Jessica Birthisel | July 23, 2009
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| Photo by Noor Khamis |
| Associate professor Jim Kelly traveled to Kenya to work on a course proposal that would take students to that country to study. |
Kelly says that his goals for the course are two-fold. First, he says he wants to give his students the experience of traveling to a developing region.
"While they’ll learn a lot about Kenya, they’ll also understand a lot about the larger, developing world," said Kelly.
Additionally, he hopes to spread knowledge of IU’s impact on the region.
"Too few Hoosiers are aware of the profound impact IU is having on Western Kenya," said Kelly.
Following several weeks of preparatory work in Bloomington, participants in the proposed course will travel to Eldoret and stay at the IU House, the university-sponsored residential compound that hosts students, professors and guests as part of the IU-Kenya Partnership, a 20-year relationship between Indiana University and Kenya’s Moi University. The partnership’s mission is to develop leaders in health care for the United States and Africa, to foster the values of the medical profession and to promote health for the human family.
As part of their work there, students in the proposed course would create multimedia news projects about the partnership’s cornerstone program, AMPATH (the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare), which, according to Kelly, treats 90,000 HIV-positive patients at 18 sites in urban and rural Kenya.
In addition to work with HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, Kelly says that AMPATH also supports gardening projects and educational programs that seek to reduce incidents of mother-to-child HIV transmission, and a family preservation initiative that seeks employment for clients, among other goals.
For the reporting projects, IU students will be paired with communication students from Moi University who speak Swahili and are familiar with the region. The AMPATH reporting experience will be followed by a short trip to Nairobi where students will tour media houses in the region, which serves as "the hub of journalism" in that part of Africa, according to Kelly.
Upon their return to Bloomington, students will spend one week debriefing and producing their projects, which will likely include a written story, photos, video and audio slideshows. Kelly says he hopes that the stories can be posted to the School of Journalism Web site and marketed to local media outlets.
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| Photo by Jim Kelly |
| A worker at the Green World passion fruit nursery in Eldoret, Kenya, prepares potting soil for planting seedlings at the AMPATH-supported project. The nursery sells passion fruit seedlings to AMPATH clients who in turn plant them, harvest the fruit, and sell it back to Green World. Students’ course work would include multimedia pieces about these types of projects. |
"I want to make sure that student safety can be guaranteed," said Kelly, who says that he feels confident taking students to the region after his recent trip.
This course is the latest in Kelly’s academic involvement with Africa. He has made multiple trips to the continent in order to host workshops for African journalists. Kelly conducted one such workshop in Nairobi during his most recent trip. The workshop served 15 journalists from a variety of media types and focused on strengthening reporters’ ability to report on social issues and how to do better sourcing in stories.
