Daily Pilot goes international

Today is a historical one for the Daily Pilot.

Two of our staffers, police and courts reporter Deepa Bharath and

chief photographer Don Leach, fly out of town today on a 10-day trip

to the Amazon jungles of Ecuador.

The Daily Pilot going international?

Sure, we’ve been out of the country a few times. Mostly trips to

Mexico to visit orphanages or as part of the Newport to Ensenada

yacht race.

We’ve had world travelers e-mail us their communiques from across

the globe.

But when have we ever sent someone to the Amazon for a story?

In my soon-to-be 14 years affiliated with this paper, I think the

answer is never.

So some of you are probably saying, “why now?”

It’s because some Newport Beach health professionals have a great

story to tell and we want to help them tell it.

The venture began several months ago when I was approached by

Bharath.

She had heard about this group called Plasticos, a non-profit band

of traveling nurses, anesthesiologists and an anthropologist, who go

to under-developed areas of the world to perform plastic surgery on

children with deformities such as a cleft lip or damage from burns.

The group is headed up by a Newport Beach doctor named Larry

Nichter, and several of the other professionals were local, many from

Hoag, she said.

She wanted to know if I would give approval to her taking the

trip.

My first response:

“What is that going to cost?”

Anyone who has to control a budget and guard against costly pet

projects knows why I said that.

Still, I told her to put together a proposal that I could run by

my boss and see what he thought.

Here are some excerpts from her proposal:

“Often they have to wade through rivers and trek miles to get to

these places, sometimes under unfriendly weather conditions such as

torrential rain. They camp out there for nine days and work 20-22

hour days.

“The great thing about this group is they have no agenda. ... They

don’t even do much fund-raising. They just decide on a location, find

a local liaison in that community, pack up their bags and leave. Next

year, they plan on going to Cambodia. ...

“It’s also worth mentioning that Plasticos won the Academy Award

in 1998 for a documentary they submitted about a trip to Vietnam.”

After a few weeks of discussion with Publisher Tom Johnson and our

human resources department, we gave the go ahead for a reporter and

photographer to accompany the Plasticos group on their next trip.

So how are a couple city slickers like our cops and courts

reporter and our photographer, who spends most of his life surfing in

Laguna Beach, going to make it the Amazon jungle?

“I’m not exactly the hiking, adventure kind of person,” Bharath

said. An urbanite all my life quite comfortable with a concrete

jungle, I’ve never been to a real jungle. So this should be fun.”

Leach had a different take:

“I’m used to dusty travel, language barriers, and heavy backpacks

and cameras around my neck while on the move so this should be no

different,” he said. “But those were surf and exploration trips with

friends who are always asking ‘why are you taking a picture of that?’

So it will be nice to concentrate on getting some real shots at my

own pace, instead of shooting from a moving taxi.”

As for the assignment, it is something they will never forget.

“This is clearly going to be the biggest story of my life, so

far,” Bharath said. “I know I’m going to have to flex every creative

muscle in my brain to pull this off and I know the writing and

rewriting part is going to be torture. It may sound paradoxical when

I say I’m going to derive a lot of pleasure from putting myself

through that torture, but that’s the truth.”

Said Leach:

“I’m really excited to go on the first international photo

assignment for the Daily Pilot. I’ve been to various hospitals and

one orphanage in Baja on photo assignments, but this is on the edge

of the rain forest in Ecuador where the people are wary of outsiders.

“It should be a challenge and I look forward to that,” he

continued. “There should be some great moments surrounding the work

of local plastic surgeons. The major issues will be where I can plug

in a laptop and charge batteries for the digital cameras, another

first for me. Shooting digital in foreign land.”

So there we have it. The Daily Pilot’s first international

correspondents.

The story is being planned for sometime toward the end of the

month. I’m looking forward to it and now I hope the readers are too.

* Tony Dodero is the editor. He welcomes your comments on news

coverage, photography or other newspaper-related issues. If you have

a message or a letter to the editor, call his direct line at (949)

574-4258 or the Readers Hotline at 642-6086, send it by e-mail to

[email protected] or [email protected], or send it by mail

to 330 W. Bay St., Costa Mesa, CA, 92627.