Friday, September 22, 2006

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

birthday thoughts

When I look back on this week (you know, when I am REALLY old, like 40-wink, wink) I truly believe that it will live in infamy as one of the hardest weeks of my life. I saw the gruesome death of a very important friendship this week because of the actions of myself and someone I care about greatly. It’s funny how we can take the gifts that God gives us and allow human nature to completely destroy them. Baltimore has been hard for me and my life here has been greatly improved by the few friendships that I have, and to lose one of the ones that is most dear to my heart seems, at times, unbearable.

The other reason this week has been hard is that this wrenching experience has made me realize that an arch of growing adulthood has edged closer to completion. I’ve always wondered when I would finally feel like an adult, and I expect that there will be more “maturing moments” ahead, but getting up this morning on my birthday makes me realize that I have grown quite a bit since last year. The first time I ever really viewed myself as an adult was when I was in India and exposed to regular challenges in taking care of myself and watching out for my well being. As I came home, I wondered if my family would notice the change in me that I felt-that I matured into more of an adult. I don’t really know if anyone noticed, but I also feel that this week has had the same sort of effect. And imagine crammed 9 months of maturing into 5 days...It would leave anyone emotionally destroyed.

I can only hope that the next year will be more stable for me, and that there will not be so many wrenching experiences. I guess a lot has changed since my birthday last year: I was working in a coffee shop when I turned 23, a recent grad who was trying to decide on next steps and battling depression over the state of her life, who felt like a failure because of having to live in her mother’s home in a city that held no future for her. As I turn 24 I am living in a new city on a different side of the country, working in the field I dreamed of in college, and traveling to places for work I could only read about in the papers last year.

Despite the gains, part of me still feels that I should have accomplished more in my life by this age. Its not that I feel like a failure, I just worry that I haven’t done all that I can with the years that I have had. But I guess all we can do is the best we can...

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

quotables

Me: Did Sarah come back yet? Did she have a CD with her?

Kirsten: Yes, she came back but I don't know about the CD.

Me: If she has Justin Timberlake with her, I'll be happy...The CD, not the man.....Acutally, the man would make me happy too.

Monday, September 11, 2006

kevin sites in the hotzone

One of my new favorite bloggers is Kevin Sites. In the fall of last year, he set out to cover all of the world's conflict zones, or at least some of the most active conflicts currently.

Below is his year in review article, as posted on his site today. I thought it was really interesting, and many of the places he visits are potential places where my organization could work in the future.

Our Journey So Far
A Year of the Hot Zone Completed
By Kevin Sites, Mon Sep 11, 1:36 PM ET

For nearly a year, through 22 conflict zones and 19 countries, I waited for this moment: a sense of absolution, something to wash me clean of what at times felt like an endless trail of sorrow.

The moment comes out of a murky blue, 60 feet below the ocean's surface. It comes suddenly and against the current; three shadows in the water, black and white angels, giant manta rays hovering over us in a liquid ballet.

As I watch them circle overhead, I well with emotion, sucking gulps of air from my scuba regulator. Their peaceful, silent beauty seems such a contrast to the nearly overwhelming suffering and death that I had witnessed this year.

Even underwater, I have a video camera with me. Something I routinely pointed in the direction of destruction and tragedy — the rubble of Lebanon's Bint Jbail, a funeral in northern Israel. But at this moment I cannot bring myself to point the lens in the direction of these magnificent creatures. Instead, I follow them only with my eyes, full of gratitude for this bit of serenity.

This is both a holiday and pilgrimage of sorts, a present my girlfriend Caitlin and I have given to each other after a long and difficult separation. Being here under the ocean off the Micronesian island of Yap is as seemingly far away as we can get from any war zone. And now I finally feel the journey has ended while watching what is mundane for the mantas, being cleaned of parasites by tiny fish, but magical for us.

But when an odyssey like this ends, especially one invested in the gravity of trying to report on all the world's conflict zones in one year, there is both personal and public accounting to be done.

