No Progress in Armendariz Case

In October we reported on the murder of Marco Antonio Armendariz Vega, a self-taught lawyer who had spent years defending the poor and powerless in northern Mexico’s Sonora state. Marcos (as he was known) was shot in his home in Agua Prieta at point blank range. Our colleague Ingrid Lobet, who met Marcos while reporting a profile of e-waste recycler Vicki Ponce, has been in touch with his friends and family and tells us that no progress has been made in the investigation. The case has been handed from the local police to the ministerio publico, which is like the district attorney’s office. Meanwhile, Marcos’ daughter Paty is taking over her father’s practice, and another daughter is considering leaving law school to help. We wish them success and safety.

 

A Match Made in Documentary Heaven

I’m just back from a terrific meeting at Magnum Photos in New York. It was my first visit to the office of the storied agency, and it was a treat to see so many iconic images on the walls. It was also a treat to sit down with our friends there and talk turkey (talk tofu?) about working together.

If you’ve been following this blog, you may know that Magnum and Homelands are teaming up on the Hunger Chronicles project. The plan is to send two-person reporter-photographer teams around the world in search of the causes of hunger and clues for how to end it. (With the number of hungry people surging past the one billion mark, this is as urgent a mission as we’ve ever undertaken.) NPR is on board in a big way, as are Cornell University and the USC Annenberg School for Communication. Magnum has an amazing global network of photographers, websites, publications and other partners. We’ve got lots of work to do (especially fundraising!) but our enthusiasm is growing by the day.

Did someone say something about fundraising? Please do consider a tax-deductible donation to Homelands Productions. We need help getting this as-yet-unfunded project off the ground! Give us a shout if you want to know more.

Thanks,

Jon

 

Peru Gives US-Owned Smelter More Time to Clean Up

Occasionally we get updates about stories we’ve done. Here’s one we thought we’d pass along.

In early 2007 Homelands produced a profile of Pedro Córdoba Valdivieso, a metal worker in Peru who was suffering from an incurable lung ailment. Córdoba worked for a giant American-owned smelter called Doe Run in the Andean town of La Oroya. The Blacksmith Institute has rated La Oroya among the ten most polluted places in the world.

When Doe Run bought the smelter from the Peruvian government in 1997, it committed to a ten-year program to cut down on toxic emissions. By most accounts, the company has done much of what it agreed to do. But around the time we reported the story, Doe Run was lobbying the government for more time to complete a plant that would reduce the smelter’s sulfur dioxide emissions. Peru eventually agreed to give the company until October 2009 to finish the work. Early this year, pleading poverty, Doe Run asked that the deadline be extended again.

Peru said no. The company then shut down for three months and sent all its workers home. In late September, after demonstrations by Doe Run employees anxious to get back to work, Peru’s congress cried uncle, granting the company another 30 months to complete the sulfur dioxide plant. The fear was that insisting that Doe Run keep its word would jeopardize 20,000 jobs. It’s a Hobson’s choice that is sadly familiar to poor countries, poor communities and poor people everywhere.

We wish we could tell you more about Pedro Córdoba’s condition. But we do have an update on another WORKING profilee: the Kenyan runner Salina Kosgei. Kosgei, who won the Boston Marathon in April 2009, ran in the ING New York City Marathon on November 1. She tripped and fell early in the race but still ended up finishing fifth. Congratulations, Salina!

 

Cecilia Vaisman Teams with OSI on Statelessness Project

Homelands co-founder, senior producer and current board president Cecilia Vaisman was part of a multimedia team working on the Open Society Institute’s initiative on statelessness. She conducted interviews with people of Haitian descent who are denied many basic rights by the government of the Dominican Republic. The multimedia project was posted on OSI’s website earlier this month. According to OSI, 15 million people around the world are denied the rights of citizenship. Citizenship enables people not only to vote, hold public office, and exit and enter a country freely, but also to obtain housing, health care, employment and education.

 

Salina Kosgei Profile on World Vision Report

My profile of the Kenyan marathoner Salina Kosgei is airing around the country this week on World Vision Report. Salina, who grew up poor in a remote village in western Kenya, is considered the top challenger to favorite Paula Radcliffe in the ING New York City Marathon on November 1. It’s her first race since she won the Boston Marathon in April by less than one second.

