(Photo above) Lindsey Perkins ’09 (left) and Sommer Saadi ’08 in Romania. (Photo below) Children in a Romanian orphanage. Lindsey took both photos.
With support from a Meadows Exploration Award and the SMU Chaplain’s Office, Sommer Saadi ’08, who graduated with a double major in journalism and history, and Lindsey Perkins ’09, a marketing major with a minor in advertising, traveled to Romania in the summer to research the conditions of orphanages. Perkins is now director of media relations and marketing for the Allen Americans professional hockey team. Saadi, now a journalism graduate student at Columbia University, offers this reflection on their journey:
It’s 1:07 a.m., July 1, 2009, six days into our two-week stay in Romania. We’re sitting on our beds in a hotel room in Targu Mures, a small city in the mountains about six hours north of Bucharest, where we’ve spent time with Livada Orphan Care. I am typing notes while Lindsey uploads the photos she took at the baby hospital we visited yesterday. Romanian law allows parents to drop off their children at the hospital – with no questions asked – so they can receive health care. The problem is that children are not always picked up; that’s when Livada steps in.
While staring at our beds covered in papers, pens, maps and blank DVDs, it hits us: We’ve taken on a task greater than we ever anticipated.
“We’re 22 years old,” Lindsey says. “Neither of us has ever worked for a major news agency. We have mentors [SMU journalism professors Mark Vamos and Robert Hart] but no editor to sit us down and tell us, ‘This is what you need to do.’&rdquo
Now that our journey has ended, Lindsey and I realize how much we learned on the trip: the importance of building relationships with our subjects and keeping an open mind; to never stop taking pictures or stop writing; and to put everything into context. We also discovered our potential, our strengths, our weaknesses and ourselves.
We are trying to launch our journalism careers. So we assigned ourselves a challenge.
Our journey started in fall 2008 when we applied for a Meadows Exploration Grant with a proposal to report on the condition of Romanian orphanages, nearly 20 years after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu’s régime. I had visited the country in 2006 as a volunteer with Humanity United in Giving, which aids two orphanages, so we had contacts through that organization.
Our project progressed as a compelling “then and now” feature package. We interviewed a range of sources on their experiences before, during and after the revolution. In developing the story, we integrated online technology. We built a website featuring a blog that chronicles our trip through video, photos and stories from abroad. As a result, we were able to add a whole new set of skills to our résumés that could help strengthen our freelance prospects.
We’re currently piecing together our research, writing stories and creating photo audio slideshows. We hope to catch the attention of media outlets interested in publishing our work.
Now that our journey has ended, Lindsey and I realize how much we learned on the trip: the importance of building relationships with our subjects and keeping an open mind; to never stop taking pictures or stop writing; and to put everything into context.
We also discovered our potential, our strengths, our weaknesses and ourselves. We reaffirmed our passion for storytelling through pictures and words. And we recognized that, in some ways, we were crazy for taking on such a big task, but Lindsey and I have never considered a little craziness to be a bad thing.
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