Trying to train in harmony

I am standing in the middle of Count Basie Hall pretending to be a Burmese politician.
Going by the name of U Jack In, I’ve been promising all sorts of things and am being peppered with tough questions by a group of fledgling journalists eager to get at the truth.
How do I begin to explain this?
Count Basie Hall is an unprepossessing room a little larger than the community room at Jay County Public Library. Its ceilings are high, and there is an abundance of track lighting. A small platform could serve as a stage at one end. There’s a lectern that can be put to use. A small grand piano — never touched by Count Basie — is tucked in one corner. I’m working at an easel with a white board that has seen too many markers.
In other words, it’s a room of many purposes. It could be the venue for a movie or a concert or a lecture or — in this case — a seminar.
Count Basie Hall — you’ve got to love that name — is part of the American Center in Rangoon, Burma or, if you prefer, Yangon, Myanmar. I’m not picky and tend to slip back and forth between the old style and the more literary style adopted about 20 years ago by the military government here.
The American Center is like dozens of others around the world. They’re low-cost, low-key efforts at diplomacy on the most personal level. They have libraries — this one’s the size of one found at a typical middle school — and classes in English and American history and democracy. For U.S. taxpayers, they’re a very good bang for the buck, attracting the best and the brightest and telling them about us.
They are also, my wife has reminded me, places that become the targets of anti-American sentiment when the pendulum swings the wrong way. They have little in the way of security, and more than once they’ve found themselves under attack from forces that find contact with American ideals threatening.
This week, the one in Rangoon and its Count Basie Hall provide the venue for a seminar being conducted by a small town newspaper guy from Indiana. Or, I should say, two seminars.
The local embassy staff, trying to squeeze the nickel for Uncle Sam, thought it would be a good idea for me to work a double shift. So from about 8:30 a.m. to noon, I do a seminar for about a dozen Burmese journalists. And from about 1:30 to 5 p.m., I do it again for another dozen or so. (If I repeat myself in the afternoon session, the participants forgive me.)
So what am I talking about?
On paper, the seminars are about election coverage. There’s a pivotal vote that was held April 1. But, in reality, the seminars are a seven-day compressed version of Journalism 101.
Of the two dozen participants, only three or four have had anything like real training. Student unrest in the 1980s led the government to eliminate the journalism curriculum along with blowing up the student union and fracturing the largest university so that its bits and pieces are all over the city.
The only formal journalism training to speak of is a vocational program aimed at churning out propagandists to work for state-run media. Nothing those students are learning prepares them for independent journalism.
The chore now, at mid-week, is to try to maintain the interest of seminar participants while shoving as much knowledge into them as I can. It’s a combination of lecture, role-play, discussion, debate, hectoring, challenging, and occasionally arguing. And it will be followed up by two weeks of visits to the participants in their newsrooms, raising ethical questions and trying to coach them to a higher level.
That’s why, at the moment, I am pretending to be a politician with the made-up name of U Jack In. U is an honorific title like Uncle. The In is a reference to Indiana.
After briefing participants on how to work effectively at a news conference, the next step was to hold a news conference of our own. I’m playing the politician. They’re playing journalists, and they’re getting better at it all the time.
Tomorrow, they’ll submit their homework, articles about the news conference and a couple of interviews in which they took turns playing the roles of politician and reporter. We’ll critique their work together and maybe find a degree of harmony, something Count Basie would be sure to appreciate.[[In-content Ad]]