On Assignment
By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
TOKYO – When I asked Masako Usui what she thought of Japan's new first lady, the news presenter for the NTV television network started to bang and twist her thumbs together.
"They were returning from a trip abroad, when we saw her thumb-wrestling with her husband through the plane's window," Usui told me, as we stood on the edge of NTV's vast newsroom. "That would never have happened before," she said laughing.
For Japan's media, politics has suddenly become a whole lot more interesting because there has never been a Japanese first lady quite like Miyuki Hatoyama. If there was a premier league for first ladies, she'd be right up beside Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni, the wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, except that as far as I know neither of them has ever traveled to Venus.
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| Pool / Getty Images |
| Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and his wife Miyuki Hatoyama at the premier's official residence in Tokyo on Oct. 29. |
That was the extraordinary claim Hatoyama made in a recent interview. More precisely, she said her spirit had flown there in a UFO, and that it was a beautiful place, very green.
She went on to describe how she "eats the sun" each morning to gain energy, and how she'd met Tom Cruise in a previous life. She said Cruise, who played a samurai knight in the movie The Last Samurai, was Japanese back in the other life.
That’s pretty wacky stuff, but you say that at your peril in Tokyo these days. Several people complained to me about the obsession of the foreign media with the first lady's eccentricities (Time Magazine called her "Mrs. Occult"), as if a trip to Venus was a perfectly natural thing to do.
Most Japanese are remarkably unfazed by Hatoyama's cosmic adventures, and see her as a breath of fresh air.
"She's very confident. Her attitude is: ‘This is me, accept me for who I am. This is what I do, and if you don't like it, take it or leave it.’ But in a very positive way," said Hayami Yu, an actress and singer, who has met the first lady on several occasions.
And that seems to have a broad appeal in a country where first ladies have been traditionally far less visible, and where women are still very poorly represented at the top levels of business and politics.
"In Japan, the man is the man, and the woman is the woman, walking five steps behind," said Jane Yamano, who runs a string of beauty schools and is a friend of the first lady. She says that is changing, albeit too slowly, and that Hatoyama confidence and openness is "inspiring."
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By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Correspondent
KAKUMA, Kenya – I've been back from my latest trip to Africa for several weeks, but there are two girls I can't get out of my mind: a mature 14-year-old called Nyanuel Noang from Sudan, and an impossibly sweet little 11-year-old named Michu Danabo from Ethiopia.
We met them at the unlikeliest place. While driving through an arid plain in northern Kenya we saw in the distance, in the middle of nowhere, a cluster of low buildings surrounded by razor wire. Was it a prison? An army camp? A food depot?
It turned out to be at school run by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees called the "Angelina Jolie Boarding School for Girls." The actress, a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, donated money to help construct the school. But while the money came all the way from Hollywood, the girls came from the Kakuma refugee camp a couple of miles away.
At the Kakuma camp, about 50,000 forlorn people from Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Rwanda are fed by aid agencies that work with the UNHCR. They live in shacks made of local materials like branches, mud, leaves and wood. Water is often available – but not always. Some Somalis have been there since 1991. There are schools, clinics and food depots. The camp offers security, support and comfort. What it cannot give is any hope for the future.
But for the past three years, the brightest of the refugee girls from Kakuma, as well as a few from the local tribes, have been permitted to dream.
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By Paul Goldman, NBC News Producer
SAMBURU, Kenya – We were on a five-hour journey from Maralal to Samburu in northern Kenya. It was noon and we asked our driver, Albert, to stop at a beautiful village we were driving past for a cup of tea.
The menu was hand written on the wall of the "Small World Hotel." The local tea is called "chai" and costs ten Kenyan shillings for a cup, or about 15 cents.
The small village was made up of one main unpaved street with mud shops lining it and straw huts scattered behind them. The town is in the middle of nowhere and the three-year drought here has left most of this region without water, food or tourists.
We ordered three cups of chai and sat on the ground beside the main road. After the very first sip, we all looked at each other, thinking the same thing: It was undrinkable. But by now, what seemed like most of the village’s residents had sat down beside us, watching our every move. Could we possibly pour out the liquid in front of the locals?
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| Krzysztof Galica / NBC News |
| Paul Goldman, left, and NBC correspondent Martin Fletcher, right, stop for a cup of "chai" tea at the "Small World Hotel" in a small village in northern Kenya. |
Albert came over and explained that in this area they combine the tea with hot water, milk and sugar. Lots of sugar. Ever the diplomat, Albert passed the cups to some women who had just arrived. By now I realized why he hadn’t ordered a cup for himself.
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By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Correspondent
KAKUMA, Northern Kenya – They shuffle aimlessly in the dust: 50,000 refugees crammed into thousands of huts made from branches, leaves, mud and plastic in the
Kakuma camp in Northern Kenya.
