World Vision Report

The African dream to play in the NBA

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 05:03:52 PDT

I remember growing up and seeing a huge poster in my brother's room of the famous NBA player Michael Jordan, who played for the Chicago Bulls.

It was Elijah's pride and joy. It represented his dream to play basketball.

NBA players and coaches pose with the 60 participants of the 2009 Basketball Without Borders camp in Johannesburg, South Africa. Taurai Maduna/World Vision Report

Elijah had the huge sneakers and the baggy shorts and tight vest that local basketball players identified with. And let's not forget the hip-hop and rap music that is associated with the game.

Sadly, his was just a dream. He never made it into playing as a professional.

Elijah was passionate and I just wonder where he would be today if he had had the same opportunity that 60 young basketball players had.

The young players I am writing about were invited to participate in the Basketball Without Borders camp that recently took place in Johannesburg, South Africa.

At the training camp I attended, I could see the excitement of the young players â of not only rubbing shoulders with the NBA stars, but also an opportunity to ask them questions such as, "How do I become like you?" and, "What will it take for me to play in the NBA?"

Practice and hard work was one answer that most players uttered.

I asked Godwin Ikoshun from Nigeria, who was selected as one of the top five players in the camp, what it would take for him to play in the NBA. He simply answered by saying, "The NBA players do not have two heads. They are just like me and if they can do it, nothing can stop me."

I hope in a few years' time, with all the hard work that he puts in, Godwin will make it into the NBA. He has a good example to follow: his fellow countryman Hakeem Olajuwon, who has since retired.

That is the dream of a young African â to play in the NBA.

Listen to Taurai's story about the dream of basketball in Africa.

An authentic aboriginal boomerang is a treasure

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 05:03:52 PDT

The Melbourne Museum is one of the most incredible museums I've ever visited. They have a whole jungle with its own ecosystem built right in the middle of it.

Authentic aboriginal boomerangs from Australia. Rachel Louise Snyder/World Vision Report

After I showed my touristy fake boomerang to Caroline Martin, she felt terribly sorry that I'd been conned. She herself is aboriginal and she's very involved with Australia's aboriginal art movement and authenticity. Her mother, in fact, is the proprietor of Melbourne's only aboriginal-cuisine restaurant (I can't remember the name of it, but it's on the Yarra River).

Anyway, I happened to be interviewing Caroline on my daughter's first birthday â she and my husband were playing in an enormous sandbox in the kids' area of the museum while I looked at boomerangs. Afterwards, all four of us went up to Caroline's office, where she presented me with the most beautiful little boomerang as a birthday gift for Jazz. It's about six inches end to end and made of glass, with white ochre paint showing the artist and tribe.

Authenticity indeed. We treasure it ... and, of course, Jazz doesn't get to play with it until she's in college!

Rachel Louise Snyder is our "Global Guru" and from time to time will be contributing her search for interesting answers to simple questions, asked somewhere in the world. Listen to her piece on aboriginal boomerangs here.

Disaster and the human chain

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 05:03:52 PDT

The day after Haiti's earthquake nightmare began, I wandered to the Haitian embassy in Mexico City to see what was happening. At first, I watched as a smattering of Haitians and Mexicans darted back and forth from the building to the street, hauling bottled water and boxes of food. The embassy had been quickly converted into a makeshift donation center, and a steady stream of cars was lined up outside, ready to unload their trunks.

Volunteers in Mexico City load relief supplies for distribution to quake survivors in Haiti. Photo/Grant Fuller

One Haitian man who seemed to be in charge would rush up to each new car's trunk, chomping at the bit to transfer the goods inside. His sense of urgency spoke to the severity of the tragedy that had just struck his homeland. Every time, he would yell in Spanish, "The chain! The chain!" and whoever was in the vicinity would hurry over, form a line, and start passing the donated items down this human chain from the road to the inside of the embassy.

He grabbed a pack of water from the trunk and pivoted to hand it off ... but no one was there. "The chain!" I found myself watching this happen just a few feet in front of me, and then I snapped out of it. What am I doing? Even though I am a journalist, I do also have two hands and an able body. Step up there and help the man! So I jumped into the empty spot. "Gracias, mi amigo," he said as he swung the water into my open arms.

