I got to thinking about Helen Epstein last night on my drive back from LA. She wrote The Invisible Cure, which is a remarkable book about HIV/AIDS in Africa. For anyone interested in the nitty gritty of this subject or just in Africa in general, this is a very good resource. It’s full of insight but she’s also a very good story teller.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFVCwEnFTjI
The first time I saw Epton Gama, he was just a few feet away, popping out of the head-high sea of grass that walls the footpath leading into the village of Zolokere. Without a pause he wrapped his arms around me and said “oooohh my brother!” If I felt a little unease in being so far from the world I was familiar with, it evaporated when Gama appeared. Gama worked for Jake (one of the people in Bush League) at his house taking care of all the day-to-day things like carrying water and cooking. This is a normal arrangement for many people in the region and for almost all the Peace Corps volunteers there. As Jake’s visitor, by default, Gama also took care of me during my first two trips to Malawi. He died from AIDS in late 2008.
A few people have asked me why he isn’t in the film, he only appears in a couple shots. The filmmaker part of me will tell you it’s just casting - Gama wasn’t a “character”. He didn’t embody any specific point of view or sector of life in Zolokere like some of the others do. But Gama’s hand really is all over the film. I know that people watching can never know that but when I watch it’s one of the things I see. He is in the film. He was pivotal in making it.
Films (for me) are primarily stories in pictures but they’re also cultural artifacts that belong to specific times and places. I hope that someday Bush League will fall into a canon of western films in which we started to move our narrative of Africa away from the tired tropes and began to see it with more sophistication and respect. But I also know it’s possible that I got things wrong and that in fifty years it may look unsophisticated and uninformed. So I’m dedicating my effort to make the film to Gama not the film itself. Making it has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done and through this labor I wish to express to you Gama that I remember you and I recognize you. Please accept this - it was the very best I could do. It is the least I can do.
Dr. Kim Yi Dionne is a political scientist with expertise on Malawi who helped me pull the kinks out of Bush League. The film isn't about HIV/AIDS but it does touch on it and other complex subjects so it was great to have a real pro look the film over in case there was an error. Among the many interesting things I learned while reading her research was a survey she did among rural Malawians about their development priorities. Here are the results of the survey: In a survey of 1259 rural villagers in Rumphi district, villagers ranked their preferences with respect to development and health in the following order:
Clean Water
Agricultural Development
Health Services
Education
HIV/AIDS services
The reason this interests me so much is because I think most of our policy makers would presume that HIV/AIDS is at the top. We've got our hearts in the right place and the money too, but I really wonder about the data that guides the whole thing.
http://vimeo.com/15247760
http://vimeo.com/15264780
http://vimeo.com/15272887
Quick, imagine you’re a rural Malawian and put this list of development priorities in order, 1 being the most important to you and 5 the least important to you: Agricultural Development
Education
HIV/AIDS services
Clean Water
Health Services
Bush League premieres in a week and a half so I wanted to take this week to post an interview I did recently with Dr. Kim Yi Dionne. Kim is a political scientist with a research background in Malawi who reviewed Bush League for accuracy during post production. In reading her work I was struck by the results of a survey she did of rural Malawian’s development priorities. The survey results look very simple, it’s just a short list of what the people in that region would prefer in terms of money/resources spent on development. Here are the actual results - see how you guessed.
In a survey of 1259 rural villagers in Rumphi district, villagers ranked their preferences with respect to development and health in the following order:
Clean Water
Agricultural Development
Health Services
Education
HIV/AIDS services
How did you do? See anything unexpected? Where did you rank HIV/AIDS services?
HIV/AIDS services were fifth? How many of us could have guessed that HIV/AIDS would be last? So what’s going on? Shouldn't they be first?
To shed some light on this I’ll be posting a five-part interview with Kim on the facebook/Bush League group page and here over the next five days that looks at this. I hope you’ll find these clips interesting both as an insight on Malawi but perhaps equally so - as a reflection of ourselves.
For today I’m posting a second short clip from an interview with the Subchief of Zolokere (he’s the highest authority in the village where Bush League was filmed) and this will start us with some insights into the extreme end of the conversation – the HIV/AIDS conspiracy theory.
Subchief Moses Khunga from Zolokere, Malawi, January 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj7cXrpznPA
Dr. Kim Yi Dionne at UCLA, June 2010
http://vimeo.com/15272951