Super Bowl Update

Hager Faisal

Martha note:  Egyptian citizen Hager Faisal became friends with WMRA's General Manager Tom DuVal and his wife, Lorie Merrow, while she was an exchange student at JMU. Now back in her native country, she works as an an English Language Instructor at Cairo's Misr International University (MIU).  

Last Friday, Hager was in the streets of Cairo when, after three decades in office, Hosni Mubarak resigned as president of Egypt and handed over power to the army. And over the weekend she sent me the following thoughts and pictures, along with a note that said: 

"I am attaching some of the photos that I have taken in Tahrir square,  which are different than those you see on TV. They show how the protestors are talented, civilized, ambitious, energetic, humorous and simple lovely Egyptians. I meant to send you this album in particular because you can only see the big crowds on TV. They also do show how peaceful those people are. The painters were drawing the faces of the martyrs. 

"The pictures that are taken at night are those of the celebration in Cairo Streets. In one picture you will see how the military are acting very nice towards people and they take pictures with them."   

Hager has promised to update us on developments. 

"Before January 25 , 2011, on some mornings, I would wake up full of positive energy while at other times I would feel greatly disappointed about Egypt. My most powerful tool for a positive change was talking to my students.

"Since I am only 22-years old, I have the privilege to understand my students very well, who are mostly between 17-20 years old. I considered myself super lucky to teach at such an early age, because I acted as a faculty member yet I still belong to that young generation who I am teaching. Moreover, I still have the student's perspective because I am a graduate student in the American University in Cairo, where I insisted to get my Masters in Gender and political Economies believing that development is a pressing need in Egypt. Being a graduate student from Misr International University, the same university I am working for, and an exchange student at James Madison University, has helped me to be very much aware of the educational process and the nature of the Egyptian students.

"One course that I am teaching is mainly about the art of analysis and we focus on analyzing problems that face the Egyptian society and offer a deep evaluation for the existing solutions. While in another course, students are introduced to the essential skills of critical thinking and developing a logical argument. This is not to say that education in Egypt is perfect, however, the teaching criteria has changed a lot.

"Accordingly, it was very easy for me to interpret the misunderstanding between President Hosni Mubark's regime and the Egyptian Youth who started the 25th of January Revolution. The first reason is that Mubark's government in the last six years was living under the delusion that they are ruling an uncivilized, ignorant and absentminded population. However, they were not aware of the fact that it is only out of the people's kindness and patience that they were staying silent. They were also so busy to notice that the Egyptian youth are very well trained to use technology not only for fun but for creating their own new world with their desired rules. Social networks, specifically Facebook, were their tools to share ideas, express themselves and take actions. Thus, it was so easy to start the call for a demonstration on Facebook.

"The most surprising thing about that revolution is that the demonstrators who started it on the Tuesday, January 25, 2011 were the upper and middle class youth who do not suffer as much as the poor. This takes us to the second reason of the misunderstanding that Mubark's government was then bewildered thinking that it is only a group of spoiled youth who would go back home after few hours. The underestimation of the youth was the second reason of the misunderstanding. It is important here to clarify that Egyptians from all social classes have participated in this Revolution after the beginning on the 25th of January.

"The dishonest promises and the corruption of Mubark's government were the food of distrust. The youth's revolution was proven to be successful because, unlike Mubark's government, the youth are sincere, successful, civilized, organized, respectful, creative, ambitious and energetic.

"I should like to conclude by translating the message that Egyptians are circulating on Facebook for a better Egypt that summarizes into:

        "Egyptians will:

1. Be positive.
2. Be proud of themselves and their country.
3. Be aware of their legal rights and responsibilities.
4. Help each others.
5. Respect each others.
6. Defend their country.
7. Eradicate corruption.
8. Build their country.
9. Vote in the next elections.
10. Practice democracy."

For me, inspiration begins with curiosity and asking questions.