Natives of Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda, the refugees have fled wars aggravated by drought, yet even here the supply of water is sporadic. They eat once a day from supplies provided by aid agencies. Kakuma is one of the oldest and largest refugee camps in the world and some people have been here since 1991 when it was established.
They don’t like to talk to strangers about their problems, but the roads are lined by placards, erected by aid agencies, with slogans and exhortations that are like windows into the refugees’ pain.
The most graphic reads: "STOP FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION – IT IS A HEALTH HAZARD (RISK)." The signs are in English, Kenya’s official language, but since the camp’s residents speak a wide variety of regional and native languages, the words are incomprehensible to most refugees.
However anyone can get the message from the disturbing illustration of a woman kneeling with a razor while a mother offers up her infant girl. Female genital mutilation is almost universal in Somalia and common in neighboring countries.
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| Martin Fletcher / NBC News |
| A poster in Kenya's Kakuma refugee camp tells people to "STOP FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION IT IS A HEALTH HAZARD (RISK).” |
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By Yonatan Pomrenze, NBC News Producer
NAIROBI, Kenya – Anena Hansen, a 32-year-old writer from New Hampshire, first came to Kenya last year for what was supposed to be a two-week volunteering stint just outside Nairobi. But she found the work she was doing with HIV-positive women so rewarding – she stayed.
"I didn’t have to have great medical skills, and I didn’t have to throw money at the situation," Hansen said. But she found that "just by being there and caring about them and interacting with them, these women who were very marginalized and shunned in this culture were feeling better because of the emotional psychological support."
She was hooked and found a job working with Africa Mission Services, an organization dedicated to community development among the Maasai tribe in South-West Kenya.
Africa Mission Services focuses on building infrastructure sorely lacking among the Maasai. A medical clinic built by the non-governmental organization has treated over 3,000 patients this year, and more than 1,000 students attend their two elementary schools.
Hansen is working on raising the funds (most funding comes from private donations) to build a secondary school and maternity ward for the clinic, while traveling to the Maasai community to implement an HIV prevention and treatment program.
VIDEO: Two-week vacation turns into mission of hope
But Hansen also wanted to do more for the women she worked with when she first came to Kenya. So she moved to Mlolongo, a truck-stop town on Nairobi’s outskirts which one resident described as a "center of prostitution for the whole of East Africa."
In the age of social-networking, it’s interesting how I found Hansen. I usually work out of NBC’s Moscow bureau, but got a last-minute assignment to help cover U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s trip to Nairobi. I decided to try to extend my trip by a few days and checked couchsurfing.org, a Web site that connects travelers who want to meet or stay with locals when they travel.
The idea is clearly an amazing tool for budget travelers, but as a journalist, I find it to be an invaluable way to meet people on the ground and get a more varied picture of a place than I might otherwise get in the State Department bubble.
Hansen’s profile mentioned the volunteer work she is involved in, so the day after Clinton and all the other foreign journalists left, I found myself in a car, navigating unfinished highways and waist-high potholes to go and see it firsthand.
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By Lee Cowan, NBC News correspondent
APIA, Samoa – Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of "Treasure Island" called the Samoan Islands home. He died here, at only 44 and was later buried on a hilltop overlooking the Pacific. But as gifted a writer as he was, even he might be at a loss for words to describe his beloved Samoa now.
Once called Western Samoa, it is a dot in the South Pacific, barely the size of Rhode Island; a paradise rich in ancient tradition, natural beauty and peace and quiet.
Most of the island escaped last week’s tsunami, and life goes on almost without a care. Tourists are arriving, music is playing, and rum is flowing.
But along Samoa’s southern coast, once home to some of the most beautiful beaches in this hemisphere, the massive wave struck, creating an unimaginable scar several miles long.
The villages along the pristine coastline never stood a chance. The tsunami itself was described to me as a giant wall of black moving at some 30 miles an hour – which brought with it a sound, as terrible as its countenance.
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By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Correspondent
CASABLANCA, Morocco – Casablanca, Morocco’s largest city, conjures images of
Rick’s Bar, couscous and the third largest mosque in the world, built at fabulous cost on land reclaimed from the sea. Only those in Mecca and Medina are bigger.
Critics complain that the close to $1 billion spent in the 1990s on the Hassan II Great Mosque, which has a thousand ton sliding roof and the world’s tallest minaret, could have been better spent on helping people more directly, like cleaning out Casablanca’s legendary slums.
The mosque is indeed spectacular, with praying room for more than a 100,000 people. But the problems of the slums are spectacular too – places of mindless violence, desperate poverty and hopelessness.
All 12 suicide bombers who blew themselves up in Casablanca in 2003, killing at least 33 people, were Jihadist products from the local slums. So were the bombers in 2007 who killed a dozen more.
