Meet The Pros Conference

 

 The Pulitzer Center sponsors international journalism around the world to help bring awareness to a wide range of crisis presently occurring. Issues that you do not think about on a daily basis. Some of which you may have had no idea about at all. The Pulitzer Center chooses students to accompany other journalist to different countries to cover such topics. We were given an assignment  in our Multimedia Journalism class that was directly related to this organization. It was time for the Pulitzer Center to chose another student. In order to be considered you needed to do some research. We were instructed to go on their website and look at some of their past projects and try and come up with a crisis that I felt needed to be documented and needed attention. A student was once again going to be chosen to actually travel to the country of their choice to cover a pressing issue.
    On April 25 our class was told to attend a conference called Meet The Pros. There we met some of the past winners who were awarded the opportunity to travel to various countries.

      The first speaker's name was Melissa Turley. She traveled to South Africa to report on women's issues. She spoke of awful stories about how the women of South Africa live in such a male dominant society. She attended some of the lesbian and gay rights conferences while there. In South Africa being a lesbian is considered something quite horrible and men feel they have the right to rape these women. Their excuse is that by doing so they are helping them to become straight. Melissa also told of the high murder rates of lesbians living there. She went on to explain how "women did not even feel safe in their own homes". In this country another big problem is prostitution. At this moment it is still an illegal act. There is a large group of women who are fighting to change that. They believe it would be much safer if it was legal. This is because this county has the highest HIV rate in the world in which many women contract this disease from being raped. By legalizing prostitution it will be more controlled and women could seek help if needed.

                 

      The second woman who spoke at this conference was Allison Shelley. She works as in independent documentary photographer. She traveled to Nepal where a abortion is illegal. There pregnancy and childbirth is one of the biggest killers of teenage girls. They do not receive medical treatment while pregnant and many suffer because of this. She showed us a photo of a young women who was in agony, just bleeding on a table not receiving the medical attention she needed.

       Another major problem in this country is that they girls are forced to marry at such a young age...some as young as 10. The way they treat these young girls and women are horrible. It is also practice in this country that girls begin to have their periods they are sent to a hut outside of their home till they are done. These huts are very small and can be quite cold. These huts are called Chhaupadi. They believe that when a girl or woman has their period they're "dirty" and can not be in the house or around food. Allison spoke of how some of these girls would die while in these huts. Some from fires and animal attacks. They are also sometimes raped in these huts.
Devin Smith was the last girl to speak. She is this years winner and will be traveling to Northern Ireland. There she will document how 90% of schools are religiously segregated. This is causing many issues there. In January 2013 a six day riot broke out because the government said they could not hang the Ireland flag. I am sure she will find many more problems while visiting that country.
All in all I felt this conference was very interesting and it brought to my attention things that had never even crossed my mind before. It made me feel that even though we have many problems in this country as well, I would never want to have to deal with some of the issues that are such a huge problem in some other countries.
You can find out more about the Pulitzer center by visiting their website  www.Pulitzercenter.org or by checking out their Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/Pulitzercenter