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Michelle Niescierenko is a pediatric emergency physician at Boston Children's Hospital. But for the last five months she's been in Liberia, helping the country's 21 public hospitals get back on their feet after the devastating Ebola outbreak there. She says the challenges they face are shocking.

Ebola: A Grim Anniversary

A year ago Monday — on March 22, 2014 — the World Health Organization announced that the Ebola disease had broken out in West Africa.

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"Almost all the hospitals that we worked with in Liberia are running on generators," she says. The trouble with generators is that they require fuel.

"And fuel is really expensive, really difficult to move. It's not like there's a functioning gas station, you know, every 10 miles."

In fact, there's often only one gas station for a whole county. Hospitals have to send a truck along rutted dirt roads to pick up the fuel. Those roads can be impassable during the rainy season, and if the truck can't make it, then the hospital just has to make do with less power. This happens so often that a lot of the hospitals Niescierenko worked with end up operating without electricity for as long as 12 hours a day.

This has nothing to with Ebola. This is what it's been like in Liberia for years. Like the two other countries at the center of the outbreak, Guinea and Sierra Leone, Liberia is one of the world's poorest countries. And now that cases are down in Liberia — the country has seen only one new case in weeks — attention is shifting to building up the broader health system there.

Pumping Water, Finding Gloves

The lack of power is just one of the obstacles. Most hospitals also don't have a regular supply of water. They get it from wells — and those run low during the dry season or the pumps just break down.

This complicated Niescierenko's top priority — making sure the hospitals could handle patients with infectious diseases like Ebola. "Yeah, it's hard to do good infection control and hand-washing when you have no water," she says.

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A nurse walks near the empty children's ward at Redemption Hospital in New Kru Town, Monrovia, Liberia. David Gilkey/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption David Gilkey/NPR

A nurse walks near the empty children's ward at Redemption Hospital in New Kru Town, Monrovia, Liberia.

David Gilkey/NPR

Niescierenko's team was able to address some of these issues. With money from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation of Seattle, they fixed a lot of the pumps on the wells. They made sure every hospital had a three months' supply of basics, like surgical gloves.

But these were temporary fixes. Building up Liberia's health system will require a major investment in building roads, setting up a steady supply of equipment and medicine. And that's not even the toughest part:

"One of the tragic implications of this epidemic has been the death of health care workers," says Gabrielle Fitzgerald, who directs the Ebola program at the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

Even before Ebola hit, Liberia had only one health worker for every 3,400 people. Ebola has killed about 180 of those workers.

She points out that even before Ebola hit, Liberia had just over 50 doctors for the whole country — and only one health worker, people like nurses and midwives, for every 3,400 people. Ebola has killed about 180 of those workers.

Fitzgerald says we're already seeing the consequences.

"Routine things like immunizing children just have not happened for a year. And there are now measles epidemics."

Intangible, 'Not Sexy' — And Essential

Recruiting and training new health workers is key, because experts warn that unless the health systems in West Africa are brought up to scratch, an epidemic on the scale of this one will happen again.

Unfortunately, building national health systems doesn't tend to attract a lot of love from international donors, says Erin Hohlfelder, who's been pushing for this kind of funding on behalf of the ONE Campaign, a global health advocacy group.

"If there is a silver lining of this horrible crisis, it's the ability to illustrate why investing in health systems is so important."

- Erin Hohlfelder of the ONE Campaign

"It's certainly not as 'sexy' — quote unquote — as things like treatment for HIV or bed nets for malaria which are very tangible and easy to understand."

She says at least for now, the international community does seem to get the importance of building up West Africa's health systems. The governments of the affected countries are preparing national plans to present at a meeting of the World Bank next month. There's talk of millions of dollars in commitments.

"If there is a silver lining of this horrible crisis, it's the ability to illustrate why investing in health systems is so important," says Hohlfelder.

