Today was our first back at “home base” (The Sibane Hotel) in five days. The past week has been unbelievable, between traveling to Kashoba, meeting the Mkoko family, speaking with the staff at the local health clinic, conducting interviews and the wedding; but it’s also been incredibly busy. Yesterday was a great example of how we are never sure of what exactly will happen during the course of a day. We were scheduled to shoot an interview with Musa, one of the professionals who screens blood samples for HIV at the clinic, who also survived MDR-TB, between 12-1pm. He told us that because he was coming from church, he might be later than anticipated. Having attended a church service last week, our entire group assumed that he would arrive by 1pm at the earliest. Weren’t we surprised when Musa was ready to begin at 12:10!

Luckily our group was fairly prepared. We met for a production meeting earlier in the morning, so everyone was ready to jump into their specific tasks. However, we did not have time to properly scout a shooting location and (of course) yesterday was the day that our normally silent hotel hosted a family reunion, which proved problematic. It’s difficult to encourage someone to tell you about transitioning from being a healthcare worker to attempting to gain employment doing odd jobs just to have money to give your children, when people are laughing hysterically in the background. Thankfully Musa was understanding and we were able to work around our obstacles. After the interview we had to thank and say goodbye to all of our wonderful new friends, which was pretty sad and took quite a while.

Yesterday was an adventure, which was why having lecture in the hotel today was a nice break and return to normalcy. One of the reasons why I love this class so much is that it’s so exciting all of the time that you are honestly happy to have lectures. Today we had an introduction to human rights, which was really interesting and much more defined and concrete than I originally thought. In the afternoon we went through editing techniques and talked about what we’ll be doing in terms of film work for the remainder of the course, which is why I decided that I would spend the rest of the afternoon practicing with Photoshop, which helps me understand the way shots are constructed. The attached image is from a very bad picture I took at the wedding in Kashoba, in which the woman was just a distant figure in the background. I’ve been working on adding masks, and sharpening parts of the image. Something about her made me feel that she deserves her own picture.