The same thing happened later at the downtown donation center. Standing with my recording gear and camera in the middle of a sidewalk swarming with volunteers and packed with stacks of donated water, I felt like I was in the way. So I took off my journalist's hat for a while, hopped up into the 18-wheeler they were loading, and experienced a bit of the solidarity so common in the wake of this disaster. Humans in Mexico helping humans in Haiti. At times like this, setting down the microphone and pitching in is the very least we can do.

Have you ever had the opportunity to be a part of a "human chain" delivering help to people who desperately needed it? What kind of perspective did that experience add to your own life?

Listen to Grant's story about the relief effort in Mexico City to help the Haitian quake survivors.

A refugee/journalist perspective in Haiti

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 05:03:52 PDT

Dear practically everyone,

So first of all, my first missive went out to the world and went viral. I had no idea it would do that. I have gotten responses about it from people I don't know, who start their emails with, "You don't know me, but ..."

and they go on to say something heart-rending about how touched they are and how much they have been inspired to contribute to a cause and could I please suggest one? And then I get emails from people in various places asking me if they could publish my work, from Utah, to Ireland, to Sweden, New York, and â get this â Abu Dhabi. They are actually using the thing to raise money with the sheiks.

MINUSTAH's Jordanian Battalion set up and opened a 12-bed hospital at their base in Port-au-Prince on Tuesday, January 19. The peacekeepers are feeding any children who enter and are treating patients injured in the 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti on Tuesday, January 12. Photo/MINUSTAH

What an amazing spiral effect of this incredibly awful and horrendous thing happening in this tiny corner of the world. And sometimes a person doesn't realize the impact of anything they do. But if one little sentiment set down in a tiny crummy office in an earthquake zone in the Caribbean can make an oil sheik pour some cash into an aid coffer, then I'll be a can of tuna.

Let me give you a sense of these last days. It has occurred to me that there is a word for what I am: "Refugee." It fits. My entire office of more than 30 people is squeezed into a small, three-room building in our compound by the airport.

We sleep on camp cots or on the ground outside the building, because no one is quite comfortable in a closed space yet. There is a bit of grass and a concrete pathway. We listen to the drone of military planes landing and leaving the airport all night. I can see the lights of the massive planes fly just over my face when I lie on my cot. It is the only time I really stop to think about anything that has happened, and sometimes I cry.

Then I fall into a dreamless slumber, swathed in mosquito repellent, in my clothes, until 7 a.m., and wake with the sun high. We stumble into our office with rumpled hair, smile sheepishly, and smooth out our clothes. If we have other ones we might change them. If we don't, who cares anyway, there's too much to do. Yesterday I was wearing my boss's shirt. No one even noticed. We are lucky to have a bathroom in our office, and a shower. So I do wash. But I don't think I brushed my hair today â I can't remember, anyway.

Then, for me, it's a frantic dash to get from thing to thing â Bill Clinton visits, a food distribution goes awry, Ban Ki Moon lays a wreath at the site of our offices, a survivor somewhere is pulled from the rubble, alive by God! Alive! News news news, it never stops, it is an insatiable animal, and I am the news-keeper, I have to keep feeding the machine. So our two camera crews go out, they fight their way through blocked, smoking, stench-filled wreckage to grab the images you see every day, then charge back to the office to me, to hand me the tapes. And I cut it and throw it out to the world. To you.

Meanwhile, from time to time, a colleague sits in a side room with a staff counselor receiving some very bad news. You know this happens when they come out red-eyed and broken, but somehow relieved. The news has arrived, the body was found, and now the knowledge sits like a boulder on every movement and thought this person will ever have. But at least they know. And there is a relief in it, to have a place to bury the body, to have a confirmed reason to grieve. And then, more often than not, they go back to their desk, wipe clear their eyes, and get back to work.

One of my colleagues told me last night about his girlfriend, who is lost in the big rubble graveyard that was my office. "I don't hope for her, I know she is dead." He says it and looks at the sky where the planes are passing. He shrugs. "What can I do? Maybe she will come now and visit me in my dreams. I love her. And I don't know how I will go home and clean up her things." And he comes to work every day. And he smiles, and tells jokes. And sits apart, and cries sometimes. Stares, sighs, gets up. And goes back to work.

I guess this is why I don't think about anything until very late at night, watching the tail lights of the aircraft bringing help and hurt across the sky.