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The empty emergency and critical care area of Redemption Hospital in New Kru Town, Monrovia, Liberia. David Gilkey/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption David Gilkey/NPR

The empty emergency and critical care area of Redemption Hospital in New Kru Town, Monrovia, Liberia.

David Gilkey/NPR

But she adds that it's going to take years to fix the infrastructure, let alone train up enough health workers. And she worries the world's attention and money could dry up before then.

Henry Gray of Doctors Without Borders shares that concern. He's the emergency coordinator for the group's Ebola response. He's not even convinced the world can be trusted to stick it out long enough to stamp out this outbreak.

"The world has failed Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia once by not turning up quick enough," he says. "And we don't want the world to fail them a second time by leaving before the job is done."

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Sierra Leone

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Back in the pre-digital era — when telephones were used for talking, not photographing and filming, and before YouTube came along to broadcast everyone's videos — capturing and disseminating moving images was expensive, time consuming and decidedly non-portable.

But that changed in 1967, when Sony introduced the world's first portable video tape recorder. Before long, enthusiasts formed "media collectives" that captured the social and cultural upheaval of the era. Fueled by a mix of the tunes, the tokes and the times, video became part of the revolution it was documenting.

One of the first media collectives called itself "Videofreex." It's the subject of a documentary and a new exhibition at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York in New Paltz.

The Freex Are Born

Parry Teasdale and David Cort, two of the Videofreex founders, met at the Woodstock music festival, where each had arrived in 1969 with video gear in hand.

"I had some very clunky, old surveillance equipment, really, and he had the first generation of portable video cameras and recorders," says Teasdale. "And so he and I decided to get together." The two agreed to turn their cameras away from the music performers and toward the revelers in the mud.

Teasdale and Cort returned to New York City and moved in together with Cort's girlfriend, Mary Curtis Ratcliff. They adopted the name Videofreex at the suggestion of a neighbor.

"What we were doing is videotaping what was of interest to us," Ratcliff says, "and it was what CBS, NBC and ABC were not videotaping — the counterculture. They had no cameras in the counterculture."

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Videofreex including Parry Teasdale and David Cort, fourth and fifth from left, Bart Friedman, third from right, and Skip Blumberg, second from right, gathered in their Catskills town in 1973. Courtesy of Videofreex hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Videofreex

Videofreex including Parry Teasdale and David Cort, fourth and fifth from left, Bart Friedman, third from right, and Skip Blumberg, second from right, gathered in their Catskills town in 1973.

Courtesy of Videofreex

Their work caught the attention of an executive at one of those networks. CBS was cancelling the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and wanted to replace it with something more timely and contemporary. Using portable video gear the network bought for them, the Videofreex recorded demonstrations and interviewed counterculture figures, including Abbie Hoffman of the Yippies and Black Panther Fred Hampton, as well as various strangers.

"You know, if we had stopped to think and someone said, 'Do you think they're really gonna go for this?' we probably would've said, 'Well, obviously not,' " Ratcliff recalls. "But we didn't even let that stop us, we just went for it."

The finished program was called Subject to Change and Videofreek Skip Blumberg remembers screening the pilot for a group of "freex" ("We were high," he says), their friends and CBS executives ("They weren't high"). The network declined to pick up the program.

"They sat there evaluating this show, which was kind of a mess, I admit," Blumberg says. "This was, like, so far removed from what CBS was doing. So I was not disappointed that we didn't replace the Smothers Brothers."

Lanesville TV

Still, the Videofreex got to keep the equipment and continued to show their work in their Manhattan loft on Friday nights. But it wasn't sustainable. Fortunately for them, the New York State Council on the Arts made grants available for video projects outside the city. In 1971, the collective migrated upstate to a huge former boarding house in Lanesville, a small town in the Catskills.

At first, Blumberg recalls, locals were "somewhat suspicious about these long-haired, alternate-culture types living all together in this big house."

