Matt Alesevich

In October 2015, I followed leads in Bali to become the first mainstream journalist to cover Bengkala, Bali's jungle deaf village.

In Bali's Deaf Village, Everyone Speaks Sign Language

Those who visit Bali tend to rely on English, which many locals can speak. Fewer visitors have mastered Indonesian, the official language. Balinese is hardly spoken among those who aren't natives. But up in the jungle of northern Bali, there's an even more elusive, geographically-consolidated language, foreign to even the native Balinese: kata kolok, a language that's never even been spoken.

Kata kolok, known as "the talk of the deaf," is a unique, rural sign language, independent of international or Indonesian sign language. It's been the primary mode of communication in the northern Bali jungle village of Bengkala for generations, where a high percentage of residents are deaf. In Balinese, Bengkala is sometimes called "Desa Kolok"—the deaf village.

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In early 2016, I traveled to tribal Gujarat, India, with a group of volunteer Indian-American doctors from Ohio. My friend and colleague, Seth Kessler, and I spent one week shadowing the medical mission's youngest doctor to produce this video, which has nearly one million Facebook views, for AJ+.

Inspired by the selfless, pay-it-forward attitude and lifestyle of a once-undocumented Thai woman, I wrote this story about the arduous struggle she faces trying to secure Thai citizenship for the children of Baan Unrak, a children's home for over 100 on the Thai/Myanmar boarder.

After initial publication in Take Part, this piece was picked up by Yahoo! News.

One Woman in Thailand Is Fighting for Undocumented Children's Rights

Just 10 miles from the Thailand-Myanmar border in Sangkhlaburi, Thailand, near two refugee camps and among a majority migrant population, there’s a place that 149 children call home. Some outsiders refer to it as an orphanage; others, a children’s home. But ask the 47-person-strong staff, volunteers, or children who live there, and neither term does it justice. To them it’s Baan Unrak—the House of Joy.

Now in its 25th year of operation, Baan Unrak has provided shelter, food, medical care, and education for local children in need since 1990, when its founder, an Italian expat, was asked to help raise an abandoned woman’s child.

While the home provides its children with more than basic care and life essentials, there’s one necessity for a child’s growth and development that proves more time-consuming to provide than all the others—documentation. [...]

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After multiple interviews with Liberation Prison Yoga founder Anneke Lucas, a woman who teaches yoga to maximum security inmates in New York, I wrote this piece which Mic opted to publish.

Meet the Woman Changing the Prison Experience One Yoga Mat at a Time

Charged with three counts of felony murder for serving as a getaway driver in a 1981 robbery that left three men dead, Judith Clark, now 62, is serving a 75-to-life sentence in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in Westchester County, New York. She fired no shots during the heist.

While accepting of her less-than-bleak shot at societal freedom, Clark has another liberating force in her life: Liberation Prison Yoga, a nonprofit that brings 18 different "trauma-informed" yoga, meditation and self-improvement programs to 143 prisoners in the New York City area.

Liberation Prison Yoga is the brainchild of Anneke Lucas, another strong woman with her own traumatic story. At the age of 5, Lucas' mother sold her into an international pedophile ring in her native Belgium. After five years of abuse, an insider brokered a deal for her release, and after stints in London and Paris, Lucas ended up in New York in 1985 at age 22.

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When thousands took to the streets of Delhi to protest caste system discrimination in India, I used my contacts to surround myself with the movement's movers and shakers.

The result is this protest coverage piece for Take Part, the social action news site of Participant Media, producers of Academy Award-winning documentaries An Inconvenient Truth and The Cove. 

In addition this piece from India, I've covered Take Part World stories in Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar and Laos. Those stories can be found here.

A Student Suicide Leads Thousands to Protest Discrimination in India

With pumping fists, chanting voices, and waving flags, student activists in India are breathing new life into a movement to bring equality to the country's silenced minorities.

Thousands of protesters took to central Delhi on Tuesday to challenge discriminatory government and education initiatives that many believe led to the suicide of 26-year-old Hyderabad University student Rohith Vemula.

The protesters, many wearing paper Vemula masks and holding banners with Vemula’s image, marched through Delhi’s capital region chanting slogans and their demands for justice. Atop the list of actions to be taken immediately are the resignations of Hyderabad University Vice Chancellor Appa Rao and central government union ministers Smriti Irani and Bandaru Dattatreya. Protesters claim all three are responsible for the institutional murder of Vemula. [...]

