Our friends at Seattle’s citizen journalist organization SalaamGarage recently announced a new travel opportunity for creative types.  SalaamGarage works to connect amateur and professional journalists, bloggers, photographers, videographers and other creative individuals with international NGO’s to create intentional content that both raises awareness and inspires positive change. 

Hue at Night by Ketai Blogger

This January (2010), SalaamGarage founder Amanda Koster and leader Maggie Soladay will be taking a small group of citizen journalists (that means you) to the Quang Tri Province of central Vietnam for two weeks to collaborate with Peace Trees Vietnam, a Seattle-based humanitarian NGO (IRS 501-C3) working in Vietnam to reduce the devastating impact left by the Vietnam War.  This is a very exciting opportunity, as SalaamGarage’s group of ten American journalists received clearance by the Vietnamese government to enter and document life in the Quang Tri Province since the war. 

Founded in 1995, Peace Trees became the first American NGO to be permitted by the Government of Vietnam to support humanitarian mine action, to remove land mines and unexploded ordnance and to provide survivor’s assistance and Mine Risk education.  Since that time, Peace Trees Vietnam has cleared more than 405 acres of land, removed more than 33,000 ordnance items, trained 16,000 children in Mine Risk Education, planted more than 40,000 indigenous trees, assisted 640 mine accident victims and their families and hosted over 450 citizen diplomats building bridges of friendship with the Vietnamese.  SalaamGarage aims to unite a team of citizen journalists who will use words, pictures, and video to document and share the story found in Peace Trees’ collaboration with the Vietnamese people.  SalaamGarage believes now is the ideal time for this trip, noting the parallels of Vietnam’s war legacy with the history the US is currently making through our involvement in Iraq.   Like the Vietnamese, we will experience residuals of our own history of war and the steps required to heal from those consequences. 

Quang Tri Province, most heavily bombed region during Vietnam War

SalaamGarage is building an incredibly talented and diverse team for the Vietnam 2010 trip – each having joined this common humanitarian cause for a variety of reasons.  Freelance journalist Daysha Eaton sees this SalaamGarage trip as an opportunity to “see a different side of Vietnam” and to share what she learns about the impact of war through traditional media outlets as well as online news sources, including her personal site, www.superstringer.com.   She is also working to heal some of the emotional wounds and answer some of the questions that American Vietnam-war Veterans, like her father, still have 30 years after the end of the war.  While Eaton has worked in traditional forms of legacy media such as print, radio and TV, she looks forward to trying something new, telling the story through multimedia slideshows for the Web. And she points out the uniqueness of this project, saying, “this will be my first attempt at being completely transparent about my connection to a story and I look forward to the authenticity that it will bring to the project”.  Daysha hopes that the stories she produces on the Vietnam War’s legacy will inspire other journalists to use creative media technologies to reach wide audiences and advance causes that they believe in. 

photo by Toby Forage

There are still 5 slots left in SG’s Vietnam 2010 trip.  If you want to join SalaamGarage in exploring Central Vietnam and educating your community through creative media, visit http://salaamgarage.com/the-trips/vietnam10/

Reservation balances are due September 15th, 2009.

To find out more about Peace Trees Vietnam, visit www.peacetreesvietnam.org/

Needing funds?  Check out how Daysha is using a website called The Point to “crowd fund” her trip.  http://www.thepoint.com/campaigns/daysha-eatons-reporting-trip-to-vietnam-the-legacy-of-war?utm_source=invite&utm_medium=email