International Reporting

Agata Poniatowski is a Bushwick resident whose parents emigrated from Poland to escape communism before she and her brother were born. Though her brother was sent to Polish school when he was a child, her parents decided not to send her to one.

Now, Poniatowski is taking small steps to learn it. She asks her parents to text her in Polish and tries her best to respond to them in Polish. In her free time, she watches children’s shows with subtitles on, including a remastered version of Baba Jaga.

Poniatowski thinks that this could have been avoided if her parents had sent her to one of the Polish schools located in New York City.

“I was really—I guess you could say a rowdy kid. I would always be crying and be upset. I didn’t like that ballet class was 40 minutes long,” Poniatowski said.

“My parents probably were like ‘maybe not’ for me, but my brother had more patience, so they sent him and he learned how to read and write in Polish. Although he quit pretty shortly … but he did have the opportunity to read and write, whereas I’m trying to do that at 20 years old and it’s really difficult.”

Poniatowski, now 21, was born and raised in Ronkonkoma, Suffolk County, with her parents and an older brother. Growing up, she became fascinated with photographs of nature and rare animals. She is currently an urban sustainability major at Baruch College and aspires to have one of her photographs published in National Geographic.

In an interview, Poniatowski recalled a moment when her cousin decided to test her writing skills by asking her to write down the word “Łóżko,” which means “bed.”

“I gave her a piece of paper with my idea of how to spell it and she just started laughing hysterically. I didn’t want for that to happen. I didn’t want to lose my communication with my family when I’m not in Poland, so I want to be able to text them, to talk to them,” Poniatowski said.

Krystian Surdel is currently 19 years old. His parents brought him to the United States when he was only 3 years old and he attended Polish school from pre-kindergarten to 12th grade. He is currently enrolled in John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he plans to earn a bachelor’s degree in global history.

In an interview, Surdel explained that the first five years of Polish school are generally concentrated on teaching students how to read and write. Once students moved on to middle school and high school, they are introduced to Polish geography, history and literature. Eight grade is generally reserved for preparing for Confirmation, as some schools require students to memorize over 100 texts from the Bible in order to receive the sacrament.

Paulina Ekstowicz emigrated from Poland after she finished fourth grade. Her father was the first to move to the United States and her mother decided to rejoin him in order to earn more money and ensure that Ekstowicz could get a good university education.

When they moved, Ekstowicz was 11 years old. Her parents never sent her to Polish school, but she was able to remember the language by speaking Polish at home and watching Polish TV with her parents. In her free time, she also reads Polish books and listens to Polish music.

“I think they [Polish schools] are [helpful] to a certain extent, because you do get to make more polish friends and learn more about your own history and traditions,” Ekstowicz said. “But I also think it’s very stressful, because it is like Saturday school majority of the time and it’s just another level of stress.”

On the other hand, Poniatowski believes that attending Polish school helps build a person’s sense of cultural identity and connect them to their country of origin.

“I’m Polish because of the culture that I have at my house, but I think that I would feel more connected to being Polish if I also had the ability to communicate with that side of my family, or read the newspaper or something like that. Actually know what’s going on in Poland. Not from The New York Times, but from a Polish magazine or Polish news. … Understanding politics or big words, that would be cool,” Poniatowski said.

In the past year and a half, Poland has been ruled by the Law and Justice Party, which proposed several right-wing laws, including a total ban on abortion and reforms that were meant to align the justice system with the party’s beliefs. While the black protests helped prevent the abortion ban, the justice system is under total control of the ruling party.

Surdel said that attending Polish school helped him stay in touch with current events in Poland and understand their historical significance.

“This used to be a democracy,” Surdel said. “That’s what they’ve been fighting for hundreds of years, we haven’t existed for several years as well. Now we have a chance to be democratic and we’re just trying to go back to older roots. They’re trying to rewrite our history and what it means to be Polish. It’s just sad.”

As Russia-United States relations dominate headlines with Russian President Vladimir Putin engaging in risky endeavors abroad, such as airstrikes in Syria, interventions in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, many Russian-Americans are left with a less-than-favorable image of their country to fellow U.S. citizens.

 

This is not a new phenomenon. James Bond movies, circa the 1960s, have painted a negative image of Russians in the minds of many Americans, and often Russian immigrants find that image difficult to escape when attempting to assimilate to U.S. culture.

