A Glance at the Pros

        On April 25th, 2013, Westchester Community College held its annual Meet The Pros event.  This years event with the Pros was International Reporting: Women & Children in Crisis, and featured both a professional journalist and a student journalist sponsored by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

        This year's event featured Melissa Turley, a student journalist reporting from South Africa, and Allison Shelley, a photo-journalist reporting from around the world, with a heavy focus on Nepal for this event.  Also present was Devon Smith, Westchester Community College's first sponsored International Reporting Fellow Student, to speak about her upcoming trip to Northern Ireland.

                                                        Melissa Turley was the 2012 Pulitzer Center Campus Consortium International Reporting Fellow Student from George Washington University in Washington, D.C.  Choosing to travel to South Africa alone, she learned much from the female community and how they are repressed and stigmatized in many ways.  Women of color are still treated as second-class citizens in many parts of South Africa, and if they are a part of the LGBT community, it stigmatizes them further, opening them up to many accounts of domestic violence that the government turns a blind eye to, such as raping a lesbian to make her 'straight'.  Rural village women have to fight for basic rights, and while they rarely make legislative headway, they never give up the fight, which is to be admired from Melissa's perspective.

        Allison Shelley, a documentary photo-journalist, traveled among Haiti, India and Nepal since 2010.  Within that timeframe she learned a great deal about how women abroad are treated within their culture, especially when it comes to sensitive issues such as teen pregnancy, or in Nepal's case, having a period.  Nepal's tradition of Chaupadi, where women having a period are pushed into isolation, was Allison's main focal point at the event.   The pictures and stories she found of Chaupadi across Nepal showcase a wide array of situations, some being where the girls were put into the same sheds outside the house as the animals, and others where the family had a special room set aside for them.

    It was a time of isolation from others and the house, and this tradition is ingrained in Nepalese culture, with the more rural areas practicing a much stricter form.  Though she did find that some families did not want to send their loved ones out of the house into isolation during their period, they felt bound by tradition to do it.  Yet while some families could afford decent housing for the girls during Chaupadi, most of the time they have to stay with animals in a simple shed, leading to many problems in the cold Himalayans.

        Near the end of the event, Devon Smith was called up to give a brief summary of her upcoming trip to Northern Ireland.  She spoke briefly, but she chose Northern Ireland because she felt the conflict between Ireland, controlled by the Irish, and Northern Ireland, controlled by the British, was still an under reported crisis, even if they publicly made amends.  There is still much segregation among the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, which causes a large divide, and she is going to report on the subject this year.  She is the first student to be sponsored from Westchester Community College.

        The Pulitzer Center is known for its bold initiative in sponsoring student journalists to venture out and report on a crisis that may be under the national scope, and this year is proud to include Westchester Community College among the national college and universities where student journalists are sponsored from.  WCC is the first community college nationally to be sponsored by the Pulitzer Center.


        For more information on the works of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, these stories and more, visit http://pulitzercenter.org/.