Anna Sale

Emil is going to Baltimore this morning.

The 12-year-old boy has a pelvis fracture that needs extensive rehabilitation at Johns Hopkins University, but his trip got caught in bureaucratic limbo, and for most of the day yesterday, his doctor wasn't sure it would happen. Emil needed one last paper to add to the stack of authorizing documents: A form from a local official to allow his entrance into the United States.

All week, Takeaway producer Anna Sale is accompanying a medical mission in rural Haiti. At a hospital in Milot, 75 miles north of Port-au-Prince, many of the injured have been transferred from the capital. For the locals, even those without medical skills, it provides an opportunity for them to help. They change bedpans, braid the hair of patients, and offer comfort to those who are far from home and family.

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With two full days down, I continue to be struck by the incredible mix of everyday miracles and frustrating setbacks here.

On Sunday, I watched an airlift transfer of an earthquake victim who is paralyzed from the waist down. Her name is Marilynn. She's 32 years old and has three daughters. This was her fourth trip on a helicopter since the earthquake, she told me. This latest transport would take her from the hospital in Milot, where she had surgery last week to stabilize her spine, to a spinal cord clinic that's opened in a town about 10 miles away. The road, though, was too rugged to keep her healing back immobile en route, so she took the trip in by air.

On Monday, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush visited Haiti. All this week, Takeaway producer Anna Sale is also in the country, but at a rural hospital 75 miles away from Port-au-Prince. Today, she reports on the journey of 17-year-old Joseph Maxon, who spent his day navigating through Haiti's bureaucracy in search of a birth certificate.

Takeaway producer Anna Sale is accompanying a medical mission in Haiti. At a hospital in Milot, 75 miles north of Port-au-Prince, many of the injured have been transferred from the capital. For some of the patients there, the biggest fear comes at the prospect of leaving.

We arrived Saturday afternoon on a charter flight to the north Haitian town of Cap-Haitien – after a stopover on a Bahamian island, because it's difficult to get gas in Haiti. The airport was bustling, filled with aid workers coming and going on top of the already steady flow of local traffic. A guard stood in the lobby to manage the crowds, it took a minute before I realized the flag on his shoulder wasn't the Haitian flag. It was from Jordan. He's here on a UN Security mission to maintain airport security – just the first of many signs of the continuing international presence here.

On most days, I work with The Takeaway's dayside production team, but today I'm leaving on an eight-day trip to rural Haiti. I'm traveling with a medical team to Hôpital Sacré Coeur in Milot, a town about 75 miles north of Port-au-Prince. Doctors, nurses, and rehab therapists from across the country will spend the week there, joining the effort that local staff and foreign volunteers have sustained at a breakneck pace for more than nine weeks now.

UPDATED 7:25 p.m.

Alex Goldmark here.  

Now that the health care bill is out, we're put our man in Washington on the case. Todd Zwillich is hunting for changes in this, likely final, version of the legislation that might change your mind on reform, either in support or against it. He'll have the most persuasive pieces of the plan ready to go by tomorrow morning. 

A couple interesting stories out of the science section of The New York Times got our curiosity twitching. We'll bring you the connection between mummies in China and ancient dogs in the Middle East. They both reveal something about the roots of humanity - and how some of our historical assumptions might be wrong. 

We'll also talk with a young woman who rowed across the Atlantic, check in on the flooding in North Dakota and play a little movie trivia. It is Friday, after all. 

UPDATED: 8:10 p.m. 

Alex Goldmark, Senior Producer, here on the evening shift. 

We continue to follow the developments in health care reform, clashes in Israel, and of course the NCAA tournament. Our curiosity was also piqued by a recent study on women of color and wealth. They found: 

 

"Single black and Hispanic women have one penny of wealth for every dollar of wealth owned by their male counterparts and a tiny fraction of a penny for every dollar of wealth owned by white women."

We'll find out how bad it is, and why. Also as part of our DIY bailout series, we'll have some suggestions for building your own wealth. 

We'll also check in on the fiscal health of our nation as Moody's hints at lowering America's bond rating and the Federal Reserve plans to keep interest rates low based on moderate economic expectations.  

 

 

Posted 1:00 - On tomorrow's show: FCC national broadband plan; Border violence in Juarez, Mexico; The view from the stage at South by Southwest, and more ...

POSTED 2:00 - The future of public education; Lessons learned from Massachusetts' attempt at universal health coverage; The author of the book that inspired 'The Green Zone,' opening ...

UPDATED 10:00 p.m.

Arwa, here on the night shift.

Not too much have changed this Anna blogged this morning. We’ve added a segment to the show to talk about Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to Israel. He’ll be wrapping up a four-day visit tomorrow and will be delivering a speech at Tel Aviv University. We’ll talk with Aaron David Miller from the Woodrow Wilson Center about where things stand when it comes to US-Israeli relations.

South by Southwest kicks off this week, and it’s for more than just music and movie fans. It’s also one of the most prestigious conventions in the technology world. Twitter was actually introduced there in 2007. We’ll talk with our Tech Correspondent Baratunde Thurston about what to watch out for this year.

UPDATED: 8:00 p.m.  

Alex here on the night shift. 

Not much has changed. We're still eager to find out about Iran-Afghan relations and to check in on the status of aid getting to Haiti.So that's leading the show tomorrow. 

