Busy work

In between plotting assassination attempts of the insects in my house (and really, potential visitors, it's not that bad)--I've been busily working on two radio pieces for this series I'm creating for the station in Tlaxiaco. The first is a story about a town where 70-80% of its citizens migrate north every year. You can read more about the town in an earlier blog of mine entitles "Town of Dust and Vapor." I'm attempting to tell the story through the scope of a small family band that just recorded a CD of traditional music. The recording, is a means for this family (and the town, by extension) to kind of stave off the rapid loss of village traditions, by preserving it in sound. More on the family band here. It's taken me a while because I was mixing quite a bit of different sound (interviews in a studio, interviews outside, ambi sound in a street, recorded music, live music, etc). Just this past week I re-recorded some ambi to get a better sound since I'd been struggling in the "editing room."

The second piece is one of the migration stories I recorded weeks ago. It's the story of an 18 year-old girl that crossed over the border through the dessert. She tells the story in her native tongue, Mixteco. So I had to work to get a translation, and then to record a reading of a translation (which was way harder than I thought--props to all those professional readers in radio), and finally to edit the pieces together. I also had this idea to mix this girl's story with the sound of her footsteps; so that involved a 5 AM recording session here at my house. Imagine me, in pajamas and hiking boots, traipsing around my gravel drive with head phones and a giant shotgun mic. Then imagine that in the streets in my neighborhood (I needed the sound of gravel walking AND pavement walking). Of course, I realized two days later that while 5 AM is a very quiet time in the city to record (no traffic), it is not quiet in terms of bird noise. So when I was coming home somewhat late at night from hanging with friends, I realized night time works even better. Out came the equipment, once again! My neighbors think I'm a weirdo. Who am I to argue?

Anyhoo, the two pieces turned out really well. I'll post them sometime soon so you can all give a listen. I've gotta get my blog sound-ready first.

In other work news Eva, my partner in crime for a youth radio project, came into town so we could go talk with a few notaries about starting what is called here an Asociación Civil. We also worked on organizational details of the project, which was extremely helpful. Here's a shot of Eva near Santo Domingo. She looks happy because we made it out of the two meetings we had still with our wallets in our pockets.


(Side note: I don't know if this was planned out or not--but there is a beautiful rotation of blooming trees here in Oaxaca. Just as the purple Jacarandas start to loose their petals, these gorgeous red-tipped trees kick into bloom. So there's always color here.)

Notaries, across the board, seem to be fast-talking, shady dealers. One of the people we spoke with, in the midst of laying out some of the paperwork we'd need, leaned in and said, "You'll learn pretty quickly that no Asociación Civil is clean." Awesome. I'm happy to say as a foreigner I most likely won't be officially entering the AC.

I also spoke with an immigration lawyer to resolve some Visa issues. The bad news is that it will cost me some travel and some money to change my Visa status here. The good news is that my current Visa is good through October--so I won't get booted out of the country in July, as I had earlier thought. Woohoo! Booting hurts.

So that's the nitty gritty of the moment, folks. Pretty exciting, all this paperwork, fine print and meetings, eh?