Blog - Homelands Productions

April 19, 2009

Homelands Wins SDX Award

I’m tickled to report that Homelands has won the 2008 Sigma Delta Chi Award for Radio Feature Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists. This is for the WORKING project, our collaboration with Marketplace about workers in the global economy. It’s Homelands’ 20th national or international award.

The SDX Awards, given annually since 1939, are for “excellence in journalism.” This year’s winners include NPR, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune.

The WORKING project is almost over – just four more profiles scheduled, then we fold the tents. We’re busily putting together a proposal for a series on hunger. We’ll keep you posted on that. If you have any ideas about sources of funding, please let us know!

Best wishes from Nairobi,

Jon

March 23, 2009

Alidad, Human Smuggler

For most refugees, fleeing the country is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. For Alidad, it’s a job. He’s spent more than 30 years smuggling Afghans on a secret nighttime passage through the mountains of western Pakistan into Iran. The trip takes up to two weeks; Alidad earns about $50 per passenger. “We go when it’s raining, when it’s snowing. People fall off the mountain, people die,” he says. “I have a lot of sad memories.”

Gregory Warner‘s profile is the latest segment in our WORKING series, which has been airing monthly since January 2007 on Marketplace. You can listen to it on the Worker Browser website, where you can also tell the world about your job and what you think of it.

Jon

March 2, 2009

In Kenya, Never Again?

On Saturday we went to a photo exhibit in downtown Nairobi called Kenya Burning, documenting in gut-wrenching detail the post-election violence that erupted between December 2007 and February 2008. More than 1,500 people were murdered, many burned alive or hacked to death with machetes. For two awful months it seemed the country might go the way of Rwanda in 1994. Saturday was the first anniversary of the signing of the power-sharing agreement that stopped the violence, so the horror was on many people’s minds, and the gallery was packed.

I had been curious about the role ethnicity played in the violence. Not long ago Homelands produced a 40-piece series on cultural identity and change, called Worlds of Difference, and although there was only one story explicitly about inter-group violence (Marianne McCune’s “Relearning the Peace,” from Burundi), many touched on the tension between the human need for cultural affiliation and the societal need for tolerance and peace. To me it seems like one of the Big Issues of our globalized (and weaponized) age. How can people enjoy the benefits of group membership without tearing the larger society apart?

Kenya is a good place to ask that question. With more than 40 tribal groups, the country had long been seen as a model of interethnic harmony. Then came the 2007 election, between the incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, a member of the Kikuyu tribe (Kenya’s largest, representing 22% of the population), and a challenger, Raila Odinga, a Luo (the third largest, at 11%). Kibaki was declared the winner despite evidence of massive fraud, and the violence that followed had a distinctly ethnic cast, with Luos and their allies attacking innocent Kikuyus and vice versa.

Yet according to what we learned at the exhibit, the violence was not nearly as spontaneous as it appeared. Nor, for that matter, was it as ethnically motivated. Those who burned and pillaged were largely members of organized gangs taking orders from politicians, not ordinary citizens whipped into a chauvinistic frenzy.

And so the papers in Nairobi one year later are not brimming with articles about the dangers of tribalism, as I had expected, but about the failure of the political leadership to confront those responsible for the violence. Editorials and headlines condemn a “culture of impunity” — not just for the orchestrators and perpetrators of last year’s slaughter, but for police death squads, private militias, and corrupt officials. The focus of public debate is not on the need for dialogue and reconciliation, but on the need for state institutions to govern as they were meant to govern. So while I’m still hung up on questions of tribe and identity, most Kenyans, it seems, have moved on. Or at least that’s the hope.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Jon

February 12, 2009

Hang Nga, Marriage Broker

For Valentines Day, WORKING goes deep into the world of love and marriage. Well, marriage, anyway. Hang Nga is a Vietnamese woman who works for a South Korean marriage agency. She and her Korean boss, Mr. Cho, organize three-day excursions for Korean men seeking Vietnamese brides. And they deliver. The marriage packages include everything from introduction and selection to rings, ceremony, cake, photos, and a half-day honeymoon on Ha Long Bay. There’s even a visit to meet the parents. Kelly McEvers went along, and found that for the happy couple, it’s not about romance. It’s about the numbers.

The profile of Hang Nga airs Thursday, February 12, on Marketplace. To see photos, hear audio, and learn more about all 24 of the WORKING profiles that have aired to date, visit the special WORKING section on Marketplace.org. Or check out the interactive Worker Browser where you can do all that and add your own voice to the mix.

Jon

P.S. I’m writing this from Nairobi, Kenya, where I’ll be based until mid-June. If you’re in the area, drop me a line!

January 27, 2009

Ordinary Lives

I wanted to make note of two things I heard on the radio this afternoon. The first was an obituary of John Updike, on All Things Considered, that included Updike’s observation that “the big problem for a fiction writer is… how do you deal with ordinary life, that is not extraordinary, that does not involve heroism, that does not involve crisis.” The show then replayed Updike’s 2005 This I Believe essay, in which he argues that the difference between fiction and factual reporting “is one of precision. Oddly enough, the story or poem brings us closer to the actual texture and intricacy of experience.”

