Graduation Day!

The last couple of weeks have been some of the busiest of my life. We've been working 12 hour days helping our students finish their final video projects and preparing our final web product, The Tiziano Project | 360 Kurdistan.

I have much to share with you but for right now I just had to show you all our latest video, representing the culmination of our project here in Iraqi Kurdistan. Our mentor Grant Slater produced it and it's pretty much one of the best things ever.

Enjoy!

This Is Iraq

I'm excited to share with you all the first video The Tiziano Project has produced in Iraqi Kurdistan. Produced by fellow mentor Grant Slater, this is one badass explanation of why we've come to this region now.

This Is Iraq | The Tiziano Project from The Tiziano Project on Vimeo.

Journalism 101: Who, what, when why and how

Today was our second class at the Tiziano Project. It's been really rewarding to see all of our hard work toward organizing this workshop materialize into students who are excited about learning from us.

I've been lead teaching the last few classes, which have concentrated on the basics of journalism - how to interview, write an article -- and social media techniques to easily display that information online.

I have to admit, while I'm passionate about sharing my knowledge, I knew that today's lesson wasn't going to be fun and I felt a little bad about subjecting my students to three hours of hardcore basics. Today's class was a lesson I reviewed over and over again through j-school and each time I did, all I could think about is how I wanted to break all the rules my professors were giving me or how I wanted to get on to the fun stuff.

Now I feel bad for sighing and yawning my way through those classes. Standing up in front of the students, I hated knowing I was about to bore them to tears.

Luckily, the students all took it in good stride, and asked a lot of great questions.

And in a really neat way, teaching reporting to people who speak English as a second language made me focus on how to drill down on those raw components of journalism that will translate into any language: How to build trust with your sources and your readers, and how to tell a story clearly, truthfully and powerfully.

When I was a kid, I used to live in an area of Los Angeles where wildfires burned through annually. Every year my family would evacuate and watch from a hotel TV as reporters stood in front of burned homes just a couple of miles or blocks from my house.

Once, a reporter announced on camera that my whole neighborhood was on fire. Another time, a reporter announced that my elementary school had burned down. Neither were true. But there was an excruciating period of waiting, in that hotel room, where we didn't know for sure what we were coming home to and we didn't know whether we could believe what we had just watched on the news.

It was these seeds of uncertainty, of anger, of a childlike certainty that the people I was watching could do better, that made me want to be a journalist. I didn't want to watch or read something and wonder if it was true, to sit and wait until I knew for sure. I wanted to see things for myself, to know what true. By being a journalist, I could be the first person to know things, and I knew I could trust myself to report stories to other people with honesty and accuracy.

So while today's lesson may have been dull as all hell, I'm glad that I now have the chance to pass on my childhood resolution to others who really want to learn.

Classes start, our dog is found, a darn good day!

Classes officially started today at The Tiziano Project. We got to meet our first group of students, a talented mix of aspiring photographers, videographers and journalists who are sure to knock our socks off with their work during the next two months.

I led a couple of lessons today about how to create a timeline on Dipity and how to start a blog on Tumblr. If you're interested in trying out some of the lessons yourself, check out our Tiziano Project Classroom, which has our full curriculum for the workshop, free tutorials for Dipity and Tumblr and will be regularly updated with all the things we teach during our workshop. Part of the nonprofit's goal is to be collaborative with other people and organizations who are teaching new media journalism, so feel free to use these tutorials to teach yourself or others how to get off the ground as a new media journalist.

Also, about 48 hours ago our housemates lost the house's beloved English Spaniel, Sam. Sam is a former bomb-sniffing dog that is just about the cutest thing you'll ever meet and has a whole house full of burly men melting whenever he trots by.

We were so worried! each of us went out in shifts calling his name all around our neighborhood, worried that the poor puppy wouldn't last long in the more than 100 degree heat of the past two days.

But much to our delight we got a call this afternoon that Sam was alive and well and we got to pick him up this afternoon. He even got a little chubby from all the food his temporary caretakers fed him.

Welcome back Sam!

A little context before we begin.

It's my last day at work, my bags are packed: In two days I leave for a six-month journey that will take me across South Africa and Northern Iraq and stretch my storytelling mettle to new heights.

First to South Africa, where I will write a new kind of travel guide for intrepid explorers and produce multimedia stories about a nation in flux in advance of the World Cup.

Then to northern Iraq, where I will be teaching I will work with the nonprofit I help to run, The Tiziano Project, to teach aspiring and professional journalists new media and multimedia journalism skills.

I've been working for over a year to help The Tiziano Project prepare for these upcoming training sessions. We provide community members in conflict, post-conflict and under-reported regions with the equipment, training and affiliations necessary to report their stories and improve their lives. Our organization has found its success through collaboration -- something that, over and over, our Impact bloggers have stressed is necessary to overcome the financial and bureaucratic confines of nonprofit business. We work with news agencies to promote stories that wouldn't otherwise be heard, to train people who wouldn't otherwise have a global voice, and to create sustainable community work where otherwise there would be none.

For the duration of our Tiziano: Near East program, we will be working with community members from the Iraqi Kurdish minority to produce multimedia stories about their singular experience of facing of centuries-long discrimination and their recent turn to near-autonomy within northern Iraq. I, and my fellow trainers, will be working with our students to produce additional reporting to give those less familiar with this culture context and depth.

Here, you will find updates from my journey and the reports I produce. But this is also a story about me -- a vastly curious young woman with a penchant for examining the world with wide eyes and straight talk.