Jon

 

Rest in Peace, Marco Antonio Armendariz Vega

We are saddened and angered by news of the murder of Marco Antonio Armendariz Vega, a self-taught lawyer who devoted his life to defending the poor and powerless against the corrupt and powerful in the northern Mexican state of Sonora. Marco Antonio, known as Marcos, featured in a profile of Vicki Ponce, an electronics recycler, produced by Ingrid Lobet as part of the WORKING series. He was shot in his home in Agua Prieta at point blank range. Marcos was, by all accounts, an extraordinary man. May he rest in peace. His good works will not be forgotten.

You can read more about Marcos on the blog of a close family friend.

 

Must-Hear Radio Event in Chicago

If you love radio documentaries and you’re anywhere near Chicago on October 23, you should check out the Third Coast International Audio Festival’s annual awards ceremony. It’s a celebration of the extraordinary work being done by audio producers around the world. The winners have been announced and the award-winning audio is up on the Third Coast site. The drama of the ceremony is finding out who won what; the joy is in hearing powerful pieces and getting to meet the makers.

Homelands’ co-founder and board president Cecilia Vaisman will be there to pick up an award for Gregory Warner, who won for his profile of Fidele Musafiri, an artisanal miner in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As faithful readers of this blog will know, the piece was part of the WORKING series.

 

Congratulations, Gregory!

I’m just back from the Public Radio Program Directors conference in Cleveland, where the good people at the Third Coast International Audio Festival announced that Gregory Warner’s WORKING profile of Congolese miner Fidele Musafiri had won a Third Coast Festival/Richard H. Driehaus award. Gregory and I were on hand for the announcement. The same profile won a Silver Medal in the human interest category of the 2009 New York Festivals award competition.

Jon

 

WORKING Featured on Chicago Public Radio

Happy Labor Day! The documentary program Re:sound devoted this weekend’s show to the WORKING series, airing six profiles along with clips from a conversation between me and show host Gwen Macsai. It’s a good introduction to the project if you haven’t heard any of the pieces. You can listen online by clicking here. You can also download the podcast. Re:sound is produced by the Third Coast International Audio Festival.

The Sigma Delta Chi awards ceremony in Indianapolis last week was good fun. Inspiring to learn about the other winning projects, many of them investigative reports requiring courage and perseverance. The plaque they gave me was too big to fit in my carry-on bag!

Jon

P.S. I’m off to Nairobi for a very quick work trip starting Tuesday, and (barring plane problems) will be back just in time to fly off to Cleveland for the Public Radio Programming Conference. If you’ll be there, and you’re reading this, I’d love to say hello.

 

Off to Indy to Pick Up Some Hardware

I’m heading to Indianapolis on Friday to accept the Sigma Delta Chi award for Radio Feature Reporting at the National Journalism Conference organized by the Society of Professional Journalists. Homelands won for the WORKING project. I’ll be in very good company—other award winners this year include NPR, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Vanity Fair, Playboy, NBC News, CBS News, and several other big-time shops. If you’re planning to be there, please make sure to track me down and say hello!

Jon

 

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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!

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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!

 

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

 

Brandon Davies, Banker

Brandon Davies‘ work is all about risk. After 32 years at Barclays Bank, he decided to try his luck as an independent operator. He quickly found himself with six or seven different jobs. He was hired to head an international association of risk professionals. He was recruited to the boards of two new banks with ties to the developing world. He began trading equities and currencies, using his own money. He helped set up one-off insurance and property deals. Risk, he told producer Sean Cole, is how we learn and grow as people. We should embrace it, not avoid it. At least that’s what he said last summer, when Sean spent a few days with him in London. Then the global financial system collapsed. Sean took a deep breath and called him back.

The profile of Brandon Davies aired on Marketplace on the 28th of May. It is the 27th profile in the WORKING series. For those of you in the public radio world, please note that all but the most recent profiles are now available on PRX.

Of course you can hear all the profiles, and see slideshows and read reporter’s notebooks, at the Worker Browser site, which was created especially for this project. While you’re there, why not tell the world what you think about your job?

Cheers,

Jon

 

Babu Hussein, Shipbreaking Worker

Ismael “Babu” Hussein works as an assistant in one of Bangladesh’s giant shipbreaking yards, where armies of laborers dismantle huge old vessels with little more than hammers and blowtorches. The work is perilous, the bosses abusive, the hours exhausting. Babu’s reward? Just over two dollars a day, and nightmares about being crushed by giant sheets of steel. Pretty heavy stuff for a 13-year-old kid.

You can hear Sandy Tolan’s profile of Babu on Marketplace on Thursday, June 18th. There are great photos and an excellent introduction to the issues of shipbreaking and child labor at the WORKING websites – http://marketplace.org/segments/working and http://working.homelands.org.

