Uganda '07

Wrapping Up

Nicki and Stephanie film in an IDP camp in Gulu this past week.

Nicki and Stephanie with Tony and his relatives.

Our time in Uganda finished up with a week of intense filming up north. Stephanie and Nicki spent time in Gulu with Tony, a former child soldier in the LRA who was forced to serve as one of Joseph Kony's personal bodyguards after being abducted from his school. Tony currently lives at the Cornerstone home for boys in Gulu. He took Stephanie and Nicki to the school where he was abducted and introduced them to his brother and grandfather. Stephanie and Nicki also spent time in an IDP camp before returning to Kampala on Thursday night, where they reunited with Gordon and Noah who have spent the past week editing and filming with Leah, Aylie and Vijay in Kampala.

We will return home tomorrow with a film that is really beginning to take shape, yet still will see much editing in weeks to come. It has emerged with a three-part structure, each part focusing on a different Peace Project (radio storytelling, water treatment, relief for AIDS orphans), and each part using the American students' project as a starting point for profiling Ugandans whose situations these projects seek to affect.

We also return with our bags packed full of woven baskets, musical instruments, lanterns, hides, and other crafts bartered for in the markets here.

See you back in the states!

North to Gulu

Stephanie films at the Cornerstone home for girls in Gulu on Thursday.

Noah and Stephanie film Middlebury student Aylie Baker as she plays some audio recordings back for the kids at Cornerstone.

We've spent this past week in the northern town of Gulu, the center of a region that has been hit hard in the last twenty years by a war that has only recently calmed down. At the Cornerstone home for orphaned children, we were inspired by stories of resiliency in the face of so much loss, abandonment, and exploitation. We have been once again following the Peace Project of Leah, Aylie, and Vijay of Middlebury College as they record the stories of children in this area. They traveled here on Tuesday with Noah and Gordon via a seven-hour bus ride, and headed back to Kampala today to get ready for a radio broadcast tomorrow afternoon. They will be bringing some of their work from Gulu to Power FM in Kampala for broadcast on Auntie Pauline's Sunday afternoon show. Pauline brings in kids from around the city to sit in with her in the studio, so we're looking forward to filming the show and being present for the kids' reactions to these stories from the north.

It has been interesting to see the different ways these Peace Projects find an outlet: for Minh, it was constructing water treatment tanks and providing Moringa seeds to a community in Mbarara. For Leah, Aylie, and Vijay, the outlet may be less physically tangible, yet the one-on-one moment of listening to an individual's story and then the act of sharing that story and everything it embodies to the rest of the community can be one of the most powerful tools for fostering understanding and communication in a country that has endured its share of regional divide.

We bid farewell to Todd Sandler, who headed back to the States today after a visit that was certainly eventful but much too quick. We miss him already. Gordon and Noah are back in Kampala for the radio broadcast tomorrow, and Nicki, Stephanie, and Billy are staying in Gulu until Tuesday to continue filming at Cornerstone and elsewhere. We have been doing much editing and the film is really starting to take shape.

Hard to believe there's only about a week left until we fly back to the U.S. on the 19th. More to come.

The newbie jumps right in

Hi Everyone-

Having just joined the crew here 3 days ago in Kampala, its been quite exciting trying to play "catch up". Today, Noah Gordon and I hit to the streets and began shooting some B-roll footage while Nicki and Stephanie began assembling some footage. In route we met up with a 15 yr old boy named Wasswa who was eager to show us the way to the market place. There, we captured some great footage of some wheelers and dealers and then made our way to the roof of the Sheraton hotel where we filmed the beatufiul Kampala cityscapes. This evening we were back at the machines editing away. During our break for dinner, Noah and I had a mini African jam session. I guess I should have mentioned that we picked up some instruments along the way. Anyway, tomorrow Bill, Nicki, Stephanie and I are going to make our way up to Gulu to begin scouting the area. Noah, Gordon and the Middlebury students will meet us up there on Tues.

Peace and love to everyone at home,

Todd

Views from the Crew

Gordon (on camera) and Noah (on sound) film 14 year-old Tefulo as he digs in a neighbor's garden on a hillside in Rakai.

