- [Pamela] Tonight we visit a North Kingstown company with a mission to end child hunger.

- So far we've been able to reach 22 million children, and I always believe we're just getting started.

(soft steel pan music) - [Pamela] Then the story of the steel pan.

- It was a piece of trash, but we made it a treasure for us and our people.

- Good friggin' morning from New England.

- [Michelle] And one Rhode Islander tells us what it's like to be TikTok famous.

- I think the biggest misconception is that it's not a career and that it's not a job.

(soft music) (soft music continues) - Good evening, welcome to "Rhode Island PBS Weekly," I'm Pamela Watts.

- And I'm Michelle San Miguel.

We begin with a Rhode Island nonprofit making a big impact on the world stage when conflicts erupt.

- As the humanitarian situation deteriorates overseas in Gaza, the North Kingstown company, once again is stepping up.

It is partnering with UNICEF and the International Medical Corps to send millions of nutritional packets for children to the area.

The aid is currently in Egypt, awaiting entry.

Tonight, we reintroduce you to the local woman behind it all, who has made it her mission to alleviate hunger and malnutrition around the globe.

- I think it's our most basic need in life is food and nutrition.

So without that, we really aren't setting children up for their best chance that they would have in life.

- Giving a child a chance in life serves as the compass for Navyn Salem.

She's on a quest to end malnutrition for children around the globe under the age of five.

And she's doing it here in a plant at Quonset Point's industrial complex in North Kingstown.

Around the clock, they manufacture these simple squeeze packets of a fortified peanut butter called Plumpy Nut.

The nutrient enriched paste doesn't need water or refrigeration and is easy for kids to feed themselves.

It has been proven to take a child from the brink of starvation to salvation in just six to eight weeks.

Salem named her company Edesia.

Which means?

- Edesia is the Roman goddess of food.

And so we thought that she really represented what we wanted to be and what we wanted to create here.

- [Pamela] She's created a social enterprise, and what Salem has accomplished since founding Edesia in 2010 is astonishing.

- Running 24/7 allows us to deliver products through UNICEF, the World Food Program, and USAID to 64 different countries.

So far we've been able to reach 22 million children, and I always believe we're just getting started.

- [Pamela] Salem got started when her four daughters, now grown, were all little girls.

The idea was born when her father brought her to visit his homeland in Tanzania, where generations of her family settled after leaving India.

She visited a clinic like this one in Chad, and her humanitarian mission took shape as she witnessed heartbreak.

- The first time that I saw a 2-year-old that looked like my newborn at home, I realized that this is an incredibly urgent situation.

That is something that I could never unsee or forget about.

It stayed with me all the time.

- You tackled a world problem as a young mom with babies of your own.

How did you find the energy, the willpower, and the time to do it?

- We're all busy and we can make excuses for why we can't do things.

I thought to myself, now's not the best time to start a business, but how can we wait?

How can this issue wait one more day or one more week without doing something to address it?

- [Pamela] Salem has traveled the world, seeing the transformation Plumpy Nut produces firsthand.

- They have to eat one packet in the clinic in order just to prove that they can eat it and they don't have complications.

After they've exited this severe program and they're in the moderate, these children don't look anything like the ones that you just saw in the severe acute malnutrition space.

They are already being interactive.

They're laughing, they're playing with you.

- What's the magic in it?

It's fortified, it has nutrients and calories.

- It tastes good.

I mean, even if you're a very hungry child, the food needs to taste good.

'Cause children, no matter where they are, they can all be picky.

(residents chattering) - [Pamela] UNICEF says 155 million children under age five are malnourished, and the World Health Organization estimates 45% of deaths in children of the same age are linked to malnutrition.

Salem says the crisis is being fueled by two things, climate change and armed conflict.

- Climate change is causing droughts, years long droughts and floods that are catastrophic.

They're biblical, right?

Like we've never seen before.

So this is forcing huge amounts of people to migrate.

New conflicts are rising every single week, also forcing migration.

I have seen children take their last breaths.

- [Pamela] But Salem says, while addressing climate change will take time, addressing the politics of hunger at the United Nations Security Council this summer was swift and direct.

Her briefing, how to combat malnutrition.

