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Books by Eric Douglas

Thriller fiction and Non-fiction

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Mandela

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africa walkingI still remember the first time I heard about Nelson Mandela and Apartheid in South Africa. It was 1985 and I was a freshman at Marshall University at the time.

In my freshman speech class, I had to give a persuasive speech on a topic. It seemed like it was all of a three or five minute talk, and of course I was nervous. (Oh, how far I’ve come…) I remember sitting in my dorm room wondering what I was going to talk about and listening to music on my stereo. I put on an album (yes, vinyl) and stared out the window. I flipped the album cover over and immediately had my answer.

The album was Manfred Mann’s Earth Band “Somewhere in Afrika” and on the back cover Mann talked about Apartheid. He was born in South Africa and campaigned against the governmental system based on race and segregation. I remember being amazed that in 1985 there was a government system based on race. (It is possible I was a little naïve.) The album was ground breaking in that it included Afrikan rhythms, lyrics and musicians, predating Paul Simon’s Graceland. Peter Gabriel’s “Biko” also talks about the horrors of Apartheid, and was released earlier, but it was not the basis for the entire album.

Twenty years later (11 years after the end of Apartheid), I had the opportunity to visit Pretoria and Midrand, South Africa. I was eating dinner with a white South African friend and his family when I asked about Apartheid. I could tell it was something he would rather not have discussed, but he asked the manager of the restaurant, who was black, to come over. He told the man what I wanted to know about. The man looked at me for a few moments and said “Things are better now. Before, I would not have had this job and I would not have friends like your friend,” he said, gesturing to my host Dr. Cronje.

Mandela served 27 years in prison until international pressure secured his release after being convicted of sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government. When he was released, I’m sure the people of South Africa expected him to be angry and punitive against the white government that had held him in prison for so long. Mandela had a different idea.

If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner. Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela died today. In all of our fascination with “reality” and celebrity, his passing is significant. I’m sure there are other leaders out there who have changed the world as much as he did, but I can’t think of any right now. I hope someone rises in his place. He will be missed, but I pray his legacy lives on. To me the world seems more divided, over less important things, than it has been in years. I wager Mandela would have thought most of what we fight and argue about is trivial.

On another note, music has incredible power to change minds and influence thought. There is no doubt learning of Apartheid through music shaped my feelings years before the west thought much about it. Time to listen to “Somewhere in Afrika” again. It really is a great album.

And it seems like we still have a long way to go..

Making a Diveheart training program

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IMG_3617From 1998 to present day, I’ve developed adult education training programs, mostly for the recreational dive industry. I’ve participated in photo and video shoots, and written scripts to teach people to use everything from AEDs to Dry Suits and a lot of stuff in between. Working with Diveheart to produce training videos to teach Adaptive Dive Buddies and Adaptive Scuba Instructors how to work with divers with disabilities was definitely a new one for me, though.

IMG_3693Probably the most important skill a prospective Adaptive Dive Buddy learns is empathy. It takes an amazing amount of nerve for an adaptive diver to trust her Adaptive Dive Buddies to care for her underwater. Day-to-day, a person who uses a wheel chair might rely on others for help, but failure to receive that help does not result in the person drowning. Or suffering through the pain and trauma of a burst ear drum. Or any number of other potential problems.

The second most important skill is handling task loading and stress in the water. As an Adaptive Dive Buddy for a disabled diver, you have to be ready to take care of your own buoyancy and equalization, while handling buoyancy and equalization for the Adaptive Diver as well. With the Diveheart system, you’re never alone in the water with an Adaptive Diver, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to be prepared for emergency situations.

IMG_3587To simulate the potential challenges Adaptive Dive Buddies will face, we filmed (above and below water) divers with blacked out masks or with their legs strapped together and their arms immobilized. There is nothing that will teach empathy more effectively than taking a diver underwater without any ability to swim, control his own situation or even pinch his own nose to equalize. Once you’ve lived through that once, you will forever have a healthy respect for what an Adaptive Diver does every dive.

