Part of the month I spent at the Caldera Arts Center was taken up by attempts to fashion some music videos out of the clips I shot while traveling in Congo. Lacking an enormous amount of video editing experience, I ended up doing a bunch of dragging-and-dropping in IMovie while trying to sync things up with some of the recordings of choral groups from the tiny village I was staying in. I think they turned out pretty well! I showed some of them at a couple of presentations I did in Portland last week. Just prior to the first presentation I had some crazy news: the crashed plane that I and some Congolese colleagues found in the forest near Obenge had been tentatively identified by some people at the Aviation Safety Network.

Now that’s what the internet is for! Within a few hours of the ASN post going live (it includes a link to pictures of the plane itself, while still in service) I was pointed to a Facebook page set up by a fund in support of the families of Russian airmen lost in crashes in Central Africa, specifically Congo, over the last ten years. I posted on that board and received a response (by now, several responses) from people affiliated with the pilots of the hopefully-identified plane. I asked what they wanted us to do with the black-box flight recorder we found, and they recommended that it be transported to the Russian Embassy in Kinshasa. The recorder arrived in Kinshasa with Terese Hart (curator of the bonoboincongo blog and joint head of the project for which I was volunteering). Now we await whatever information can be dragged out of the strange nest of wire within that box.