Gordon, Billy and Noah with Tefulo, his Uncle, and Solomon (seated, lower right), a field worker for the AIDS relief group PARDI.

Noah and Gordon avoid mosquitos while getting in some editing in Mbarara. As they say, it's important to "always use protection" while "net-iting".

Noah offers a bite of his sandwich to a baboon on a drive through Queen Elizabeth National Park.

That's all for now. We're back in Kampala for a few days, then it's up to Gulu on Sunday to follow Leah, Aylie and Vijay as they record the stories of children in the north. Also, check out the article in last Sunday's Journal News on the World Crew in Uganda.

Weekend Update

We’ve been working intensely this past week on following two issues here in Mbarara and neighboring Rakai District. Continuing our focus on Minh’s water purification project, Gordon and Noah spent last Saturday and Monday with a local family affected by the current lack of clean water. They filmed the daily routine of Henry and Kate Kabagambe, the parents, and their five children. Henry is a farmer who peddles Matoke to Mbarara three times a week, maintains a herd of cattle, and is building a new structure intended for market stalls to be rented to locals. He and his family have suffered through much sickness as a result of bacteria-infested water. The construction of the new water treatment tank (see previous post for a picture) will directly impact their quality of life.

On Sunday, while Noah and Billy drove to Rakai to meet child-headed households (children who have lost their parents to AIDS and now support their siblings and other relatives) for one of our other focuses in this film, Nicki, Gordon and Stephanie filmed a local funeral for George, a father who had died of AIDS, leaving behind his wife, Grace, and eight children. They captured a moving interview with Grace and her kids as they began for the first time to contemplate their future without a husband and father. AIDS has had a devastating impact in this region since its beginnings in the early 1980s in nearby Rakai District. Another Peace Project we are focusing on is that of Libby Mooers, a Columbia University graduate who has been working with AIDS orphans to set up personal bank accounts and furnish textbooks, trying to determine what gives these kids the strongest sense of agency in their own futures and desire to pursue their own educations.

Noah, Gordon and Billy traveled to Rakai District on Tuesday night to pursue an example of a child-headed household for our focus on the AIDS issue. They spent Wednesday and Thursday with Tefulo Nyangabo, a 14 year-old boy who lost both of his parents to AIDS seven years ago. He has been supporting his 11 year-old brother and his disabled uncle who suffered a spinal chord injury when their hut collapsed during a rainstorm.  Gordon and Noah followed Tefulo as he gathered and prepared food, did the laundry and dishes, and went to school for a half-day only to leave early to earn some money by digging in a neighbor’s garden. Tefulo lives in an isolated hut on the side of a steep mountain, surrounded by rolling hills and farmland. When compared to Tefulo’s daily routine, the exhaustion they felt upon returning to Mbarara after two full days of filming seemed somehow manageable.

This weekend we are taking some time to review and edit footage. Noah and Gordon will film Henry peddling his Matoke to Mbarara tomorrow morning, and Stephanie and Nicki will return to Rakai on Sunday to film a follow up interview with Tefulo. Then it’s back to Kampala next week in time for Todd Sandler’s arrival on August 2^nd.

The "Making Of" World Crew Uganda

    

The physical process of making a film can be one of the most rewarding aspects of storytelling. You have to find a way to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right equipment. Here in Uganda we've wriggled into all sorts of contorted positions in order to get exciting angles on our subjects. Noah found a good spot in the back of our van with the hatch open to film a "boda-boda" motorcycle. Note Steve keeping a firm grip on Noah’s belt!

    

Kids at the Cornerstone Home for street kids in Kampala were incredibly energetic when we first arrived. It was only after a number of visits that we got to see what their daily lives were really like.

 

Listening and quiet play helps to build trust. Gordon spends time drawing with one of the boys. This process of understanding each other is critical to our filmmaking process.

 

Filming scenes with villagers around Mbarara, it’s common to come across indigenous Ankole cows with huge horns. No tangles with audio cables yet!

To get some perspective on what we’ve filmed so far, we spent a couple days thinking and planning in Jinja. This is the birthplace of the mighty Nile, where it flows out of Lake Victoria. We had a chance to do a white water rafting trip through some pretty serious Class 5 rapids - a real team survival test - especially when the raft flipped over...

