The first is a feature-length film that Matt has been working on for the past few months. This past January, he spent nearly two weeks climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania with a film crew, an army of Tanzanian porters and two physically challenged athletes - Tara, an amputee with a prosthetic leg, and Erica, who became the first female paraplegic to summit the mountain. The production was organized by and made for the Challenged Athletes Foundation out of San Diego, and they'll premiere the documentary in California and Ohio in May. A full trailer and more info can be found at http://throughtheroofmovie.
The second is a short project Matt and I are working on to submit to the ViewChange Online Film Contest, which seeks documentaries reporting how international projects are working to complete any of the UN Millennium Development Goals to eradicate poverty. Once films are submitted, viewers will have the chance to vote for their favorite video from late April to early August. Naturally, I will send you a link where you can vote for OUR video, be it the best or otherwise :) We've selected maternal mortality as the topic of our documentary, as nearly 60 maternal deaths in 100,000 live births occur each year (compared with around 5 in the United States and in Canada). The kicker, however, is that more than 80% of these deaths are very preventable, meaning the woman probably wouldn't have died if she didn't live in Middle-of-Absolutely-Nowhere, México.
To fill you in a bit on the project, last weekend, the two of us traveled to San Cristóbal de las Casas, a beautiful colonial town in the southeastern state of Chiapas (and 3 hours from the Guatemala border). From there, we teamed up with Merit, the local director for Kinal Antzetik, an NGO that promotes maternal health in indigenous communities. She took us on a 2-hour, bumpy, swerving taxi and pickup truck ride to the small community of Carmen Zacatal, where we met with around 10 traditional midwives in the three-room, one-floor concrete home of one of the midwives. Through interviews we learned that these women are essentially the lifeline for pregnant women out there. A proper clinic is hours away, and many times families have to pay a hefty sum to hitch a ride. Other times, über-traditional husbands won't let the women leave the house, especially if it means a strange man will be searching her most intimate of regions. Most of the time, the midwives aren't paid for their work, but they do it anyway because they feel their profession is a God-sent calling.
However, groups like the one Merit works with - and midwives themselves - over the past few years have greatly improved the training and education of midwives through workshops and classes. This way, they can better attend to the women at home and also recognize warning signs, particularly those that require hospital care. Organizations are also working with hospitals to better incorporate indigenous patients and midwives, as many of these women are often turned away based on lingering discrimination and/or an overly-swamped staff and/or under-qualified doctors. The midwives in Carmen Zacatal in recent years have actually reduced maternal mortality to zero, as they very proudly stated.
The women were also very happy to have us follow them on their rounds, which meant us walking into a one-room house with a camera and boom pole and watching the midwife jostle around the patient's fetus from the outside. We even saw the baby's head as the midwife repositioned the body to make sure the niño exited the right way when nine months hit. Of the three mothers whose belly-massages we witnessed, all were my age (24) or younger, and all had two other children. There's nothing really alarming about this from a health perspective, it's just weird for me, as my situation dictates that I can hardly care for more than two houseplants, let alone a human being.
The rest of the trip was very laid back; we interviewed two experts on Saturday and formally interviewed Merit on Sunday. I was hoping to get footage of a house in San Cristobal where women can go to give birth in the care of midwives, but no one was there on Monday. So, instead I just decided to get a stomach virus and mope around town miserably all day until our 8:50 p.m. flight. Next stop on the UN documentary road trip is Guerrero, where hopefully we'll be able to show how traditional midwives and modern hospitals are working collectively to combat maternal mortality.
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