Jai-Yen: Cool Heart

Produced through DCTV's Pro-TV Youth Media Fellowship Program in association with Where There Be Dragons.

Daniel Howard, a teenage boy who lives with his family in a housing project in Brooklyn, makes an unlikely six-week journey from the hectic, noisy and often dangerous world of NYC to the poor, rural villages of Laos. Though living in barely adequate shelter and working hard in the fields every day to survive, the villagers seem happier to Daniel than his comparatively comfortable neighbors back in Brooklyn. He attributes the difference to the Laos peoples' "cool heart," their ability to find contentment and joy in the common pleasures of family and environment.