Then, on The Treatment (a show about movies out of KCRW in California), this line from an interview with Edward Zwick, director of the film Defiance: “You find your way to the epic through the specific.”

Both ideas worth thinking about as we go about our business of describing the world.

Jon

January 17, 2009

Svitlana Svystun, Circus Performer

When we first drew up a list of jobs we hoped to include in our WORKING series, “acrobat” was right at the top. Okay, that’s because the list was alphabetical, but even so, we’ve always itched to know more about folks who travel the world doing amazing things before a largely unappreciative public. Why do acrobats, jugglers, and high-wire artists live on the fringes of society when movie actors, pop singers, and orchestra conductors get five-star treatment? Why do we value Kelly Clarkson or Lindsay Lohan more than a person who can do a double backflip onto another person’s shoulders?

It’s hard to imagine a better man to tackle this question than Sean Cole. Sean brings a distinctive mix of wryness and wonder to his radio stories about how the world works. So we sent him to the UK to spend time with Svitlana Svystun, a Ukrainian dancer who performs an Argentinian gaucho act with her Russian husband for the British-owned Great Moscow State Circus. Sean was fascinated by Svitlana’s dual identity – part death-defying superhero, part homemaking mom (home being a little travel trailer). In some ways, circus life was as weird as Sean expected – the cramped quarters, the strange hours, the eccentric people with murky pasts. But what struck him in the end was the normalcy of it all.

If you didn’t hear it when it aired, I hope you’ll go have a listen. And please let us know what you think!

Jon

P.S. We’ve been too busy to make a lot of noise about the Worker Browser in the last few weeks, but we’d love it if you’d visit and, if you like it, send the link to your friends.

January 4, 2009

For 2009: The Hunger Chronicles

Happy New Year, everyone! I wanted to thank you all for listening to our radio programs and for visiting our burgeoning Internet empire (Homelands.org, this blog, the Worker Browser, the WORKING section of Marketplace.org, Worlds of Difference, Sandy Tolan‘s site, and The World Without Us).

I also wanted to give you a heads up about what we’re looking to do next, provided we can find a way to fund it.

We’re putting together a proposal for a multimedia project about food and hunger around the world, tentatively called The Hunger Chronicles. The idea would be to look at how, despite huge strides in technology and a worldwide effort to halve hunger by 2015, humanity still can’t manage to feed itself. One in seven people — more than 900 million around the world — is now undernourished (an astonishing 35 million are in the USA). We’re looking at a series of human-centered radio features, an hour-long radio special, a series of short videos, and lots of web stuff. Two major universities would like to work with us and we’ve pulled together a terrific team of radio and video producers.

If you have thoughts about who might be inclined to contribute to such a venture, or if you have questions or comments, please let us know. Contact info is all here. Thanks again, and best wishes for a peaceful, joyful, nourishing, (sustainably) prosperous 2009!

Jon

P.S. Next up on WORKING is a profile by the inimitable Sean Cole of a Ukrainian woman who performs an Argentine cowboy act in a Russian traveling circus in the UK. Currently scheduled for Thursday, January 15.

December 18, 2008

Leandro Carvalho, Labor Inspector

I hope you get a chance to hear the new WORKING profile of Leandro Carvalho, an idealistic young Brazilian whose job is to find and liberate workers who are held against their will or forced to endure illegal and degrading conditions. The profile, co-produced by Sandy Tolan and Brazilian journalist Petra Costa, airs on Marketplace today (Thursday, December 18).

Leandro works with the Special Mobile Inspection Group of Brazil’s ministry of labor. The group has freed more than 30,000 slaves since the mid-1990s. Although Brazil formally abolished slavery in the 1880s, tens of thousands of workers are still thought to be held captive by landowners and middlemen who use intimidation and an ancient system known as debt bondage, in which wages are withheld against money owed to employers, recruiters, and suppliers of food, housing, and other services. Leandro left a comfortable life as an insurance adjuster on Rio’s Copacabana Beach to work in a hot, dusty place known as “The Mouth of Hell,” but he says he has no regrets.

It’s worth noting that forced labor is linked to some of Brazil’s most important exports: sugar, ethanol, beef, soy, and steel. By all accounts, the government is serious about rooting it out, but it’s distressing to think that there may be slave labor buried in our breakfast cereal or automobiles. Please give the piece a listen and let us know what you think!

Jon

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About Homelands

WHAT WE ARE

Homelands Productions is an independent nonprofit journalism cooperative. Since our founding in 1989, we have reported from more than 60 countries, produced nine special series for public radio and television, and won 22 national and international awards.

We also serve as a nonprofit fiscal sponsor for projects that excite us, and our Public Interest Reporting Defense Fund helps journalists whose work has gotten them in trouble.