Blog - Homelands Productions

May 1, 2009

Happy May Day!

In nearly every country in the world, May First is an important holiday – a time when people come together to celebrate the dignity of labor, and to reflect on the crucial role that ordinary workers play in building better societies. For the last two years, we at Homelands Productions have tried to do both those things, and it has been a profoundly uplifting experience.

It’s worth remembering, though, how hard life is for so many working people. Workplaces are too often zones of exploitation, where employers squeeze what they can from their employees with little regard for their basic human rights. Big corporations disrupt thousands of lives with the stroke of an accountant’s pen. Small businesses use family obligations or personal debts to hold their workers hostage. People toiling in the informal economy are tormented by everyone from street gangs to police. Incredibly, millions of people, many of them children, are still bought and sold and forced to work against their wills. Governments too often leave working people physically or legally unprotected.

We’ve touched on a few of these issues in the WORKING series. We profiled a teenage tannery worker, Mohmen, who isn’t allowed to go to the window when the fumes overtake him. We profiled a metal worker, Pedro, who can’t get his bosses to compensate him for a deadly lung disease he contracted on the job. We profiled a miner, Fidele, who is shaken down by corrupt soldiers every time he finds minerals. We profiled a sex worker, Samanta, who has been threatened by zealots, harassed by police, and stabbed by a client. We profiled a lobster diver, Romulo, who was nearly killed because of corner-cutting by boat owners and negligence by government regulators. We profiled a middle-aged woman, Vicki, whose attempt to start a recycling business was nearly thwarted by jealous neighbors and bribe-seeking officials. And we profiled a young labor inspector, Leandro, who has devoted his life to freeing slaves, of whom, he has found, there are still far too many.

Our hope for WORKING was that it would remind our audience how work connects us to millions of other human beings around the world – to real people with hearts and lungs and families and dreams and needs and desires. It’s an obvious point, but one worth noting, and celebrating. And one that comes with a dose of responsibility as well.

Jon

April 30, 2009

Vicki Ponce, Recycler

For Mexican women of a certain age, finding decent work can be nearly impossible. Vicki Ponce was in her 50s, selling tamales on the street, when she and some women friends decided to try their luck in the electronic waste business. They butted heads with local officials and withstood the taunts of jealous neighbors. Today Las Chicas Bravas (“The Tough Girls”) spend their days dismantling old computers and TV sets and selling the parts to buyers around the world. Now if only they could convince the mayor to turn on the power.

Ingrid Lobet’s profile of Vicki Ponce aired on Marketplace on 29 April, the latest segment in the WORKING series. If you didn’t have a chance to hear it, please check it out online. You can also see photos of Vicki and read Ingrid’s reporter’s notebook.

On the subject of Mexico – our thoughts are with the people of that good country as they head into two of their most important holidays – Labor Day and Cinco de Mayo – under strict instructions not to gather in public. Estamos con Ustedes, amigos!

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.

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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.