- We control the conflicts.

We right here in this room, just as we decide to wage war, we can decide to end war.

You're literally sitting around a round table with Russia and China and all the powers of the world and your job, their job, our job, is how do we create world peace?

Really trying to get across the humanity of it, that we're not looking at statistics, you know, we're talking about real lives that are affected.

- Yeah, overseeing the entire operations and it's a much more bigger role.

- [Pamela] Andrew Kamara, Vice President of Operations at Edesia, was once one of those affected by rebellion.

His family had to flee Sierra Leone during its long civil war.

- My two sisters and I ended up in Guinea, west Africa as refugees, so we had to learn how to survive, how to stay resilient, how to fight to really make it another day.

I think that experience prepared me for the work that I'm doing today.

I felt like during my many, many years of living in a refugee setting and seeing suffering, human suffering, hunger and starvation and malnutrition and all kinds of difficulties that folks were going through in that part of the world, it prepared me to stay focused.

Nathrone, how you doing, man?

- [Pamela] And Kamara is not the only one working here who has lived that experience.

Edesia's staff of 100 includes workers from 25 countries.

- Many, many of my colleagues have been through the same path as me.

They've lived in refugee camps.

They were once hopeless, not knowing where help was gonna come from.

And today they're in a position of giving back to those same refugee camps.

They take that job very, very seriously.

There's no giving up here.

Folks come in, they would start the shift fired up, they will end the shift fired up no matter how tired they are, because they see the result of their work and the impact is making globally.

There's a life saved for every time you produce a box.

- [Pamela] Kamara views each package as a box of hope.

The Plumpy Nut inside provides meals for two months, enough to rescue a severely malnourished child.

- These could be your children, these are our children.

These are the world's children and we all have to be part of the fight to give them a life that is full.

- [Pamela] And Navyn Salem is also concerned about children here at home.

Edesia has developed plain peanut butter packet.

- There's a need for protein and something that was easily distributed and ended up distributing it through food banks and school lunch programs across the US.

There's a lot of people in the US who are doing that though, and there's not a lot of people who are supporting and just planning for Yemen and Afghanistan.

- [Pamela] And while her main focus is international, Salem is always seeking ways to expand programs for all children.

She says it's not about treating malnutrition, preventing is the priority.

Currently Edesia is creating a new Plumpy Nut for pregnant women.

Meantime, Salem continues navigating everyday challenges to make a world of difference.

- I have some words on my door that say, find a way.

Like we don't have the luxury of saying, oh, this isn't working so well today.

Because yes, we're gonna get interrupted everywhere, on a government level, a policy, a war zone that a truck's trying to get through, pirates in Somalia, you name it, we've had it, right.

But how do you get around that and how do you make sure?

Because every minute counts.

It's pretty powerful to be able to take something that you made and understand that it's traveled halfway around the world to a child who's actual life depends on the fact that you made that box.

- Up next, when local musician Becky Bass first arrived in Rhode Island from the Caribbean island of St. Croix to attend Brown University, she had plans to pursue chemistry.

But as the years passed, she returned to the art form and instrument of her youth, the steel pan.

Now she's become known as Rhode Island's expert and virtuoso on it.

As part of our continuing My Take series, producer Isabella Jibilian recently spent time with Bass to learn more about her artistic journey.

(soft steel pan music) - My name is Becky Bass and this is my take on the steel pan.

(soft steel pan music) I'm a musician.

(upbeat rock music) I've been singing and playing the steel pan since I was two years old, so a very long time.

I won't say how long that is.

(laughs) But it's been a long time.

♪ Love should be real ♪ ♪ Not this flakey stuff ♪ I was born and raised in St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands.

My father is also a steel panist and so when I was in third grade, that was the first time that you could actually take steel pan as a part of the curriculum of the school.

So just like band, choir, you could take steel pan.

And of course who was the teacher?

But my dad.

(laughs) So this has about 30 notes in here.

And so taking a look at it, the outside is actually the lower register.

The inside middle is more of the middle register, and then the tiny few notes in here are the higher register.

So if I were to play a C major scale it would sound like this, starting from what we know of as middle C on a piano.