We capped off our retreat with a group photo which reminded some of us (the old ones) of an album cover for the Monkees.

 

Left to right: Billy Shebar, Gordon Bell, Stephanie Harris, Steve Apkon, Susan Todd, Nicki Sobecki and Noah Hutton

A View of Mbarara

To add to Noah's description of our exciting past few days-- some images!

A field view from Mbarara. It has been wonderful to escape Kampala and see some of what gave Uganda the name “the pearl of Africa.”

A woman sits in her hut in the Mbarara district. Made of sticks and mud, with a thick thatched roof, it provides a space to sleep, cook and relax within the circular confines of a four foot diameter.

In the Mbarara district a man gathers water at dusk for his family of eight. He currently rides his bike two miles ever day to reach this water point, only to bring back water so full of mud it is the color of a paper bag. In the dry season families often travel over seven miles to find water.

A girl stands outside her home in the Mbarara district.

The village meeting house for one of the six parishes in the Mbarara district. This is where Minh hosts his project's water treatment workshops, the benches crowded with people hopeful that they may, in the future, have access to clean water for themselves and their families.

A pile of "matoke," a popular Ugandan dish made of mashed banana-like fruit. Delicious when combined with a nice groundnut sauce.

A young mother holds her daughter against her pregnant belly in the Mbarara district. Women in Uganda, as in most developing countries, bear the brunt of the majority of the daily work including child care, gathering wood, gathering water, caring for the fields and garden, preparing the meals, keeping the home clean and ensuring their children are educated. 

This water treatment facility, almost completed, will complete a critical phase of Minh’s project. Once finished this facility, consisting of a well, water storage area and basic filtration system, will allow the villagers to mass-treat their water with the ground seeds from the tree’s planted through the project. Beginning with the Bubarre sub-county Minh and his co-worker Duncan hope to expand this project throughout Mbarara and eventually throughout Uganda.

--Nicki

Moringa in Mbarara

Greetings to all. We can’t believe it’s been two weeks already since we landed in Kampala. So much has happened and we have met so many remarkable people so far. We have been in the southern town of Mbarara, home to Mbarara University of Science and Technology, since Tuesday. Here we are following another Peace Project led by University of Florida graduate Minh Quang Vo.

His project, entitled “Provision of Potable Water” seeks to develop sustainable methods of water treatment using the ground-up powder from the seeds of the Moringa tree, native to Northern India but now found throughout Africa as well. The tree and all its byproducts have long been been known for their various medicinal uses: its roots allegedly cure hysteria and its leaves provide a natural aphrodisiac. Now, building off recent research into specialized cleansing proteins found in its seeds, Minh has developed a simple method for water purification that could bring enormous change to this small community in the Mbarara district and eventually beyond.

On Wednesday Minh and his Ugandan colleague, Duncan (a professor at Mbarara University and a government chemist) showed us the current source of water for this area: a filthy pond, used by both cattle and humans, where locals arrive with empty gasoline jugs and step into the water only to stir up more debris into their containers. Water-related disease is rampant in this community, where boiling is the only method of purification. We met several families that have been suffering from the plethora of ailments stemming from the condition of their only water source. Construction is almost complete on the new water treatment structure just beside the pond, which consists of a well, a treatment tank and a reservoir tank. The system will use the Moringa solution to treat the pond’s water and store it for access to the community even in the dry season. Minh has devised a project whereby he can leave Uganda and this system will be sustainable by the community itself, the Moringa trees grown in backyards and used to treat private water supplies and the new reservoir tank.

To make sure the community can purify their own water, Minh and Duncan have been holding workshops at the town center to demonstrate how to grow, harvest, and crush the Moringa seeds, eventually using the powder to create the purification solution. Nicki and I filmed one of these workshops yesterday. We filmed community members showing up with bottles of dirty water from the pond and Duncan leading them through the process of purification, adding the Moringa solution and watching the sediment fall to the bottom of the bottles, leaving clean water above. It was a privilege to capture the reactions of the crowd to what seems like a small trick, but, as they surely know, will ultimately save many lives and lead to a healthy, more peaceful existence in this district and hopefully beyond.