IMG_7612To capture the video and still images we need for the manuals and online training, we brought in two industry experts. There is practically no one better at shooting video in the Florida Keys than Frazier Nivens. He has years and years of experience shooting in the local waters, equally distributed between shooting critters and divers. Ken Berry worked for 15 years as the Executive Producer at PADI and then a few years at DAN and now for himself at LivingWater Media. No one in the dive industry knows more about producing training videos and organizing divers to perform, and repeat, skills above and below water.

IMG_3919We shot video for a week in the Keys, including a day and a half on dive boats provided by DJ Wood at Rainbow Reef. The staff there was great and really in tune with the needs of Diveheart and Adaptive Divers. Every time you see three divers on the screen, there are at least five people in the water including the three divers, the director and the camera man. Often, there were seven or eight to make sure everything was done correctly and to capture behind the scenes photographs and video at the same time.

One of the most amazing parts of this process was that the on-camera divers were all volunteers. They were all Diveheart Instructors and Adaptive Dive Buddies who donated their time to polish up their skills at a dress-rehearsal and then even more time to spend time underwater being put through the proverbial dive-ringer to perform and repeat skills underwater. They had to do skills over and over, allowing the camera to capture “establishing shots” (wide angle) and then the same scene from medium and then close up to allow for “cut-aways”.

IMG_3875Often, when you are teaching, if you sit back and pay attention, you can get more than you give. This was one of those situations for me. I learned so much from the divers who gave their time to volunteer for this unique organization it was incredible. And I realize just how much every day.

This is the second of three blog posts about Diveheart and the development of a ground-breaking set of training materials to train adaptive divers and adaptive dive buddies and instructors to learn to scuba dive. The first installment Diveheart: Imagine the Possibilities (November 13), discussed the idea of taking Adaptive Divers diving. The third installment (November 25) will include lessons I’ve learned from working with Elliot and some of the Adaptive Divers I’ve met through Diveheart.

On November 25, I’ll also be releasing a new Jackson Pauley/Withrow Key short story with a character inspired by Diveheart. The story is called Caesar’s Gold..

Visiting the Manassas battlefields

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The civil war was a truly terrible time in American history. A young nation nearly tore itself apart, brother fighting against brother and father against son. We should never forget those who died on both sides and the sacrifices made to keep this country whole.

I thought it was interesting that after the battle, most of the dead were buried in shallow graves on site. After the war, most of the Union soldiers were transferred to Arlington National Cemetery and the Confederate dead were buried in a local cemetery.

For West Virginians, this is the battlefield where native son “Stonewall” Jackson earned his nickname.

IMG_9715IMG_9723IMG_9737 IMG_9788IMG_9794 IMG_9768IMG_9796 IMG_9814IMG_9806  IMG_9835  IMG_9862IMG_9854IMG_9846.

Harvesting divers still dying all over the world

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IMG_1665In spite of efforts from various organizations over the last several years, men (and yes, they are almost exclusively men) use scuba equipment to harvest lobster, conch and sea cucumbers among other things from the ocean floor. They do this with little regard for themselves or the environment, often overfishing the area. In the process, nearly all of them have injured their bodies so completely only a few of them are even fit to dive at all. They all have various levels of paralysis and nerve damage.

When I’ve written about this before, I’ve had people comment that the divers should just stop diving and do something else. Or, people have said, it isn’t our fault, we don’t make them dive.

In a sense, we do make them dive. We insist on cheap seafood so we can “all-you-can-eat” ourselves into obesity. As long as we are willing to buy these products, without insisting on sustainable sources for them, we are responsible. There is no difference between this and sweat shops or child labor being used to create the cheap goods we use and throw away when we are done with them. Yet, the moral outrage that is directed at sweatshop labor is nonexistent for harvesting divers.