 

Irina Groushevaia, 22, emigrated from Russia after her high school graduation and has found that Americans generally hold negative stereotypes about Russia and its people.

 

“When I came here, I kind of felt that everyone either thinks I’m this crazy femme fatale or thinks I’m going to show up with fake blonde hair and be a super thin model, which I’m not and they are stereotypes that everyone tries to fit me in and I don’t fit into them because the perceptions by Americans of Russians is very different from reality,” she said.

 

“Of course stereotypes exist for a reason, but the way we are perceived in American movies, in American culture is just ridiculous,” Groushevaia added, “We’re all over the top with how we look, always in fur and stilettos and every woman is like the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. And we’re always evil and really cold and backstabbing and I think that exists in every culture, not just in Russian culture, but when you ask an American what a Russian is, it’s always a James Bond villain.”

 

 

While Russia-American relations have continued to be tense since the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union, Americans’ perceptions of Russia as “the enemy” seems especially relevant in a tense political climate where rumors exist that Putin helped rig the polling system to elect President Donald Trump, an unfavorable candidate to many Americans, according to the popular vote, which he lost by nearly 2 million.

 

Sergey Arinkin, 26, who lives in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn with his partner, another Russian immigrant, has noticed Americans’ attitudes toward Russian immigrants changing since the election of Trump. “Nowadays, there is some sort of a new stereotype that all the Russians are Trump supporters. When we were in LA, in one bar, super liberal folk decided not to continue any communication [with us] because we said that we were Russian,” he said.

 

Arinkin added, “I would say that generally Americans feel uncomfortable that Putin somehow tried to affect the elections. So liberals and democrats don’t like [the] Russian government and people who support it, but I don’t think that true republicans care about it.”

 

Regardless of whether Putin did rig the presidential election, it seems that many Americans have long-held stereotypes about Russians that are a combination of their representation in pop culture and in mainstream media. Russia has been accused of hacking into Hillary Clinton’s emails, being a huge financial backer of Trump, rigging the presidential election, appointing certain members to Trump’s cabinet, among many other things.

 

Russian-Americans, who have no involvement in Russian government, often bear the brunt of criticism by fellow Americans for their motherland’s actions. Anastasia Amelchakova, a 35-year-old mother of two, who has been living in the United States for nearly 20 years, thinks Russian stereotypes are, for the most part, a product of Anti-Russian propaganda dating back to the Cold War.

 

Amelchakova said, “There is a widely accepted stereotype about Russians being ‘tough,’ mostly inspired by the legendary cold winters, tolerance toward vodka consumption and Soviet-era propaganda. This stereotype translates into [a] perception of Russians as abrasive individuals, unyielding in arguments, with strict parenting ideology and impenetrable to personal offense.”

 

She went on to say, “Needless to say, this is actually untrue. Russian mentality is actually mostly inspired by extensive fictional literature, spiritual background and connection to nature. A true Russian, to me, is a ‘free spirit’ with a creative imagination, sociable and appreciable and quite impressionable by others’ opinion.”

 

 

Jared Diamond’s novel, Guns, Germs And Steel, uses historical archaeology to try to answer the controversial and unknown reasons why different regions and cultures developed with such disparity across the world. “Empires with steel weapons were able to conquer or exterminate tribes with weapons of stone and wood. How, though, did the world get to be the way it was in A.D. 1500?” Diamond also addresses the illusion that throughout history “industrialized states” have been looked at as better than “hunter-gatherer tribes” and that industrialization means progress and happiness.

This relates to the country of India, which I am focusing on this semester. From 1757 to 1858 the British East India Company ruled parts of India after the Carnatic Wars, which were mainly fought on Indian territories. The British East India Company became a monopoly of trade and their dominance led to their control over most of India and then to British Raj, in which the British crown controlled India. British Raj lasted all the way up until 1947. Under British rule, India started producing steel in 1908 to compete with the United States and Germany. The Indian Empire (British rule) also built railway systems in the late 1800’s. Like Diamond points out, throughout history, more developed nations desired to colonize more primitive nations. One explanation Diamond might give as to why India and Great Britain developed at different rates is climate, as Great Britain is colder and needed to rapidly make technological advances to stay alive while India was warmer and people could survive with very little advances.

