Page 48 - Winter 2021

Courtesy Michael Pierce
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“He was able to show me around for two weeks, and he introduced me to important figures in the Islamic world,” Pierce recalled.
Pierce’s crew was waiting for him in Quetta, near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.
“I got a ticket from Karachi to Quetta, and I had 15 cents left,” Pierce recalled. “The train was full of the Taliban...I didn’t have any sense of that [at the time], though.”
During the early 1980s, the Taliban were actively involved in armed conflicts with the Russians in Afghanistan.
“During the day, I was almost falling asleep, and this guy yells ‘No sleep! No sleep! Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola!’ And I’d drink that Coke and I’d be up,” Pierce recalled.
Thankfully, Pierce spotted his crew with two rickshaws when he finally got off the train. They then drove 1,500 miles along a road that Pierce considers “almost as narrow and bumpy as the rural road outside my home now.”
Once the crew arrived in India, they went to see various cultural landmarks like Amritsar, Delhi’s golden temple. They filmed India’s Asian games, where Pierce saw the wife of the late Mahatmas Gandhi.
While the film crew was originally staying at an ashram, which is a spiritual retreat facility, a guru invited them to stay at a remote village in the Himalayas.
During that time, they documented five generations of Indian musicians.
“It wasn’t sitars (a type of stringed lute) or anything like that but more primitive drums and shakers and vocal stuff,” Pierce said. “The families had mud houses with walled-off courtyards and livestock. We hung out there, and they took care of us, giving us lots of tea and biscuits.”
To top that all off, Pierce and the rest of the film crew built a biogas plant in India funded by the World Health Organization.
“It was amazing to watch the community spirit of everybody who helped,” he said.
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PAGE 46 | OCONEE THE MAGAZINE | WINTER 2021
Pierce sculpts one of his signature gourds. He grows the crops himself before carving them out.