By MITCH SMITH
Mitch Smith is a journalism major who will begin his second year at UNL in August. Originally from Overland Park, Kan., Smith was the winner of Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s annual Win-A-Trip contest. Smith, who had never left the United States before, was selected from nearly 900 applicants based on his entry essay.
Smith spent 12 days reporting with Kristof in four African countries in May, covering issues ranging from conservation to maternal health to education. While in Africa, he filed a daily blog post for the Times. You can read his entries at http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/author/mitch-smith/.
Mitch with new-found friends at a mud-hole on Republic of Congo’s Highway No. 1. The truck behind them had been stuck for the last month.
When I was checking in for my flight to Libreville, Gabon, the ticket agent politely asked one of my traveling companions, “Where the hell is that?”
There I was, totally out of my league, standing in the middle of one of the world’s busiest airports, and the person giving me my boarding pass didn’t have a clue where I was going.
If you, like the geographically challenged airline employee, aren’t familiar with Gabon, don’t feel too bad. It’s a relatively wealthy West African nation slightly larger than Nebraska in area but a little smaller in population. It gained modest notoriety as a host site for Survivor and received some coverage for setting more than 10 percent of its land aside as national parks.
But aside from a few old National Geographic articles, the CIA World Factbook and clips from that ridiculous CBS reality show, I really didn’t know much more about where I was going than that ticket agent did.
I was born in Omaha, grew up outside Kansas City and returned to Nebraska for college. Driving through the Midwest, I have paid an admission fee to see a five-legged cow, marveled at a cliff with five presidents’ faces carved on the side and spent hours wondering why I have to go through Missouri and Iowa to get to Lincoln when my home state of Kansas borders Nebraska in the first place.
But spending 12 days traveling overland from Libreville through the Republic of the Congo and into the Democratic Republic of the Congo put the five-legged cow and the rest of my Midwestern roadside adventures to shame.
In Africa, I saw camps of the purportedly dangerous “Ninja” rebels who were unarmed and underfed. I encountered six-foot-deep muddy gorges on Congo’s National Highway No. 1 that had ensnared some trucks for more than a month.
And, perhaps most poignantly, I watched a pair of teenagers in a remote village tell me of how they dreamed of attending college and of the hunger that gnawed at their bodies. Their story made my heart sink when I walked into the Selleck dining hall on the first day of my summer class, making me wonder why I had access to a university education and a buffet of endless food when those two teens struggled for both.
Because I had never left the United States before, much of my experience seemed surreal at the time. Things that would be illegal (14-year-olds having children with adults) or unthinkable (a swarm of bats flying out of the roof of a hospital) back home coexisted alongside cell phones and friendly locals. Some parts of Africa were uncomfortably foreign, but always nearby were things that felt not unlike Lincoln or Kansas City.
It was that human side of Africa that transformed my perspective on the world and on my life. I hope to use that fresh outlook to my advantage as I return to my comparatively tame life in the States. But even more, I think this trip transformed the way I look at a story and at journalism.
For years, I had wanted an opportunity to practice “real” journalism and to cover global issues for a wide audience. I was frustrated with the seeming insignificance of things like the investigative project I wrote for my high school newspaper about crosswalks.
This summer, I got the chance to cover those big-picture issues. I learned what I do well, what I need to work on and what it’s like to have my work read by thousands of discerning eyes while writing on tight deadlines and no sleep.
Now I can come back to school and work on making those improvements and finishing my degree. But I feel I do so as a much different person than I was when that ticket agent asked just where we were going.
My ideas about what is important in this world and what journalism can accomplish have changed, and I know that will help dictate where I go from here.
And, hey, if nothing else, I now know where Libreville is in case any other curious airline employees inquire.
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