The crowded waiting room was getting hotter as more people came in. Their impatient eyes looked out the tall buildings of Manhattan from the sixth floor where the Ecuadorian Consulate is located.

Hundreds of Ecuadorians visit the Consulate every day after president Donald Trump promised to deport immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants. There are an estimated 687, 000 Ecuadorians in the United States, 61 percent of them are foreign born according to The Pew Research Center.

“I am here to get my son an Ecuadorian passport,” said Andrea in Spanish, who did not want to give her last name. Many parents like Andrea who have U.S. born children are rushing to get their children an Ecuadorian passport so they will not have problems if they are sent back with their undocumented parents.

But most of them were at the Consulate to get a document called a “poder” (power). Poderes are documents that authorize Ecuadorians living in the United States to manage their property in Ecuador. When that document is signed, anybody can sell or buy property on behalf of that individual who signed it.

What does it mean for Ecuador’s Economy? The Economist Intelligence Unit categorized Ecuador as the seventh worse economy in the world. Ecuador has always had a fluctuated economy. In 2008 it suffered greatly when the prices of the oil dropped, but then it slowly improved as the new elected president Rafael Correa made some adjustments. Correa brought back the economy by investing in new roads, hospitals, schools and giving electric access to isolated regions.

However, he did not count with all the funds for public investments. It led him to increase taxes, borrow money from the Central Bank and the prices of oil dropped again.

Ecuador’s economy now has two positive events that could change it from being the seventh worse economy.

First, with so many Ecuadorians living in the United States that are buying property, opening bank accounts and transferring their money from American banks to Ecuadorian banks. These movements will inject value to lift the economy up.

According to Maria Ines Costa Vargas, the vice-consul of Ecuador more people are sending poderes to Ecuador compared to last year. In February 2016, a total of 373 poderes were sent to Ecuador compared to 623 poderes this year in the same month. Last year Vargas said, the poderes were mixed either to buy or just manage property, but this year they are mainly to buying more houses, lands and opening bank accounts.

“People are scared and they want to have a plan B,” said Vargas. “Almost all the poderes are for buying or opening bank accounts in Ecuador.”

Second, the upcoming presidential election has Ecuadorian hopeful that the new president will bring new reforms to help rebuild the fallen economy.

“People stopped spending money because the prices for everything went up,” said Jose Alveres a U.S resident who was in Ecuador six months ago. He said the economy could be better if Colombians and Peruvians who come to work in Ecuador spend in Ecuador rather than sending it to their countries.

The public stopped spending as the prices for everything went up. The idea of increasing prices was to make up for the low cost of oil. Ecuador has an economy highly dependent on oil production and public spending. During the years the price of oil decrease from $ 94 a barrel to $32 a barrel.

Another main factor why Ecuador is in the seventh worse economy is the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that happened in 2016. It affected Ecuador’s economy greatly, leaving over $3 billion in damage and killing 660 people. The already hurt economy began to worsen in every corner as people stopped spending more and companies began laying off employees left and righ.

Former president Rafael Correa borrowed $1.5 billion from China in order to bring the economy back, but in exchange, China asked that a 90 percent of oil shipments go to them for the next few years. Ecuadorians hope their new leader will change that as the country depends on oil and they need to be free from China in order to trade with other countries.

“Basically, now we belong to China if we don’t pay that money back,” said Alvares.

Ecuadorians who live in the United States and the new incoming president will determine the future of Ecuador’s economy.

“More money will be circulating with all of these movements,” said Vargas. “They are going to open their own business and create jobs.”

 

 

There are many broad patterns in the development of societies. Jared Diamond talks about how each society, how each continent and how each region developed the way they did. Of course, some of the places had and still have more advantages than the others.

Diamond says that almost every societies started either as hunt-gathering, working in agriculture, herding or doing metallurgy. But as they learned ways to improve their way of living, they invented new tools and become civilized. However, in some parts of the world the process of civilization took longer simply they were not in favorable place.

One can infer that those countries that are still struggling had a bad beginning. They were people who used stone and wood tools to survive either from hunger or from other tribes who wanted to invade them.

Ecuador is one of those many struggling countries. Even though it is a developed country, it still has indigenous population and groups of tribes who are not civilized. According to Diamond’s point of view on how geography either favors or not, Ecuador was in a place where not favorable. They were hunters, worked in agriculture so the process to civilization and developed as country took more time than others. And when they were invaded by Spaniards, the natives were slaves. So basically the Spaniards were the ones who made Ecuador a civilized place because they brought their ideas on how to mine the gold and the oil and eventually they developed a political system that control people.

