Doctor Mehret

I have been working on a new film project for the past month and a half that has me very excited. I literally feel like the film found me.  I was minding my own business at a Health and Human Rights conference in Los Angeles when it happened.

Truth be told, the story actually start in Washington, D.C.  I was attending my cousin’s film premiere Guzo when the cinematographer on the film, Zeresenay Mehari, started to tell me about his own project Oblivion.  The film is about the story of a legal precedent setting case against the abudction of girls into marriage in Ethiopia. My ears immediately perked up because I recognized it was a story of women’s rights and justice.

Fast forward, a few weeks later, I am in L.A. for a conference and I connect with Zeresenay, who happens to live out there.  He gives me a copy of the screenplay and I am literally blown away by the story. I had to be a part of it. More importantly I had to help! TruthAIDS is currently designing the outreach plan for the film and helping out in any way possible to get the project done.

The production of this film will mean big things for women’s rights in Ethiopia. So thankful that it found me!

I am just getting back from presenting at the USCA. I was speaking on a panel about the connections between domestic violence and HIV. I talked about my research connecting HIV positive women’s stories in the South Bronx and Ethiopia. The same work that is featured in the documentary film All of Us. The discussion was rich and we filmed the exchange as a “truth circle” about the connections between violence and HIV.

I started out the my talk by asking the crowd the difference between solidarity and partnerships?  The audience had much to say on this point. There were many great answers but one that stuck is that partnerships are “financial” and limited, while solidarity is much bigger. Solidarity is about the sharing the risk in the work and making sure all benefit.  This definition was given by a young Trinidadian woman from Washington D.C. that does a great deal of work with HIV positive women.  The same woman later asked me  about the “bigger vision”, meaning 10-20 years from now, what are the steps we would have to talk to create a society where peace was the default?

My response was announcing the class I was going to be teaching called “Mass Collaborations.”  The class is about the mechanics of finding the practical steps to the big questions, together. This course will be administered by the Community Research Group at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. It is a class being offered through the University of Orange which is a free online university.  This course is designed for all who have seen All of Us which opened in the theater in the Cinema Village theater in NYC this week.

This course is about how we can work together in an equitable manner to solve the bigger problems in society, like HIV and violence.  There will be future postings so look out for it. In the meantime click here to learn more.