Shock Video

Whenever I am visiting the Twiga Centre in Kisii, the kids are usually well-dressed, having just returned from church, they are happy and smiling, giving their all in the games we organise for them.

This is not surprising as they get few chances to play organised team games when not attending the Twiga Centre.

So, I take photos, and lately, videos of happy, smiling, clean kids. They are relatively healthy because we keep a check on their health.

But they all have a story to tell. Loss of one or both parents, living with elderly grandparents or in the case of four children, living with no adult supervision, other than that which we can provide.

My photos and videos do not reflect this. They show shiny, smiling children. So, having just acquired a "new" digital camcorder, I am determined that on my next trip, I will film the children in their real environment.

I will follow a day in the lives of Aloys and Nyachuba. Aloys milks his cow, buys food, cleans the house, washes clothes, cooks the meals and still finds time to go to school and do his homework.

Or Edwin and Dennis, who live with an older teenage sister, but she has two under-fives to bring up as well as her siblings. So the boys sow and reap, and help their sister as well as going to school.

I could probably shoot hours of shock video about Evangeline, Emmanuel and Imani.

Or Morfat, Boniface and Shaida; or Rister, Duke, Brian and Divina; or any and all of the children we support.

They all have a story to tell, a sad story. And they are just the tip of the iceberg in Kisii.

There is Simon, the little deaf boy I met on my last day in Kisii. His story is slowly unravelling.

Yes, I will have to order the kids not to smile every time they see me with a camera!

Photos, videos of Kenya

During my recent visit to Kisii, I took a lot of photos, the Twiga kids used my camera to take even more (some of them are rather good), and we also shot some candid video, using my old, creaky 8mm camcorder.

Back at home, I now have the endless task of weeding out the photos and editing the video.

Which posed a problem - how do I transfer analog video on tape to a digital format on a hard disk?

And the answer came from an unexpected corner. I was glancing through the adverts in last week's Sunday paper when i spotted a "USB video grabber". It was expensive, but i had a look on eBay and there was the same gadget, but a lot cheaper.

The gadget arrived and I set about installing it on my most powerful computer, which runs under Windows XP X64 (I inherited it so I didn't get a say in the operating system). And guess what, it is not compatible - most hardware isn't compatible with X64.

So to the second most powerful computer, which I build myself from stuff lying around.

For the technically minded, it has an early Pentium-D 2.8GHz and 2GB RAM, 3 x 250GB SATA hard disks, but a very poor internal video card (16MB) and no video card slot.

It installed perfectly on this second machine, so I connected everything together and wow! I could see my video on-screen. I can capture a video or bits of it, edit it with the software provided, and generally mess about with them - brilliant.

Now all I have to do is to figure out what all the buttons and commands do - the manual is, as usual, not terribly good, so this could take some time.

There is also the question of resolution. Obviously, I want the biggest possible screen-size, but there seems to be a problem and I have chosen a smaller format for the time being. I can always recapture the videos, and probably do a better job next time.