Steve (host):
Welcome to the 34th Wonderspace Journey. It's great to have you on board. My name is Steve Cole and since September 2020 I have been asking the same 6 questions to people from around the world. The questions revolve around life and wonder, places of reset and stories of hopefulness. The setting for all of our interviews is a virtual window seat on the space station 250 miles above Earth where we see everything from a different perspective.

Steve (host):
This week our orbit will take us from Spain to Kenya and to experience these views with us in this ultimate window seat we welcome David Goff who is a filmmaker and journalist who after working as the East Africa correspondent for the Guardian newspaper went on to lead the UN Film and Special Projects Unit in New York. More recently David founded the Humanitarian Cooperative which is a team of filmmakers, animators and artists united by a shared commitment to use their creativity as a force for good in the world. A shorter version of this episode together with footage of this journey from Spain to Kenya, can be found at ourwonder.space. I start by asking, from this window seat 250 miles above earth, which place, city or country would you want us to fly over and why?

David:
I think the place that I would like to take a steve is over a slum in Nairobi called Kibira which is regularly described as the largest slum in Africa, although some people dispute that. It's a place where I have spent a lot of time starting in 2007 when I was living in Kenya. And I spent 6 months almost daily in the slum making a film about the lives of people there. I was hugely fascinated about how the socioeconomic realities of a life like that, how that affects people, and what sort of stories they have to tell about what that life is like. And I think there's a tendency on our part, our sort of privileged part, to think of a life like that as sheer and utter misery and nothing more.

David:
Whereas of course the reality is it's very, very, very different. There is of course lots of misery, there's lots of violence, there's lots of especially of sexual violence, it's not the place you want to be a young girl at all. It is really, it's a cliche, but it is really the sort of the best and worst of humanity all wrapped up into 1, which I think is within us all the time anyway. So it's a perfect illustration I think of the complexity and excitement of being a human and dealing with the sort of the day to day struggle to survive.

Steve (host):
David, give us a glimpse into your life story so far with an emphasis on what you are doing currently.

David:
So, in terms of a sort of glimpse into my life story so far, I think I have a bit of clarity now, you know, as I sort of in my 50s. Looking back, I never saw it at the time But the the life story so far is the story essentially of a storyteller Which in itself sounds a little bit pompous and so I apologize for that but it is the best labor I can apply I started out as a newspaper journalist working for The Guardian. That took me to Africa. From there I felt the growing frustration with what was even then fairly inevitable, the decline of newspapers and the decline of readership. And I suppose I was driven by this idea that if you're going to tell a story, you want that story to get in front of as many people as possible, otherwise what's the point of doing it?

David:
So I was somewhat seduced by TV and the prospect of larger audiences. So I jumped towards TV journalism. So I was a stringer for Sky News for a couple of years, which wasn't quite the sort of the holy grail of audience that I was expecting, largely because, as you can imagine, Editors in Sky Headquarters in London didn't quite have the same idea as I did in terms of what the important stories were and what we should be focusing on. And it was around that time that I became increasingly within the sphere of the United Nations and I started meeting more and more people who worked for the UN and I started to get a little bit more captured by the imagination of that global weight of an organization behind you And I think simultaneously I also started to realize that actually maybe what I was really looking for was advocacy rather than storytelling or storytelling per se. And that if there was an important take out or consequence of that story, then I wanted that to be able to, I wanted to be able to showcase that as wide as possible so that people would hopefully reach the same sort of conclusions that I did.

David:
So I was very lucky and I got to start a film unit. We made humanitarian films and distributed them free to broadcasters. And it was a remarkable experience. It really, really was. From there, I moved to New York to work on still with the UN, but at headquarters and working on campaigns.

David:
And again, I had 1 of these sort of like defining moments when in 2012 we were running a big campaign for World Humanitarian Day. And Beyonce had amazingly sort of out of the blue contacted us. We were a small office of just 3 people, contacted us to say she had a song, it was off her album 4, which was out at the time, and there was 1 song, I Was Here, for which she didn't have a music video and would we want to create a music video and shape it in a humanitarian context. And to her immense credit, not only did she do that, She lent her face and name to the campaign. She came to the General Assembly in New York and performed live in the General Assembly.

