That’s the question that Peter in Carbondale had to ask himself, within just a few hours of an accident he had chopping wood. The small businessman can’t afford health insurance, and knew that the life-flight needed to reattach his thumb would cost him in the tens of thousands. Watch his story:

Check out some of the other videos I’ve produced lately for the Cover America Tour, a project of Consumer Reports Health. I’ll post the best stories to this blog.

It’s been on the road less than two-weeks, but the vehicle you see in the background already has a couple nicknames. “Aqua Box” is my favorite, coined by my co-worker Meg’s five year-old nephew, Kyle. Whatever you want to call it, it’s the class “C” RV I’m living in until mid-September.

I’m the video producer for a Consumer Reports Health project, The Cover America Tour. Three of us are traveling around the lower 48 for three and a half months, interviewing average Americans about their experience with the health care system.

And as you can tell from the videos, the system of taking care is not getting raving reviews.

We’ve met uninsured seniors with diabetes who can’t afford medication, patients who have received amputations after receiving bad care, and moms who say they their Visa card is their only insurance.

I can’t complain about the journey. We’ve been staying at beautiful New England campsites, where I’ve been going on long sweaty bike rides and taking swims in huge fresh water ponds. So far we’ve been through the town with the second best hot-wings, and the birthplace of the author of the Wizard of Oz. Exciting, huh?

I named my terrabyte hard drive Moldenke, after the one-eyed character in the science fiction cult book, Motorman. So far I’ve been producing about a video a day from my production studio, a 1′x3′ space on the RV kitchen table. I gotta reach 100 by the end of the trip, no small feat when you have to edit off a generator going down a bumpy highway at 60 miles an hour. Meantime, I can’t stop snapping photos. I’ll keep you posted.

The sound of a metal bat hitting concrete is constant on Sunday in Brooklyn’s McCarren park. On the first sunny weekend of the Greenpoint Neighborhood softball season, dozens gathered to play a little ball. Some have been coming since 1971, dressed in sweatpants and jerseys. But in recent years, some players have been showing up in formal black loafers, dress pants and white button-down shirts. They’re called the Stormers, a team of young, mostly Hasidic Jews.

I’m doing a series of stories on the team. A radio feature aired on the local NPR station, WNYC this past weekend:

This year’s International Landmine Awareness Day was especially significant to Colombians. In 2007, the South American country reported the highest number of mine and explosive remnants of war casualties in the world. On April 4th, Colombia’s major weekly paper, Semana, published part of my documentary web project, Remnants of War. Last year, I produced a series of black and white photo-slideshows, interactive graphics and timelines to help understand how the country’s rapidly increasing landmine problem affects innocent civilians. I traveled all over Colombia with a Human Rights Watch researcher to gather the material for the multimedia presentation, and later produced a bi-lingual version for their website.

That’s Andres, an 18-year-old survivor of an explosive remnant of war. He picked up what looked like a battery attached to a cable, and the device went off in his hand. Now he has difficulty cultivating coffee and hasn’t returned to school.

His story is all too common. The landmine victims I talked to all faced difficulties returning to a normal life after their accident. Many of them were without adequate medical and financial assistance, unable to continue agricultural work, or were forced to flee from the countryside. Take Manuel, for instance, in this picture to the right. He has to take an all night bus to see his doctor in Medellin, and agricultural work now gives him pain.

Here are the 2006 statistics from the Landmine Monitor report on Colombia:

Mine/ERW casualties in 2006	Total: 1,106 (2005: 1,112)
Casualty analysis	Killed: 226 (169 military, 44 civilians, 12 children, 1 civilian age-unknown) (2005: 282) Injured: 880 (623 military, 198 civilians, 54 children; 5 civilians age-unknown) (2005: 830)
Estimated mine/ERW survivors	4,681
Availability of services in 2006	Unchanged-inadequate
Progress towards survivor assistance aims	Slow (VA24)

Let’s just hope next year’s numbers will be different.

It’s over - my three-month production gig at National Public Radio’s The Bryant Park Project. It came and went like a storm. I barely remember the day-to-day, but my web traces say it was productive.

