At least once or twice a year, most of us feel the need to sort though our wardrobe to make space for the new season of fashion. Sifting though the piles of clothes, we filter old favorites from those we wonder why we ever bought. The latter pile is assigned to one of those big plastic garbage bags, then dumped at nearest charity drop-off bin. From there, we can enjoy a feeling of satisfaction, happily surmising that the clothes will be worn by someone more needy. With closet space and consciences cleared, we can begin the process of accumulating another outfit, repeating the cycle the following year.

How and where these clothes end up is the subject of the documentary, T-shirt Travels. We will explore how the old T-shirt you dumped in the local charity bin, winds up in being sold and traded in Africa. The documentary will also examine the broader implications of why Africa seems to be the dumping ground for not only our old clothes, but other handouts as well. It will explore why so many people in a continent, rich with natural resources and human potential, now find themselves poorer than they have ever been. Focusing on Zambia, a large country in Southern Africa with a population of approximately 10 million people, T-shirt Travels will explore the second hand clothes business and seek to understand the growing inequalities that exist between the first and third world.

Over the course of three months, and with the help of a talented crew, I was able to piece together the story of our old clothes - the hands they pass through and the remote places they reach - told by the people whose lives are part of that journey. Anna Cutler, both an old friend from Perth, and a talented camerawoman, took six weeks off work, to shoot the bulk of the film. T-Shirt Travels takes the viewer on this journey and introduces them to the people who sell, trade and wear these clothes. We meet Luka, who at 19 must support his family by selling and trading clothes in remote part of western Zambia; and Gertrude, a schoolteacher whose husband has been laid off from his job as a miner, sells in the main market on the Copperbelt. We also get to know Christine, who lives in an isolated Chiefdom of Kopa with no stores, collects caterpillars and trades them for an assortment of commodities. Through these and other portraits, we can come to see how our old clothes have formed the backbone of Zambia's growing informal economy and provides a livelihood for so many.

In a country where more than 80 percent of the population, live under the poverty line, and one in five people are HIV positive, life is not easy. But it is not all hopeless either. What these people demonstrate, in their interviews and through resilience and determination within their day-to-day lives, is that they simply need an opportunity. T-Shirt Travels aims to shed light on what we in the West can do to help give them that opportunity. Sure, Africa seems far away. Often it is represented as too far gone to deserve our attention. But as the journey of our old T-shirt reveals, the world is small and interconnected. These stories will bare testimony those who fall through the cracks within our "global village", as divisions between those who have and have not have grown enormous.

Production on T-shirt Travels is nearly complete and editing has already begun. George O'Donnell, an accomplished editor whose credits include the award-winning documentaries, Peace of Mind and Out of the Past, will work with me to produce what promises to be an entertaining and thought-provoking film. Our goal is to have this film ready for broadcast next year. We are now fundraising to finance post-production and are now editing a trailer toward that end.