Survivors

My second week working at KBIA was a major improvement on the first. I think I did pretty well my first week, but it’s always hard when you’re getting used to an environment that is new. This week I worked on a story about the Jewish Student Organization hosting a speech by a local resident and holocaust survivor. I started out by contacting some of the people involved with the organization to get some soundbites to use in a short piece for the afternoon. After talking to a few people it became obvious to me that the story wouldn’t be very good if I didn’t contact the speaker and get a bite from her. I found her in the local phone book (it took the KBIA staff a second to find me one) and had a conversation with her that provided me with compelling bites that fit the story much better than what I had gathered so far. I spoke with Janet before leaving and she suggested covering to the speech that night. She thought it would be interesting to get an audiences perspective after the event was over and run it on the morning broadcast. I went and I ended up with a story that was much more interesting than I had expected. I thought I would ask students how the night made them feel and get fairly typical and unemotional responses. I was partially right. I got a few of those. Before I left I decided to ask one more person what their feelings were about the night. He was an African American man (several years older than a traditional college student) who was there with his wife. I didn’t really expect anything in particular besides a point of view that was different from the ones I had gathered so far. I was surprised to find out that what he had to say would turn what would have been an ordinary story into something special. He said he came there because it was the 16th anniversary of his wife losing her family in the genocide in Rwanda. He said that they wanted to hear the speech and talk with the speaker afterward because they share a connection with her. While I was interviewing him, his wife and the speaker were saying something to each other in French. A survivor of the holocaust in German occupied France and a woman who lost her family many years later in a different genocide in Rwanda, sharing their experiences with each other in Columbia.

The story is here. Make sure to listen to the audio not read the text. It was written to be an audio piece.