The government is working hard to move the country’s slum-dwellers to better homes. But to see the lives of the people still left behind, about half a million people nationwide, is truly shocking – yet in a few cases, humbling and inspiring.
That’s because of Boubker Mazoz.
VIDEO: Teaching self-respect in Casablanca's slums
White-haired, mustached, bronzed, slim and charismatic, the 58-year-old voluntary community organizer is a dead ringer for Omar Sharif, the famous actor. Seven years ago, while continuing with his day job at the public affairs office of the American Embassy, he founded an organization with the goal of bringing hope into the lives of the hopeless.
"Education is everything," he said, as we strolled in one of his classrooms among 10-year-old boys and girls being taught English, French and Arabic by high school seniors, all volunteers, many of them slum-dwellers themselves. "They must stay in school, become independent and especially, not be dragged down by all these stereotypes people have of them that they are failures, criminals, the bottom of society."
Mazoz grew up in Sale, a city near Rabat, and was grateful for the educational opportunities that gave him to make a better life for himself. He’s worked at the embassy for the last 30 years – while most of his country cousins are still back in the poor village where his father grew up. When Mazoz came to Casablanca, he wanted to help people make the best of themselves – especially through education.
At the community center I watched as one young girl, her hair covered in Islamic traditional style, enthusiastically pointed at letters. She mouthed them, and two boys and a girl, leaning across the table, one half-sitting on it, stroked the letters with their fingers and imitated her. A drone of English and French and Arabic vowels rolled across the room.
"They’re all from the neighborhoods," Mazoz said proudly. "They are such good kids, they just need a chance."
"Who is the girl teaching them?" I asked. And therein lies a tale.
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By Mike Mosher, NBC News Producer
BUKIT LAWANG, North Sumatra, Indonesia – It’s said one should not take work along on vacation. "Leave the BlackBerry at home!" my supervisor insisted. But, no way was I going to leave behind the camera with the opportunity to spend a week on an eco-tour in Indonesia.
In the forests of North Sumatra, Indonesia, there's a delicate balancing act going on, witnessed by a few eco-friendly tourists every year. It's not easy to see, but well worth the trip. And you might even see a little piece of yourself looking back at you from high in the trees.
The location was new for me and the trip was special, hardly work, particularly when I can share the experience (through the video links here) with others.
I set out to find a critically endangered species, the orangutan, in their native habitat before they become extinct. Its estimated just 6,600 Sumatran orangutans remain.
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By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
BUREN SOUM, CENTRAL PROVINCE, Mongolia – In Beijing, we're used to hearing about the problems of desertification.
Roughly 400 million people in China and a third of its land are affected by desertification – the consequence of several factors that include not just climate change but misguided farming policies, deforestation and drought. Some estimates say, at this rate, roughly one million acres of grassland in China are being devoured by the desert each year.
But desertification knows no boundaries, especially when it entails the Gobi Desert. Not only is Asia’s largest desert expanding from north to south across China, it’s creeping south to north, too, farther into Mongolia.
"Seventy percent of our territory is affected by desertification," said Tsognamsrai, a project officer with the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP) in Ulaan Baatar. (Like most Mongolians, he goes by just one name. But fortunately, for tongue-tied Westerners like us, he has a nickname: Namsrai.)
Adapting to the Gobi’s spread
An ecologist by training who used to teach at the Agricultural University of Mongolia, Namsrai has seen first-hand the impact of the growing Gobi.
For two years now, he's been working with local communities in the Middle Gobi – the northernmost reaches of the desert – to help them combat desertification.
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By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
HOVSGOL PROVINCE, Mongolia – Bayanjargal laughed as she watched the three of us from NBC News turn on our cell phones for the first time in 24 hours and maniacally start emailing and texting. We probably were a ridiculous sight – hungry, dishevelled, basically slightly worse for wear after having flown two hours and then bumped along another ten hours inside a Russian UAZ van. But that wasn’t why Bayanjargal was grinning so widely.
"I’m happy to see you on your cell phones," said the 40-year-old, who like many Mongolians goes by just one name. "It means there is a signal up here!"
"Up here" was Tsagaannuur, the northernmost town in this part of Mongolia, where we had stopped briefly during a strenuous three-day journey to the taiga, a subarctic area on the Siberian border. The region ranks amongst the most isolated and harsh environments in the northern hemisphere. It’s so remote there are no power or phone lines. But there is cell phone service, which became available this past year.
Mongolia’s smallest ethnic minority
Bayanjargal moved to Tsagaannuur when she was eight, but she still misses the taiga despite annual visits.
"It’s my parents’ birthplace," she told us over mugs of hot tea and coffee as we stretched out our legs. "I miss the environment, and I miss especially the reindeer milk."
Yes, reindeer milk.
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