By Steve Collins | Board president
Reports from Remote African Village to Icy Lake Superior
Each day, Youth Journalism International students give us all reason to be proud and to feel hopeful about the future. They’re such an outstanding group that we’ve come to expect excellence. But sometimes, a piece of work rises so far above that it makes us wish everyone on the planet could see it. Nigerian YJI student Linus Okechukwu’s January story of a small village struggling to overcome a horrific massacre did just that.
Reporting from a place so remote it’s not on any map we could find, Linus interviewed survivors of the murderous attack, and wrote of their suffering but also about how they were healing by celebrating Christmas. It’s a remarkable piece. To get the story – which was barely noticed in the local media and not at all outside Nigeria – Linus visited the village several times, snapping photos with his cell phone, even climbing a tree to get an aerial view! Linus now leads a small group of new Nigerian student reporters for YJI.
Of course Nigeria is not the only place where YJI reporters are busy. The polar vortex – and a tough winter in general – had students trekking through the snow and ice with their cameras in Chicago, Toronto, Minnesota,Georgia and Connecticut, sharing the troubles and beauty of winter with readers worldwide.
From India, reporter Harsha Mishra marked the one-year anniversary of the brutal gang rape in Delhi with a tribute to the victim’s bravery and a scathing rebuke of the system slow to punish the attackers. Jenny Neufeld, a YJI student in upstate New York, cleverly compared the glitches in the Obamacare website with the troubles she and other high school seniors faced with the online Common Application.
YJI reporter Yelena Samofalova, an American who was born in Ukraine, wrote about her own sadness in watching the chaos there and from Venezuela, YJI’s Mary Granella did her best to explain that food shortages and an economic crisis are at the root of public protests there. Coverage of the Lunar New Year came from YJI students in China and Vietnam, along with movie reviews, news and more from the U.S., U.K., Nepal and Pakistan.
Connecticut YJI writers Ambriel Johnson and Alan Burkholder detailed a wild rumpus: the New Britain Museum of American Art’s tribute to artist Maurice Sendak and his Where the Wild Things Are. And, sporting YJI’s first White House press credentials, newcomer Sherry Sah covered President Barack Obama’s March speech at Central Connecticut State University. All this and more is posted at www.yjiblog.org . Please check often so you don’t miss anything!
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