"But after a while, because we were providing service to the community by putting people on, covering community events, they began to trust us and became our really good friends," he says. "We were turning on people to video the way people were turning people onto pot. "

In the Catskills, the Videofreex started what may have been the country's first pirate television station, Lanesville TV, using a transmitter bought for them by Abbie Hoffman. Videofreek Bart Friedman remembers it was basically public access TV.

"We got the kids to participate in the kids' programs, we covered stocking of the stream, the firehouse, local residents, car accidents, gun club dinners, things like that," Friedman says. "It was just local television."

They also filmed drama. In one video, a local woman acts out a fantasy of escaping the tedium of small-town life.

"They made hundreds and hundreds of tapes," says Andrew Ingall, the Dorsky museum show's curator. "Some are gems; some are absolute duds."

Ingall says the Videofreex collaborated with and influenced other collectives and producers across the country. One of them was filmmaker DeeDee Halleck, now professor emerita at the University of California, San Diego.

"Their house in the Catskills became a kind of hideaway for a generation of rebels such as me," Halleck says. "I really felt that this was a place that liberated the technology and enabled the kinds of learning, the kinds of self expression that could really make the change. I mean, we were very optimistic."

'Something To Be Learned'

By 1978, the group was out of funds and disbanded. Some members moved back to Manhattan. Some pursued other professions. Others continued to make video.

"I'm not so interested in Videofreex as cave drawings on the wall of video history," says Teasdale, who now publishes a newspaper in upstate New York. "This [exhibition], I hope, can be valuable to people, not because we were such a great success, but because there's something perhaps to be learned about technology and living together and working together. And if that's true, then that will make it all worthwhile."

It was also, he says, a lot of fun.

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A few months ago, inside her stall in a Mexico City market, Ofelia Contreras showed Monika Essen the intricate handwork on an indigenous Mexican skirt. She pointed out how many months it took to complete the patterns by hand.

Essen is the costume designer for the Michigan Opera Theatre's revival of the opera Frida, and came to Mexico City to get the look of the opera right, since Kahlo was so particular about her traditional wardrobe.

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"To really get the authentic quality that I think that we're looking for, for this production, I think it was imperative for me to come here and to actually get a sense of who Frida was, where she lived," Essen said.

But in 1932, Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera also lived in Detroit — where the current revival of the production overlaps with an exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit.

Opera For Everyone

To showcase the opera to a larger audience, excerpts will be performed for free outside the Detroit Opera House. Wayne Brown, the Michigan Opera Theatre's president and CEO, says it's important to show that opera isn't just a black-tie affair.

"Clearly, Frida Kahlo would have been very upset if everyone showed up in mink coats," Brown says.

So Frida is also being performed at venues throughout the city and southeast Michigan to attract young Latinos like Ricardo Barajas, who's seen ads for it on Facebook.

"I love anything that has to do with [a] real-life story that's reflected in Hispanic culture," says Barajas, who has also seen the Rivera murals at the museum. "I don't like just going on with my life and not knowing what my culture is."

Kahlo's own popularity as an artist will also attract audiences, says Colombian soprano Catalina Cuervo, who's playing Frida in the current production.

"This is the kind of opera where people go because, 'Oh, I love Frida!' 'Oh, there's a Colombian soprano? Oh no, I have to go.' 'Oh, she's hot, I'm going to go,' " Cuervo says.

Yes, this soprano is hot. In a promotional video on the opera's website, Cuervo looks fit and tan and wears a dress with a plunging neckline as she performs a monologue and sings.

At a local bakery in Detroit's Latino neighborhood, shopper Eloisa Perez said opera's boring, but shown some of the video of Cuervo on YouTube, she said with that soprano, men would go.

"Truth is, she sings beautifully. It would be really cool if people would go see it, and I think I'd be one of them," Perez said, in Spanish.

