Setting the stage...

To friends, family and other curious parties:

I’ve set up this blog as a way to keep in touch with people while I’m in Europe and to give a little bit of insight into what I’m doing while I’m over there. I’ll be leaving for Prague on Friday, May 25 at about two in the afternoon as part of an exchange program through the University of Montana School of Journalism. I’ll be away until June 18.

Some quick background info… This spring, the School of Journalism selected five students to travel to Prague to cover minority issues in the Czech Republic. Charles Hood, a former dean of the J-School and our professor leading this project, chose two photographers (Ashley McKee and Mary Rizos) and three writers (Zach Franz, Israel Tockman, and myself) that will work with five Czech students at Charles University, reporting on the Romani (Gypsy) population in Europe for three weeks. Following our time in Prague, the Czech students will join us in Montana to report on the Native American population here. We’ll create an Internet publication of stories, photos, and audio slideshows.

For the past three days, Ashley, Mary, Zach, Israel and I have been taking classes to get ready for the trip. Monday we concentrated the Web site itself and started brainstorming different ideas for the site’s layout. We also went over nuts-and-bolts types of things like the exchange rate (one Czech crown is roughly equal to a U.S. nickel), the public transportation system, and tips on where to get a cheap meal and a cold beer (the first word of Czech I learned is “pivo,” which means “beer”). Yesterday, a student who did her senior project on the Romani people in former Czechoslovakia gave us a brief lecture on the history of the people and their treatment under socialism and the evolving issues of being a minority in a young democracy. Most surprising to me was the fact that many Romani have fond memories of the Communist era because the state provided basic health care, education, housing, and jobs. While the jobs, housing and health care were not what we would consider to be adequate, it was an improvement over the persecution of years before, especially during the Nazi era.

Today, Jana Hood (a native Czech and Professor Hood’s wife) gave us a crash course on the Czech language. It’s a soft language with lots of “juh” and “yeh” sounds in it, very different from Spanish or German. But so far, the rules of pronunciation are fairly simple and don’t deviate nearly as often as English does. While I have no delusions that I will master it, I’m fairly confident that I’ll be able to order a beer at a pub without making a complete ass of myself.

After the language lesson, we started hashing out some story ideas for the project. The overall idea is to compare and contrast the situations of two very different minority groups in two very different countries. What sort of social problems to do they face? What sort of benefits do they have access to, and are those benefits being taken advantage of? Issues like education, health care, and criminal justice loom large, and I’m looking forward to meeting our Czech counterparts and getting to work.

That’s all for now. More tomorrow, methinks.