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There are 2 comments on Dateline: Kenya

  1. Many thanks to Leslie Friday and BU Today for featuring the PamojaTogether project. As one of the faculty involved with the project from the beginning, I would like to highlight just how critical our partnership with Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology (JOOUST) and Great Lakes University of Kisumu (GLUK) has been.

    If it weren’t for Dr. Charles Oduke (the PamojaTogehter Kenya Director and a member of the JOOUST faculty) or the 10 Kenyan students we would have been very lost indeed. Before we arrived in Bondo Town in early May, Professor Oduke and the JOOUST and GLUK students had identified stories, tracked down leads, set up interviews, and thought through travel logistics. Upon arriving, our team of 23 (18 students and 5 faculty members) holed up in a JOOUST classroom for two days to talk through these as well as the story ideas BU students had generated from afar. Then we debated (at length!) which stories were the most compelling, the most likely to work out, and the most accessible to hasty travel. By the end of that two days the BU, JOOUST, and GLUK students had shed their school identities and were operating as a single team.

    Sure, as the BU Today story points out, we hit some snags along the way. But we also parted after two weeks with a promising collection of 18+ stories, miles of video footage, hundreds (maybe thousands) of photos, and some lifelong friendships. For me, the primary achievement of the project was bringing together students from 3 cultures (Kenyan, Sri Lankan, and American) to learn from one another and give voice to a wide variety of stories and perspectives on foreign and local aid.

    The plan was for each student to have the opportunity to be primary author on at least one story and to support each others’ stories (in the form of photography, technology know-how, cultural and contextual knowledge, translation, editing, public health fundamentals, storytelling techniques, etc). For the most part, we achieved that goal while also coming away with plenty of lessons learned from one another, from trial and error, and from our numerous adventures in cross-cultural collaborative journalism.

    To read all the stories posted to date, please visit: http://pamojatogether.com/

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