My other good friend here has signed up for probably the worst job there is. Her office no longer functions â there are no longer uses for things like "language training" or "career development." Those concepts seem absurd even. So she volunteered for duty at the morgue, and her job is to take photos of the dead. She is young, and beautiful, from Paris â she loves to read Vogue and wear pretty, red high-heeled shoes. But she spends her days now photographing the decomposed remains of the people we worked with, the ones that annoyed us, the ones we loved. And it has to be done, there has to be the proof that they are gone. And for some, it's impossible to tell who it is, they must search the pocket for an ID card or look for a signet ring. She sat in my office today, impassive, exhausted, looked down at her sneakers and said, "I think I will throw these away."

One last thing. I work in the news business. So I see the things that the agencies say about us â CNN, the major networks. They decry the slowness and the disorganization, and defame the UN, the Red Cross, the American soldiers. "Why isn't the aid getting through!" they collectively scream, and I would like to invite them to Port-au-Prince on a good day and see how long it takes them to cross the street, much less deliver hundreds of thousands of tons of food and water to 3 million people through stench and wreckage and shooting and burning and blockades built of the dead.

And I look around my office, at my colleagues who have lost their husbands and their secretaries, their hard drives and their homes, who sleep on cots by the airport and slam their way through the day so fast â probably so they don't have to spend too much time thinking â and I think, Hey, man. Cut us some slack. Because we are doing our best. And the truth is, we are victims too.

But I am going to end this message on a good note. Today is my mother's birthday, and we talked about how we have so much to be thankful for â our families, our friends. Heck, I even have clean underwear! But for me, maybe the best thingÂ came from my cousin today. He wrote to me on Facebook:

"My wife and I just wanted to send you a quick note. She and I have been following your updates since the earthquake and have been touched by your courage and dedication in the face of the horrors that you have witnessed.Â Tomorrow evening we are headed to the hospital for the birth of our daughter. We decided midway through this last week to change our daughter's name from what we had previously decided (Ginny) to something that represents the courage that you have shown in Haiti. We have decided to name her Amelia Grace Macaulay."

Now if that doesn't beat all. I read that, and put my head down on the desk and cried.

With that I leave you, thankful to be alive, and looking forward to another night tracing planes across the sky. I am sure you will see pieces of me tomorrow, behind the scenes, as you watch the news. I send you my love from Haiti. Please send us your prayers. And don't stop writing, it's some of the best news I get all day.

Listen to Amelia tell her story in a phone interview with Peggy Wehmeyer.

Amelia's first blog after the earthquake in Haiti.

Watch a slideshow of Reuters photos depicting the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti.

Click for a list of charities working to help Haitians recover from this week's devastating quake.

Haiti: After the Shock

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 05:03:52 PDT

This is a guest blog from the scene of the Haiti earthquake by James Addis, senior editor, World Vision Magazine.

It was a heart-stopping moment this morning when a powerful aftershock just after 6 a.m. had me making a hasty exit out of my hotel. I was soon joined by the rest of the World Vision staff, mostly in pajamas.

Once we had recovered our breath, the conversation quickly turned to how many more fragile buildings might have been brought down.

The whole aftershock maybe lasted six or seven seconds. I'm writing at 6.30 a.m. and my heart is still pumping quite hard. It's certainly the biggest quake I've ever been in, but I imagine it's peanuts for others.

Rosmond and his son are struggling but alive. (James Addis/WV)

You can't help feeling the people of Port-au-Prince could use a break. Yesterday, I spoke to a man named Rosmond at one of the city's hospitals, where World Vision was delivering medical supplies. He was holding his bandaged-up son, but he had actually come to visit his daughter,who was lying on a stretcher, wrapped in multiple bloodied bandages. She had been trapped in a church building for two days before being rescued.

But it was Rosmond's story that struck me on this occasion. He and his wife and 8-year-old son have been living on the street since the quake, sleeping on plastic sheets. He has been using the cash he had on him to buy food and water. That morning, his money had run out. It was about 3 p.m., and he and his family had not eaten all day.

In one sense, though, he was remarkably lucky. His home was built on a hillside, and he was the only one at home when the quake struck. His wife was at work and his son at a neighbor's house. Seconds before the quake hit, he went to the outhouse. It will probably be the most fortuitous call of nature of his life. As he stepped outside, the quake hit. Three houses slid down the hillside, crashed into his home, and demolished it.

Rosmond and the outhouse remained standing.

Give to Haiti relief efforts.

Read more of James' blog entries at WVmagazine.wordpress.com.