For Pastor Mario Augustave it is not strange to see 50 children packed into a tiny classroom with chalkboards in hand and the hot sunlight streaming through the windows. In fact, he was the one who helped make it happen. Although this may seem like terrible conditions for students, being packed into a small room to learn math with 50 other children is the best these children can have in Haiti.

 

According to the CIA’s World Factbook, the total percentage of people who can read and write in Haiti above 15 years of age is 60.7% which is a far cry from other Caribbean countries which are 90% and above. These literacy rates are due to a limited amount of schools in the country.

 

For people like Augustave, education is one of the most important issues in Haiti to tackle. “Without the proper education of Haitian children, the country is continually left vulnerable,” Augustave says. “The children are the future, and an illiterate future is almost guaranteed to go nowhere.”

Children in the makeshift school in Haiti smiling for the camera.

And yet, it seems the Haitian government is not interested in the future of their nation.

 

“When I was growing up in Haiti, every school I knew was private. I didn’t think there were public schools in our country. I can imagine that it’s worse today,” said Adeline Francois, a current New York resident who lived in Haiti until 1994.

 

It is worse.

 

According to sionfondsforhaiti, the government is only responsible for 10% of schools in Haiti.  Haiti as a whole has only 15, 200 primary schools, of which 90% are non-public and managed by communities, religious organizations, or NGOs.

 

Community, religious organization, or NGO – run schools, need constant funding from those outside – usually United States and Canadian residents – to keep their schools running since they are non-profit organizations. Because they are so reliant from funding from the outside it is difficult for these schools to be properly functioning. Necessities like bathroom and plumbing is rare, school supplies like textbooks, notebooks, and pencils are of limited supply, and sometimes teachers cannot be paid; essentially doing volunteer work.

The state of the school that Mario Augustave and organization Voices For Haiti is managing.

“It is hard,” Augustave says. “But we are doing God’s work in Haiti. Right now I am going around churches in New York to collect funds to build a well at the school. People don’t think they are doing much by putting in a dollar, but to the kids over there in Haiti, it means the world to them.”

 

Discussion:

Avoiding problematic narratives in international reporting

The thing is, news is often—inherently—bad news. That just logically follows from the very definition of news.

So the question is: how do you report the news, but avoid falling into the trap of playing into these tired tropes/stereotypes of coverage?

How to Write About Africa as performed by Djimon Hounsou

Lara Logan’s Ebola coverage

.@60Minutes Tells us the Americans regard the Liberian support staff as heroes, but Lara Logan doesn't interview a single one.

— Howard French (@hofrench) November 10, 2014

How to Write About Pakistan

How to Write About the Middle East

Dismantling Visual Cliches in the Palestinian Territories

When Anti-Cliché Photos Turn Out To Be Clichés

Africa is a Country

Haiti Needs New Narratives

How to Report on Cuba Responsibly

Famine babies and crying war widows: unpicking the cliches of conflict photography

New Narratives: Africans Reporting Africa

“Africa Rising”

KONY2012

Ruddy Roye’s commentary on IG photo of naked schoolboy

The problem with photojournalism and Africa

Deconstructing the Visual Cliches of War Photography

Look! I’m Just Like Lawrence of Arabia

Assignments:

For Monday, read the prologue of Guns, Germs and Steel and write a short blog post (about 300 words) about how the history of your chosen country fits into the historical patterns discussed, and reflecting on how this history may shape some of the common narratives you sometimes see about these countries in the press.

Final draft of story #1 due next Wednesday, 3/15

Pitches for story #2 also due next Wednesday, 3/15 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1QCciJ6yTo&feature=youtu.be

This is the roughtests of drafts ever made. I haven’t used Premiere before so it took me a while to learn and I made a very small clip. There’s not much to judge.

I plan on doing voice overs, raising the volume of the clip overall, adding better transitions, and if I have time adding subtitles. Since I was able to learn how to use the basic tools by making this tool it shouldn’t take me as long as it took me with this one.

