January 2010

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11 little things a girl from Kansas loves about living in Phoenix

- desert plants like cacti and palo verdes
– wearing my “summer clothes” year round
– amazing sunsets
– sounds of movement: traffic, light rail, and helicopters
– downtown is flat but surrounded by mountains
– biking to school
– seeing planes que up for landing at Sky Harbor- the tunnel on the 10
– being about 5 hours from both LA and Nogales
– desert driving gives me the big sky feeling of my Flint Hills
palm trees

From Phoenix (2010)

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Yes – I know I promised Burj Khalifah, and yet here’s another Haiti post. Since classes started again last Tuesday, I’ve been busy (or, as Steven would say, busier) again. Yet I’m painfully aware that here I must come across as someone who’s been glued to CNN, unable to function in because of events happening thousands of miles away. I see that in print, I wonder why I’d feel uncomfortable for allowing my life to be disrupted over something serious, yet the embarrassment is as palpable as the guilt for not “staying on task” and coming up with the goods I’ve promised. But, when if there’s a too late to switch back to covering Dubai, is there also a too soon? When is the best time to switch from “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere” to “Las Vegas on Steroids?”

The weird reality is that all these links from the last three entries have surfaced through homework – I am on task, or at least no more off task than normal. Following disasters and disaster coverage are both now – a part of my job? Ok. But I’m not a journalist in the field – and there’s plenty of debate there, too.

Then I stumbled across “Good Intentions Are Not Enough: An honest conversation about the impact of aid“, and found a wealth of material, both collected and written by Saundra Schimmelpfennig addressing another kind of disaster involvement (and the impact on coordination after a disaster) : travelers. Sometimes they are volunteers, sometimes tourists like those on the 3,100-passenger Navigator of the Seas, sometimes a hybrid of both.

Schimmelpfennig introduces the (new to me) concept of Disaster Tourism and describes it’s (mostly negative) impact on natural disaster survivors and aid efforts. Disaster tourism. I’d heard of “dark tourism” – defined by a travel seminar class in my undergrad career as “death tourism – and the concept made me deeply uncomfortable. There’s also the “more grey” – if there is such a thing – travel dubbed “development tourism.”

Explaining that well-intended attempts to help after a disaster may make a confusing situation worse, the Schimmelpfennig starts a list of four articles with Guideline #1 for Volunteering Overseas and follows up the series with “What to look for when evaluating an aid agency.”

Going a step further, I’ve explored the idea of travel being more than just getting on a plane – it can rise from a book, flow through a television, or over the radio. Can disaster tourism be virtual too – does that help explain my fears and chagrin at potentially being perceived as frozen in my living room?

CNN and Anderson Cooper have already been the whipping boy for frustrations over media coverage, while editors at The Washington Post and New York Times have weighed in to explain their publications’ respective stances.

It’s a concern that shifts uneasily when I come across links like this one to CNN’s new interactive video feature shot January 17. Before I play with it and forward it to my ethics instructor, I can’t help notice that the technology is a) cool and b) celebrating it too much would feel a little macabre given the nature of the footage. By the way, they may not be there much longer.

Well, no one ever told me this wouldn’t be messy – there’s no one to blame but myself.

On the other hand, Conan O’Brien’s directive against cynicism transcends its network battle context.

The coordinated disaster and medical professionals going in are truly priceless. As my friend Tina will discover Feb 8 through her hospital’s programs, there will be seriously tough times ahead. I worry and at the same time, remember her as the awesome babysitter she was to me before becoming an amazing doctor and Alea’s mother, and I believe she can make small but important differences. Sites like Biosurveillance: Operational issues in the practice of biosurveillance has set up a dedicated website for Haiti to address the demand for information and the information coming in for people like Tina and everyone they hope to help.

In the meantime, I have a very different kind of work to do – including covering both Haiti AND the Burj Khalifah – before catching, hopefully, a few hours of badly needed sleep.

Finally, to steal from Dispatches one more time, people don’t remember loved ones as CNN portrays them – this is how people will be remembered.

