Posted: October 31

Getting news from your friends

Last week I sent out an email to the Jescom list because the provincial of the Wisconsin province is looking for someone to help give a new direction to the radio station on one of the native American reservations which that province serves. I added his request onto a reminder to people to post their own news on this site. The best part of sending out a message to almost 400 people is that you get a lot of replies from people you know but don't normally talk to. Of course, the worst part is getting messages that bounce back because the address is no longer correct; it is amazing how fast email addresses change. But then communication is a field that does not stay long in place.

What did I learn? Fr. Jerry Martinson from Taiwan's Kuangchi Studio was recently visiting East Timor and reported that "Ruedi Hofmann is doing quite interesting video production work and coping with some very large obstacles (his injured leg, electricity black-outs, a young staff still in need of training, etc.). He is now working with a young East Timorese Jesuit, Fr. Venancio, who is doing good work in radio. Neither Venancio nor Ruedi have done anything in community radio yet." Ruedi moved to East Timor a few year's ago after spending many years in Indonesia at Puskat Audio Visual Center. According to Jerry, Puskat has a very interesting community radio station which I look forward to visiting when I go to Indonesia in January. It will be my first trip to that part of the East Asia assistancy.

Friends in Latin America also wrote. Jaime Carril, the head of the Chilean Jesuit operation, Campaña per la Buena Vida, wrote to let me know that the province web site was being redone. And Fr. Jack Warner said that his teatro la fragua theater group will ge traveling from Honduras to Guatemal to present a Christmas show. "Today I had a bit of a talk with Edilberto (our musician) and Edy and Chito (who's doing percussion) about Guatemala," he wrote; "we're doing the Christmas show for there (with the hope of teaching it to kids as well as doing it) -- and they want to fancy it up with electronic stuff.... which we do normally, and which is nice, but I insisted to them that we can't count on electric current there so we have a guitar and a drum and actors' voices and that is more than enough. Yes, the Guatemala project is extremely exciting. Especially, being in contact with one of the great cutures of the history of the world and knowing that we are contributing something to that."