(steel pan notes) Now I'm gonna play another octave up so you can hear the register shift.

(steel pan notes) As a performer, I think it's really important to share the history of your instrument.

(upbeat rock music) And so honestly I try to incorporate the story and the history of the steel pan as well as my story as often as I can.

Drums are a huge part of the African culture of my ancestry.

And drums were used to communicate, to express ourselves and for celebratory moments.

Back in the late 1800s, the British were colonizing Trinidad.

They decided to ban Carnival because they were afraid of uprisings.

By then, the Africans were emancipated, but it was still very much like, you know, they didn't want them to rule, right?

And so when they banned Carnival, they took away the Trinidadians, the drums.

And so on the island of Trinidad, there was a lot of scrap metal lying around the island.

And one of these pieces of metal were 55 gallon oil drums.

And they discovered that when you hit it on the edge, okay, it creates rhythm.

But when you hit it at a place where it has like a little bump, a little raised bump, then it actually creates sound and music and a pitch.

It started with one, five, eight, 15 notes and now what you're gonna see in my instrument is that there are about 32 to 34 notes now in there.

(soft steel pan music) It started in Trinidad, but then it started to spread and it went of course close in its proximity first, right, so the different Caribbean islands.

(soft steel pan music) You'd start to actually hear it more in popular music.

So like Jimmy Buffett, he started using the steel pan and things.

♪ Wasting away again in Margaritaville ♪ ("Margaritaville" by Jimmy Buffett) - And then even fast forward, like there's a very popular like hip hop rap songs that started using it too.

Like 50 Cent started using it.

♪ I dunno what you heard about me ♪ - Soulja Boy.

("Crank That" by Soulja Boy) And now when we think of the Caribbean, we always think of the steel pan, right?

(upbeat steel pan music) My name is Becky Bass and this was my take on the steel pan.

- Now, influencers, social media personalities, if you scroll through TikTok or Instagram, you'll likely come across their videos.

For many, it's a full-time job with a full-time salary.

If you're curious like we were about how it all works, last November we met with Rhode Island content creator Ian Brownhill.

His signature look and a hooded sweater and flip flops, drinking iced Dunkin' Coffee portrays him as the stereotypical New England guy and he's cashing in on it.

Full disclosure, Brownhill has in the past helped promote work here at Rhode Island PBS.

- Wouldn't you know first thing in the morning I come out here, I open up my front door to see- - [Michelle] Westerly native Ian Brownhill has amassed a huge following on social media by creating videos.

Many of them poke fun at what it means to be a guy from New England.

- Hey, Ma, we got this nor Eastern on the way.

Just wanna make sure you got your milk, bread and eggs.

Call me back.

Oh God, I would not want to have to shovel that driveway.

- So for people who are unfamiliar with your videos, describe for me what is the typical New England guy?

- That's a tough one, that's broad.

I think New Englanders are very fast-paced, very impatient, very protective of themselves and their family members, but also incredibly caring and loving and I think we all just kind of wanna live like a good life and anything that interrupts that is very irritating to us.

- [Michelle] Irritated by things like snow the day before Halloween.

This video from 2020 has almost 10 million views.

- I should be putting on my Betty White costume for Halloween tomorrow, but instead I gotta go down to my mother's house and get my winter clothes out of a box, in the basement, because I wasn't prepared for this.

Nobody was.

Good friggin' morning from New England, folks.

- [Michelle] We met up with Brownhill at his home in East Greenwich where he gave us a behind the scenes look at what it takes to be, as he describes it, a content creator.

At 31, he already has 1.2 million followers on TikTok and more than 145,000 on Instagram.

- When I first started, I was like, how can I market myself so that brands wanna work with me?

And originally it was mostly because I wanted to create a name for myself in the acting world.

- [Michelle] But his popularity on social media has become more than a way to get noticed as an actor.

He's found a way to a living creating videos full-time, working with companies like Dunkin', Papa Gino's, and Iggy's Doughboys and Chowder House.

- All right, we are answering the question, do we prefer white chowder, red chowder?

- White chowder.

- White chowder.

We got another winner, folks.

These companies will reach out to me, we'll have a conversation, they'll say, Hey, we would like one, two, three, four, five videos from you spread over the next couple months.