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A quick thoughts post… covering a disaster – and looking at how a disaster is covered – can quickly bring up some dicey ethical questions. My instructor for Journalism Ethics says he avoids hypothetical situations, and one major reason this makes sense to me is that it seems real live ones are everywhere you turn and much more relevant than anything constructed from the abstract. The big one everyone’s talking about is Anderson Cooper’s on camera moment, though First Draft quickly moves the debate from Cooper to the coverage as a whole with this article: The Giggly Twerps on the Evening News.

Meanwhile, the New York Times has created an index of their multimedia coverage, which simultaneously feels organized and… odd… Do I pick the video or the photography next for my visuals of earthquake victims? I feel strange asking myself the question – and yet I am.

Prison Photography asks the questions bluntly and graphically with posts like this: Staring at Death: Photographing Haiti.

And yet the work of photographers / reporters like Minksy is undeniably important, and her quick thinking and speed are definitely a factor in the impact of her work: Behind the Lens: There for the Quake (from the New York Times’ Lens Blog). Reports like Minsky’s Haiti coverage or Melissa Bloch’s China coverage both have an immediacy because of how and when the work was done that can’t be replicated by people who weren’t there because it records both the earthquakes themselves and the experiences of someone going through them – and then beginning to report on others (I wrote about NPR’s radio coverage here during last semester).

Finally, for those who really want to wonder about the metaphysical – media coverage of how people are using media: How does Haiti communicate after the earthquake? (BBC).

If you’ve got thoughts or answers for how to handle these kinds of questions and issues, let me know below…

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First things first, credit for these photos go to my friends Gabrielle Vincent and Preeti Singh (except for the fruit which is courtesy of Wikipedia.org).

This summer I found out that a friend of mine has started working with a Haitian development organization called Sonje Ayiti. Sonje Ayiti (based out of Limonade) is unique because it’s a grassroots group of Haitians living both in Haiti and the US, as opposed to a larger, international organization like the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders – all great groups, with different goals and methods but a similar overall purpose of improving the lives of people wherever they work.

In Sonje Ayiti’s case, they’ve been operating long enough that their goals are starting to get bigger, and they’re going through one of those painful but rewarding growth stages where they have to figure out what they want to do and how to do it. They have projects ranging from livestock distribution to sewing training. Their goals are to connect grant funding with local contacts to kick start local businesses, get kids into schools, and most importantly, empower Haitians with some of the same opportunities the rest of us enjoy to take control of our finances and our lives.

One of the big obstacles – a dramatic lack of infrastructure and a culture of corruption that’s deeply embedded in the country’s politics (see this example of BBC’s coverage).

On the other hand, it’s a land rich in agricultural resources – mangoes, avocados, peanuts, cocoa beans – and more importantly, strong people. The more I learned, the more I look forward to visiting some day.

Like everyone else, when I heard about the earthquake, I was overwhelmed. I hoped that the people I know – or at least, the people that people I know know – are safe, yet as I hear about the casualties, I know that not everyone will be ok. The toll includes international aid workers – the very people needed by international organizations to coordinate relief efforts – as well as Haitians. Gradually, I started to get news – Sonje Ayiti’s main point person in Port au Prince, Gabie, was safe and starting to locate family members. A partial sigh of relief.

But I knew that as bad as the initial situation was, it would get even worse, and quickly. All those obstacles to development projects? Twice as difficult now, when emergency services are so important. There’s a great post here, at the blog Wanderlust, about the obstacles medical and aid workers will be facing as they try to help. Some sources like the author of this Economist article are even asking if this is “the end.”

And then I was shocked and disappointed as a bizarre backlash started – certain networks and commentators labeling a whole population with negative terms or characteristics. Simultaneously, this is deeply offensive and untrue and exposes deep ignorance of people who don’t travel physically or, more importantly, mentally. It’s harmful and inexcusable.

I’m not linking to it because it’s not productive (and all too easy to find). Instead, at about 4:08 minutes in, here’s Jon Stewart’s awesome response.

What Haiti needs now is what any country or people need in an emergency – water, food, shelter, medical aid. As I mentioned earlier, Doctors Without Borders and Red Cross are stellar organizations.

In the long term, Haiti needs infrastructure, which may not be possible without addressing the systematic corruption that’s damaged efforts again and again. That’s where groups like Sonje Ayiti may come into play. And perhaps most importantly – we all need to learn more about what’s going on and how we can work together. Academic coverage, news coverage, personal connections, and blogs are all a good start.

