That's right, I'm back.
Admittedly, I didn't go anywhere -- I of course didn't abandon my ode to wanderlust -- but I have been M.I.A. for about a month. That's not okay with me.
For those who are curious about what I've been up to in the past month, here is a summary:
I started my last year of undergrad at the University of Missouri Journalism School. Oof. People have been asking the classic question, "So what are your plans for after graduation?" I can't quite answer that question, but I've developed a calm, confident persona in approaching this year. So, what are my plans? I'll get back to you.
My classes this year are enlightening, even Communications Law (the language of law is an alien communicator to me). This semester I'm busy with poetry and creative non-fiction assignments in my Creative Writing and Pedagogy class; later in the semester we will run our own workshop with local high schoolers. This is both intimidating and intriguing to me. Today, I had International Journalism with Gareth Harding, a former international reporter formerly based in Brussels. This class is about the cruciality of wanderlusting and understanding cultures before reporting on them. Today our guest speaker Carolina Escudero, a J-School professor from Argentina, showed us a clip from a United Nations meeting with Bolivia's President Evo Morales to illustrate a point about Western media's generalizations and stereotyping of what it does not fully know. In short, Morales was labeled a "dictator" and an "enemy" to the American government because he grows coca and is, therefore, a "drug addict." So U.S. media says. But if these foreign corespondents had actually been in Bolivia and interacted with the culture, they would understand that coca is chewed by people of every social class to help relieve altitude-sickness. The coca plant is also a representation of Bolivians' connection to their land and culture.
Drug addict? According to the "evidence" our media has gathered, we are wrong.
This -- our media's failure to attempt to understand other cultures and lifestyles -- is my biggest disappointment in media and society. Why must our lifestyle be the only lifestyle? It is not.
More on classes... BIG NEWS!!! That's right folks, in my Women and Media class, taught by the amazing Mary Kay Blakely, a former/current writer for Ms. magazine and Mother Jones, we will be Skyping with Gloria Steinem. Sorry, I think I'll repeat myself. We will be Skyping with Gloria Steinem. When Mary Kay announced this in class last week, I had a reaction comparable to Beiber fever? I don't know much about Beiber fever (hysteria for celebrities freaks me out...except if it's Beyoncé), but I held my breath for a frightening amount of time and later there were screams, lots of screams. Anyway, more on that later.
I'm also taking Magazine Design and now is the time I decide my capstone. Magazine Editing? Producing? Design? Writing? (Obviously I'll choose Writing). But perhaps not so obviously (at least right now) I may change my mind.
The Big Project I'm working on is slowly blooming. Slowly, trickling, some would call it molasses. But my dedication is not molasses. I'm just carefully documenting my Rwanda experience, piece by piece, tapped tree by tapped tree.
The other Big Project I'm working on is also progressing. I went to The Mustard Seed, a fair-trade store in downtown Columbia, last week and discussed details for selling the Avenir art in-store and online. The world of fair-trade business is foreign to me, but I'm finding myself more interested in its concepts, just as I surprisingly found myself interested (and still interested) in micro-finance and micro-loans. When I was a kid, I rejected numbers and math -- too confusing, too many rules -- but I like these numbers.
More on all of this later. In the meantime, I've got Big Projects.
I'm glad to be back.
Yanna
