Over the BorderLine:
Dispatch from the North

About a week ago I was fortunate enough to spend a few days in Piura, a town in northern Perú surrounded by desert and near the Ecuadorian border. A journalism contact Luz Maria Helguero, who runs the local El Tiempo newspaper invited me to give a few talks to a group of rural reporters and local University students.

Journalism students at the
Universidad Alas Peruanas in Piura

Luz Maria runs an Open Society funded organization dedicated to training news reporters and editors from around Perú to do their jobs better. Unlike my students here in Lima, most of these reporters have little formal training before they start actual media work. While many have the desire to exude the fourth power, few have the training to understand how to do it well. Luz Maria invites these reporters to workshops around the country so they can get a little slice of how to be better, more complete reporters. While I struggle sometimes to get my students to listen to me, I often find the opposite at these rural workshops, an eagerness and hunger from participants that is heart warming. In Piura I was forced to abandon my planned powerpoint presentation (the nerve of some countries to not have proper technology), and just talk.

I have gotten way too accustomed to visual aids and have somewhat strayed from the real, effective nature of story telling. Spanish Improv Gringo Jesse style, to my surprise, went well. We developed an outline for more creative news coverage, how to find new sources, and how to write more complete stories. One of the participants offered the example of a polluted river in his town for us to use as an example. We worked around the various informative scenes we could create, the people who dump their garbage next to the river, the people who scavenge through that same garbage to make their livelihood, the people whose health is jeopardized by this garbage, etc.. So instead of a simple story that the river is indeed polluted, we came up with a whole week series of stories about the river and its various implications in this town. At first I felt what I had added to this group was kind of pedestrian and simplistic, but the response I got was indeed the opposite. They wanted not just a creative solution, but a framework that they could take back to their papers and radios. They felt that I had helped them with that. I am now hoping to follow up and visit some of them so I can see if and how they have used my suggestions.

The second part of my trip to Piura involved an adventure with some local journalists from Luz María´s paper, El Tiempo. A lazy Sunday afternoon of coverage got a whole lot more interesting when we dropped in a local town, Sullana, to investigate what turned out to be a probable case of human trafficking. After a few hours of waiting, a busload of 31 Chinese nationals arrived at the local national police office. My cohorts snapped photos as the Chinese, most looked twenty something, blurry eyed and decidedly un-showered, were ushered into a room for interrogation. The only Spanish word uttered from the group was baño despite the effort by local authorities to make them speak Spanish. The police captain tried for about a half hour to communicate by getting directly into their faces and shouting, “Ha-Blas Es-Pañol?” They stared straight back expressionless. The scene turned a bit comical as the police tried to figure out what to do and the Chinese began to get restless and started touching everything in the room, computers, file cabinets, photos, etc., I fully expected the 3-stooges to arrive to complete the moment.
Eventually 4 Peruvians, also detained, arrived looking extremely culpable, hiding their faces as my reporter companions snapped photos. One of them helped his case by eating his cellular phone sim card so as to prevent the authorities from tracing his calls. Pretty funny, I am sure that sat well in his system.
Details finally came out that the group was found in a hotel on the beach near Piura. They had no credentials and had not paid for a weeks worth of room and board. The authorities were trying to determine if the Peruvians had stolen their credentials or if this was a case of human trafficking. Apparently the group’s itinerary included going from Perú to Panama to the US eventually, presumably illegally. Something tells me that if people are willing to fly to Perú from China and from there figure out a way into the US, building a wall on the Mexican border is not going to stop them. But what do I know.