Of those videos, I think I have a favorite: Dave of Asheboro, North Carolina.

This 64-year old used to do IT work for the military, then put in a few decades at a very well-known “global consumer goods” company. After 42 years he says, he was let go, and his retirement benefits went with the job. But Dave didn’t have the luxury of going into early retirement. At 64-years-old, he had to go into the job market looking for a full time job with benefits that would cover himself and his wife until she becomes eligible for Medicare.

We all know that life throws some blows at you sometimes. But this Ronald Reagan-loving Southern Grandpa says his health care woes are making him lose faith in our political system. I wonder how many other Americans are starting to feel the same way. We’re sure meeting a lot of them on this trip.

In recent years when Jessica came back from a doctor’s visit with a diagnosis of relatively minor ailments such as strep throat, her husband would make pencil drawings in their trailer home. He sketched fantasy scenes, populated with moons and star-gazers. By selling his art to supportive community members, the couple was able to offset a portion of medical costs.

But when Jessica was told last March that she needed gall-bladder surgery – immediately – she knew just being crafty would be a hard way of working off medical debt.

Initially, she was told the cost of her surgery alone would be $12,000. The family took the savings set aside in hopes of one day buying a home and put it towards the down payment for the surgeon. The family was cut a break when they got a bank loan and her bill was cut in half by sympathetic providers. They’re paying it all off in monthly installments, but Jessica says, it’s still a struggle to pay up to $300 a month when they have six mouths to feed.

Jessica says she’s looked into putting herself on her husband’s insurance, but the family wouldn’t be able to pay an additional $375 a month on one take-home income of $25,000/year. Nor could they afford, she says, giving up the 2-5% of their income that would go towards a state program designed for the uninsured.

Since her surgery, Jessica’s looking for supplemental income to knock back some of her medical debt. Meantime, she’s become crafty herself, weaving dream catchers from hemp twine and leather. It will be years before the family can pay off the costs of her surgery, and many more before they can begin to realize the classic American dream of owning their own home.

The poll asked them what they would do if they didn’t have Cabrini’s volunteer labor to care for their medical needs, from routine check-ups to getting their diabetes medicine. Half of them said they would go without care. Some said they would go to the emergency room. One patient wrote only “.38 Special,” the name of a bullet, what I can only guess meant they would die or kill themselves without the free care that Cabrini provides.

That’s pretty extreme.

Sister Mary Ellen told us about other extreme things, mainly about the changes they’ve noticed in their clientele recently. More people are calling the clinic to inquire about their services. Patients have been coming in showing more advanced stages of illness, and in the past few months, the head physician reported that her patients have been losing weight.

Considerable weight. Not just a few pounds, but 10, 20, 30 pounds. So the volunteer doctors have started asking not just “How are you feeling,” but “Are you eating enough?” and “Do you know where to get free food?”

One can only surmise that people are eating less because of the rising costs of food, of fuel, and of the troubled economy. But I felt flurries in my stomach when I saw this flyer (right) on the Cabrini Clinic walls.

The patients at the Cabrini Clinic are the working poor. They don’t have insurance at their jobs. Many of them don’t qualify for government health care for the poor because they have an income. I know people are pinching pennies. But we are at a whole new level when working people, in the United States, are suffering from lack of food.

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.

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.

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.

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.