David Rees Interview

mf: Let's talk about your charity work with Adopt-A-Minefield. Any sort of feedback on that?

David Rees: It's interesting because the first round of GYWO financing was about a year ago first when I sold a limited edition of the book and then when the first publisher, Soft Skull Press, and I donated money. Those checks have all been sent over to the field, to these deminers in Western Afghanistan, in the Herat province. What we're trying to do for the second GYWO book, which is coming out this fall, is include in the back of the book some kind of update on the progress that's been made in that province - you know, so people have some sense of what their money was used for, so maybe with a map or something like that. And then also with the new book, I'll be donating the royalties to the same team of guys to keep doing the work.

You know the landmine situation after Operation Enduring Freedom was compounded with the so-called unexploded ordnance, the cluster bombs that don't detonate when they hit the Earth. It's still a really big obstacle to reconstruction and economic self-sufficiency. I kind of see it as the first step to reconstructing Afghanistan. You have to make sure that people can walk safely and can plant crops and stuff.

Adopt-A-Minefield is kind of like the Adopt-A-Highway program. Like, you and your church group get together and raise $20,000 to sponsor the clearance of a particular minefield, and when you're done Adopt-A-Minefield will send you the U.N. Certificate saying its been cleared.

Once it became clear that we were going to start bombing Afghanistan, they had to suspend all the demining operations in Afghanistan because there's no point in having the guys out there when they're getting bombed. And then once they returned to Afghanistan, the priority was to start cleaning up all the unexploded cluster bombs. They no longer had the luxury of clearing minefield by minefield in this really orderly fashion because it was kind of a combat zone. That's why now, in Afghanistan, you sponsor a team of deminers wherever they go instead of sponsoring a particular minefield being cleared.

mf: So the pictures of the deminers on your website is the team that your sponsoring?

David Rees: Yeah! Those are the dudes. Those are pictures that an Adopt-A-Minefield staffer who was over in Afghanistan in the Spring of 2002 brought back of the team. And she also shot some video of them, which I showed on a book tour when I was promoting the first GYWO book. What I would like to do when I go out on a book tour this fall for GYWO2 is to have new pictures and new video footage, to have some kind of update for people.

mf: I certainly appreciate the amount you've donated to this cause, and I think you have the right idea with getting your readers involved with it, as well.

David Rees: Well, it was moving for me to have this connection with it. And I thought it would be cool for the readers to get a sense of the same thing, because in the end it's their money that's doing it. When I went out on the book tour, the feedback I got from the video was amazing. Because you can talk about how many millions of landmines are in the ground, but when you actually see a guy going through this really laborious process of detecting a mine and then starting to scrape away towards it, and then having to detonate it - it kind of makes it a lot more immediate, you know. The scale of the problem is so massive.

mf: So what can the rest of us do?

David Rees: Oh, I don't know. I guess everyone should vote in November. It'd be nice to have high voter turn-out.

mf: Thanks very much for your time, David.

David Rees: My pleasure.