Please donate to RISC (Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues)

(All photographs in this post by James Lawler Duggan)

A couple weeks ago, I was incredibly lucky to be able to attend the third and most recent Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC) training in New York. During this course, freelance journalists learn battlefield first aid over the course of several days. To encourage freelancers' participation, the course and accommodations are entirely free, and each trainee receives a full medical kit to take with him/her into the field. To my knowledge, RISC is the only FREE formal course of its kind, entirely devoted to battlefield/wilderness medical response for freelance journalists. Two more RISC sessions are scheduled for 2013, but there still aren't enough spots for the hundreds of freelancers on a waiting list to receive this critical and potentially life-saving training.

All of which brings me to the real reason for this post. RISC relies on charitable donations from organizations and individuals to keep going. The next group of RISC participants needs your financial support. Each of the previous trainees has set up a fundraising page here. Anything, even $10, can help. With even a small donation, you may help train the person who saves my life on my next assignment.

Below are some additional photographs (shot by James Lawler Duggan), links, and information about the course:

Above, Ben Solomon (who also happens to be one of my Istanbul roommates) applies a pressure bandage to a dummy during a battlefield first aid drill at RISC training.

With 23 of my colleagues, I learned how to assess patients, how to address the three critical systems of the body, how to stop bleeding, how to open and maintain a person's airway, how to do CPR, how to splint broken bones, how to prepare a patient for evacuation, and a ton of other stuff. We did numerous practice drills, in between lectures and demonstrations, everyday for four days.

The instructors, from a company called Wilderness Medical Associates, included a National Guard flight and combat medic who had been deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, a paramedic and guide with 15 years of rural and urban experience, and a wilderness EMT who has worked in the South African bushveld. They were amazing.

Here I am helping to "package" a patient for transport with Mike Shum, another trainee, during the battlefield drill on the last day of training. (Did you know that one of the top four preventable deaths on the battlefield is from hypothermia?)

I attended a hostile environment training (with thanks to financial support from Rory Peck Trust and my agency Redux Pictures) in Lebanon last year. It was great, but only half of it was devoted to medical training. And I think it's something you have to practice over and over, throughout the years, updating your skills and training your mind and muscles to act.

Robert Nickelsberg, Carol Dysinger, and Michael Kirby Smith practice stopping bleeding using chicken carcasses and fake blood. It may seem macabre or gory, but they use fake blood to try to get us used to real blood, if, god forbid, we ever need to use these skills in a real situation.

Jonathan Saruk, Michael Kirby Smith, and Ben Solomon finish the documentation and packaging of their battlefield patient.

There's Sawyer, one of the amazing trainers, in the briefing session after a mass casualty drill.

The trainees, instructors, and RISC directors outside the Bronx Documentary Center, where the training was held, on our last day of training, March 29, 2013.

Everyday Africa Portraits

 "She's my girl," said the young man proudly, in Dembara, Senegal.

I can hear the voice of Dan Pelle, one of my mentors from my years at The Spokesman-Review newspaper, as he edits over my shoulder: "I like seeing all these faces."

A funny thing happened while I was in Senegal. I started to use my phone to take portraits of people. It was kind of a whim decision, like, sure why not? I have this tool, why not experiment a bit? But, it turns out, these are some of my favorite photographs that I took while I was in West Africa.

Believe me when I say this was a shock for me. Unlike some of my colleagues, I was reluctant to use my phone's camera to take serious pictures, the kind with some weight to them, the kind that I would want to share with the world. I worried about the quality of the images, and the "Hipstamatic" filters bothered me. (In fact with the first set of portraits I took, I spent a lot of time in Photoshop trying--for the most part unsucessfully--to remove the filter, until I found a "lens" and "film" that was truer to my style, and started using that instead.)

I still don't think camera phones are perfect for every situation, but for some subjects and the right light conditions, they can work really well. People are not so afraid of a little phone camera.

Gniana, Fafacourou, Senegal.

Mai Mona, 12, Near Kolda, Senegal.

Fafacourou, Senegal.

Dembara, Senegal.

Elizabeth, 19, university student, Fafacourou, Senegal.

Obama fan, Kolda, Senegal.

Dembara, Senegal.

Maly, Fafacourou, Senegal.

Aminata, vegetable vendor in the market, Kolda, Senegal.

Samba, Fafacourou, Senegal.

Fatoumata, 20, university student, Fafacourou, Senegal.

Young laborer wearing hand-me-down hospital scrubs, Dembara, Senegal.

Bailo, bissap (hibiscus) vendor in the market, Kolda, Senegal.

Dembara, Senegal.

