Under-Told: Verbatim

Our team actually lives in St. Paul and Minneapolis...which, on a fateful day in late May, became the epicenter of a protest movement that’s swept the world since: the death of George Floyd. We’ve been on the frontlines of this story for the PBS NewsHour.  Alongside NewsHour producers Mike Fritz and Sam Lane, we produced an in-depth piece on inequality in the Twin Cities, how ‘Minnesota Nice’ only applies if you’re white. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch the full story at undertoldstories.org. In this episode, we have a chance to expand conversations our correspondent, Fred de Sam Lazaro, had with community members after police killed Floyd and protestors burned the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct.

Somaliland, a region of Somalia that lay in ruin from years of war, suffers some of the world’s highest rates of infant and maternal mortality. But 15 years ago, Edna Adan fulfilled a lifelong dream by building a nonprofit hospital and nursing school to address the health needs of women. In this episode, we hear Edna, the former first lady of Somalia, describe her path toward achieving that dream and the myriad obstacles she faced, and still faces, in reducing infant and maternal mortality.

The Monk Doctor: 72, shaved bald and draped in flowing maroon robes, Barry Kerzin gently presses his stethoscope to the neck of an elderly Tibetan man. He’s just as gentle with this patient as he is with a much more famous one: his holiness the Dalai Lama.  The Tibetan spiritual leader now calls Kerzin, a tall, white California native, his messenger to the medical world – a journey that took a classically trained Western doctor halfway across the globe to become a buddhist monk.

In 1994, Nelson Mandela’s election marked the end of apartheid and the beginning of democracy in South Africa. But the scars of racial segregation haven’t healed yet. Infrastructure designed for 5 million white South Africans has failed to support the majority black population of over 56 million power outages and water shortages are a part of daily life. Zola Nene was 10 years old when apartheid ended. Today her cookbooks and television appearances have made her a famous and beloved celebrity chef. Our director Fred de Sam Lazaro, talked to Zola in a Cape Town coffee shop about cooking in a post apartheid kitchen.

Rebecca Letven is the Cambodia country director for the UK based Mines Advisory Group, or MAG, a non-governmental organization that works to clear explosives and return land to communities. These deadly remnants of the Cambodian civil war were planted in the late 1960s and early 70s by both the genocidal Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Vietnamese forces. They also include thousands of unexploded bombs dropped by the United States as part of the Vietnam war. Most of the minefields are in rural areas, where close to 80% of Cambodians live and depend on the land for farming or other natural resources.

While training as a chef, Sean Sherman learned French, Italian and other western styles of cooking, but he had no way of knowing what his ancestors ate. So he decided to find out himself. His cookbook, “The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen,” won a James Beard award in 2018. Today, he and his partner Dana Thompson run “The Sioux Chef,” a project to revive indigenous traditions in the kitchen and encourage cheaper and healthier eating for everyone. 

Jimmy Carter was President of the United States from 1977 to 1981, but he dove into humanitarian work as soon as his term was over. He’s worked to eradicate neglected tropical diseases and mediate age-old conflicts around the world including Sudan and South Sudan--two nations carved out of one after a bitter war that Carter helped end. In this episode, Jimmy Carter reflects on his foreign aid methodology and the global and personal impact of the Carter Center.

In 2005 there were about 150 orphanages in Cambodia, but that number grew to more than 400 in 2019. But an estimated 80 percent of kids in Cambodia's orphanages aren't actually orphans. Sebastien Marot’s Friends International social enterprise is working with the larger campaign to remove children from orphan care. In a courtyard near a busy Phnom Penh street, he explained the business of orphanage tourism, the harmful impact it can have on the children and how international volunteers—often part of the problem—can be part of the solution.