Reflections on Africa: A Student Perspective

by Paul Bowers, guest contributor to this issue of InterCom

I could have stayed home this summer. I could have skipped out on the sweaty nights beneath mosquito nets and the long days spent pondering disease and poverty.

But I wouldn’t have learned the things I did. And I wouldn’t have gotten to write for the New York Times.

I spent the first two weeks of the summer in West Africa with Nicholas Kristof, a Times columnist who’s got a couple of Pulitzers under his belt. We saw five countries, and I posted a blog to the Times Web site every day.

The things I learned ranged from the problems of healthcare in the developing world to the etiquette of eating from a neighbor’s mango tree, but the lessons that will stay with me the longest are the ones about journalism.

For journalists, there are few halls more hallowed than those of the New York Times, and Kristof is one of those globe-trotting giants we all think we’ll be when we grow up. So naturally, I felt I had skipped a few steps.

One of the first things I learned on the ground was the importance of asking hard questions. It’s a pretty basic concept, but until I met Kristof, I had never seen someone live it out so relentlessly.

Frankly, I wouldn’t have had the guts to ask a pair of Bissau Guinean parents whether they intended to mutilate their newborn daughter’s genitals. It’s a dangerous practice with deep cultural roots and various religious rationales, but the basic idea is that, by eliminating pleasure from your daughter’s sex life, she will be faithful to her future husband. Asking these parents about it was like stomping on all the world’s most delicate toes at once: sexuality, family life and religion.

But you have to ask those questions. It turned out this family wasn’t going to do it, but we learned some startling things by pursuing the topic with other families. In the Guinean village of Kouttan, a traditional birth attendant explained the bizarre social dynamic in which women pressure each other to have the procedure done to their daughters.

I learned that I can’t do a foreign country justice in my writing if I focus only on the hardships. I was surrounded by fascinating people and a striking landscape, and to omit those details would be to paint West Africa as an oversimplified victim. So my reporting on malnutrition and maternal health was peppered liberally with things like rooftop dancing and pickup soccer games.

I learned why multimedia work is important. Our party had a third person: Patrick Farrell, a young Times videographer who describes the online news video format as “mini-documentary.” Patrick handed me an HD camcorder and gave me the simple directive to shoot what I saw fit. As I blundered my way through shooting videos and recording voiceovers, my Luddite tendencies slowly faded. It’s one thing to write about a foreign country; it’s quite another to let your readers see and hear it all.

And that experience — the seeing and hearing of news and issues — is what this job is about, after all. A journalist can put a face on injustice. In the times that I felt impotent to help the people I saw suffering, I tried to remember that I was a conduit.

I can’t solve the problems I saw in West Africa. And I don’t have to. My job is to tell the stories of the wailing mothers and begging children and to help people make sense of them. Really, that’s all I’m equipped to do.