Many NPR listeners heard Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson’s February 19 story about the time she spent with U.S. Marines from India Company and the resulting death of Marine Alejandro Yazzie, of Rock Point, Arizona.
U.S. Marine and Afghan army commanders confer after their men begin taking fire while on patrol earlier this week. Image by: Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson/NPR
Nelson’s behind-the-scenes story shares the challenges and intimacy when covering intense stories in close quarters with the subjects:
“I was in a room with maybe 20 or 25 Marines. It was freezing. I mean, it was basically a petrol station that had been – the glass had been blown out from the various IEDs that they had detonated. I was in this room, and you have to picture it’s just a concrete floor, rat feces everywhere, and all of us were so cold.”
Reporting on the reaction to her story, Nelson exchanged shared:
“And so what struck me about him, unlike the others, he was a little quieter, he was a little shyer, but very sincere, very nice, and just – I could tell when he would just mention that he wanted to talk to his wife, his eyes would just light up in a way that I knew he was very much in love with her. And I know he was trying to call her on Valentine’s Day on my phone and couldn’t reach her and he had planned to call her that night again. But he definitely was thinking about her and their unborn child.”
Montange, in her closing, said,
“Soraya’s story, with sound of the firefight in which Lance Corporal Yazzie was killed, upset his family, but his wife Colandra(ph) also told NPR she was glad he was interviewed before he died, because now she knows his last thoughts were of her.”
As I prepare for the second weekend of our Storytelling in Health Care Leadership seminar, I’ve been going through some old work and reels. Lots of material is recorded, some in older formats than others: Hi 8, DVC-PRO, DV. I came across some video from a shoot in 1998. Before we see the video, I need to set up the story.
In 1997, shortly after the death of Princess Diana, I began producing a web documentary project called “Behind the Viewfinder – A Year in the Life of Photojournalism”. It was a regular diary of 10 photojournalists, telling their stories and their work. Some people have called it blogging before we knew what blogging was. The site, just as it was created, is still live at www.digitalstoryteller.com/YITL
I was also shooting video interviews for a video documentary of the work. So here is the set up for the video below:
Photojournalist Mark Lent was shooting a project about Jerry Pope, a world record holding water skier. Jerry is paraplegic and skied 100 kilometers without stopping. So Mark, the photojournalist, was facing backwards in the tow boat pulling Jerry. The photo would illustrate a story about Jerry.
I was in a chase boat, and we cruised along side and behind Jerry, videotaping Mark, taking photos of Jerry. The boat motor sound was loud, so Mark was wearing a wireless microphone, which transmitted everything he said to the video camera and to my earphones. Mark ultimately wrote about the day in his post for Behind the Viewfinder on September 5, 1998.
If we fast forward 11 and a half years later. Saturday afternoon, I was reviewing old tapes for possible examples to share with students in the next seminar session. In my search, I came across an un-logged tape and popped it in the video deck to preview it. What I found was the video from that day.
You can clearly hear Mark’s voice, and his shutter, as he takes the photos including the photo included here. The video below is compressed to a .mp4 to make it a quick load for you. You’ll want Quicktime.
Later this month, I lead one of our Leadership Seminar Series on Storytelling in Health Care Leadership. I found this video by NPR’s Scott Simon on You Tube and I anticipate including it in our discussions.
As a storyteller, I like producing documentaries and an opportunity to produce a documentary and build a graduate course at the same time was too good to pass up.
We Are What We Eat: The nutrition, policy and public health of America’s diet is the working title of our public health elective to be tentatively offered fall 2010. It’s a graduate course, with a text book, quizzes, papers, and discussion, but what I’m setting out to do is to create five one-hour documentary interviews with our faculty to create student engagement in the course materials.
There are lots of reasons we need a course like this in a medical school, and one I find striking is this summer’s policy statement from the American Medical Association:
“Preventing disease is paramount in the provision of health care. Hospitals, physicians and nurses are ideal leaders and advocates for creating food environments that promote health. This policy is an important contribution to a prevention-based healthcare delivery system.”
The AMA’s new Sustainable Food policy builds on a report from its Council on Science and Public Health (http://www.ama-assn.org/ama1/pub/upload/mm/475/refcomd.pdf), which notes that locally produced and organic foods “reduce the use of fuel, decrease the need for packaging and resultant waste disposal, preserve farmland … [and] the related reduced fuel emissions contribute to cleaner air and in turn, lower the incidence of asthma attacks and other respiratory problems.” Industrial food production is a significant contributor to increased antibiotic resistance, climate change, and air and water pollution.
The new AMA policy states:
That our AMA support practices and policies in medical schools, hospitals, and other health care facilities that support and model a healthy and ecologically sustainable food system, which provides food and beverages of naturally high nutritional quality.
That our AMA encourage the development of a healthier food system through the US Farm Bill and other federal legislation.
That our AMA consider working with other health care and public health organizations to educate the health care community and the public about the importance of healthy and ecologically sustainable food systems.
This is an interesting time to explore this topic. There are new videos about food and sustainability, there is a growing interest in what food labels like “organic” really mean, and a slowing economy has led to interest in backyard gardens, urban gardens, back yard chickens, and our continued concerns about obesity and the health consequences to the nation.
We start shooting the 5 segments this month, shooting with a tapeless JVC GY HM 100 camera, straight to disk, which ought to speed up our post producti0n work flow.
F.R. "Fritz" Nordengren is Assistant Professor at Des Moines University where he supervises health care administration graduate student capstone projects.
He is a President of the Iowa Food Systems Council to recommend policy, research and program options for an Iowa food system which supports healthier Iowans, communities, economies and the environment.
Nordengren is an award winning producer, a graduate health care educator, and a small farmer & rancher