Honoring The Artists

The exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts has works by both artists in its collection, including Rivera's acclaimed "Detroit Industry" murals, about the city's manufacturing and its workers. It also has Kahlo's Henry Ford Hospital, a painful oil painting about her miscarriage there.

"The fact that she focused on her own pain and worked her way through it — I think it's really an inspiring story for anyone," says Migdalia Cruz, who wrote the lyrics and monologues for the opera. "If I did justice to how beautiful she made her own pain then I've accomplished something very special in writing the play."

The music for Frida was composed by Robert Xavier Rodriguez in 1991. He says he's especially happy the work is being revived in Detroit now, after the city overcame a difficult bankruptcy without having to break up the Art Institute's collection to pay its bills.

"It's a sign of good times, hopeful times, when the artists are supported and people recognize the beauty and wonder of art," Rodriguez says.

If nothing else, Soprano Catalina Cuervo hopes Latinos will see they can have a good time at an opera.

"This is fun and dramatic and they will love it, they will just be on the edge of their seats," she says. "Just like with the end of any, every telenovela."

After all, opera is often just a telenovela set to music.

frida kahlo

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Latinos

Detroit

A few months ago, Craig Ferguson, host of The Late Late Show, interrogated a special guest: James Corden. When asked what he did for a living, Corden replied demurely, "I don't do anything at the moment."

That is set to change Monday night, when Corden succeeds Ferguson as the host of The Late Late Show.

He is 36 and English. Ferguson is Scottish: Score one for diversity.

Corden has won awards on screen and stage. He starred in the Broadway production of One Man, Two Guvnors, and won a Tony. And he played the best friend of Keira Knightley's character in last year's film Begin Again. But most Americans may know Corden for playing the Baker in the film version of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods.

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Corden won a Tony for his role as the comically overworked servant in One Man, Two Guvnors. Johan Persson/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Johan Persson/AP

Corden won a Tony for his role as the comically overworked servant in One Man, Two Guvnors.

Johan Persson/AP

James Corden has never worked as a talk show host, or a comedian. The topic of late night TV came up when he was in a meeting with American network executives about about a possible sitcom.

"I talked with Leslie Moonves, who's the CEO of CBS," Corden tells NPR's Scott Simon. "And we talked about late night and how I felt it could change, and perhaps be given a breath of fresh air, and then he offered me the job — it was very strange."

Late night TV is a crowded field right now. But Corden says he hopes that coming to the job new might bring in some fresh and untested ideas. "We have got to give it a reason to exist," he says. "It's not enough to rely on fact that there' always been a show. The fact that we're on after a talk show means we have to try and respect and honor the traditions of late night, but in so many ways try and make something that at least feels a little different to the show that's just been on."

Whatever changes he may introduce, the heart of late night remains the interview. Until now, James Corden has always been on the answering end of interviews. But his mother was a social worker, who talked with lots of people.

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"I think she would say that being a social worker is more about listening than it is about talking. And I'm sure you agree that's equally as important if you're going to interview people, it's not so much about the question you ask but more about listening to the answer and seeing where it goes after that."

And of course, late night TV is about humor, sometimes a little naughty and pointed. And, with James Corden, British. Craig Ferguson won a devoted audience. Piers Morgan, on CNN, was less successful. Some critics, including Tania Bryer of CNBC, wonder if Corden's British banter might fall flat with an American audience: "The worry is not so much will they understand him in terms of his accent, but it's the humor, will they get the humor?"

Corden himself isn't concerned about humor being lost in translation. "I had never been to New York but I absolutely loved Seinfeld. And I had never been to a bar in America, but I loved Cheers. And I've never been to a hotel in Torquay but I love Fawlty Towers. So of course there are going to be things which I can only really learn by making mistakes in doing them — about colloquialisms, or words in dialogue and things. But I don't know that it will come down to people people understanding my accent or my sense of humor."

If something is good, Corden says, it will travel. He begins his stint on The Late Late Show Monday night — or technically, is that Tuesday morning?