What I Call Journalism
I'm eager to introduce a terrific venture that my dear friend Sarah Stuteville is involved in, by the name of the Common Language Project. This involves aggressive, risk-taking journalism in places most of us tend to shudder at; Cambodia, India, Pakistan, to name a few. The project goal as I get it (caveat: my impression here, not the words of those doing the heavy lifting) is publicizing constructive projects and activities in remote places where our increasingly irrelevant mainstream corporate media don't/won't go and where the gazillions of US corporate dollars sucked out of the middle/lower classes are conspicuously absent, presumably because the profit margin sucks.
To be clear, this program bears no resemblance to the Highlight Magazine happy junk you may have been infected with in the doctor's office way back when. No trumped-up good news crappola. It is Good News in the sense of actual people helping people. Real folks caring for and taking care of each other. Remember when we had that here? These Real Reporter folks are scrabbling to uncover these uplifting scenarios in places far away.
I offer this partly as reinforcement for the progressive principles so critical as we work to become a part of US governance again - we need government because the profit-principle does not compel any corporation to look out for any entity but itself - and, yes, their stockholders. Government absolutely has to be there to regulate that greed. The bottom line, as we all should know, probably with personal experience to back it up, is that true community spirit and support of the common resources are absolutely anathema to the folks desperately using unprecedented levels of secrecy and media-bashing in hopes of hiding their criminality.
As a terrific recent read (Amusing Ourselves to Death) suggests, this edgy work by the Common Language Project folks is not shallow or insipid enough - not to mention not being constantly amusing in the sense of pratfalls and the like - to make it into our mainstream media. These folks are enduring genuine discomfort and risk in the interest of reporting "news." I gather there was formerly some of this available in the era before constant barrages of television, including tv-supervision of preschoolers, turned many of us into folks with an attention span measured in seconds. Real "news" is not something mainstream television offers these days. And of course tv-crippling often leads to no appetite for anything resembling exposition or rational analysis. That impatience and limitation in cerebral skills might explain a good part of the rancid political spectrum these days - name-calling, strawmen, swift-boating, and sleazy political rovian stunts are just the assumed parlance.
I've known Sarah's dad for a good long time, stretching back to high school in the late '60's. He's as close to a soul-brother as I have. We do not get nearly enough time together, but have managed to hang in there via a couple weekends in the mountains and a few social events each year. We've shared high-fives on all but one of the big volcanoes in Washington State so far and interesting experiences on a lot of other peaks in between.
Sarah is a source of wonderment and admiration, with an imagination and courage that are astounding. I cannot do full justice to the venture taken on by Sarah and her co-heroes Jessica and Alex in my own words. I will excerpt a bit here, but suggest you check out their website and strongly encourage a monetary contribution - this is a pretty shoe-string operation from what I can tell, considering the scoops they have been offering up. A donation would be greatly appreciated and might make the difference in their ability to report a story that would otherwise never reach the light of day.
Excerpts from the CLP website:
Siem Reap, CAMBODIA-The landscape is all dust and smoke and heat. In the parched countryside the fields smolder and burn under a brutal sun. March is the height of Cambodia’s dry season and all over the country peasants are clearing and preparing the land for planting rice when the rains come. But here in Chrun, a remote village near the Thai border and a holdout of the Khmer Rouge as late as 1998, the burning land serves another dangerous purpose. These farmers hope the flames will detonate the hundreds of thousands of landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) that litter their land--before one of them or their children does.
“This is a dangerous season,” says Aki Ra, a man who has devoted the last fifteen years of his life to de-mining Cambodia, “the farmers are working the land and moving further a field, this is when they are discovering more mines and explosives. They hope that burning the field will also blow up anything, but they don’t know how to do it and it is dangerous for them.”
If anyone knows about the dangers of landmines, it’s Aki Ra. Born in Siem Reap province around 1973, he grew up on war and violence. By the age of five both of his parents had been executed by the Khmer Rouge, and at ten he was given an AK-47 and became one of the many child soldiers that made up their army.
The Vietnamese Army that liberated Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge reached the northwestern regions much later than the rest of the country, and even then the fighting wasn’t over for Aki Ra, who says that for most of his life he only understood the world as being perpetually at war. As a teenage conscript of the Vietnamese he would do much of the landmine laying in areas he would later commit his life to de-mining. See below for a timeline of the war in Cambodia.
