Today, Jumana split the team in half and sent one group to
get B-roll while the other group focused on the pregnant mother we had chosen
as the woman to follow in the story the video will tell about the clinic. (For
those who may not know, B-roll is footage that supports the narrative. For
example, if the lab technician talks about HIV tests while being interviewed,
we would shoot B-roll of the lab itself and, ideally, show the HIV test being
performed.)
The first group followed the woman for the first part of the
day, being checked by the midwife, receiving medication, and walking on the
road towards the clinic. The second group pursued the B-roll shots. When not
needed for other things, two students went out to record natural sound to be
used as “background noise” in the video.
In the afternoon, the first group took the pregnant woman
home to her “boma” so they could get shots of her in and around her home. (A
boma, as described in a previous post, is a house made of cow dung and ash, and
is topped with straw or thatch.) It turned out that another wife of the same
husband was pregnant as well, and the babies were due only a few months apart.
Back at the clinic, yet another woman had given birth the
night before. She had understood that we
were to give her and the baby a ride to her boma in the land rover. The B-roll
group decided to give her the ride, even though that hadn’t been part of the
plan. I tagged along with that group. The new mother, the baby, and two other
women piled into the land rover, along with us, and we drove the short distance
to the boma. We were able to follow her into the boma, which was exceedingly
dark, except for a warm fire burning in the center that kept the house quite
warm. Kamran got a wonderful shot of her inside her home, nursing the new baby.
Our driver took us a few hundred feet away to where the men
– the new father and other men from the community – had slaughtered a goat and
were cooking it over a fire. This is the customary celebration for the arrival
of a new baby. The men eat goat meat. They also boil part of the meat, keep the
fat, and stir it into the porridge that is fed to the new mother. Despite the
mix of genders among us, we were offered some goat meat to taste. It was wonderful!
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