I’ll be using this information :https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/pisa2012highlights_6a_1.asp

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/data/

http://www.compareyourcountry.org/pisa/country/kor

 

During the presidential election, Donald Trump made disparaging comments concerning China, blaming the country for the global warming “hoax” and for pitfalls in American business.
Being #2 in the global economy, China is considered one of our most important economical allies but also one of our biggest competitors. The United States is China’s number one export market and China is third for the U.S. Would it be possible for these two countries to maintain a cordial business relationship with America under the leadership of President Trump?

At present, both countries are undergoing a major change in leadership. Under President Trump, the United States’ economic policies are sure to change. Trump has already appointed Peter Navarro as lead to the National Trade Council and has signed an executive order to get rid of the Trans-Pacific Partnership created by Obama. On the other hand, Beijing is shifting leadership as well since five of their Politburo leaders will be reaching the retirement age, leaving President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang to remain.

Trump has already expressed discontent with China’s practices during the election, stating that China purposely keeps their currency artificially low, labeling the country as a “currency manipulator.” In January 2017, he tweeted “China has been taking out massive amounts of money and wealth from the U.S. in totally one sided trade…”. Slapping The country with this label could give Trump an excuse to impose a higher tax (a proposed 45%) on Chinese imports but some economists, such as Lee Branstetter of Carnegie University, think this may be a bad decision.  He compares Trump’s proposed tariff to the tariffs supported by Republicans at the start of the Great Depression.  What followed was an increase in American tariffs that resulted in a global trade war.

The current status of trade between China and the U.S. is indeed an unbalanced one, with the U.S. at a disadvantage. The Nita States has an import tax of 2-3% while China’s is 3-9%. To put it simply, U.S. exports to China were only $116 billion in 2016 while imports from China were at $463 billion, putting the total deficit at $347 billion. Americans buy Chinese manufactured goods because the prices are so low.

Since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the U.S. and China’s past trade relations have been rocky. The United States filed 23 complaints with the WTO against China overall and 14 during the Obama administration alone. The most recent accusation being the distortion of prices of crops by China making it difficult for American farmers to compete in global markets. This means that China’s “market price support” program causes an overproduction of wheat, corn, and rice. This undercuts the American market for exporting those crops and results in a loss of revenue for American farmers. President Obama claimed that this program breaks the rules set forth by the WTO.

There’s no guarantee that Trump’s proposal of higher tariffs will help the United States.  In addition to possibly triggering a trade war, it is the belief of many economists that American consumers will be the ones who ultimately will suffer. Retail prices for imported goods and their domestic substitutes would increase. This means costs for these goods could also rise. Production of such products can also be delayed, especially amongst bigger companies.

In an article by The Economist in February 2017, The Peterson Institute for International Economics does not believe a tariff would be positive for the United States. Their assessment finds that American private sector employment would decline by more than 4% by 2019, which would hurt American families living on modest incomes if Trump were to follow through with his threats. (The Economist, Nov. 2016, Daily Chart: A Trump Trade Agenda ).

Relations between the United States and China are not entirely negative.  According to Joseph Weed, Director of Communications of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, there is a rapid growth in Chinese direct investment in the United States. “This is a function of Chinese investment in existing U.S. companies, as well as the creation of ‘greenfield’ or new businesses; in both cases, this represents Chinese owned companies operating in the U.S. And providing jobs to American workers and business suppliers. In just a few years, this investment has grown to support more than 100,000 American jobs.”

“While there are issues of concern between the two countries, diplomatic relations continue to represent a productive working relationship. Both sides have areas of dissatisfaction but strong economic ties and areas of shared concern continue to encourage both sides to work together within the framework of the global community.”

100 Years Later, Scholars Remember Ukrainian Revolution

By Anne Ehart

Panelists at the Friday, February 24 “Ukrainian Statehood 1917-21: Institutions and Individuals” conference at Columbia University.

100 years ago today, Ukraine was in the midst of a struggle for independence from Russia. From 1917-1921, war was waged between Ukrainian independence and Soviet forces, resulting in the creation of the Ukrainian National Republic.

Today, Ukraine is once again butting heads with Russia, fighting off Russian military and pro-Russia separatist groups attempting to take control of Ukraine.

On February 24 and 25, the Ukrainian Studies Program at Columbia University commemorated the 100-year anniversary of the Ukrainian revolution with a series of panel discussions entitled “Ukrainian statehood 1917-21: Institutions and Individuals.”