[clip]
Phnom Penh, CAMBODIA – At first glance, Tumlop 2 village looks like any third world city slum: crowded huts with corrugated tin roofs are scattered along dusty dirt paths, and barefoot children mingle with freely wandering chickens and dogs. Look closer and you’ll find that this community also houses a tidy health center where local women diagnose and treat common ailments. Look even closer and you’ll see that gender relations in this poor and traditional society may be more evolved than in the more wealthy households of the teeming and ever-expanding city that surrounds them.
Inside the health center, a humble but cleanly scrubbed building rising on thin stilts above the scummy green water that surrounds it, large plastic jars of medicinal herbs stand near a modest medicine cabinet, though many prescribed herbal remedies will be made on the spot, using fresh plants growing nearby. Posters promoting literacy and gender equality cover the simple plank walls – this small center is also home to trainings on domestic violence and women’s rights.
Urban Poor Women Development (UPWD), a nonprofit organization located in Phnom Penh, helped the Tumlop 2 community develop its health center in 1998, and the organization’s six paid staff and five volunteers are currently helping 11 slum communities in the area, with plans to add three more this year.
The organization first developed its health program when the international anti-poverty group Actionaid sent a volunteer medical expert from its India program to train UPWD staff in community health care.
[clip]
Uttar Pradesh, INDIA--The whirr of old fashioned sewing machines reverberates in the high-ceilinged room. Forty girls dressed in uniform green and yellow salwar kameez bend their heads towards their stitching as shafts of afternoon sunlight warm their identical hairstyles of black looped braids.
In India this scene easily evokes the word sweatshop, and rightly so. Twenty five percent of India’s population lives below the poverty line (defined for rural areas at $8 a month--or enough to buy exactly 2200 calories per day), and impoverished girls and young women are an easily exploited demographic. But here in Anoopshahr Sub-district in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), these students at Pardada Pardadi Girl’s Vocational School are not sewing for someone else’s profit, but for their own futures.
While India is currently the second fastest growing economy in the world, it is also home to the world’s largest population of poor people, half of whom are concentrated in three rural states, including UP. In a country where two thirds of the population works in agriculture, mostly as subsistence farmers, stories of technology millionaires seem light years away, and the hope that the recent success of an emerging urban middle class will trickle down is too distant a promise for most rural Indians.
“Everyone in the world is talking about how India is shining,” says Sam Singh, a local man who made his fortune in the United States, and returned five years ago to found the school, “and it’s true, but only for about twenty percent. You have to ask how these twenty percent can fly with the other eighty percent hanging off of them.”
[clip]
To be clear, this program bears no resemblance to the Highlight Magazine happy junk you may have been infected with in the doctor's office way back when. No trumped-up good news crappola. It is Good News in the sense of actual people helping people. Real folks caring for and taking care of each other. Remember when we had that here? These Real Reporter folks are scrabbling to uncover these uplifting scenarios in places far away.
I offer this partly as reinforcement for the progressive principles so critical as we work to become a part of US governance again - we need government because the profit-principle does not compel any corporation to look out for any entity but itself - and, yes, their stockholders. Government absolutely has to be there to regulate that greed. The bottom line, as we all should know, probably with personal experience to back it up, is that true community spirit and support of the common resources are absolutely anathema to the folks desperately using unprecedented levels of secrecy and media-bashing in hopes of hiding their criminality.
As a terrific recent read (Amusing Ourselves to Death) suggests, this edgy work by the Common Language Project folks is not shallow or insipid enough - not to mention not being constantly amusing in the sense of pratfalls and the like - to make it into our mainstream media. These folks are enduring genuine discomfort and risk in the interest of reporting "news." I gather there was formerly some of this available in the era before constant barrages of television, including tv-supervision of preschoolers, turned many of us into folks with an attention span measured in seconds. Real "news" is not something mainstream television offers these days. And of course tv-crippling often leads to no appetite for anything resembling exposition or rational analysis. That impatience and limitation in cerebral skills might explain a good part of the rancid political spectrum these days - name-calling, strawmen, swift-boating, and sleazy political rovian stunts are just the assumed parlance.
I've known Sarah's dad for a good long time, stretching back to high school in the late '60's. He's as close to a soul-brother as I have. We do not get nearly enough time together, but have managed to hang in there via a couple weekends in the mountains and a few social events each year. We've shared high-fives on all but one of the big volcanoes in Washington State so far and interesting experiences on a lot of other peaks in between.
