Global Information Internship Program

Katie Roper: Thirsty Trees Video Project

June 2006 - Present
Katie's Blog: Hatua in Kenya

In July of 2006 I made my second trip to Kenya. The purpose of this internship has been to complete a video project to be aired at a major event as publicity for ICRAF's research and to further develop a partnership between the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF http://www.worldagroforestry.org/) and GIIP.

Part 1: Video Project

This project was very different from last year, when I worked in a small city in Western Kenya, for SANA. Now I am working in Nairobi with an organization that receives millions of dollars in funding and has hundreds of staff. ICRAF is actually adjacent to the United Nations headquarters for Africa and the most interesting part of this internship was learning about how these large organizations function (or don't function) in the developing world.

The video was funded by one of the senior scientists at the Regional Land Management Unit (RELMA http://www.relma.org/), which was recently integrated into ICRAF. RELMA funded $5000 for the entire project. The video, called "Thirsty Trees: And the Search for Better Alternatives", was an investigative process into how different trees-especially eucalyptus- are causing huge problems in arid regions of Kenya and Africa because they are exotic, evergreen species which consume huge amounts of water. We also investigated local alternatives to eucalyptus, including some indigenous tress, which have local spiritual and medicinal properties.

The video incorporates both scientific and colloquial observations as to the effects of eucalyptus and economic reasons behind its proliferation in Africa. In the process of creating the film I went to several parts of Kenya (Kisumu, Kisii, Meru, Nairobi, and Machacos) with at least one scientist from ICRAF, to interview stakeholders such as:

• The Forestry Department,
• Local farmers and residents, and
• Industries that consume firewood and timber.

While we got over 9 hours of very interesting footage, because this video needed to be short, we shorted it to 6 minutes. I did all the production (filming, sound, lightening except some interviewing) and all post-production work (editing, voice-over, musical composition) of the video. So it's my first complete solo project and the fourth video project I've worked on to date.

The video was then shown at Stockholm's World Water Week (Aug 20-26) at ICRAF's side event and will now be released to many of Kenya's environmental policy makers, including the National Environmental Management Authority and the Water Resource Management Authority, which assisted in the making of the video.

More information on this campaign can be found at:
http://www.worldagroforestry.org/water/

And the video can be viewed from:
http://www.worldagroforestry.org/water/video_vault.asp

Watch the Video

Part 2: Partnership Development

Additionally, I have been working to set up a partnership between ICRAF and GIIP that guarantees a position for at least one GIIP intern in one of ICRAF's headquarters in East Africa, South Africa, South East Asia, or Central America. In exchange for communication deliverables provided to ICRAF by the intern, ICRAF will provide for all local support in the location, a small stipend, and give a percentage of each negotiated internship cost as overhead to help sustain GIIP as a program. This coming year I have been told that a GIIP intern will be needed in the South East Asia headquarter, out of Indonesia.

Challenges

The hardest part was not having any crew and having people around during filming who were not particularly conscious of how they affected what was shot. People walked in front of the camera, cell phones went off in the middle of key sentences, and people finished other peoples sentences just about every 30 seconds. We also were on such a tight schedule that we were always in a hurry and we traveled so far each day where we could not return and redo something, that some really good material was sacrificed.

Conclusion

The best part of this experience was going all over Kenya asking politicians and everyday people what was happening. We hiked all over in the Meru mountains while the grandfathers of the community excitedly told us the different uses for the indigenous trees: from healing wounds, curing scars, and even as a gum for trapping birds. I learned more Swahili this time around, but still am far from fluency.

The most interesting part has been seeing how big organizations work and how complicated it can be to learn to navigate a gigantic city like Nairobi, since much of it was constructed without any sort of plan. It was also very interesting to me to be in a country with a large Muslim population, during the war between Isreal and Lebanon, and to see different perspectives and concerns than those of CNN.