in limbo

Back in the United States now for over a month and a half. Both Mike and I have been recovering from the summer's experiences, though I don't think that either of us have quite gotten over the reverse culture shock of coming back to the United States, what with its clean water, antibiotics, fast food, SUVs, and oblivious citizens, nor the stark disparity between this world and Tanzania: our opportunities and conveniences and consumerism vs. their poverty and suffering.

Okay, so, maybe that's me making this a little bit more black and white, so to speak, than the issue really is. There’s poverty and suffering here in the United States, too, but the reality that most Americans probably couldn’t find Tanzania on a map is pretty disheartening to me.

Also, obesity is one of the biggest health care issues in the United States: illness and debilitation caused by, most often, an excess of calorie intake. There is a certain, undeniable irony in the fact that we Americans are dying from having too much food, while a good majority of the rest of the world is dying from the lack thereof.

As far as the projects go, both of us have been juggling writing/editing with college classes, work, and homework, (for Mike) and graduate school applications, funding applications, job-hunting, semi-homelessness (for me).

It's definitely challenging, and I fear more than anything else that people (namely, our donors) will not be sympathetic to my financial inability to simply sit around and edit all day, rather than attempt to pay off medical bills, apply to grad schools, seek alternate sources of funding, housing, etc.

Now I’m finishing up a ten-day stint in HD video editing training in Dallas granted to me by some very generous people at a production company down here. I've been mostly looking over the shoulders of broadcast engineers flying Quantel eQ editing bays. These are very high-end editing and color-correcting systems in video work, and as such are way beyond my financial reach in terms of what I’m going to be able to use to work on this little documentary (the new poor person’s editing studio: a Mac, Final Cut, and DVD Studio Pro, in essence), but I imagine that some of what I manage to soak up from this endeavor will translate into this project. I have learned quite a bit about HD color-correction (or color-grading, for those of you in the new school of digital video terminology), which will certainly help when it comes to cleaning up some of the rougher footage where, as was most often the case with Africa, I had little to no control whatsoever regarding location or lighting.

I leave Dallas tomorrow and fly back to West Virginia where all of my stuff (the cats, some boxes, the footage) is waiting for me. Over the weekend I'll transfer every bit of my footage to the external hard drive, and then, once I'm sure that's taken care of, probably hit the road and head down to Kentucky to begin some sort of translating, probably a transcription process at first, to be repeated at a later time and turned into subtitling, once I get all of the footage re-organized and a good storyboard set up using the documentarian's two best friends:

1) a really strict organizational system, and...

2) a wall full of post-it notes.