Sarah is a source of wonderment and admiration, with an imagination and courage that are astounding. I cannot do full justice to the venture taken on by Sarah and her co-heroes Jessica and Alex in my own words. I will excerpt a bit here, but suggest you check out their website and strongly encourage a monetary contribution - this is a pretty shoe-string operation from what I can tell, considering the scoops they have been offering up. A donation would be greatly appreciated and might make the difference in their ability to report a story that would otherwise never reach the light of day.
Excerpts from the CLP website:
Siem Reap, CAMBODIA-The landscape is all dust and smoke and heat. In the parched countryside the fields smolder and burn under a brutal sun. March is the height of Cambodia’s dry season and all over the country peasants are clearing and preparing the land for planting rice when the rains come. But here in Chrun, a remote village near the Thai border and a holdout of the Khmer Rouge as late as 1998, the burning land serves another dangerous purpose. These farmers hope the flames will detonate the hundreds of thousands of landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) that litter their land--before one of them or their children does.
“This is a dangerous season,” says Aki Ra, a man who has devoted the last fifteen years of his life to de-mining Cambodia, “the farmers are working the land and moving further a field, this is when they are discovering more mines and explosives. They hope that burning the field will also blow up anything, but they don’t know how to do it and it is dangerous for them.”
If anyone knows about the dangers of landmines, it’s Aki Ra. Born in Siem Reap province around 1973, he grew up on war and violence. By the age of five both of his parents had been executed by the Khmer Rouge, and at ten he was given an AK-47 and became one of the many child soldiers that made up their army.
The Vietnamese Army that liberated Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge reached the northwestern regions much later than the rest of the country, and even then the fighting wasn’t over for Aki Ra, who says that for most of his life he only understood the world as being perpetually at war. As a teenage conscript of the Vietnamese he would do much of the landmine laying in areas he would later commit his life to de-mining. See below for a timeline of the war in Cambodia.
[clip]
Phnom Penh, CAMBODIA – At first glance, Tumlop 2 village looks like any third world city slum: crowded huts with corrugated tin roofs are scattered along dusty dirt paths, and barefoot children mingle with freely wandering chickens and dogs. Look closer and you’ll find that this community also houses a tidy health center where local women diagnose and treat common ailments. Look even closer and you’ll see that gender relations in this poor and traditional society may be more evolved than in the more wealthy households of the teeming and ever-expanding city that surrounds them.
Inside the health center, a humble but cleanly scrubbed building rising on thin stilts above the scummy green water that surrounds it, large plastic jars of medicinal herbs stand near a modest medicine cabinet, though many prescribed herbal remedies will be made on the spot, using fresh plants growing nearby. Posters promoting literacy and gender equality cover the simple plank walls – this small center is also home to trainings on domestic violence and women’s rights.
Urban Poor Women Development (UPWD), a nonprofit organization located in Phnom Penh, helped the Tumlop 2 community develop its health center in 1998, and the organization’s six paid staff and five volunteers are currently helping 11 slum communities in the area, with plans to add three more this year.
The organization first developed its health program when the international anti-poverty group Actionaid sent a volunteer medical expert from its India program to train UPWD staff in community health care.
[clip]
Uttar Pradesh, INDIA--The whirr of old fashioned sewing machines reverberates in the high-ceilinged room. Forty girls dressed in uniform green and yellow salwar kameez bend their heads towards their stitching as shafts of afternoon sunlight warm their identical hairstyles of black looped braids.
In India this scene easily evokes the word sweatshop, and rightly so. Twenty five percent of India’s population lives below the poverty line (defined for rural areas at $8 a month--or enough to buy exactly 2200 calories per day), and impoverished girls and young women are an easily exploited demographic. But here in Anoopshahr Sub-district in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), these students at Pardada Pardadi Girl’s Vocational School are not sewing for someone else’s profit, but for their own futures.
While India is currently the second fastest growing economy in the world, it is also home to the world’s largest population of poor people, half of whom are concentrated in three rural states, including UP. In a country where two thirds of the population works in agriculture, mostly as subsistence farmers, stories of technology millionaires seem light years away, and the hope that the recent success of an emerging urban middle class will trickle down is too distant a promise for most rural Indians.
“Everyone in the world is talking about how India is shining,” says Sam Singh, a local man who made his fortune in the United States, and returned five years ago to found the school, “and it’s true, but only for about twenty percent. You have to ask how these twenty percent can fly with the other eighty percent hanging off of them.”
[clip]
posted by Sir Gumbo at 10:31 PM
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