My cell phone lit up with this text message at 10:45 today (11/4/07). The sender was Sue Ellen Ruggles, shown in this photo I took of her holding a mirror up for a young cleft lip patient to see his natural smile for the first time.
The photo was taken in Villahermosa, Mexico in 2000. According to news reports, today the city and State of Tabasco has 800,000 homeless and maybe 150,000 in shelters due to flooding and rain. Potable drinking water has been returned to approximately 30 percent of the area.
Here is Des Moines, a city about the same size as Villahermosa, we were flooded and without fresh water in 1993. Villahermosa, at an average of 10 meters above sea level, will have significant recovery issues
Sue Ellen is reaching out, I am reaching out, and soon, others of our teams will be reaching out to see the best way we can provide aid or be a conduit for aid.
When I left Villahermosa the first visit, I wrote this reflective piece about life’s questions.
More as I know it…
EDIT: Here is a like to Tabasco Hoy http://www.tabascohoy.com/villahermosa/
Or use a translate page to see in English.
Yahoo News photo show
Okay, it’s a 15 year old reference to a Mel Gibson movie, but I think it works. A Year of Living Dangerously is the Peter Wier directed story of Guy Hamilton (Gibson) in his first job as an international correspondent.
Sigourney Weaver is Gibson’s co-star and the story paints international journalism in a very romantic light. I suppose having Sigourney Weaver on your next shoot would even paint the “ladies of the D.A.R. potluck” assignment in a romantic light, but that’s the subject of anther column.
Billy Kwan, the photojournalist in the story (played by Linda Hunt) tells Hamilton, “We’ll make a great team, old man. You for the words, me for the pictures. I can be your eyes.”
And they set out to tell an important story. One they hope will change the world in 1965 Indonesia. It’s a romantic notion, using your skills to make a difference. Photojournalists often hope that something they do with make a difference. The Year of Living Dangerously is the stuff war stories are made of. Our own site, the Digital Journalist is filled with some pretty intense stories – both of the subjects shot by the talented people here, but also the behind the scenes stories of what it took to get the photos. The “dangerous” makes the story seem even more important.
But if you read the title of this piece – and have been patient enough with me to read this far, you can change your focus from dangerous to generous.
2001 is going to be a year of living generously for some producers and photojournalists I know. They are giving back to people in need by working with a non profit organization called “New Media for Non Profits” http://www.nmnp.org/. New Media for Non Profits grew out of some conversations with a number of people – and much of it connects to the columns I write here. The interesting thing about a non profit like NMNP is that no one “owns” it. It’s a collaboration of talents that has a board of directors who govern it, but the work produced is directed by need rather than profit, commercial appeal, or shareholder greed. (Don’t get me wrong, profit, commercial appeal and greed are all good in their right time and place, NMNP just isn’t one of them.)
So living generously this year is a way of saying these producers and photojournalists are giving back, working to make a difference with the images, words, and stories they tell.
Donald Winslow is my fellow producer and co founder of NMNP. Both of us have been extremely fortunate in our careers and by coincidence were in a position to devote some time and energy to getting this non profit started. In his words, its time to help other non profits do a better job of telling the world who they are, “This is why we founded NMNP.org, to better help the people and non-profit organizations of the world who work hard to make life better for those who can’t help themselves when they need help the most, and to help those organization’s whose goal it is to improve our society, our culture, and the environment.”
NMNP will be securing grant money, foundation support, and other funds to make it possible to fund new media and traditional story telling profits on behalf of charities in the world. Charities that need to tell their story and producers and photojournalists that are looking to tell stories are coming to the group. NMNP will be the place that helps bring the two together, and find reasonable budgets to fund quality work.
People who are able to give their time and talents are donating some of the work being done. Some of the work is paid work at fair rates. But it’s through the generosity of producers and photojournalists like you that the real work will be done. Generosity in the form of a donated print, generosity in the form of bringing a creative mind to a project, and generosity in the form of taking the time away from vacations to shoot a project that makes a difference in someone’s life.
2001 is my year of living generously. I hope that by the 2002, we can all look back at something we’ve done this year and seen that we have made a difference.
Learn your skills. Find your passion. Make a difference.
PS: There are literally hundreds of people who have been instrumental in getting this rolling. I can’t thank each of you here, but if you’re reading this, you know who you are and thank you.