Haiti: Hope in the Heartbreak

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 05:03:52 PDT

This is a guest blog from the scene of the Haiti earthquake by James Addis, senior editor, World Vision Magazine.

Navensky recieves medical care at a makeshift hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. (James Addis/World Vision)

Navensky Charles might be surrounded by the stench of death, but he is alive.

Like all patients at LâHospital General in downtown Port-au-Prince, the 18-month-old cannot be accommodated in a hospital building. The few buildings still standing are unsafe to use.

Consequently, he lies in a hospital bed in a street outside. Regularly, trucks rumble past, carrying corpses.

They come from the city morgue about a block away. Outside the morgue, hundreds of bodies are stacked three deep.

But Navensky is alive. When his house started to collapse, his father, Jerome, dashed upstairs to rescue him. They both made it outside just as their home caved in. Navensky suffered a broken shoulder, leg, and arm during the hurried escape.

As darkness was falling, and the streets were in chaos, Jerome and his wife, Nadia, had to wait until morning before carrying Navensky to the hospital. The walk took nearly two hours. It was not until the early afternoon that hard-pressed medical staff could treat him.

Injured children are being treated at a makeshift hospital. (James Addis/WV)

World Vision is supporting the hospital by supplying essential medical supplies such as surgical gloves, syringes, antibiotics, and bandages.

Navensky moans softly and flinches if he thinks you are about to touch him. Otherwise, he does not complain. Nadia and Jerome will spend the night anxiously watching over him. They have no home to return to anyway.

Jerome is thankful for the humanitarian organizations, such as World Vision, who have come to help following the worst quake in Haitiâs history for 200 years.

âIf it was not for the NGOs [non-governmental organizations], the Haitian people would be lost,â he says.

Give to Haiti relief efforts.

Read more of James' blog entries at WVmagazine.wordpress.com.

Fighting obesity in New York City ...

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 05:03:52 PDT

They're known as the food deserts. Low-income neighborhoods in the five boroughs of New York City where people live below the poverty level amidst busy business districts.

Fried fast food is the norm. Fresh produce is harder to come by.

Green Cart brings fresh fruit and vegetables to the poor in New York City.

That's why New York City launched its Green Cart program. It's one component in a larger program to fight obesity in the city. Get these green carts into the hands of burgeoning entrepreneurs, most with a knack for street vending, and they'll provide fresher produce than most other stands or bodegas in the neighborhood, making for a healthier community.

When I headed to Bushwick, Brooklyn to do this story, I purposely checked out the closest bodega and supermarket to the Green Cart which I was profiling. Sure enough, the bodega had pretty funky vegetables which had clearly seen better days, and very little fruit.

The supermarket's produce was better but rather pricey. I started to get a picture of why the city was turning to green carts.

I spoke about the program with Cathy Nonas, the Director of Nutrition and Physical Activities Programs at the New York City Department of Health. She told me that the city targets obesity throughout the city, but explained there are greater disparities in low income areas where there is less access to affordable healthy food and physical fitness activities. Poverty, she explained, simply makes you more at risk for obesity.

Obesity is one of the only growing chronic diseases that exists globally. Among the illnesses that can occur are Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and high blood pressure. With that Nonas says, obviously comes additional health care costs and a reduction in the quality of life.

This startling statistic came in our conversation. She told me that this childhood generation might not live as long as their parents due to obesity. That promoted me to hit the internet for obesity stats.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just released new data that revealed obesity has somewhat leveled off in the United States, but it's not waning. Two out of three American adults are either overweight or obese, and about 17% of children under the age of 19 are obese. The study behind this information is being published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The green cart program is designed to provide healthier produce but implicit in the program is this entrepreneurial component. And there are a number of players.

The Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund is providing the capital for the city program. Accion New York, a nonprofit that helps people get microloans. Finally, Karp Resources is providing business training for the new vendors. As they say, it takes a village.

Listen to Judy's story on the Green Carts in New York City.

I really was regretting my choice of wardrobe in that moment ...

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 05:03:52 PDT

Essentially, the entire world here in Haiti changed in a matter of about 45 seconds. I went to work on Tuesday morning with a strapless maternity dress on that my sister gave me, and little pumps and a red bead necklace. At 4:48 p.m. I was calmly sitting at a computer in the UN headquarters working on a story for the UN Television and thinking about going home soon.

Photo released by the UN shows the ruins of the MINUSTAH UN headquarters in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, following Tuesday's 7.0 earthquake.

