Seeing as my name was plastered across your
FB pages the entire month of May (Still waiting on word from the van
committee!), I thought it best to bury my nose in work and keep a low social
media profile for a bit. But as my time here is winding down (four weeks left),
miraculously, I can see the finish line to my film project. I haven’t written
much about it because, for the first two months, I did not see how I
was ever going to get it done.
The scope of the project was pretty broad
to begin with. The goal was to produce the first comprehensive set of
rehabilitation training videos in Nepalese. It took a few weeks of just hanging
out and shooting random videos so people could understand who I was and what my
competencies were. I shot a some videos at the hospital, but since I couldn’t
post them without hospital administration approval, nobody saw them. I needed
to publish a few on my own.
The first video I shot outside of the SIRC
was a three-minute summary of the rebuilding of the National Disabled Table
Tennis Center. I was shooting some interviews and b-roll (back-roll – the
stuff they put up there so you don’t just see somebody’s face on the screen the
whole interview) for my final trip summary when the project manager, architect,
Deepak C.K. saw me and begged me to whip up a quick piece for the inauguration
– which was in two days. I took a day off of work and cranked a piece that ended up
being a huge success. When we presented the video to a crowd of athletes and
V.I.P.’s they roared their approval. That led immediately to two more outside
pieces (Amrita Foundation for Mental Health and Nepal Spinal Cord Sports
Association) that really let people at the SIRC know what I was capable of
producing.
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| Everyone was all smiles after our Table Tennis video got a screaming ovation at the opening ceremony. |
Once those doors were opened, I was
immediately overwhelmed with work. I’d slowly been filming a project with the
Occupational Therapy department, but it sat on the shelf while I did the
off-site projects. But once they saw the potential, the video topics jumped out
of the woodwork.
There was just one huge problem: I don’t
speak a word of Nepalese. There are plenty of training videos on any number of
medical subjects, but none are in Nepalese. The goal of this project was to
create videos so therapists and care takers in the furthest villages of Nepal
could easily learn without having to struggle with a new language. When I proposed the project, I wrongly assumed there would be any number of English speakers who could help me out. What
I quickly discovered was that most Nepalis have a little English; very
few have a good working command of it. And those who do are obviously quite busy
– because they’re the smartest people in the country.
The SIRC offered me one of their employees
for two days a week, but this project didn’t have an on-off switch like that.
It was getting to be harder to schedule her than it was the film shoots. She
was more than competent, but she was also quite busy. When it took more than
two weeks to schedule and shoot the first video, it became apparent that I
would never be able to complete the project.
Then one day, a miracle walked into the
SIRC. Actually 21-year-old Rownika Shrestha had walked in about a month
earlier as the family care-taker for her father who, although a paraplegic for
twenty years, had never been to rehab. We became fast friends mainly because
her English is fantastic and she had more free time than an ambitious college
senior wants to have. She asked me if I could teach her ANYTHING just so she
could keep her mind busy when she wasn’t helping her dad. SIRC family
caretakers move in with the patient and are there 24-7. I started showing her
how to do some rudimentary web stuff, but our poor Internet connection is so
frustrating that we had to abort.
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| Rownika reading her poem on the Bagmati River Cleanup at the 14th Anniversary of the SIRC. (Yes, I am aware that she should be in front of the camera, not behind it.) |
A few days later she saw me editing video
and asked if I could teach her. “Sure,” I said. “It takes some time, but if you
keep at it…” It seems now, that before I finished the sentence she was already
competent. She had great computer skills and the video editor was just another
piece of software to learn. I showed her the basics and in less than a week,
she was uploading video clips, chopping them up, synching sound and adding
graphics. She picked up the cameras like she’d owned them her whole life. When
she showed up at the film shoots I could put down my bag; talk to the therapists
and patients in the video; then turn around and both cameras would be mounted
on tripods and ready for positioning.
Oh yeah – SHE SPEAKS NEPALESE! Great for me, but unfortunately for her, she has to do the lion's share of editing. In three
days I went from wondering if I was going to have to bail on the project to
walking around scheduling as many film shoots as I could. It was like hoping
for a million dollars and having a loot sac fall off of a truck at your feet.
So for the past month we’ve been cranking
out one video after the next. We’ve donned ourselves “Kollywood Studios” (“K”
for Kathmandu. “N” for Nepal doesn’t work because “Nollywood” has already taken
by the Nigerian film industry.) and we are an instructional video production
machine. We’ve produced nearly 20 titles including Hydrotherapy, Spinal Cord
First Responder (back-boarding into an ambulance) and Wheelchair to Motor
Scooter Transfer. This week we’re putting the finishing touches
on three videos from the wheelchair maintenance shop and that leaves us with
only two left to shoot before we’re done!
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| Just a few Kollywood Production titles. |
But we’re not retiring Kollywood so fast.
We’ve also signed on to produce a video for the new Kathmandu Wheelchair
Basketball League which runs through the month of June. . We’ve had our first
meetings with the league organizers and discovered the same group also
teaches English and offers vocational training to wheelers. So it’s a bigger
project that just speed-editing hoops highlights. Since I’m going to be playing
in the league and Rownika has refused to be a cheerleader for the SIRC squad,
it’s her project. She’s lead and I’m the production assistant.
What do I do if she turns out to be a
cruddy boss?
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