By Paulo Braga

The year 2000 was most of all a year of transformations for the thirteen fellows who were brave enough to face the challenge of discovery. Discovery of new journalistic practices, a new environment, a new culture but, above all, the rediscovery of themselves as professionals and human beings. The texts that follow reflect those changes, each in their own way. They are put together like patchwork, rather than thrown on a pot, melted and presented in a cosmetic way. The result was a mixture of well thought out and elaborated material with raw and spontaneous accounts of what those six months meant for each of us.

The election kept most of the fellows busy, writing their accounts of the story for their home publications, but also providing great food for thought. Fellow Ljubica Gojgic was with no doubt the luckiest one: she was able to return to Yugoslavia to report on the changes that were sweeping her country. Back in the U.S., she witnessed America being engulfed by a political crisis of its own. "It made me realize that, even in highly developed countries, there are crisises. In a way, our countries were united."

We also saw how our newsrooms worked with a great deal of resources to provide the best possible coverage. The outcome, however, was not the most desirable one for some media outlets. As fellow Xu Binglan put it, "giving in to the pressure of competition at the possible expense of inaccurate reports" can lead to "great shame." The same pressure of competition is forcing most of America's cities to live with a one newspaper monopoly, and fellow José Velázquez expressed his concern about the changes he witnessed at the Denver Rocky Mountain News as the paper puts in place changes related to a joint operating agreement with its former competitor. Velázquez ended up asking "where is the full freedom of the American press?" The answer, he concludes, is that "in some countries, the media is affected by the pressure of the political power. In some other countries, the pressure comes from another kind of power. The power of the green bills."

There were lots of lessons to be learned, both personally and professionally, and sometimes one territory invaded the other, as it was impossible to dissociate our professional successes and failures from our experience as a whole. Vietnamese Hai Van Nguyen admitted she was "unsure of a warm encounter" with her compatriots in Minnesota, because of the scars left by the Vietnam War. Later, she concluded that, in her new environment, there was no difference between a South Vietnam soldier and somebody from Hanoi. South African fellow Rowan Philp expressed what he confessed was a "rehearsed" opinion on a personality of his country's history, only to be amazed when he realized some American knew by heart part of the history of his country he never bothered to watch, hiding behind the mask of a reporter's neutrality. In another episode, Rowan had to learn fast how to improvise, after a veteran Washington Post reporter erased all the research he did for a news story and made him start from scratch, writing "what really happened" at a White House dinner as their deadline approached.

We also had to learn that more than wars, major disasters or political crisis, the everyday content of American newspapers reflects the emphasis on local news. News, as fellow Kibret Markos learned, can also be the story of a fallen tree in a Tampa (Florida) yard. "Who would want to read about a fallen tree that didn't kill anyone? And what am I going to write in this story?", fellow Markos asked himself when given an assignment for the St. Petersburg Times. He later found not only answers to his questions, but was able to learn a new way of doing his reporting, maybe not sensational or grand, but full of meaning to his paper's readership.

Fellow Daniel Gutman realized during his tenure at The Kansas City Star that hearing the voice of the common folk can enrich a good story, although he points out that including "real people" on a story doesn't make it any better. "With my experience as a Friendly fellow, I became aware that many journalists in my country are too far from the average people. And, it's true, they are missing a wonderful source of stories." The difference in news values made a strong impression among fellows. Nivedta Kowlessar, from Guyana, was surprised by how big a story it was for her paper when a bunch of kittens were abandoned at the gate of an animal shelter. More surprising was the reaction of the Monterey community in another case, willing to give more money to a fund benefiting a sea otter than to the family of a young woman who had been murdered.

Fellows also got in touch with different work practices, like the mandatory use of tape recorders in The Greenville News. South African Noxolo Nxusani recalls her frustration when her name was removed from a story, "because I did not have a tape to back me up."

The fellowship was an opportunity to forget limitations and pursue long-forgotten dreams. For Jeerawat Na Thalang, it meant entering the almost all-male world of sports coverage and proving her Thai colleagues, who considered the atmosphere at the sports section too harsh for a woman, were wrong. And while here, we always had thoughts for the ones we left back home. For some of them, like Gloria, the daughter of Kenyan fellow Hellaine Anyango, the explanation for her mother's absence came as a magic one. "That plane is so high up in the sky and mummy cannot get out and come home!" We wished, in a way, that we all could settle our moments of loneliness with such simple explanations.

There were plenty of lessons of humility, like using the return to an almost cub reporter status to rediscover ourselves as "individuals and journalists," as fellow Raffat Rashid explains. "When you are doing the same sort of writing for years at a stretch, you don't know how good or bad you are. You tend to think of yourself as the high and mighty where you have the ability to criticize the policy makers or change human lives." I made her words my own, as I had to rediscover myself as a journalist through accomplishments that may seem small from an outside point of view. But if most of us weren't changing lives as we used to do in our home countries, one thing is for sure—our 13 lives have changed in ways that couldn't possibly happen otherwise.