I had just been talking with our cameraman, Blago, through the door that splits my office with his, about leaving in the next 20 minutes. And I hear this noise that I thought was a really huge bumbly truck coming down the driveway by my office. So I stood up to see the truck â I mean, what kind of vehicle makes a noise like that really? And as I walked to the window, my brain computed that the building was vibrating, then swinging wildly from side to side. I wasn't scared, I was just perplexed, and trying to remember what to do in a situation like that â is it "hide under the desk" or "run outside?"

For some reason, I thought it was "stand in a door jam," so I was trying to get to the door of the building, which is seven feet from my office. And I kept falling, and Blago was behind me, and I fell, and he lay on top of me to cover me â I guess he thought the answer was, "Lie on your colleague in an earthquake."

And our other colleagues were behind us. One of them, crazy Logan the camera man who runs boot camp classes in his free time, was bounding down the hall, bouncing off walls and screaming: "GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!" He grabbed Blago by the neck and somehow I found myself falling down our front steps, landing on our car which had crashed into our building. And then we were all kneeling on the pavement, rubbing our eyes. The shaking stopped. Then started again. And someone said, "Where is our headquarters?" Because all we could see was dust. No sunlight, no buildings, nothing more than four feet in front.

It took us more than 20 minutes to verify that our six-story headquarters were no longer there. It's the type of thing that just does not compute. New Yorkers will understand this after September 11 â the building is supposed to be there, and you look to see it, but your brain can't figure out why it's not there.

In the shantytown outside the UN compound, the fates were the same. We sat huddled in the parking lot of the HQ, in the dark, listening to tens of thousands of people scream and cry and wail. Wail. I mean really, like a tide. And every time there were tremors and aftershocks, the hills moaned in panic and fear.

I sat there for five hours, and wondered if my family knew what was happening. I know they listen to NPR while making dinner, and was picturing what they were doing when the news broke. And I was wondering how the news would break, because we had no power, no cell phones, no nothing. And people were wondering about the other islands. Was there a tsunami? What? At around 11 p.m., I found a person in the lot with a small transistor radio. He was listening to Radio France International, which was reporting a massive earthquake in Haiti, epicenter in Port-au-Prince. Good God, I thought, is God really trying to finish this little island â I mean, how much more can it take? It seemed too unfair that Haiti of all places had to be the one to take this on. And it was surreal that we were sitting in the center of the mess, and couldn't know what was happening â we had to listen to news reporting from Paris, which was getting its information on Haiti from CBS in America. Very bizarre. Me sitting there in my strapless maternity dress and heels, smudged with dirt and mud, sitting with my knees up and thinking of my family. And I really was regretting my choice of wardrobe in that moment.

I spent the night watching the rescue operations, and looking for people I knew among the survivors. Rescue finds were very sparse. It's hard to pull people out of hundreds of tons of concrete. Maybe they pulled 10 people out, and we struggled to see the faces. "Is it anyone I know? Please be one of ours" was written on every person's face as they watched the bloody, dusty body come in on a stretcher. I sat with a colleague whose husband was missing, and whose toddler was in her fourth story apartment in the hills above the city. She was stone-faced and silent, eyes wide watching the rubble. She was able to get home and rescue her child at 2 a.m. Her husband's whereabouts are still unknown.

We are just now beginning to understand who is not showing up, whose faces have been absent in the little recovery area we've set up in the logistics base by the airport. This is where I am now. It's an awful experience. To know that the people that you meet for coffee, the ones you say hi to at parties and bars, the ones you have stupid arguments with over email about catty, dumb s--t â that suddenly those very people could be dead. Or worse, trapped in a small space, without air, in pain.

I think many of us get by right now on these things. First, the notion that "I survived." I survived. I am still alive. That building came down, and by some miracle, I'm still here. So I better be happy about it and not waste it because many people are not so lucky. And second, "There is very important work to do." There is â tons of it. Tons of rock to be moved, tons of people to be saved, tons of bodies to be picked up, tons of food to be handed out â and water. And for me, tons of TV to be sent out to the world. So we throw ourselves into these things, with gusto. It's better than sitting around waiting, and feeling helpless.