My first introduction to filmmakers Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney came over a year ago in late spring when I was listening to WMRA. They were on Bob Edwards Weekend discussing their latest film, The Greening of Southie, about the construction of the first green building in South Boston, a working-class Irish neighborhood locals know as “Southie.”

Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney

Like many NPR listeners, I’m curious about people and other creatures, and how they come to do what they do and know what they know. I’m drawn just as much to voices – like Bob Edwards’s voice, which sounds like a classical pianist and an angler got together and made a smart, understated man, slightly worn but alert, with the traces of someone who used to smoke. On the day I heard Curt and Ian, they, too, had the sincere voices of people who present what they do plainly, without cajoling, as if they knew those who cared would listen. It made me want to learn more. Then what sealed it for me came at the end of the interview, when Bob Edwards mentioned the name of their production company, Wicked Delicate, and Curt said it’s “the kind compliment a Midcoast Mainer might give to a really good blueberry pie.”

It didn’t take long for me to look them up. The Wicked Delicate site itself offers a visual feast of their work. I plucked up a YouTube video of one of their more recent projects, “Truck Farm,” and posted it on my facebook page for friends. Jen Bedet, a redheaded biking vegan, and friend from my years in Iowa City, wrote to me and said, “Didn’t you know Curt and Ian when they were here?” Apparently, they’d lived in Iowa City while filming King Corn, their award-winning breakout film, and they’d befriended enough folks in Iowa City to get invited to at least one wedding. “You must have moved to Maine by then,” said Jen. Indeed, I had. That was 2004, when I graduated from Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program in the spring, and Curt and Ian were just two years out of Yale and in their mid-twenties, moving to Iowa to grow corn and make a film about it with the help of several farmers and Curt’s cousin, director Aaron Woolf.

King Corn asks questions, the first being where does our food come from and what goes into making it? From there, how did corn come to dominate the American diet mostly in the form of corn products like high fructose corn syrup? And how do extensive government subsidies for corn affect our health and the health of the land?

These questions never occurred to me when I was their age, drinking multiple sodas a day. But over a decade later, by the time I heard Curt and Ian on Bob Edwards, the sodas were long behind me. I was putting together a food-writing course for Spring 2010 at James Madison University, where I’ve taught since 2007. For that course, something Virginia Woolf wrote had been circling my thoughts: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well,” she said. What does it mean to dine well? I wondered. I knew King Corn would be a part of the course, and so I thought, why not? Why not contact the King Corn guys and see if they could come to the valley? I knew I could count on broad support: the film and environmental studies people, and that JMU entity with the most unwieldy name, the Institute for the Stewardship for the Natural World—they would help. I just had to ask.

But first I had to contact Curt and Ian and see if they had time to do this sort of thing. I imagine our Iowa City connection and knowing people in common gave me the gumption to do so. Thing is, whether we knew people in common or not, they would have come, and I’ve thought since that I ought to reach out more. Having scoured the Wicked Delicate website, I knew a few things about them before I sent out that first correspondence. For example, they ran a film workshop in Waldoboro, Maine, and according to the site one of the major draws of said workshop was the chance to see “one of Ian’s childhood soccer trophies”! Well, that was just doggone irresistible.

I’ve known Waldoboro since I was three years old. Just south of there, in Pemaquid, was the first place I saw the ocean. My Grammy used to take my brother and me there in the summers, just as she’d taken my mom and Aunt Beth, and just as she’d been taken by her parents. Next to Ian’s trophies (I’m sure), Waldoboro may be most famous for Moody’s Diner, and Moody’s is famous for its pies. So, when I sent that first email, I asked, “What would be considered a wicked delicate pie at Moody’s?”

Ian’s favorite, I learned, is their peanut butter pie. Not so for Curt. He said Moody’s peanut butter pie is too custardy for his tastes. He likes fruity things, like marionberry pie, a specialty in his home state of Oregon. I’m thinking about dessert even as I write this. Peanut butter and berries—surely two of the world’s greatest creations.

