By Nivedta Kowlessar
News Editor, Guyana Chronicle
Georgetown, Guyana

Flicking back her short crop of straight, graying hair, Joan, the forever busy, harried looking assistant city editor approaches me early one August morning. "Someone left a box with six kittens outside the gates of an animal shelter," she reports. "Can you call the officer at the shelter and ask him for the details? And, we need that for tomorrow."

Handing me a small yellow note paper with a name and number, she reads my puzzled look and adds: "The story is really to let people know that there are a lot of spay/neuter services available that can help control the cat population." "Oh, okay," I replied, grateful for something to do, but surprised that something like this could really be news in the United States of America.

A picture of home flashed across my mind—scores of abandoned cats and dogs, some hungry and sick, some deliberately left to stray—and I think "these kittens would never make news in Guyana." Even the homeless humans, sleeping on cardboard on concrete pavements, have become a tired topic. In Monterey, the felines managed to make the front page of the local section of The Herald, with a big color picture too, and even became a major topic of conversation that day.

Very early that cold morning, two officers had found the cardboard box outside the shelter. Lying on a towel inside were the newborn kittens and a note that read: "I'm sorry, I can't afford to get her fixed." The owner meant getting the mother cat spayed—a service that is provided free or at a subsidized cost by some cities. The officers fed the kittens milk while calling rescue groups to adopt them. If the kittens were not adopted, they would have had to be put to sleep at a cost of $10 to $20 each.

"Aahh!" There was a very audible sigh of relief in the newsroom when a last minute check by the city editor late that afternoon revealed that a group had stepped forward to take over the kittens and make sure they find good homes. "The only negative," my edited story read, "was a sense of loss at the Department of Public Safety where many officers set aside their guns and traffic ticket books at times during the day to help feed the hungry felines, using syringes."

The story made me realize news is really what a community thinks it is and its definition will vary depending on where you are. In this extremely animal-conscious community, a lot of people will bark if a man ever 'bites a dog'. These past months, I have watched them rally faster to raise money for a dog or a sea otter than for a search for a missing single mother with a six-year-old son or the homeless youths who hang out on the streets downtown and commit suicide out of despair.

The kittens got more space than another piece I did on local church volunteers toiling 12 to 14 hours night and day, weathering rain and humidity to build a home in just 11 days for abandoned children in Romania. There was no rush to print a follow-up on an appeal fund for the church to continue helping the orphans. No quarrel, the paper knows what the people want. As the office voice mail would prove, that follow-up did not manage to get as much reaction as the kittens or another story I did on a mentoring program for fund-raisers, prominently displayed, above the fold, on the front page of the business section. Compared with one or two calls about the orphans, the fund-raising program pulled calls for three weeks straight. Whatever the focus of the stories I did during my fellowship—kittens, orphans, fundraising, weed watching, or just a man who knows how to make anybody look good in a hat, thanks to The Herald, I now see a story in every single thing.