What was accomplished? What have we learned? Did anything or anyone change because of it? There is no easy answer for any of these questions, and we will be examining them for some time to come.

Reporting from all these places felt at times both evolutionary and revolutionary.
We used some of the latest digital equipment to put a human face on global conflict and share it with the world. But technically, physically and mentally, the process was exhausting both for me, doing the physical coverage, and my Mission Control team of Senior Producer Robert Padavick, Producer Erin Green and Researcher Lisa Liu planning, prepping, packaging and posting our work.

From our first conflict zone in Somalia in September 2005 to our last in Israel this August, we had to make changes, improvise, and often work around the clock to try to make the places and the people we've met relevant to you.

People like the Afghan child bride, Gulsoma, who was given away in marriage at the age of four and tortured nearly to death by her in-law family; a Congolese woman named Serapina who was repeatedly raped by rebel soldiers and then forced to eat the flesh of her husband who was killed in front of her; a Nepalese boy named Yubaraj who at the age of 12 became head of the household when his father died and who now parks motorcycles 16 hours a day to support his family when he wishes he could be in school.

But while many of these stories are steeped in tragedy, we also hoped you could see the strength and resilience of their human spirit.

That is one of the two most important lessons that I believe were revealed to me on this journey. First, that the world is indeed filled with conflict, pain and suffering, and that amazing people overcome it everyday.

And second, that in war, it is not the combatants, but the civilian population that ultimately pays the highest price in death, injury and the legacy of destruction.
We raise statues around the world in honor of our war dead, but often forget the innocent civilian victims of conflict.

In that vein, we want to reintroduce you to the extraordinary people we met and the places we reported on during this journey, so over the course of the next four to six weeks, we are going to repost all the stories, text, video and still images, from each country in the order we covered them.

This will give you a chance to see the full scope of our year's work in a condensed time period, while also allowing us to rest and retool for the launch of the next phase of the Hot Zone, which will primarily focus on putting a face on the untold stories in America.

Thank you for sharing our journey so far.

Sunday, September 03, 2006

do, do, do you, do you wanna

I am totally obsessed with my new Franz Ferdinand CD. I keep listening to it over and over...I think it may be driving Sarah a little crazy. It makes me so angry that they played DC in April and I had no idea! Who knows when the next time they will be in the States will be. I actually got a bunch of new CD's last week, and I uploaded into iTunes at work. Now that I have music to listen to, I am totally oblivious to the world while I sit in my cube. Whenever people stop by to try to have be do something or because they need my help, it takes me awhile to realize they are there. The other day, Kirsten came by and put her hand on my shoulder and it startled me so badly!

Today was such a beautiful day! After church, Kirsten and I didn't want to go back to the concrete hell of B'more, so she and I decided randomly that we were going to go to Alexandria. Neither one of us had ever been there before, so that's a good enough reason for us to visit. We ended up taking a walking tour of historic Old Town Alexandria, and its 200 years of historical glory. I love walking around the DC-area and being around all the tourists...its a totally different communal vibe than from Baltimore. The people-watching dynamics change. Anyway, while we were wandering we took a slight detour; one of the homes in the neighborhood was having an open house and we wandered through it. It was beautiful, but a skinny, tall rowhouse. The asked price? $1.25 million. Guess I shouldn't expect to ever want to buy a house in this part of the country. K and I also bumped into the last guided tour of the Carlyle House, this big colonial mansion. As we were "toured" through the building, I was having serious American Girl dejavu. When I was a girl, I was obsessed with the American Girl's and all of their stories and places in history. Walking through the house was like perusing Felicity's clothes and belongings in the catalog. I actually knew a bit about the colonial lifestyles of 10 year old girls, which made me feel intellectually superior for all of 5 seconds!

Tomorrow K and I are going up to Philadelphia on our day off. Hopefully some of the historical stuff will be open, so we can get a sense of the history of the place. I couldn't stand the idea of spending my day off just running errands...you have to enjoy those days when you can.

I can't believe it's September! Very weird.