Here’s a list of links that I’ve found useful:

Crises Map
Relief Web
Dispatches From a Fragile Island – a really fascinating blog
Partners in Health section on Haiti – according to the person who sent me this link, “They are actually doing one of the best jobs right now because their own rural centers were not as affected and their organization is based there and up and running.”
New York Times interactive coverage

The University of Texas at Austin’s Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection currently has maps of Haiti, Haitian cities, the earthquake, the response, and other national features on their main page

Please post your thoughts about Haiti, and if you have other good sources, share, or you’ve ever been, tell me what your trip was like

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On the sixth day of the trip, we went to Abu Dhabi (check out Lonely Planet’s interactive map here) and started with the marketplaces. Here’s another post from our trip blog. I’m also continuing to update my trip photos map – a never ending process at this rate! I have a lot more to post, and what I don’t get up before our Monday evening departure I’ll post from home base.

So, without further ado, Abu Dhabi markets:

Dates

I think few things taste as good as a chocolate covered date.

Fruits & Vegetables

The fruit and vegetables in these stands were so many beautiful colors.

Fish

This is a place of truly… amazing… smells – for people with strong stomachs only!

For the rest of the Abu Dhabi pictures, click below…

Abu Dhabi (January 2010)

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I’m stealing this from my post on our trip website so that you can get a sneak peak at what we saw in Sharjah, and yes, for better or worse, there’s lots of photos! (Also, you’ll see a couple examples the black and white I’ve been playing with for a few days.)

Mosques

Sharjah, or “Knowledge City” as our instructor calls it, is a city just outside of Dubai. It’s older, and the cost of living is much lower, so many workers live there and commute to their jobs in Dubai each day, and the traffic during those times is legendary.

We visited two mosques first, but in Sharjah mosques are closed to non-Muslims, so we stuck to admiring the outer architecture and patterns. Then we walked down the pier of Sharjah Creek towards the museum.

Museums and Art

The booklet for the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization describes it as “the first of its kind in the UAE” and that it “started its life as a traditional Middle Eastern souq,” specifically the Souq al-Marjarrh. The building is known for its zodiac mosaic and has over 7 galleries and display areas for cultural and historic items from all over the Islamic world. Afterwards, we walked through the art district on the way to the souks.

Souks

There are two sets of souks in Sharjah – the old souks and the newer, blue souks. The old souks are together in a building which has an Indian restaurant in the middle of it. We had a choice of chicken, lamb, or fish (barracuda) to go with our rice and drinks. The picture below is of my lamb. As you can see, it’s a little tricky to eat rice with your hands, but we managed, and got to catch up on Arab Idol at the same time.

Afterwards, we shopped at stores like these below. I was thrilled to finish my shopping, and Anthony also bought presents for people back home.

Sharjah’s Old Wall

We’re almost done, but I love this wall so much that I did give it its own heading.

Animals, Fruits, and Vegetables

After lunch and the souks, we walked through several markets – one for “birds and animals,” one for fruits and vegetables, and a butcher’s market. Then it was back on the bus and back to Dubai to get ready for evening events.

For the rest of the Sharjah pictures, click below…

Sharjah (January 2010)

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Tonight, the Burj Dubai opened, renamed as the Burj Khalifa. Many made it downtown to the event, including some of our team from ASU, and even more watched the event from all over the city including this group near the Mercato Shopping Mall in Jumeirah. But the event wasn’t just about a building opening – the 4th of January is 4th anniversary of Sheikh Mohammed becoming the ruler of Dubai – check out the last picture of the Burj al-Arab wishing him the best. A few more photos can be found by posters like nileshzw, who’s already linked photos to the Burj Khalifa’s location on Google Maps, as well as more coverage through Gulf News and Dubai City Guide.

If you look backwards at my blog, you’ll see why I’m visiting Dubai and some of the recent news I looked at before I came. I’ll be updating shortly on the trip so far – including how I ended up trying something completely new, spontaneous, and totally unexpected – so check back to see what’s been happening and what will happen next.

Also, while you’re here, tell me what you think about fireworks – what’s your favorite kind, favorite color, or favorite fireworks memory?

Burj Khalifa fireworks (January 2010)

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