoods for the security of crowded refugee camps. Still largely dependent on handouts from government and relief organizations, they’ve returned to their land with nothing. Economic and psychological recovery has yet to be realized. When you’re[…]

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Struggles of a Small Farmer in Zambia

You certainly won’t need an umbrella in South-West Zambia outside the month of January. While many places in Africa have plentiful rainfall and lush soils (central Uganda for instance), many rural farmers, after only one brief rainy season each year, must attempt to cultivate enough food for their families in extremely dry and sweltering conditions. This means that families have only one small window of opportunity to grow food and sell any surplus to earn income. Often that window is not great enough to last the entire year, and so not only does poverty persist, but something even more brutal occurs: hunger.  Most of us who would read this entry have never experienced true hunger. Perhaps we’ve had to go without lunch because we were too busy at the office.  However, true hunger is a reality for the people of this area of Zambia, most of whom survive on cornmeal porridge[…]

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A Toast to Tea

If you could get a caffeine rush from walking through tea fields I’d be bouncing off walls by now. But as I’ve learned recently from shooting for Shared Interest in Uganda’s tea-growing highlands, there’s a lot involved in getting those glossy green leaves into a palatable consistency. Shared Interest, an ethical investment company out of the UK, loans exclusively to fair trade buyer and producer organizations around the globe. Hit play below (and turn on the HD!) to find out what Shared Interest is doing in this corner of Africa.

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Development in the Digital Age

Highways, electrical substations, dams and water systems…. now computers. It’s exciting to be documenting Africa’s infrastructure and technology expansion. The above video was shot in Kenya and produced by yours truly. UK NGO, Computers 4 Africa, helped Peter Kanini break the cycle of poverty in which he and his family found themselves with a computer training course. The organization also provided equipment to his technical training school. Now as a computer teacher, Peter is passing his knowledge on to the next generation.

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Dam That River

How can a family earn income when most of their time is spent meeting the most essential of needs? How can an entire village or town develop if all its inhabitants face this same problem? As with other things, water does not grow on proverbial trees, but neither does it run through municipal pipelines in much of the East African nation of Kenya. Consequently, families are at the mercy of rainfall and river water to ensure the ability to drink, cook, bathe, and wash clothing. Unlike much of the West, rainfall in Kenya usually occurs only during a certain few months out of the year. The later in the dry season it is, the harder it becomes to find a water source. On one of my latest assignments with ChildFund, I documented the lengths to which people go to find water in Kenya’s Migwani District, just four hours north-west of[…]

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