Though we did get curious once we dove in a little deeper into a study on Americans and retirement. It reveals another sector of society living hand to mouth in part because of the recession. Shockingly few American workers have saved for old age, which means that they are working longer and longer into their "golden" years. So what does that mean for the younger generation waiting to get into, and move up in, the workforce. By showtime tomorrow we will have a hopeful answer for you. 

And we'll eat some jellyfish live on air, because that is an environmentally friendly food. Tune in tomorrow to find out what other sumptuous meals are good for the planet, and what large rodent makes for a good chili! 

UPDATED 5:45 p.m.

Alex Goldmark here. 

We're monitoring the media blitz of Rep. Eric Massa tonight as he heads for the cable news channels to defend himself against ethics accusations. And also to throw a few more parting shots at President Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel. It's an inside story for Washington, but some valuable insights might come out on how work gets done in the Obama White House. Our partners at The New York Times are covering that here. 

Also, it is python hunting season in Florida. We'll bring you a sharp shooter. 

 

UPDATED: 5:15 p.m. 

Alex Goldmark, Senior Producer, here. 

All is still rolling along smoothly today. We're still planning on covering the elections in Iraq, and to bring you a slew of entertainment and movie coverage tomorrow ahead of this weekend's Oscars. 

 

With American manufacturing taking an especially big hit this recession, we want to check in on some one-company towns around the country. We'll hear from the Mayors of three small towns that are having different experiences with plant shutdowns, cutbacks and similar dangers to their fragile economies. 

 

UPDATED 7:15 p. m. 

Alex Goldmark here with the night shift update. 

We've lined up our live reporter interviews from Chile for tomorrow morning. We'll get a sense of how the curfews and looting has unfolded as the hunt for water and gas gets more desperate in some areas. But we will stick with our plans to find out the science behind tsunamis and quakes and also the construction techniques that kept the death toll so low. 

Other than that, not much has changed, which means that here on the night shift we can get into long debates about the meaning of "999 dead in Operation Enduring Freedom." And should we consider a fallen CIA agent in Afghanistan differently than a troop killed in Somalia? Or across the Afghan border in Uzbekistan? It's all part of Operation Enduring Freedom so what's a radio show to do when covering "The War in Afghanistan."  Here's the official count from the DoD with little explanation on how the number is derived. We will hear from the mother of one of the first troops to be killed in Afghanistan on how she marks her loss eight years later.

 

POSTED: Friday at 3 p.m. Anna Sale on the Friday shift. 

We're following the breaking news reports today that New York Governor David Paterson is ending his reelection bid, and the news that handwriting will change on the Obamas' social calendar as Desiree Rogers resigns as White House Social Secretary. For our show on Monday, we're looking across the snowy horizon to see where the news next week will be.

UPDATED 7:00 p.m

Alex Goldmark, Senior Producer here. The heavy snow here in New York City has knocked our our satellite links; we have no TV, no wire services, but hey, we can blog and make phone calls. 

One new addition to the show deals with the shootings after Hurricane Katrina. We're following up on the disturbing revelations out of New Orleans about a police cover-up of shootings. There has been some great reporting from Pro-Publica and The Times Picayune, so we'll hear from one of the reporters and find out what the local reaction has been with a chat with a leader from the local NAACP. 

In lighter news, we're compiling a list of Olympic highlights - and lowlights too - to share with you tomorrow. If you have some of your own, leave a comment, or call us at 877-8-MY-TAKE. See which ones we pick tomorrow morning. We'll also have a little number on why curling is all the rage ... on Wall Street.

It's still Friday, so yes, we will have a movie segment a week ahead of the Oscars. We'll tell you what you need to do (instead of watching) to come up to speed on all the nominations by the time the big show hits the stage/screen/etc. 

 

UPDATED 4:45 p.m. A quick update from Alex Goldmark, producing this evening, with some ideas we're considering.

We're still looking to find out how cities like Miami and New York can help Haitian schoolchildren with distance learning. American educators have just come back from Haiti; they're trying to assess how technology and willpower might meet the needs of kids who are still showing up each day in front of crumbled school houses, hoping for a plan to get their schooling back on track.  It's not certain this will be on tomorrow, but we all think it's an intriguing story.

The FCC is looking at broadband access in rural America. We're reaching out to mayors and business folks in states where many, many people still don't have reliable access to broadband internet. (Compare this to highly connected Finland, which recently declared broadband access something that every one of its citizen has a legal right to.) We want to know the economic and social change that might come with the new FCC plan. Maybe it's better without internet in some ways. What do we know here in wired NYC?  Another story that might come together for tomorrow, or might hit later on.

UPDATED: 4:45 p.m. - Adam Hirsch, Web Producer, here, on the afternoon swing shift.

The second day of our "Frustration Nation" series is coming together nicely: the conversation about the role of the media in political gridlock will now include our friend Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and long time political journalist Michael Kinsley. They've each watched politics and political reporting for decades and somehow kept their sanity: we're expecting a lively conversation from them.

We'll be talking with journalist Najibullah Quraishi and his producer, Jamie Doran, who managed to get themselves embedded with a group of Taliban insurgents in northern Afghanistan and documented it for Frontline.  The footage is pretty incredible, and Quraishi apparently barely made it away from the group alive, after they began disagreeing about the wisdom of allowing a reporter to tag along with them.

And as a follow-on to our segment about credit card changes this morning, we'll be talking about changes to debit card fees with reporters from our partners at The New York Times; that's just coming together now, but we'll fill in the details later tonight.