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While in Myanmar during its landmark November 2015 elections, I traveled to the nation's northernmost Kachin State and discovered an HIV/AIDS home most deserving of its name: The Hope Center.

Myanmar's Forgotten AIDS Patients and the Irish Nun Who Cares for Them

MYITKYINA, Myanmar — A week after Myanmar's historic Nov. 8 elections, a white jeep bounces up the dusty horseshoe-shaped driveway of a YMCA hostel in Myitkyina, capital of the conflicted Kachin State.

The driver's-side window rolls down, and a white-haired head pops out.

“I wish you could have seen what I just saw,” says the woman, in an Irish accent. “A[n HIV-] positive baby — not a week old. The mother wants nothing to do with her. [The baby's] probably not gonna make it, and [the mother] don't even care.” 

The voice belongs to Sister Mary Dillon, a 70-year-old Catholic nun from Ireland who's been caring for people in Kachin infected with HIV and AIDS for over a decade. Just like the region, she's no stranger to poverty, death and disease [...]

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Through connections in Nepal, I got wind of the existence of "Kidney Village," an impoverished Nepali village exploited by Indian organ traffickers for half a century. In April of 2016, I traveled to the area, Hokse, to tell the story of its inhabitants preparing for the upcoming monsoon season.

Destroyed by a quake. Targeted by organ traffickers. Will a monsoon break this village?

From June to September, Mother Nature will add insult to injury and hammer central Nepal with its second monsoon season since a catastrophic earthquake.

The April 2015 quake left 8,000 dead and hundreds of thousands homeless. Many living with the fresh scars of tragedy, especially in rural villages, remain wildly ill-prepared to face the region’s elements.

One of these villages is Hokse, a mountainside town of 3,000 people 30 miles east of Kathmandu. While Hokse lost 11 of its own in last year’s disaster, the scars that most connect them predate the earthquake and are physical, not metaphorical.

For decades, kidney traffickers have targeted Hokse so frequently that it’s become known as Kidney Village. Hokse's impoverished district, Kavrepalanchok, has become a stronghold for Indian brokers trading in black-market organs. [...]

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After four surreal days in North Korea, I wrote this piece for North Korea News, the Western world’s insider source for DPRK news, examining the morality and misconceptions surrounding travel to the region.

I Was Told There Would Be Robots: Examining the misconceptions and morality of traveling to North Korea

On Halloween 2011, I did as all the travel blogs suggested and arrived early at the Myanmar Embassy in Bangkok, an unassuming one-story building, not far from the Chao Phraya River. A few hours and 1,260 baht (roughly $40) later, a 28-day visa to Asia’s second-most oppressive regime adorned my passport.

In the eyes of some, I had already legitimized a military junta, supported human rights violations, funded an iron-fisted army and destroyed the very relics I was going to see.

Far too eager to step off the tourist trail and to discover if the Burmese really were “the friendliest people in the world,” as they are so often (rightfully) called, I shrugged off the aforementioned claims, convincing myself that history had not yet vilified the Burmese tourist.

One year later, on November 19, 2012, on the very runway my Bangkok-bound Air Asia flight had taken off from exactly one year earlier, Air Force One touched down at Yangon International Airport, making Barack Obama the first American president...

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In May 2017, I traveled around Iraqi Kurdistan interviewing members of the region’s underground Jewish community and the government leaders responsible for its preservation.

Iraq’s Kurdish Jews look to the future with hope and skepticism

ERBIL, Iraq - Growing up in Erbil, the capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region, Taha Smith and his best friend were inseparable.

Long days of football and tag evolved into international adventures - as teenagers they vagabonded around Europe, eventually finding jobs and staying a few years.

Lifelong confidants, it was not until recently each revealed one anecdote: each was Jewish.

"He never told me. I never told him," said 30-year-old Smith, who revealed his ancestral religion to his best friend only before marrying the man's sister earlier this year. "It was crazy for me. We were so close."

The scenario would perplex Smith's ancestors.

Jews have inhabited Mesopotamia for over 2,500 years and throughout the rise of Islam and into the twentieth century, mosques and synagogues, like the one Smith's grandparents attended in central Erbil's Citadel, enjoyed a cordial coexistence.

Centuries of amicability decayed, however, when in early June 1941 Nazi-inspired anti-semitism in Baghdad encouraged rioters to loot and destroy Jewish homes and shops during the Jewish Shavuot festival.

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