David:
We made a music video. It was an incredible sequence of events over many, many months to get to the point that got us to where we wanted to get to. And then we ended it with what was then the first thunderclap. And I'm not even sure actually if thunderclap still exists, but at the time it was the principle is a sort of quite a simple and I think quite widely used now, which is that a single message is seeded through everyone's different social platforms at exactly the same time so that you get this mass accelerator of reach. And the target was 1000000000 people with 1 message in 1 day.

David:
That was the objective. So after we finished that campaign with Beyoncé, and I really did have this sort of moment sort of sitting on the sidewalk scratching my head and wondering, that was amazing, but what have we really done? What have we changed? What have we achieved in terms of the plight of people trapped in humanitarian emergencies around the world. So that was actually the beginning of a sort of several year process that led towards the creation of what I'm running now, which is the Humanitarian Cooperative.

David:
The Humanitarian Cooperative seeks to try and address shortcomings within the world of humanitarian communications that we, and I say we, the people within the cooperative, had felt were holding us back or things that weren't happening that felt obviously like they should. And it was about trying to inject greater urgency into storytelling, to shift the focus of the storytelling away from just awareness raising and towards solutions and advocacy and action. And what we effectively do is we build bespoke teams on a sort of job by job basis to try and address whatever the communications need of the client is. But very importantly, not just to be producers who respond to a client's brief, but to try and use our experience and our knowledge and our expertise to shape that in a way that we think is going to get closer to the objectives that they have set and to try and break the mould a little bit in terms of the way humanitarian stories are communicated. So when we talk about, for example, the classic sort of humanitarian emergency image of the starving child in Africa with flies on its face, this is exactly the kind of imagery that we want to really just try and break away from.

David:
Not just to say, well, let's have positive smiling faces, but just to reflect better the reality and to engage the audience with an empathic response rather than a sympathetic response. Empathy is a much more difficult thing, it involves getting down on your knees, looking at the person eye to eye and recognising what experiences or traumas or difficulties they're facing that you feel within yourself. And that to me is the key to storytelling for change is stories that generate empathy rather than sympathy. I think my place of reset or recharge is probably, and this was actually 1 of the questions that I agonized over the most because there are so many, but I think I've settled on a small fishing village in South Devon called Salkham. I've been going there all my life.

David:
It's my great aunt and uncle lived there, which is why we first started to go there as kids. And many years later, my parents bought a house down there. And it's a big sort of annual focal point for our family. Everyone gathers there during the summer. There is something about the connection to your roots as a child, that sense of padding around on a beach with bare feet, regardless of the fact that it's pouring with rain and the sea's freezing cold, eating fish and chips and breaking your teeth on the bars of rock and those kind of very restorative memories of community and family and togetherness.

David:
And I think probably now more than ever those kind of points of connection are so important and so that's why I settled on Salkham.

Steve (host):
What wonder of the natural world excites you the most?

David:
I think the wonder of the natural world that excites me the most has to be the Himalayas. I was very fortunate to have lived for several years in Nepal in the late 80s and then again in the 90s and again in the 90s as well. It's a wonderful, wonderful country. It totally captured my imagination. I've never felt as strongly connected to a place that I had not at that point yet been to.

David:
And the Himalayas are this just phenomenal force of nature. And of course it's just wrapped up in so many things. You have within 20 kilometers as the crow flies, an elevation from around 800 meters above sea level to 8, 000 meters. You know, there's nowhere else on earth where you get that, at least as far as I'm aware. It's just the sheer force of nature and the sheer effect that it has on you, the observer, the viewer, the walker, the trekker, the climber of how small we are and how much we are beholden to these forces of nature.

David:
So it's inspiring, It's hopeful, it's life-giving, it's life-taking. It to me perfectly summarises our precarious position on earth and reminds us to respect what we should respect and to follow the rules of the laws of nature as much as we can.

Steve (host):
David what is your story of hopefulness that's not your own about a person, business or non-profit who are doing amazing things for the world?

