Posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
Keith Joseph and Jonas Rigodon with Alvin outside Neno Hospital, Malawi
In this time of anguish for the people of Haiti, my thoughts keep returning to the people from “Partners in Health” whom we met during our filming in Neno, Malawi, especially Dr. Jonas Rigodon and Dr. Keith Joseph.
Partners in Health started in Haiti 25 years [...]
Posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010
“You’re a natural.”
That’s what Andrea and Barry Coleman said to me after I was filmed completing my first motorcycle lesson on an unused portion of the tarmac of the tiny airport in Chipata, Zambia. The idea was not that I would be somehow enticed into motorcycling (a passion of Andrea and Barry), but that I [...]
Posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
Dancing and drinking beer in the evening with former and current commercial sex workers at a truck stop in Malawi wasn’t something I would ever have imagined doing. But there I was, shaking it, albeit a bit nervously and reluctantly.
When I first heard that we would be filming at a remote truck stop, one word [...]
Posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009
Memories from 1968 kept coming back to me spontaneously, uncontrollably, as the pilot Edmond landed the tiny Cessna at an airstrip in Mpika, Zambia. Back then, I had been accepted to Project Upward Bound, a federally sponsored education program at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida. A smart, kind, and stylish woman named, Miss Freddie [...]
Posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009
Although landmines are intended to kill soldiers, in reality, it’s civilians like 26 year old Rambo that are too often their victims. In his teens, Rambo was travelling home in a full bus. The bus drove over an anti tank mine killing everyone on board accept him. A passing vehicle rescued Rambo and took him [...]
Posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009
I can honestly say that I had no preconceived idea about what it would be like to film in a mine field. We were in Mozambique, interviewing Apopo’s field workers about their jobs and watching its Hero Rats sniff the earth for TNT—an indication of the presence of a landmine. This picture gives no indication [...]
Posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009
When I was offered the opportunity to come to Mozambique to film with the ‘Hero Rats’ of Apopo, highly trained landmine sniffing rats, I jumped at the chance to make an exciting, dramatic and unusual film. Naively, the danger of filming in mine fields didn’t really dawn on me until Richard Wilson, the executive producer, [...]
Posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
This morning we filmed a terrific sequence with an Indian farmer who’s just putting in a drip irrigation system made by IDEI. As Alex wrote earlier in this blog, IDEI supplies a range of cheap irrigation systems to poor farmers who are often only just making a living. The farmer had also decided to enlarge [...]
Posted on Thursday, May 21st, 2009
Filming in the developing world is always challenging. But sometimes the challenges come from unexpected sources…
We’re filming in Tanzania, with Apopo’s Hero Rat’s. Apart from their amazing work sniffing out landmines (see Alex’s earlier blog) they are also being trained to sniff out TB in human spit samples.
Almost 150,000 new cases of TB are [...]
Posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
Communicating with our teams when they are abroad can be tough. But in recent years, the rapid spread of mobile phone coverage in the developing world has improved the situation immensely. Now I tend to get regular text message updates from the field. They’re very useful but can be a bit cryptic. This week I [...]