Nearly two years ago, I traveled to Honduras for the fourth time (There were additional trips to Brazil and Mexico to meet with other groups of divers as well) to meet with and talk to Miskito Indians who dive for lobster; this time it was with a crew from the NBC show Rock Center. In January of 2012, they aired a two part segment (with additional online footage) called Lobster Trap. They used articles I had written on the subject as background material and I was interviewed on the show as well. I just learned yesterday that Lobster Trap won the 2013 RFK Book & Journalism Award for International Television. The segment’s producer Catherine Olian and the reporter Natalie Morales were specifically honored.

The RFK Journalism Awards recognize outstanding reporting on issues that reflect Robert Kennedy’s dedication to human rights and social justice, and his belief in the power of individual action. Winning entries provide insights into the causes, conditions, and remedies of human rights violations and injustice, and critical analyses of the movements that foster positive global change.

I am proud to have a small part in this story and hope that this award will continue to draw attention to the problem of harvesting divers throughout the world.

If you want to read more about this problem, view a short film I put together on three groups of harvesting divers, or watch the NBC show Lobster Trap, you can find the links on the For Cheap Lobster Page..

Words of Wisdom

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monk in russia
The unheated cave home of a Russian Orthodox monk lit by a single candle in a small town outside of Moscow.

Earlier this summer, a friend from Russia asked me to review a book that had been translated from Russian into English. She wanted me to just read through it and tweak the translations to be more conversational. I’m barely literate in English, but my friends who are multilingual tell me that one of the greatest challenges in translating written works is maintaining the author’s voice in the new language while making things seem natural.

The book was about Mount Athos, a mountain on a peninsula in Greece that is dotted with Eastern Orthodox monasteries and has been for nearly 1000 years. Reading through Ways of the Holy Mountain I was intrigued by the history and events that shaped the dozens of monasteries and the approximately 1400 monks who live in them today. (It has moved to the top of my bucket list of places to visit.)

If you’ve never been in a holy place that is that old, you’re missing something. Even the harshest non-believer can’t help but feel the decades of human emotion that are imbued on a place like that. While nothing exists in the United States that is that old, you can feel the same power and depth in places like Arlington National Cemetery or the 9/11 memorials in New York or Washington DC. Regardless of your feelings of “religion” and Orthodox versus Catholicism versus Protestantism versus any of the other world religions, you can find respect for these men and the way they choose to live their lives.

All too often, people post “sayings” and thoughts for the day on social media, without really reading them or understanding them—as long as it comes with an interesting picture. I generally ignore all of them. Most of the time you have to question the people quoted and even the content of the quote. I have seen quite a false attributions or changed quotes because someone didn’t exactly like the way it read or tweak it so it better supports their own political leanings.

At the end of the manuscript I reviewed, there was a document that included quotes from many of the monks on the island. I was struck by how many of them were fantastic platitudes that many of us (and I am definitely including myself here) could stand to remember in our daily lives. There was no “twist” to anything, just their feelings. I have copied a few that I liked best. My favorite is the last one…

  • Abba Arsenius said about himself: “After a conversation I often regret, after silence – never”.
  • If you want to learn to speak well and infallibly, first you should learn to keep silence. (Schemamonk Zosimus)
  • If you want to gain peace now and in the future, always say to yourself: “Who am I?” and do not condemn anyone. (Abba Joseph)
  • A Christian is one who takes after Christ in words, deeds and thoughts as much as it is possible for a human being. (St. John of the Ladder)
  • Do not say: “I cannot.” This phrase is not Christian. The Christian word is: “I can do everything,” but not by myself – with the help of our God who strengthens us as Apostle Philip says. (St. Theophanes the Anchoret)
  • Do not like to listen to people about the demerits of others and you will have fewer demerits yourself. (St. Ambrosius of Optina)
  • Do not tell anyone about a good action you are going to do beforehand, just do it. (St. Antony the Great)

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