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Behind the Video: Chris Anderson’s “Meet the Flood Victims of Pakistan”

By Chris Anderson

Ted Curator

In this new series, YouTube users take you behind the scenes of a video they’ve made and explain, in their own words, how the video came to be and what they hope it achieves. First up, TED Curator Chris Anderson captures the stark faces he encountered on a recent trip to a ravaged area of Pakistan.

When Jacqueline Novogratz and I returned last week from a visit to Pakistan's flood-hit areas, we couldn't get out of our heads the faces of the people we'd seen -- in equal measures beautiful... haunting... hopeless... hopeful... These faces are the best possible answer to the troubling indifference so much of the world has shown in response to this crisis, which by any objective measure is one of the worst this century.

We wanted to spread the word about what we'd seen, so we wrote to one of our heroes, Peter Gabriel, and he generously agreed to let us use an unforgettable song of his as the soundtrack to a video that will show you the people we met.

Every one of these people has lost almost everything they own: their homes, their possessions, their animals...in most cases, all but the clothes they're wearing. Please stop what you're doing for five minutes, take a deep breath, sit down next to someone you care about, click the full-screen button below the video, and then press play.

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