Please let us know what you think!

Jon

 

Friend of Homelands Held in Iran

Iason Athanasiadis, an extraordinary young freelance writer, radio producer and photographer, was detained by Iranian authorities on June 19 while trying to board a plane to leave the country. Iason had been covering the contested elections there. Homelands Productions joins many other media organizations in calling for his release. We know Iason as an intelligent, fair-minded, compassionate reporter with deep knowledge of the Middle East and Central Asia. A 2008 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, Iason was raised in Greece and educated in England and Iran. He holds a degree in Arabic and Modern Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford and a masters degree in Persian and Contemporary Iranian Studies from the Tehran School of International Relations. You can read and see some of Iason’s work at http://www.iason.ws.

P.S. You can read an op-ed about Iason and his detention by Homelands Productions co-founder Sandy Tolan on Salon.com.

 

Iason is Free!

Great news today from Tehran. Colleague Iason Athanasiadis, who was detained by Iranian authorities after reporting on the disputed elections last month, was released after more than two weeks in detention. The government of Greece and officials of the Greek Orthodox Church had been pushing hard for this. According to today’s news reports, Iason was the only non-Iranian journalist being held. Things in Iran are clearly in turmoil after yesterday’s announcement by leading clerics that the election results were invalid and the government crackdown unjustifiable. Anyway, welcome back Iason!

 

Waiting for Iason

Rather than rewrite yesterday’s post (is that even allowed?) we thought we’d say that news of Iason’s release, which has been widely reported, is still at the “Iranian foreign ministry officials confirmed” level of certainty. As of this hour, we haven’t seen proof that Iason is out of custody. We’ll either confirm the news when we hear it or sneak back and delete this post (surely that is allowed – you may not be able to rewrite history, but you can always erase it!). Still, feeling hopeful.

 

Free Indeed

What a relief to hear that Iason Athanasiadis is in Dubai, confirmedly free! We are anxious to hear what happened from Iason himself. We know that Roxana Saberi, another colleague who was held in Iran, endured much during her detention, physically and psychologically. Chilling to note that many other journalists, all Iranian, are still being held. Our thoughts are with them.

 

Salina Kosgei, Runner

Salina Kosgei was the 10th and youngest child of poor farmers in the highlands of western Kenya. The family home had no electricity or plumbing; Salina got her first shoes at age 14. As a kid, she used to run 10 kilometers to school, barefoot, just for the fun of it. Twenty years later, she’s still running, not for kicks but for a living. It’s been a long slog, with plenty of ups and downs. Then this year she found herself elbow to elbow with the defending champ in the most prestigious marathon in the world, with the finish line in sight.

Jon Miller’s profile is scheduled to air on Marketplace on Thursday, July 16. To hear it, read more about Salina, and see 23 terrific photos by Kenyan photographer Stevie Mann, click here. The story will be posted around showtime.

 

The End of WORKING As We Know It

The profile of Kenyan marathon runner Salina Kosgei is the 29th and final feature in the WORKING series. Kenya is the 25th country we’ve visited.

It’s hard to believe that the series is coming to an end. We set out two and a half years ago to create a sort of group portrait of the working world. The best place to see if we succeeded is here. Click on the “Listen” button or the “Radio Stories” tab. You can hear the audio, see photos, and read reporters’ notebooks for each profile. You can also check out the Worker Browser, a spiffy web tool we created for this project.

As we have reported in this space, WORKING won the 2008 Sigma Delta Chi Award for Radio Feature Reporting from the Society for Professional Journalists. Also, Gregory Warner’s portrait of a miner from the Democratic Republic of Congo won a New York Festivals Silver World Medal in the “human interest” category. The series as a whole was a finalist under “community profiles.”

A huge thank-you to the many fine people who have made this project possible, and especially to our friends at Marketplace. It’s been a lovely ride!

 

Worker Browser Finds a Home

I’m tickled to announce that the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations has agreed to take over the interactive Worker Browser site that Homelands created as part of the WORKING series.

The ILR School is the world’s leading college focused on work, employment and labor issues. Faculty, students and staff members there hope to use the Worker Browser as a teaching tool, and to link it to impressive digital resources such as daily and weekly labor news services, research databases, etc. They’re also interested in making the site more user-friendly and attracting a wider range of visitors.

The Worker Browser was developed by Thiago Demello Bueno of MadeOfPeople.org in close collaboration with yours truly. We’re proud of it, and glad that it has found a home now that the WORKING project is history.

Jon