IMDEC hosted a Latin American wide popular education conference this weekend to mark their 45th anniversary as an organization. It was an incredibly rich and hopeful conference, and also an exhausting experience for us to film and listen to Spanish for 12 hours a day. Popular education leaders from Cuba, Costa Rica, Panama, Paraguay, El Salvador, Colombia, and many states within Mexico came to present, listen, and engage.
The warmth, dedication, and down to earth nature of the popular education leaders made the field of popular education even more exciting. The conference ended with a Día de los Muertos influenced celebration at IMDEC’s headquarters (check out the beautiful altar we got to help make to the left), and included a deeply touching Mayan Día de los Muertos ceremony, musical and dance performances by conference participants, and two live bands with lots of fabulous dancing. In case there were any doubts – popular educators definitely know how to get down. Read more »
The final rains of the rainy season fell today in Guadalajara, according to our friends here. We captured the sounds and sights from our apartment. The picture is of Arthur leaning out the window to record the rain, thunder, bird calls, noisy buses and church bells intermingling. In documentaries, it’s always good to have background noise and transition shots, so we began collecting that footage today. It felt great to embark on the documentation process visually and aurally.
Read more »
Tags: audio recording, Fred Pearce, Gujarat, Hyderabad, monsoon, rain, rainwater harvesting, Rajsamadhiya, tanka, video library, When the River Runs Dry
Equipment, Literature | sarah | 
10 October 2009 0:12 | 
Comments (0)
Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment by Jacques Leslie captures the dam politics from many angles. Leslie focuses on three people embroiled in the debate: Medha Patkar, a prominent Indian antidam activist; Thayer Scudder, an American anthropologist and expert of displacement politics in southern Africa (Zambia, Botswana, South Africa, and Lesotho); and Don Blackmore, an Australian water manager of one of the most managed rivers in the world, the Murray River.
Read more »
During a glorious week of camping around the Grand Canyon, I finally made some time to delve into more project related literature. The first book I read was remarkably inspirational and informative: Maude Barlow’s new book Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. Barlow is the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy organization, and one of the founders of the Blue Planet Project. Borrowing her own catch phrase, she is one of the preeminent water warriors.
Read more »
Last night I attended a screening of Liz Miller’s documentary film The Water Front at the Food and Water Watch (FWW) office in San Francisco. FWW wrote the documentary “offers a sharp look at the possible risks ahead for communities looking to privatize their water supply.” The movie highlighted a community’s struggle to maintain their right to affordable water amidst a privatization scheme pushed forward by outside consultants hired to balance the city’s budget. The citizens of Highland Park, Michigan, right outside of Detroit, successfully organized a grassroots campaign to maintain control of the public water supply, however lost a million dollars by employing the consultants.
Read more »
Tags: campaign, El Salto, Food and Water Watch, grassroots, Highland Park, IMDEC, infrastructure, La Red Vida, Liz Miller, public private partnership, public water, The Water Front
Literature, Relationships | sarah | 28 April 2009 18:31 | Comments (0)
IMDEC hosted a Latin American wide popular education conference this weekend to mark their 45th anniversary as an organization. It was an incredibly rich and hopeful conference, and also an exhausting experience for us to film and listen to Spanish for 12 hours a day. Popular education leaders from Cuba, Costa Rica, Panama, Paraguay, El Salvador, Colombia, and many states within Mexico came to present, listen, and engage.
English