We would like to talk about maybe some new products that we have.

We'd like to talk about, you know, maybe some things that we're doing for our local community, would you mind commenting on that?

- [Michelle] He was making videos for almost three years before he earned any money from them.

And even now, he says, 90% of his videos aren't sponsored.

- These videos I make because I love making videos, I love entertaining and I'm going for a laugh.

The fact that I've been able to fortunately get the following that I have and create the brand that I have is what attracts brands to wanna work with me.

98% of the people that I work with are all New England based.

- [Michelle] Brands that resonate with his New England persona, who, like Brownhill, runs on Dunkin'.

- Delish, I feel like I can fall asleep right here.

- And he's got the outfit to prove it.

The Dunkin' costume.

- Oh yes, my onesie.

- Did you reach out to Dunkin' and say, I need that costume.

- Nu-uh, nu-uh.

- They reached out to you?

- Oh no, I bought that.

- Oh, you bought that?

- Oh yeah.

Dunkin' put that online, I said, I'm gonna have that.

- [Michelle] Before Dunkin' was sponsoring Brownhill, he was dressing and acting the part.

- They were sponsoring athletes and mega million followers type of creators, but not smaller folk.

So I was kind of like, if I make videos and Dunkin' sees it at some point, maybe they'll reach out to me.

- [Michelle] All of those videos gave him time to find tune his New England character and his accent, a mix of Rhode Island and Boston.

- What's up with their accent too?

It sounds like Connecticut, Rhode Island, and like York Maine mixed in one, it's like awful.

- I don't got an accent, you got an accent.

If you're from like Southie or Easty and you're like a true, authentic like Boston person, it's really like the Rs are really what gets dropped.

Whereas in Rhode Island, it's kind of just words that are specifically missing letters and vowels.

Like, you know, Warwick, Rhode Island, there's two Ws.

But if you're from Rhode Island, you can say, oh, I'm from Warwick.

You don't pronounce the second W for some reason.

Or you, you know, my mom will always say like, well, not for nuttin'.

And I'm like, where's nuttin', what's nuttin'?

Is it not for nuttin'?

It's not for nothing.

- His mom isn't at all surprised by his success.

- And all my friends, "Your son is so good.

Your son's so funny, he's so handsome."

I'm like, "Hey, he's my son, so you don't have to gimme the handsome stuff.

Stay away, old cougar."

(Michelle laughs) - If there's one thing I hate more than traffic, it's New Yorkers.

Especially the Giants.

- [Michelle] while Brownhill's always looking for a laugh, he's also exploring how to use his social media fame to talk about another topic he cares deeply about, men's mental health.

- A lot of people don't know that I'm in therapy once a week, that I go and I talk about my emotions and my feelings and my struggles and things going on.

You know, my mom always created an open door policy for our family.

So my mom has always been someone to say, "You know, I know you're upset, don't walk away.

Sit here, let's talk."

- [Michelle] Brownhill's not sure what his future as a content creator looks like, but he says the type of digital marketing that he provides is here to stay.

- I think the biggest misconception is that it's not a career and that it's not a job, and that what I do isn't hard and that it isn't something that could be like sustainable.

- [Michelle] He says he's approaching the future one video at a time.

- I don't know that I necessarily have a plan, but for now, as long as people will have me on their screens of their phone, I would love to continue to entertain and be there for you.

- Finally tonight, we have some very exciting news to share.

Rhode Island PBS received 19 New England Emmy nominations this week, shattering last year's record.

And we here at "Rhode Island PBS Weekly" earned eight, which include two of the stories that we shared this evening.

The winners will be announced in June.

- We're so grateful for these honors and we'll keep you posted.

- Absolutely.

And that's our broadcast this evening.

I'm Michelle San Miguel.

- And I'm Pamela Watts.

We'll be back next week with another edition of "Rhode Island PBS Weekly."

Until then, please follow us on Facebook and X and you can visit us online to see all of our stories and past episodes at ripbs.org/weekly.

Or please listen to our podcast on your favorite streaming platform.

Goodnight.

(soft music) (soft music continues) (soft music continues) (soft music continues)