Here’s a little round up of the multimedia moments:

My first week was the holiday break, when I attended a festivus party and experienced the traditional “Feats of Strength” from a 200-pound guy named Harsh. I caught the moment in photos and audio and told all on the radio show.

My favorite slideshow was about the graphic novel American Born Chinese. The multimedia piece was on the front page of NPR.org and was top three most emailed the entire weekend.

Equally as sophisticated but perhaps more cryptic was the fine art of Iranian-American Shirin Neshat. I created a sort of multimedia artist notebook while her work was on display at the Gladstone Gallery in New York.

I enjoyed collaborating with a couple of Alaskan reporters to create a slideshow about the Rebels to the Pebble, a group of native seventh graders protesting the development of one of the largest gold mines in world. The mining company executive and the rebels’ teacher hashed out some of the issues on the air for 14 minutes.

Then there were the St. Mary’s College students who stripped down to their skivies for a “Polar Bear Splash” during a national week of campus teach-ins about global warming.

Oh, and I got to exercise at least some of my flash skills when I blogged about “Yo” a new gender-neutral pronoun being used in Baltimore schools.

My video debut was about the furor that became of the 42nd street Modell’s sporting goods store the morning after the Giants won the Super Bowl.

Then, the videos about the Project Runway reject who found vindication at Fashion Week and the wake for love on Valentine’s Day eve.

Don’t forget Jake Sasseville, the 22-year old from Maine who’s producing a night show about producing a night show.

And perhaps my favorite video piece, the Brit artists who turned a sweaty nightmare into an installation at Rockefellar Center plaza.

My last slideshow at NPR was about an Anglican-priest hopeful and graphic artist who made a comic book out of the bible.

I might have missed something. But I didn’t even delve into all the radio pieces I produced at the Bryant Park Project, which was my main job. I’m most proud of the Valentine’s Day piece about an evangelical Christian woman who started a sin-free sex toy business. It was number one most emailed on NPR.org for a week straight. The blog post got over a hundred comments. Religion and sex, go figure.

I was put up to it, I swear.

Right before I moved to New York, my video producer friend Charlotte Buchen asked me to be the on-camera reporter for a Current TV piece on ‘eye gazing’ parties. Basically it’s like speed dating, except the flirting happens non-verbally. Rules are simple: Lock eyes with someone for three straight minutes, then move onto the next person. It’s pretty intense. I assure you, my flirting was purely part of the reporting process.

This short slideshow was produced though the Knight-Carnegie Fellowship I did during the summer of 2007. Click on the icon to the right of the print story here.

I spent a night at a San Bernardo mosque while I was reporting on Muslim polygamy in the United States. Note: The people in this slideshow are NOT all polygamous.

Pastor Drew Phoenix is the first openly practicing transsexual minister within the United Methodist Church (UMC). Through my Carnegie-Knight Fellowship I had this summer, I traveled to Baltimore, Maryland to see how the recently self-outted minister interacted with his parishioners. See for yourself, in this slideshow I produced for NPR’s Bryant Park Project.

When the UMC’s Judicial Council met to decide his fate within the denomination, I worked with NPR’s Bryant Park Project producers to post a story on their blog. Check out the discussion it generated.

At the beginning of October, I teamed up with independent photographer Neil Osborne to produce “Generations,” at the Eddie Adams workshop this year. The 2-minute photo-slideshow profiles a fifth-generation dairy farm in upstate New York.

I was honored to have been invited to the workshop as a multimedia producer by Brian Storm of Media Storm. Along with some of his producers and several other talented multimedia extraordinaires, we created 10 espresso-like slideshow packages in 48 hours.

This flash web feature was my masters thesis at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Through a series of photo-slideshows and interactive graphics, “Remnants of War” shows the increase in use of landmines in Colombia and how it largely affects the country’s innocent, rural, poor civilians.

I think the project took a few years off my life. Not only because I listened to stories of murder and misery, but because I was learning Flash as I went along. Throw in reporting, color correcting, and writing, and you have very little sleep for 4 months. But I finished. And this is the multimedia piece I’m most proud of. Spend some time with it. Human Rights Watch launched just the slideshows with their report on use of Colombian Landmines in July 2007.

Check out the spanish version.