University of Florida students flew to Nicaragua in October 2004 to gain international journalism field experience. Photographers and writers at the graduate and undergraduate levels teamed up during the trip to document Nicaraguan culture and the community.

The overseas trip was part of a program nicknamed the Florida FlyIns, now in its sixth year. In preparation for writing and photographing abroad, students spent the first part of the semester doing research about Nicaragua in the university's Latin American Studies library collection and hearing from expert guest lecturers.

After the trip, the last part of the semester was dedicated to publishing an online magazine, producing an exhibition and submitting the stories for publication in U.S. and foreign media outlets. Pulitzer Prize winner John Kaplan developed and teaches the course each fall semester.

Each fall, the class travels to a new country in Latin America.

Sense of Direction
Story By Melanie Marquez

The van full of students drove along the nameless streets of Jinotepe on a cool Friday night. On their way to Hotel Casa Grande, the only real hotel in this part of Nicaragua, the empty sidewalks displayed little sign of life. No people were out on the street and everything was dark. The students felt disoriented – addresses are given out by landmarks in Nicaragua rather than with street names and house numbers, so the students had a hard time getting a sense of where they were. The address of their hotel was three blocks from the Central Bank, but they didn’t know where the Central Bank was located. Weaving through unmarked, one-way streets, the students wanted to see much more than what the night managed to reveal.

This arrival, in what was to be the focus of a week-long journalism project, gave little encouragement to the students seeking Nicaraguan life to witness and document.

Saturday morning delivered a welcomed contrast.

Horns honked. Children pushed carts through the street gutters. A woman roasted corn on the corner. A three-legged dog hunted for scraps. Church bells rang in the background of salsa beats blaring from stereos in the market.

Everyone, from a man carrying a pack of toilet paper on his head to a boy leading his horse away from the exhaust of a car, managed to breathe life into Jinotepe. A town that had been so silent the night before now throbbed with energy. Eager to become a part of this life, the students gathered at 8 a.m. in the hotel lobby to meet and pair up with translators. Day one of an intensely challenging week for the 2004 Florida Fly-Ins began.

The class, organized by UF photojournalism professor John Kaplan, brought writers and photographers together to travel to Nicaragua and work as journalists. The students spent weeks researching the culture, current events, history and politics of the country beforehand to put together their story proposals. Nicaragua, one of the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere, has been torn apart by war, political turmoil and natural disaster for most of its existence.

The story ideas, and how they developed and changed became central to the experience of the group. The students, with the help of translators, hunted down sources. As ideas shifted, the students gave way for the paths in which their stories took them.

The challenge for the students was to find out where their story ideas would take them once they got to Nicaragua. Some stories stayed on expected courses; others changed completely. Other challenges came up along the way. One photographer even had his story bring him into contact with a dying woman.

Before departing for Nicaragua, Erica Brough, a photojournalism senior, thought she knew what she wanted to find.

“I have big intentions to photograph a child in the hemisphere’s second poorest country,” Erica said. “The first challenge is finding him.”

She wanted to find a child alone and living on the streets. This changed after her first day, when she met a young boy in the market.

“I followed him to his house,” she said.

The young boy’s family welcomed her into their home, and until the day she left, Erica became a part of their lives, photographing their everyday life as a poor family in Nicaragua.

Each night the group of students met to discuss the day’s events. They gathered around plastic tables in the hotel courtyard, and in the first evening meeting, Laura Fiorilli, a journalism graduate student, discussed the changes in her story. She had originally planned to do a story about how people live off of remittances, money sent from overseas relatives to family members in Nicaragua. But then she met a woman living off of remittance and raising five children, three of them mentally retarded.

Laura found that remittances exist as a mainstream part of life in Nicaragua. The challenges facing disabled persons revealed a more powerful story. Public education suffers in all parts of Nicaragua, making funding for additional programs for the disabled nearly nonexistent. Laura set out to find what kind of minimal help was available for the disabled.

“It just struck me as interesting because in the U.S. you can go to a regular school, and we have to provide teachers for handicapped kids and kids in just about any situation you can think of, but here the regular schools just won’t take them, so I thought that might be something interesting to pursue,” she explained to the group.

She attended school with the three mentally retarded boys, and she spoke with leaders in the community working toward improving the lives of the more disadvantaged in an already struggling country.

Laura saw her new story coming together by the third day in the field. She spent the day at a center for disabled people and interviewed the director. Children’s’ piñatas, made by the disabled students, hung across the ceiling. Two classrooms, a small courtyard, a kitchen and an office made up the entire facility.

“The sources were very forthcoming and seemed to really understand what I was asking,” she said. “It’s almost baffling to think that we could come up with stories to do even before coming to a strange new country. I know from experience even when I’ve been working in a place for four years, it’s not easy to pull all the threads of a story together.”

Lauren Russell, a Latin American studies graduate student, came with the idea of doing a story about women migrant workers. But her story evolved into taking a look at the likely end of world textile agreements and their impact on Nicaraguan workers. During the evening meeting she shared the possibility with the group.