So, yes, now, Ian and Curt are coming to visit and they'll be here this week.

Please join the three of us at James Madison University for a screening of two of Curt and Ian’s greatest creations, King Corn and its companion sequel Big River, this Wednesday, September 15 at 7:00 in Miller Hall, room 1101. At 8:00 the following evening, Curt and Ian will be here to give a media-rich presentation, “Back to Back to the Land” on sustainability in Harrison Hall, room 2105. I’m looking forward to thanking them for their inspiring work.

Former President and Mrs. Carter have come, spoken, and gone. And it was my job to do a short distillation of what Mr. Carter said for Morning Edition. So, about 5:30 p.m. on Monday afternoon, draped in press credentials, loaded down with equipment, I headed over to JMU's Convocation Center to set up.

This was a pretty straight-forward reporting situation. We had a mult-box (short for what? multi-function box? multi-purpose box? anyone else know?). This meant I could simply run a cord from my recorder directly into the sound system and be assured of having good sound quality. (Except that this hook-up developed a slight hum, which, sadly, no one could get rid of.)

So, anyway, by 6 o'clock, I had run my cord, plugged in, tested the connection, and sat myself down to spend a pleasant hour chatting with my fellow reporters (Channel 29 on my right, Staunton News-Leader on my left).

The ceremony began promptly at 7 with a procession, followed by introductory speeches, and several lovely songs. About 7:45, the Carter's were presented with the Mahatma Gandhi Global Nonviolence Award. Then it was time for Mr. Carter's speech, and so time for me to go to work logging tape. This involves keeping my headset firmly on my head and staring at the counter on my recorder so that I can take accurate notes about when Mr. Carter said what. Doing this meant that once I got back to the station, I could pull the sections of his speech I wished to use without having to go back and listen to the whole speech again.

Once the speech was over, I sat in traffic like everyone else, glad that I'd remembered to stick a water bottle in the car. Logging tape is thirsty work.

Back at the station, I pulled my actualities (the parts of the speech I want to include in the story), wrote my script, voiced my script in the studio, and then transferred both the actualities and the pieces of script (call trax) into Adobe Audition (sound-editing software) multi-track file on my computer. Then it was just a matter of fiddling around with placement, fading in and out, and adjusting levels. Around midnight, I pressed the magic mixing icon on my computer and voila! a story emerged.

I love these overnights. I have to focus, push myself, battle fatigue, and just keep going until I'm done. Of course, I probably wouldn't love them as much if I had to do them all the time.

By the way, if you couldn't hear President Carter in person last night, I posted his entire speech at WMRA.org.

There! It's 12:53 Tuesday morning and I'm going home.

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter will be in Harrisonburg on Monday to accept the Mahatma Gandhi Global Nonviolence Award. The former president will speak to us in the Convocation Center, the same room in which now-President Barack Obama addressed us last fall. Before that, you have to go back donkey's years in Harrisonburg's history to find a presidential visit. And now we're having two presidents come and speak to us within a year.

Former President Carter's topic will be Middle East peace, something with which this brave, quiet-spoken man has involved himself for a long, long time. An uptick of tension in the situation there was caused just a few days ago by a new United Nations report, which makes his visit astoundingly timely. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/world/middleeast/16gaza.html?_r=1&scp=5&sq=UN Study Israel&st=cse).

It is perhaps the most complex, volatile situation our world has to deal with, and one of the major players in the quest for peace there is coming to Harrisonburg to talk about it. I am agog, amazed, in awe at James Madison University's Gandhi Center for allowing us an opportunity to hear Jimmy Carter speak on this subject at this critical time.

Amazingly (to me) I think there are still tickets. You'll find a link to getting some for yourself at WMRA.org.

Housekeeping note: I think this blog will now take anyone's comments. If you try to post and still have trouble please drop me a note at mwoodroof@gmail.com/