Follow summer Foreign Intrigue interns on their blogs
Nicholas Visser, right, clowns around with a friend in Paris.July 28, 2011
The Journalism Foreign Intrigue Scholarship sends journalism students all over the world to report on exotic locales of their host newspapers. This summer, Imogen Janelle Kohnert, Alexis Krell, David Krueger and Nicholas Visser are working as journalists on three continents.
Kohnert is working for The Cambodia Daily. Krell is stationed with Reuters in Latin America. Krueger is in Freetown, Sierra Leone working for Awoko Newspaper, and Visser, originally destined for Syria, is now interning in Amman at the Jordan Times. While away, both Krueger and Visser are blogging about their experiences.
In his blog, “To the Middle East and Beyond,” Visser writes of his adventures, traveling from America to Paris to Istanbul. After violence had torn the region apart, Syria could no longer be his final destination, therefore postponing his internship. Despite the change in plans, Visser reflects happily upon his extra time spent in Istanbul before moving on to Amman, Jordan. “How lucky was I, to spend a month in this 2,000 year old city that’s been an integral part of some of the most powerful empires in human history?”
Krueger has been busy in Freetown, having written 16 columns so far, but he blogs mostly about what it’s like to experience Sierra Leone as “ampoto” from Washington state. He’s battled the biggest spiders he’s ever seen in the “Great Spider Massacre of 2011.” His guest room was broken into, and he met a fellow Husky, Mr. Njai, a Kambia native who earned his master’s degree at UW in urban planning in 1966. Overall, Kreuger says, “Life is really good here. The bars are awesome, the food is good. I’m even starting to learn some Krio.”
