Dear Friends,
I have thought of you often since our meeting two months ago. In fact, not a day passes by in which I don’t think of TED, listen to a TED talk, or approach my work in a more innovative way thanks to a TED idea. Though I’m not the most active blogger--there’s a reason I write fiction and not memoir--I have been avidly following your blog posts. Congratulations to Meklit and Jon for wonderful recent press coverage, and to Naomi for her making bones video. I loved Seth’s posting about his wedding day and the playful humor generated by an order from Better World Books. I look forward to seeing William when his book tour passes through Seattle in October. I’m awed by the web activity of folks like Esra’a, Jessica, and Gabriella.
I have some big news of my own to share. Though you know me as a doctor, humanitarian aid worker, and novelist, it’s now official, my latest professional incarnation is as producer of a documentary film! Two months ago, when we met at Oxford, I knew next to nothing about filmmaking. Since then, I have tried to school myself, assembling a stellar crew (including the Sundance-award-winning director of Afghan Star, clips of which we saw at TED U; www.afghanstardocumentary.com), finding mentors, and writing a film treatment and project proposal. Just before September 11 of this year (the tragic anniversary of which turned me into the kind of “born-again” Middle Easterner that Shereen describes, one hoping to build bridges between the West and East), I received the thrilling news that USAID will fully fund my film! I will be returning to Afghanistan next month to begin scouting and preliminary filming.
Operation Midwife: A Labor of Love on the Afghan Frontlines, is the name of my documentary film that will function as an advocacy, educational, and social marketing tool to decrease maternal mortality in Afghanistan and hopefully worldwide. Operation Midwife will attempt to capture the stunning success story of the Afghan national midwifery program, a powerful testimonial to the far-reaching impact of educating women, giving them a means of economic self-reliance, and investing in their health (see the wonderful August 23 New York Times Magazine on women and girls: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.html?_r=1&scp=2&...).
Some background:
More than a half a million women die from pregnancy each year, predominantly in the developing world. This statistic has not changed much in over three decades, despite remarkable health advances in richer countries, more aid money than ever before being spent on maternal health, international recognition of the problem as one of the 8 UN Millennium Development Goals, and the simple fact that most of these deaths would be preventable within a functioning, basic health infrastructure where skilled providers delivered women.
Afghanistan has one of the highest rates of maternal death ever recorded—approximately one in seven women dies from pregnancy, and the figure is as high as one in three in remote rural areas. This tragic death rate results from a legacy of war, poverty, illiteracy, geographical remoteness, and gender discrimination, which left the health care system in shambles and caused an alarming shortage of female health providers necessary to treat women in this conservative Islamic culture. When the international community promised to reconstruct Afghanistan following the overthrow of the Taliban regime in November of 2001, saving women from the death sentence of pregnancy became a high priority.
Last May, just after being accepted into the TED Global Fellows program, I returned to Afghanistan to assist an NGO in assessing a national midwifery training program that had grown from a single midwifery school in one province in 2002 to 31 schools serving all 34 provinces by 2010. I was astounded by the success of this midwifery program that I had watched closely in 2004-5, when I was working on a partner project in Afghanistan. The progress I witnessed in midwifery training was all the more impressive because of the daunting challenges faced by the program. The Taliban regime prevented girls from getting an education, resulting in a limited pool of literate potential midwifery students, who had either studied in secret underground schools or were educated as refugees. Under the Taliban, women were not allowed to work outside the home, causing many midwives and doctors to flee Afghanistan, making it difficult to find qualified faculty for the midwifery schools. The growing anti-government insurgency has poisoned girls in schools, kidnapped health providers, and burned clinics, making communities fearful and more conservative about allowing their women freedom of movement outside the home—both to seek and provide health care. The Taliban has also targeted Afghans perceived to be working with the government and especially with foreign humanitarian organizations. Finally, some Afghan health officials and physicians have been reluctant to allow these newly trained midwives to do their job and integrate into the health system as equal members, questioning their competence, jealous of their modern training, or threatened by their success.
Nevertheless, the midwifery program has triumphed despite these harrowing obstacles, and Operation Midwife will tell the story of these brave, hard-working women who are saving lives and transforming their communities. Operation Midwife is intended for hour-length TV viewing in the US, UK, and international English-language television stations, and will hopefully tour the international film festival circuit. A separate but related 30-minute film, which will involve a different post-production edit, is aimed at Afghan audiences in Dari and Pashto to be aired by Afghan TV and used by the Afghan Midwifery Association as promotional material. The film is a non-profit, educational, social-marketing venture, channeled through the infrastructure of a 501(c)3 Johns Hopkins University-based non-governmental organization working in Afghanistan for many years. Funds generated by international TV stations airing Operation Midwife will be given to the Afghan Midwifery Association, and every midwife will be given a copy of the Afghan version of Operation Midwife to show to her family and community to increase demand and respect for her services. I am hoping to include a DVD of Operation Midwife in the TED Gift Bag in 2012.
None of this would have happened without the magical sense of possibility, interdisciplinary thinking, and personal connections that being a TED Fellow at the TEDGlobal Conference gave me.
THANK YOU!
Please keep in touch. Warmest, Nassim
P.S. I so wish I could attend TEDIndia. If I weren’t going to be in Afghanistan in early November, I would be there. I noted several filmmakers among the new fellows. I hope to meet them one day, or perhaps we could have a subgroup of TED Fellows interested in film. (By the way, Taghi, glad you’ve returned safely from Iran!)
Nassim Assefi, MD
Doctor-Writer-(fledgling) Filmmaker
nassimassefi.com
Photos:
1. Nassim (R) meeting Afghan health providers in the field. Photo credit: Sallie Craig Huber.
2. Afghan girls. Photo credit: Shahriar Ghane
3. Afghan girl in front of a collapsing building down the road from where I worked. Photo credit: Katherine Kiviat.
4. Healthy Afghan woman and child. Photo credit: Nassim Assefi
5. Afghan midwifery students working with a model of the placenta. Photo credit: Sheena Currie.
6.Afghan midwifery students and faculty at their graduation. Photo credit: Sheena Currie
7.Afghan girls in window. Photo credit: Nassim Assefi