We started the day by filming Minh and Duncan on their way to the workshop. Duncan had rented a Boda Boda for the day (a scooter/motorcycle hybrid) and I drove ahead of them with the rest of the crew in a van with the trunk and side door open, Steve holding on to my belt as I filmed out the side and back. It was an exhilarating day and we certainly captured some great footage and saw a community take a step toward a more peaceful life with clean water. Today Gordon and Stephanie are back in the community spending some time with more families that have been afflicted by the issue and who will be directly affected by Minh’s project.

Stay tuned for pictures from the day.

-Noah

On location

Here's Noah getting some help with slating a new scene. 

It's good to have a visual marker on screen at the top of each section of footage.

One week in

Just six short years ago, the Jacob Burns Film Center was founded with a belief in the importance and power of film – both as a cultural lens to explore and understand other cultures, as well as an important educational imperative in today’s media dominated world.  We could never have guessed that in such a short time we would be sending our first group of college students – part of JBFC’s World Crew program – half way around the world, to document powerful stories taking place here in Uganda.  We hope to share our story of this adventure with everyone in the JBFC community through this blog, to give you a small taste of our experiences.

We are just finishing up our first week of World Crew, here in Uganda.   After a 24 hour journey, we were met in Kampala with the news that we had not been cleared through customs with all our equipment, and the hotel which had been booked for over a month, was no longer available because thanks to post-9/11 security measures, our wire transfers had likely never left the shores of New York.  So the Fang Fang Hotel would become our home base for the first week of our shoot.

Located in the middle of Kampala, a bustling African city, the hotel turned out to be convenient to everything we needed, and within a day or two we had sorted things out, established a production office in Billy Shebar’s room (Billy is the Project Mentor for World Crew), and were ready to begin. 

Our mission seems simple enough – to follow one of the 100 Projects for Peace that came out of a wonderfully creative initiative sponsored by JBFC friend and supporter Kathryn Davis in honor of her 100th birthday.  (For more information about this great project visit www.kwd100projectsforpeace.org.)  The project that we chose to document came from four Middlebury students (Leah, Aylie and Vijay plus a fourth collaborator back in the US) who are coming over to establish a storytelling project in which children from all over Uganda will be able to share their experiences and stories through the radio.  The Middlebury students’ idea seems to be that by hearing each other’s stories, we can begin to put a face on “the other” and appreciate both our differences and our similarities.

The first week has been spent getting to know not only the Middlebury crew, but several people in the Ugandan community who are potential subjects for both the Middlebury students as well as our project.   We are fortunate to have a long-time JBFC friend and member Art Reimers meet us here in Kampala.  Art has been involved in some truly inspiring work here through The Cornerstone Project which works with street children to provide homes and education and a lot more.  Through Art, we are introduced to several of the Cornerstone leaders.  These mentors, most of whom are former residents of the Cornerstone homes, are studying for college degrees while also playing parent to close to 20 children – hard to imagine.

We are privileged to be able to spend time getting to know people like 14 year old Mutebi, and his good friend Marvin, who have been in and out of the street home for the last several years.  At the girls home we met Joaneta, who would invite us to a rehearsal for her traditional Ugandan dance troupe.  We are beginning to think about characters for the film and how we might tell the story of this project.  Shooting takes us from marketplaces to a mosque overlooking Kampala, to local radio stations.  I think we are all struck by the tremendous diversity of socio-economic class in Kampala.    Already overwhelmed by the number of stories that can be told – without ever even leaving the city, our biggest challenge will be remaining open to what that story might be.  As Peter, one of the radio personalities from Sanyu Radio, told us – it is important for people to hear and respect each other's stories – especially in a country and region that has seen so much conflict.  Uganda is just coming out of a Civil War and the backdrop to our time here includes the ongoing peace discussions between the Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony and the Ugandan government.  Peter reminds us that people can easily slip back. 

Where this process will take all of us and what stories will ultimately emerge for us to capture and document will continue to unfold over the next 5 weeks, however we know that they will be rich and deep and we look forward to sharing them with you!

Mwelabaa – Good-Bye For Now…