Manning Radio Transcript

Manning Radio Transcript

The idea that was clear to me--being sort of tech nerdy--was: bring a video camera, bring microphones, bring a laptop, and make sure you can find a way to keep everything recharged because there was no power out there. There was only a generator until seven o'clock at night. We were staying in this grimy place and meeting the various people with whom we had to work. Very fortunately, it was clear from early on in my working relationship with my supervisor, Pierre Rollin, that he was very committed to the comms, the communications aspect. So I went asking for money to do radio spots because everyone was telling me, as they were in West Africa, people get their information from radio. You've got to cover radio. You can make posters and you can do interviews, but radio is going to be the way to get this going. So I was able to have some money to do these radio spots. We were able to give a small amount of money to the radio station who was going to run them for a period of twenty-one days, several times a day in multiple languages. We went to the homes of the people. We got the translations going and that process was pretty challenging because you're in the field with the battery running down on your laptop and we're recording in candlelight and there's no generator running and so you're needing to get this thing to the radio station the following morning. We were able to burn those radio spots onto CDs and take them to the radio station and put them in rotation.