Category: Good Causes
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Every Day is a Surprise. Also, People are A$$h0Le5. (part 2)
And so, my motorcycle was repaired, and I planned for the next day to be completely uneventful – one of those days where you catch up on tasks that have been piling up. But I was wrong. The morning was pretty routine, and then I went to my place of work, where I saw that…
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Introducing Kids in Madagascar to Photography: Results (3)
This is the third in series of posts in which I write about introducing kids to photography, using point-and-shoot film cameras from the 1980s and 90s, at the youth center, Le Cameleon, in Antananarivo, Madagascar. You can find previous posts in this series here, here and here. When it came time for the kids to choose their third…
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Introducing Kids in Madagascar to Photography: Results (2)
This is one of a short series of posts in which I write about introducing kids to photography, using point-and-shoot film cameras from the 1980s and 90s, at the youth center, Le Cameleon, in Antananarivo, Madagascar. You can find previous posts in this series here and here. Previously I wrote about how we had sent the…
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Introducing Kids in Madagascar to Photography: Results (1)
I wrote last time about the youth center, Le Cameleon, we crowdfunded and built in Antananarivo, Madagascar, and the project we organized to introduce a half dozen interested kids to photography, using point-and-shoot film cameras from the 1980s and 90s. I was excited and hopeful the kids would wind up with good results, because I…
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Sharing our Passion: Kids in Madagascar Get a First Taste of Photography
A few years ago, I joined a couple of other folks with a passion for photography and an interest in doing something for the local community in Antananarivo, Madagascar. We collaborated to successfully crowdfund a small youth center that would cater to local vulnerable kids who, for whatever reason, were not attending school. Thanks to…
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Great News: Jerome is Learning English and Coding!
Way back in 2016 when I was still new to Madagascar, Anne and I saw an online notice that a crowdfunding initiative on the eastern coast of the country was looking for a photographer and a videographer to produce a crowdfunding video and associated imagery to support a project (at the time still unnamed) to…
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Barefoot in the Malagasy Jungle: the Making of Onja’s Crowdfunding Video (part 3)
In the third and and final installment in this series I have written about a trip we took out to a remote village in Madagascar, to help film a crowdfunding video for a great cause, Onja. In this post I share (with the help of Anne’s photos) our impressions of life in the 700-person village…
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Barefoot in the Malagasy Jungle: the Making of Onja’s Crowdfunding Video (part 2)
This is part two in a series. Part one can be viewed here. So as I noted yesterday, after our long trek into the countryside, the first order of business was to meet with the President of Andovolalina, the village we were staying in, to explain what we were up to and get his blessing.…
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Barefoot in the Malagasy Jungle: the Making of Onja’s Crowdfunding Video (part 1)
It started back in July when I got an interesting item in my “Google Alerts” for Madagascar. A small NGO was looking for a filmmaker and a social media manager to support their project in eastern Madagascar. I quickly fired off an email doing my best to convince “Sam” that this project was tailor-made for…
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Anjezika: Antananarivo’s “Waterworld”
This is Anjezika. Once a vibrant fishing and rice-growing village, it has gradually been encircled and choked off by the surrounding city of Antananarivo, Madagascar. Now, nobody grows anymore rice here. A few small fish can be collected from the stagnant water that separates small squares of low-lying land where the people have built their…
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Children of the Street: Ankorondrano
A group of about a dozen kids gathers on a small patch of green with a few benches and trees. Basically a large roundabout. Imagine an oblong Dupont Circle, except Starbucks is 3,000 miles away. The sound of traffic is constant. Two young volunteers lug a bag of supplies to a cement bench and quietly…
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Love Your Neighbor
Truth be told, we didn’t ask to come to Madagascar just for the lemurs – although they’re a pretty nice bonus. A big reason we came here because we want to try and make a difference, somewhere, in someone’s lives; to have a purpose. But Saturday was a pretty tough day. We started the day…
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Checking in with Rocky
I recently had the opportunity to meet Rocky Braat, the subject of an amazing documentary called “Blood Brother,” winner of both the Audience and Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2013. The film tells the story of a disillusioned young American who goes to India to find meaning in his life and finds it at an…
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Baby Olive Ridley Sea Turtles
Sea turtles have been on this earth for 110 million years, compared to humans’ 200,000. If my math is correct, relating Earth’s 4.6 billion-year existence to a 24-hour clock would have seen sea turtles arriving at around 11:26 pm…and humans arriving at 11:59 and 56 seconds. Yet we’ve been tremendously successful – there are now…
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These Student-Athletes Can Use a Hand!