And last, "Miracles do happen." One of the security officers â a guy who would have been on the team that my husband, Eduardo, was to join next week â was stuck under the rubble somewhere on what used to be the fourth floor. He could talk on his radio. He was awake, stuck in a hole. And the workers couldn't get to him â there were two meters of concrete between him and them, constant tremors, and too many fears of dislodging the whole mountain of stuff to get to him. But finally, after nearly 48 hours without food and water, he walked free from the debris, unscathed. And promptly resigned from the UN â who can blame him? When we heard this, many of us cried. "Thank you God â and please let this happen again."

The city is ... well. I don't really know how to describe it. It's sort of like everyone you know â EVERYONE â getting into a serious car accident on the same day, at the same time. And their house falling down too. Some come out without a scratch, and others â don't. Many of my colleagues lost everything. Some lost children, others a husband or wife. Logan lost his entire apartment and everything inside it. Me â in the face of all that â I am doing pretty darn well. And as I go through the city looking at the rubble through my car window, watching the dazed faces of Haitians who are impassively balancing a suitcase on their head, or sitting on the sidewalk with their head in their hands crying, I realize that despite everything, there is no place I would want to be right now. I couldn't go home and watch this happen from the TV. I would feel so helpless. So I am hoping to stay, and give the most that I can to help pull people from the rubble, cry their tears, dust off their lives, and carry on again.

Listen to Amelia tell her story in a phone interview with Peggy Wehmeyer.

Watch a slideshow of Reuters photos depicting the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti.

Click for a list of charities
working to help Haitians recover from this week's devastating quake.

Seeking yams, finding plantains ...

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 05:03:52 PDT

My first encounter with the camotero cart was through its distant whistle in the streets of Mexico City. "What was that?" I asked a friend. I think the explanation confused me more than the sound; a wood fire burning push cart with yams. Huh?

So, I had to check it out. It was pure genius! Imagine the flavor of Thanksgiving oven-baked yams to-go on a styrofoam plate...with some condensed milk drizzled on top for good measure.

Actually, there are a variety of ways to serve up the yams and plantains. Mexico City offer such toppings as strawberry jelly and chocolate sprinkles. I personally like maple syrup when I have it, but I've never seen that offered on a cart.

After moving to Oaxaca City from the Mexican capital, I was a bit disappointed to find that most carts here only carry plantains. I thought it was an anomaly at first, but soon came to the realization that every time I asked for yams, the vendors in Oaxaca would say "No, only plantains". I've asked a few vendors why they don't sell yams and all have told me that the yams just don't sell as well.

Cesar PÃ©rez, profiled in my story on the camotero cart, is thus far the only vendor I've found in Oaxaca who sells both yams and plantains. He says he carries both in order to keep the tradition alive and to provide variety.

I prefer the yams, personally. Maybe it's because "absence makes the heart grow fonder." Which would you prefer ... and what topping would you want on it?

Read Shannon's story on the camotero cart.

We could all use a little Christmas miracle ...

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 05:03:52 PDT

It was just a little story about a bunch of guys building a giant Christmas tree of metal. I could just waltz up to the construction site, talk to a few workers, record some crane noise and be done with it. Should have been a piece of cake, right?

Workers celebrate their creation of the world's tallest Christmas tree in Mexico City. Photo by Grant Fuller.

Well, not this Christmas. Not at this construction site. Not in Mexico, where bureaucracy and official-ness are king and queen. Stymied on multiple fronts by security telling me not to move a muscle, by confused workers who didn't want to get in trouble, and by a hazy language barrier between my Spanish and the Brazilians' Portuguese ... I decided to wait for the boss to hook me up. And boy did I wait. By the end of my three-day stakeout, I estimate that I'd spent at least seven full hours simply waiting for them to speak to me. They were busy, sure. But I, too, have a job to do.

In Mexico, going through the official means to get what you need is often a recipe for disaster. I've learned that the hard way on multiple story assignments. Unreturned phone calls, unanswered e-mails, misleading information, unnecessary attitudes, chronic lateness, and bold-faced lies are all part of the game. People seem to enjoy making it more difficult than it needs to be. You just have to learn to deal with it, and circumvent the official route whenever possible.

So I needed a Christmas miracle to get this one done. And lo and behold, I eventually cornered the tree boss for an interview. But guess what happened? Perhaps predictably, we ended up cutting him out of the script completely. Sigh. Just my official Mexican luck.

What "Christmas miracles" have you discovered recently, as you seek to cut through the clutter of the season?

Listen to Grant's story on Mexico's giant metal Christmas tree.