David:
My story of hopefulness, I'm going to take us back to where we started in Kibera, in that slum in Nairobi. It's a man called Abdul Qassim who, I have to say, is the most remarkable person I've ever met. He a few years ago, probably 10-15 years ago, set up a school, a secondary school, free secondary school for girls in the middle of Kibira, the slum. And as he told the story, he initially had a football team, a girls football team, and he says they came back after 1 summer break and he'd lost his entire striking force to pregnancy, to teen pregnancy. And he realized that as much as he was trying to to set up things to support the chances for girls in this environment that really education was the only thing that was really going to address that.

David:
So he set up a very simple, literally 2, you know, mud and wattle rooms, which he set up as classrooms. He ran around asking, you know, anyone who had any kind of teachering experience or skills to come and work in the school for free, which they did. And when I first met him he had I think 25 girls in the school and it wasn't really, it didn't have any great academic objectives or it was really just to try and keep the girls safe and in a place where they had some prospect, at least of a future. So we're talking about a new context where in Kenya primary education is free but secondary isn't, so everyone will go to primary school but if you can't afford secondary you're not going to go. So For families who are extremely poor, probably none of their children will go to secondary school, but if they have a choice, typically they choose boys.

David:
There is still that sort of lingering perception that boys will deliver more for the family if they're educated than girls. And girls are largely left to their own devices. So they're leaving primary school at the age of 14 and into that environment where oftentimes the family is a broken family. Mother will be working every hour that she can, doing whatever she can to survive. And there will typically be 5 or 6 children who are all living together in this very sort of tight space.

David:
So that puts girls into an incredibly compromised and difficult situation where they are obliged to do whatever they can to survive. And typically that means going into sex work, finding a sugar daddy, drugs, alcohol, all manner of social crises, because there simply is no choice. And Abdul, as a man who'd grown up himself in the slum, and he was quite an affluent slum dweller in relative terms in that he was educated himself and he worked for Kenya Telcom so he was relatively well today. He certainly had the resources to be able to leave the slum which of course is the objective of most of the slum dwellers to acquire the financial means to be able to get out but even though he had acquired that he decided that he wanted to invest back into his community as much as he could. And this engagement with community is such a powerful thing.

David:
So that's why he started this school. Well, it's why he initially started working with girls. And then as I said, you know, because he lost his striking force to pregnancy, he set up the school. The school now, 15 years later, they're just building the first boarding house of the school. They have, I think, nearly 200 students now.

David:
And you can see so, so clearly the reward, the individual, sort of spiritual reward that he gets from what he's been able to achieve and the respect that he has within his community for what he's done. So Abdul Qasim is my go-to when I'm feeling sort of gloomy or pessimistic about the future of things. I remember him and obviously I don't see him as much as I would like but he is my sort of go-to point of recovery when things don't look good.

Steve (host):
Finally, as we prepare to re-enter, what insight, wisdom or question would you like to share with us?

David:
I think the question that I want to put is 1 that's continually on my mind these last few months or last year, is it feels very much like we are at an epochal moment. That as all the things, all the consequences, all the things that we've learned about ourselves because of the pandemic, and are we going to seize this moment? I think everyone's recognised so many things, how interconnected we are, how things that happen in far removed places affect us all. So I really feel like we have to seize this moment. It feels like a great opportunity which I really hope we don't miss.

David:
I think the sense of being feeling interconnected, the sense of working together in community to solve problems and the sense of reward that you feel once you do able to overcome these kind of difficulties and problems. I feel that a chance to reset on how we look at resources and how we use them, how we feel connected or not connected to other people, all of these, the drivers behind the growing inequity, which is I think the great danger and the great curse that we face right now. It feels like this really is a chance so my question is you know will we seize it?

Steve (host):
More information about the Humanitarian Cooperative can be found at humanitariancoop.com In his story of hopefulness, David spoke about Abdul and the school that he founded in Kibera. You can find out more at kgsa.co.ke To listen to the previous 33 Wonderspace interviews, the website is ourwonder.space I want to thank David for joining us on this wonder space and I hope

David:
you