Tomorrow we head out to Kiev - and then onto Chernobyl, for several days filming “The Babushkas of Chernobyl” in the Exclusion Zone. This month marks the 26th anniversary of the accident and we’re going back to capture
the incredible/sad/timely/oddly inspiring stories of the women who insisted on returning to their ancestral homes after the disaster. Holly Morris wrote about this unusual sisterhood in MORE magazine last year, and now for the documentary....
Today a quick shout out the indomitable Ruchira Gupta and Apne Aaap who have been working to end sex trafficking for more than a decade. When we interviewed Ruchira for Adventure
Divas- India she said :“What we want to do is actually eradicate sex trafficking and the exploitation inside prostitution...The good news is that the women are willing to fight. Six years ago, when I came into this brothel, they were so timid and they were so scared, they were not willing to even talk to each other. They did not let outsiders in, and today, six years later, you can see the laughter and the joy that they have.”
In honor of their first decade we’re highlighting an excerpt from that doc.
Kiran Bedi, the rabble rousing Indian top cop and anti-corruption guru who we featured in Adventure Divas: India, makes the opinion pages of yesterday’s New York Times. Check out her comments on the Occupy movement and learn about her role with team Anna Hazare.
“We’re not anti-capitalism,” she says in the article, “we’re pro-integrity.”
And you better believe it. After all, Bedi’s first notable act as India’s first female cop was to tow the prime minister’s car (hey, we was illegally parked). Then she went on to
reform India’s notorious prison system- with meditation and other unlikely revolutionary tools.....
Many of the women featured in our doc series are too deep in the trenches to Tweet, others are living in Arab Spring-ish countries and Tweeting under pseudonyms, and still others embrace the tech under their real names. Here are some feeds to follow in order to keep up with the work and spirit of the divas.
"Bangladesh, Bangladesh, where so many people are dying fast, and it sure looks like a mess, I’ve never seen such distress,’’ crooned George Harrison in 1971, but forty years later there’s a different story to be told. The story features Dhallywood, 10 million environmental refugees and otherworldly rickshaw artists. As soon as I manage to peel apart my notes (currently fused together with sweat and humidity), I’ll post a fuller report. Meanwhile, feel free to check out the photos posted by Globe Trekker.