In Mabella Quarter, Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Mariama, 10, and her pet monkey, with a re-purposed electrical cord for a leash, Bolama, Guinea-Bissau.

Noé, 21, Bandim district, Bissau, Guinea-Bissau.

Alai, 21, refugee from Mali, Mentao Refugee Camp, Burkina Faso.

Sidi Ag Muhammad, 60, refugee from Mali and shepherd, Mentao Refugee Camp, Burkina Faso.

Ali, a 7-year-old refugee from Mali, is covered in dust from the walk to school, Mentao Refugee Camp, Burkina Faso.

Fatma, 8-year-old refugee from Mali, Mentao Refugee Camp, Burkina Faso.

Agali Ag Hamaduh, refugee from Mali and the camp's school director, Mentao Refugee Camp, Burkina Faso. 

Fati, 13, refugee from Mali, wearing a t-shirt with the Bollywood star Vaidehi on it, Mentao Refugee Camp, Burkina Faso.

Lala, 8 months old, refugee from Mali with her mother, Mentao Refugee Camp, Burkina Faso.

An extraordinary woman: my grandmother

 Yvonne "Bonnie" Bost Pickett, a.k.a. Grandma, in her living room, Bozeman Mont., Dec. 25, 2012.

Warning: this post contains extensive amounts of bragging. I hope you don't mind.

My grandmother, Bonnie (Bost) Pickett, is 97. Which, to me, is in itself kind of amazing.

Right around Thanksgiving last year, with the help of her son and daughter, she published a memoir about her time in Honolulu during World War II. Grandma's adventurous spirit brought her to Hawaii in April of 1941, where she was working as a Queen's Hospital nurse when Pearl Harbor was bombed on Dec. 7, 1941. She continued to work in Hawaii until 1945, when she received an engagement ring in the mail from my grandfather, a doctor with the Army Air Corps in the European theater.

Frank Pickett and Bonnie Bost were married on June 8, 1945, moved to Montana, raised three children, and the rest is history.

The cover of "Our War: My Life as a Nurse in Hawaii 1941-45" is graced by a stunning portrait of Bonnie in her nurse's uniform, back in the day. There are tons of cool historical photos inside, too.

Most authors have at least one book signing--Grandma is no exception. Here she is with my Aunt Mary Pickett, inscribing books that she'll give as gifts to her many fans. Aunt Mary, a journalist at the Billings (Mont.) Gazette, edited the book. (See everyone? I come by my chosen career path honestly, inspired by world travelers and journalists on all sides.)

I can't wait to see what else you've got up your sleeve. Love you, Grandma!

Everyday Africa

 Corner kiosk, Dakar, Senegal, July 19, 2012

More even than the Middle East, Africa is arguably the most stereotyped region in the world. It is depicted over and over as a hopeless place with insurmountable problems. Images of famine, war, disease, and the latest coup dominate the Africa story in so-called "Western" mainstream media. We have a duty to report these life-or-death events, but I believe we also have the obligation to present a more complete picture of daily life. Human beings are more than just their problems.

To that end, photographer Peter DiCampo and writer Austin Merrill have started a streaming photography site called Everyday Africa. DiCampo and Merrill worked together most recently in Ivory Coast, where the idea of the project took root.

This New York Times Lens blog is a good synopsis of the premise behind the Everyday Africa project, but DiCampo put it best here: “I realized that I had to keep doing it, because there’s a constant barrage of imagery of misery, despair and hopelessness, and more than any of those things — helplessness, the idea that Africans need to be saved,” he said. “There are attempts out there to reverse this and tell empowering, hopeful stories about Africa. This is neither of those. This is an attempt at changing representation of Africa just by sharing things that are casual, that are a general stream of daily life.”

In my opinion, it's a pretty brilliant idea.

DiCampo and Merrill have made this a collective effort and have invited other photographers who are working on the African continent to post images to Everyday Africa. I became a contributor a couple weeks ago. Other contributors include Glenna Gordon, Shannon Jensen, Jane Hahn, and Laura El-Tantawy. DiCampo says he hopes eventually every African country will be represented by streaming images of daily life.

If you're interested in seeing the work, you can follow this project at everydayafrica on Instagram. For those of you who aren't into the smart-phone/photography-ap trend, you can also see the images on the corresponding tumblr site here: http://everydayafrica.tumblr.com.

One more thing. There is a lot of focus on the fact that these images were, almost exclusively, taken with mobile phones. A word of advice: don't worry about the equipment that was used to produce the image. Just concentrate on the picture. If the image works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't.