“The agreement of textile and clothing is going to end Jan. 1, 2005, and an estimated 200,000 Nicaraguans in the textile and apparel world are going to be out of work,” Lauren said. “There’s a textile factory in between Jinotepe and San Marcos.”

The agreement helps the Nicaraguan textile industry survive by guaranteeing business with the United States. Once it ends much more business will shift to the Chinese textile industry.

“It’s just really timely and so interesting, and I’d really like to find out what’s going to happen to this factory, because if that’s the case that seems like a much more compelling story.”

Lauren chose to focus on the textile industry and went on to gather information from workers, factory owners and government officials during the week.

Some students did not stray from their original ideas, and found themselves immersed in topics that started as simple words on paper.

Claudia Adrien, a history senior, wanted to report on the coffee crisis and its effects on the coffee farms of the Carazo department. Her story brought her in contact with coffee workers, plantation owners and with economists studying the industry in Nicaragua.

On her fourth day in the field, after having interviewed people affected by the coffee crisis, Claudia made her way to a farm. It was outside of Jinotepe, just off the Pan American Highway.

“He [coffee farmer] has a bunch of various trees, but one tree was just gorgeous, because you had these light green leaves and the sun at about 5 o’clock was just shining through the leaves and right on to the coffee trees.”

Claudia’s previous involvement with the Free Trade organization at UF made her feel confident in her story topic, but this experience gave her a new outlook. “If I do want to become a journalist, I realized… it’s a profession where you need to come with a blank slate. You have to try to not have preconceived notions. What’s the point of doing the story if you think you know all about it?”

This project became more than getting the story. It was hoping the story would let the students in, let them understand it and let them find a way to share the tales they found through their articles, photo stories or multimedia pieces. Professor Kaplan continuously encouraged students to go deeper into the lives of their story subjects. In one evening meeting he suggested the students see the inside of a common Nicaraguan home if they had not done so already.

Kelly-Anne Suarez, a journalism senior, spent a whole day, starting at sunrise, in the home of Kenia, a 14-year-old former prostitute and the main subject of Kelly’s piece on child prostitution in Nicaragua.

“It’s just like a typical mud-packed, no-running-water, tin-roof shed house and gritty,” Kelly said. “And everyone was just soiled, running around barefoot.”

She first met Kenia at a women’s day center in San Marcos. Once a relationship had been established, Kelly felt a little more comfortable asking Kenia about her past. This interview was one of the most difficult parts of Kelly’s week in Nicaragua.

“I’ve never in my life experienced anything of that nature.” Kelly said

They sat in a dimly sun-lit room. Kelly asked questions, and Kenia talked and cried. When Kelly could not say the word prostitution, Kenia said it boldly. The light faded, and Kenia kept talking. Kelly barely had to say anything. The interview ended and Kelly said goodbye to Kenia. Then Kelly’s tears started and did not stop all the way back to her hotel room in Jinotepe.

“Walking away from her was almost as disturbing as everything she had said to me, because I knew she was going back to her house where all of this had happened, and I was going back to my house where I live my perfect little life,” Kelly said. “I’ll never forget her, her story and her spirit.”

The emotional challenges the students faced were not part of the week’s itinerary. But they also learned about the need to go on even when their stories affected them personally.

“I was very surprised to find how impacted I could be by another persons life that I had known about three days,” Kelly said.

Each time David Zentz, a photojournalism graduate student, went out into the rural areas of Carazo, he was not sure what he would find.

His story idea of photographing people in rural areas with serious health conditions and a lack of necessary medical care brought him face-to-face with dire situations. He went between two rural towns, each with populations of less than 1,000, in search of people willing to let him into their homes to photograph their most critically ill family members. He spoke with doctors in clinics that struggle to keep their medicine cabinets well-stocked. He went from one person to another and found the kind of problems he thought illustrated the medical struggles these towns face.

The first case he found was a woman on her deathbed.

She died a few hours after he photographed her.

“I knew that when I was there this woman was on her last leg,” David said. “I was kind of shocked that it happened so soon. That made it more real. The gravity of the situation hits you as very concrete.”

Later he found two cases of epilepsy and a bedridden retarded boy, and he photographed the emergency care of a girl who had fallen and split open her head. These cases were all from the area David referred to by a newly learned Spanish phrase “el culo del Diablo,” or “the butt of the devil.”

His ability to find these cases displayed the combined strength of journalistic skill and the extremely devastating situations people in these towns face on a daily basis.

The challenges of David’s subjects became the challenges of his story and ultimately challenged him through the week to stay focused on what he wanted to find. Each step of the process had the chance to push each student beyond their limitations as journalists and as people.

No one except the students will ever really understand the strength it took to get their stories, but the best thing they can do is share a glimpse of the lives they saw with the world. In one week, these students found information on a tiny part of all this life. It took one week for a semester’s worth of work and a lifetime worth of perspective – on themselves, on others and on Nicaragua.

The world will not see the hotel they slept in, sit in the crowded taxis they rode in or feel the cold water they showered in, but they will see the place, the color and the life that gave these students this week together. The world can catch sight of the places where these students challenged themselves. Somewhere between the research, the week-long experience and all of the post-trip work, the students managed to discover the kinds of stories they had set out to find all along.