Shedding Light on Crisis Around the World

On Thursday April, 25 Westchester Community College held its annual meet the pros event. Westchester Community College has held this event for 25 years. Along with WCC this year meet the pros was a collaboration with the Pulitzer center on crisis reporting. This event allows journalist to come to campus share some of their work and give their personal insight on their jobs to students. This year this event hosted Allison Shelley and Melissa Turley. Shelley is a documentary photographer and multimedia creator. Turley was the 2012 winner of a pulitzer center grant which gave her the opportunity to go abroad and report on the story of her choice. The pulitzer center on crisis reporting focuses on bringing to light stories that are underreported from around the world. Allison Shelley shared her experiences in Haiti and in Nepal. Her main focus on her presentation was Nepal. Allison along with Allyn Gaestel visited Nepal to investigate chaupadi. This is a practice that forces women to be isolated from their families during their menstruation. A lot of women must sleep outside sometimes unsheltered from nature. This practice has been the cause of many tragedies. Melissa Turley traveled to africa to find her story. Melissa was faced with many womens rights issues in Africa. Including violence against women and the law of the land. Women in the LGBTI community are faced with high rape numbers because some men believe they can rape them straight. The police is not very helpful with this matter. Other women still fight for their rights. Some women in certain communities need men in order to take a case to court and to own property. These laws held by tradition along with traditional leaders who make sure they are followed. The big issue now is these traditional leaders now want these customs written into law. If this were to happen it would be devastating for the women fighting for the right to be their own person. The last person to speak at the meet the pros event was Devon Smith who was WCC first winner of a Pulitzer center grant. She will be traveling to Ireland to investigate on the conflict between Catholics and Protestant people still going on today. After the presentation students were able to ask the pros some questions. The meet the pros event definitely did its job shedding light on stories most people don't know about. This is a wonderful event for students, future journalist or not. I look forward to using the pulitzer center to learn more about crisis around the world.

 For more information on Turleys and Shelleys stories please visit: http://pulitzercenter.org/