Those of you who know me may recall that in Windhoek, I was quite active in teaching Namibian teens to swim, and training them to compete in multisport competitions involving swimming, running, and/or cycling. The story of one of these athletes is captured in this blog post. A group of 4 athletes (and a chaperone)…
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The Best Chowkidar in the Universe
Way back in 2007, on one of my earliest tours in Afghanistan, I was responsible for writing these weekly situation reports, and I recall there was an open source report being published in the UK that I would regularly rely on as a source, because the author was able to get more detailed information on…
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The International Coastal Cleanup: Chennai, India
Today we joined thousands of Chennaiites in taking part in the 2013 International Coastal Cleanup. Regular readers in this blog will recognize that Chennai struggles to maintain clean beaches and waterways, like many large urban areas on the coast. It was impressive to see the number of people involved and active in this annual event.…
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Check out Namibia’s ‘Shishani’
One of Namibia’s rising young talents needs your help! Namibian musicians have a hard time “breaking out” – primarily as a result of Namibia’s small population – just over two million, around the same size as the city of Houston! Namibia also has one of the biggest income disparities in the world, which means that…
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Female Entrepreneur Launches Indiegogo Crowdfunding Campaign for Township Bicycle Touring Company
Here in Namibia, where income disparity is one of the highest in the world (THE highest, depending on whose figures you use) and unemployment hovers around 34 percent, small entrepreneurs in both the formal and informal sector are likely to be the biggest drivers of Namibia’s economy in the near future. This is something young…
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Video for a Good Cause
One of the things I’ve had the opportunity to do in Namibia is to make short videos highlighting important causes, or to show far-away donors where their money is going. A little more than half a year ago, my wife told me that she had been to an informal settlement (a “shantytown”, literally) where people…
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Documentary: Child Labor in Afghanistan
I wish I could say I had made this documentary on child labor in Afghanistan. This is a story that needs to be told; the circumstances in Afghanistan have led many, many children to lose any real childhood whatsoever. The filmmakers, who work for an Afghan television station, would not have had to look hard…
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Namibia’s “N/a’ankuse” Needs a Filmmaker
The N/a’an ku se charity lodge, wildlife-sanctuary-and-a-whole-bunch-of-other-stuff is looking for a filmmaker. It’s not a high-paying job, but it’s a good cause and a great opportunity to hang out in Namibia and take pictures of cool stuff. The organization occupies a large piece of land just east of Namibia’s capital Windhoek, where a number of…
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Conservation International: Forests and Carbon in Madagascar
This is an excellent example of what organizations are doing to protect forests. In Madagascar, forests are especially important, because something close to 80% of Madagascar’s animal life is unique, and highly adapted to very specific areas and niches in Madagascar that may in some cases be limited to a few thousand hectares of forest.…
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Hope of Good Hope gets a Sponsor
It seems that the “Home of Good Hope”, a local soup kitchen that feeds approximately 350 desperately poor children in a local township shantytown, has gotten a Dutch “gemeente” (roughly equivalent to a county) as an official sponsor. TAZM Pictures recently made a promotional video for the Home of Good Hope, and it receives regular…
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Video: the Home of Good Hope
Every now and then I get an opportunity to take a break from filming bugs and upside down chins and silly stuff, to making a video with some social value. I heard there was a need to show overseas donors a bit more about a cause they were supporting – a soup kitchen in Windhoek’s…