Emergency

I've been busy! I'll spend the next couple of weeks posting recent stories and projects, starting with this story about Emergency Hospital that I worked on while I was in Afghanistan for a month this fall. The doctors and nurses at Emergency were kind enough to let me spend a few days with them, observing and listening to the patients inside:

After shrapnel from a mortar shell penetrated the skull of 1-year-old Bashir Ahmed, pictured above in his mother’s arms, the boy ended up in an intensive care unit in one of Afghanistan’s most medically advanced hospitals.

Emergency Surgical Center for War Victims is Kabul’s newest war hospital. The hospital, run and funded by the Italian Emergency non-governmental organization since 2001, changed its admission criteria to treat only “war wounds”—shell injuries, bullet wounds and stabbings—just three months ago.

The change, according to current medical coordinator Dr. Antonio Rainone, happened because the hospital has seen a dramatic increase in shell injuries and bullet wounds in the past year. A whole ward of the hospital lies empty, ready to use in case of a mass casualty incident.

“It is Afghanistan that has gone back to being a war country,” said Dr. Rainone.

Emergency Hospital is proof of the growing violence and complexity of conflict happening around the capital. Patients come to the 100-bed medical facility from Logar, Wardak, Ghazni, Kapisa, Parwan and Kabul provinces, sometimes even from as far away as Baghlan or Kunduz in the North and Paktika province in the Southeast.

Their injuries, almost without exception, are severe and complicated. Thirty percent of patients are children.

The following photographs provide a look inside Emergency Hospital.

Thirteen months ago, Apzal was shot in the chest by an AK-47-wielding tribal rival in his home district of Urgun, Paktika province. The 18-year-old’s spinal cord was shattered by the bullet and he is now paraplegic. In Afghanistan, treatment and care of people with serious spinal cord injuries is sparse. Apzal has spent the last several months at Emergency being treated for pressure sores, deep and potentially-fatal tissue wounds that sometimes develop in bed-ridden patients.

Dr. Antonio Rainone examines the chest x-ray of a patient with bullet wounds.

Ruhillah, a mother of four, lives in Ghazni province in the village of Khuschi, where she said Taliban and pro-government residents live side-by-side. She was asleep at home with her family when a rocket exploded nearby. Ruhillah’s arm and jaw were fractured, and now her mouth is wired shut to help her heal. Her 2-year-old son and her husband were also injured.

Italian nurses, from left, Georgia Novello and Andrea Freda and anesthesiologist Federico Cafagna wheel a patient with two bullet wounds to the chest back to the operating theater. The patient had arrived earlier in the day and immediately underwent surgery to repair the damage. However, steady blood loss indicated a problem, so surgeons prepared to open him back up.

Surgeons look for damaged tissue in a patient with bullet wounds to the chest.

Gul Bashara, 11, cries out in pain while her mother and aunt move her to a wheelchair in the children’s ward. She was outside at home in Logar province with her brothers and sisters when a shell landed in the family’s garden. Seven children were injured and two were killed in the explosion. Gul Bashara’s spine was injured and she was paralyzed from the waist down. She also has severe flesh wounds to her arms, legs, back and chest.

Gul Bashara’s 4-year-old sister Sidiqa received two badly broken legs in the explosion.

Norullah was at a relative’s wedding in Wardak province when a grenade was thrown into the wedding party. He had injuries to his arms and abdomen, and lost vision in his right eye.

Minadar, a mother of nine, said she and her family huddled in their home in Sar e Pol province while fighting raged one night. A mortar detonated nearby, killing one of her sons and injuring two others. Minadar’s right hand was amputated and she suffered a severe fracture and open wound to her left arm. She said she thought the situation in Afghanistan was getting worse. “I wish the war was finished,” she said.

Anesthesiologists prepare 8-year-old Waris from Logar province for emergency surgery. The boy had shrapnel wounds to the chest, abdomen and skull.

Mohammad Agha, 20, was shot in the chest outside of a polling station in his home district of Archi, Kunduz province, on September 18, the day of Afghanistan’s parliamentary election. The bullet damaged his spinal cord: he is now paraplegic. He got engaged shortly before his injury, and now can’t summon the courage to tell his fiancée that he’ll likely spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

Khan Agha, right, 28, talks with a relative outside his hospital ward. Agha is an Afghan policeman in Takhar province, is married, and has two young sons. He said he was in a firefight with Taliban insurgents and stepped on a mine while running. His left leg was amputated as a result of his injury. When asked how he would be able to earn a living, he said, “I don’t know, but God will provide.”

A child sleeps at Emergency Hospital. He had shell injuries including a broken leg and shrapnel in his abdomen.