I Am My Own Correspondent

Celebrating Emanicaption Day, the day that slavery was abolished in the British Empire, I bring you live to the colourful event that is cupmatch - Bermuda's biggest holiday and annual cricket match between teams at either end of the island. Whether you wear red and blue or blue and blue, it's a day that brings the island together.

From the land down under where you'll find the most expensive flat white coffees, this last episode in season 2 looks at the health impact racial discrimination has on the aboriginal population in Australia. 

Crossing time zones physical and cultural, I land in the newly renamed kingdom of Eswatini and listen to young women speak comfortably about one of the world's historically uncomfortable topics - menstruation. To learn more about about the impact campaign and the game inspired by the documentary WOMENstruate visit womenstruate.com.  Get your submissions in for the 2022 Global Health Film Festival here at globalhealthfilm.org . 

In a country with human rights concerns past and present, the country's future doctors are delivering data that are helping to shape health outcomes within and outside their borders. And there's good coffee too.  To learn more about the work of GlobalSurg mentioned in this podcast visit https://www.globalsurgeryunit.org/  Season 2 is sponsored by Global Health Film, get your tickets to their upcoming online UK Premiere of How To Survive A Pandemic at globalhealthfilm.org. 

Travelling by plane, boat, and then car resulting in a standoff on a suspension bridge brings us deep into Sierra Leone to hear from one of the Malimba Queen football players. This episode is in memory of Robert Coleman. For tickets to the screening mentioned in this episode of The Tinkerbox hosted by Global Health Film on the 14th April 2022 get your ticket here: https://www.globalhealthfilm.org/events/the-tinderbox.

The final filming days of the award-winning documentary The Checklist Effect were not the shortest, simplest or most straightforward. In fact they were as winding as the roads in Guatemala and as revealing as the vistas. Listen to a conversation about literal life and death decisions in the operating theatre.  Season 2 is supported by Global Health Film This episode features: Lifebox a charity working to make surgery safer globally The book Being Mortal by Atul Gawande, available at my bookshop 

Capturing a power cut during a surgery in Uganda leads to more questions about how the country manages to keep its patients safe during operations.   This episode features a lifebox pulse oximeter, visit lifebox.org to learn more about these life-saving devices.   Season 2 is sponsored by Global Health Film, check out the 2021 Film Festival panel discussions and resource packs at globalhealthfilm.org.

Wrapping up 2021 with one last story coming from Cambodia and the impact NightCare has had for one mother who was able to transition from performing sex work.  NightCare is a programme run by Saving Moses, visit savingmoses.org to learn more. Season 2 is sponsored by Global Health Film, try making a new years resolution to support storytellers in health by making a donation at globalhealthfilm.org.

Long layovers, luggage restrictions, and lack of information lead up to a mother's courage to challenge the legal system in the world's youngest country still riddled with conflict.  This month's episode was created to kick off the #16DaysOfActivisim and the Global Health Film Festival beginning on the 25th of November.  Get your passses to the festival online from anywhere you are in the world: https://globalhealthfilm.eventive.org/welcome

In a place I would live in and visit over a dozen times, comes my first story from Haiti and a group of doctors brining hope to people suffering from an unknown neurological disease not in prescriptions but in other forms of aid.   To hear and watch more stories like this, be sure to get your passes to the Global Health Film Festival this year taking place online from Thursday 25 November to Sunday 05 December. Get your pass here: https://globalhealthfilm.eventive.org/welcome

Coming out of COVID restrictions, I share what its like back in the field on my first film shoot since the pandemic in Ghana.

Before digital nomads and social distancing, isolation has always been a way of life for Mongolians but when a health concern comes up how do they access services deep in the stepps?

In Ukraine disputed Donbas region on the border with Russia, population control is less about the perscriptions and procedures and more about controlling the overwhelming violence occuring inside the homes while conflict rages outside.

Spending most of my time in the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh, I felt the need to travel to Myanmar to experience the country where extremists persecuted and evicted over a million of it's own citizens- where I was met with a stifling silence. This episode marks the beginning of Season 2 which is sponsored by the charity Global Health Film. Visit globalhealthfilm.org to learn more abou t their work supporting storytellers for change.

In this anniversary episode celebrating one year of this podcast combined with a release from lockdown (again) we find ourselves in Bermuda discussing with a taxi driver the logistics of being locked down on an island in a real prison and not one created from COVID.

With the US Election looming, this episode brings us back to 2015 to some inspirational Americans that redefined the American dream for me. Visit VotoLatino.org and iwillharness.com to learn more.

Written and recorded during a hurricane looking back on one woman's story of survival of a cyclone while menstruating in Mozambique.

Not from an official film shoot, but unofficially many lessons learned from the highest mountain in Africa like how to knit a scarf while climbing, coffee beans bought at a petrol station are some of the best, and how to recognise the symptoms of HAPE-high-altitude pulmonary edema.

After a false start of filming a new documentary and surviving a snowstorm in the Middle East to get to Beirut, I reconnect with a friend from my Oxford days and learn about the human rights issues facing migrant domestic workers in Lebanon.

Finishing my feature documentary WOMENstruate in Eswatini, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, I had just wrapped my day filming in the first when I learned I had to skip to the last location completely unprepared. Listen to how I saved the shoot through creativitiy and by going outside my comfort zone with a little help from Madiba and the activists of Voice it in Action.

My very first international documentary film shoot had me landing in Israel and Palestine, and this episode includes a lot of the conversations I did not get to use in that documentary from the Palestinian perspective on peace, conflict, and of course coffee.

After spending more than a month in the world's largest refugee camp mostly on my own, a friend and fellow photographer joins as we discover, listen and learn from the Rohingya people in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh.

In this episode, I go back to Dzaleka refugee camp in Malawi where I involve men in the uncomfortable conversation of menstruation while exploring my own discomfort on the issue of racism for #BlackOutTuesday.

Liberia in West Africa was the first country I filmed in Africa, and one I would return to over and over again. In this episode I return with less than a weeks notice, getting a visa turned around in a day, all in the name of football and the impact it has in the life of one 17 year old mother.

In Jordan in 2017, I visited Azraq Refugee Camp to create a series of films on midwives. This story did not make that series, but still resonated with me as an important topic worth addressing-the life restoring surgery for women with prolapse.