ABOUT US

The University of Montana School of Journalism is committed to a global education for our students. While journalism students are taught skills needed report local stories in the community, they also gain experience through diverse student projects at UM. Montana Journalism Abroad provides an opportunity for student journalists to gain valuable, real-world international journalism skills in a breaking-news setting through on-the-ground reporting. Past groups have traveled to India to investigate the environmental aspects of the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve, and to Berlin, Germany, to report on the refugee crisis. This year's trip is to Fukushima, Japan, to study the effects of the nuclear energy crisis

Jack Ginsburg

Senior / Videographer

Family comes first. That’s been clear to me for as long as I’ve been able to understand what my parents were saying. My family has always been the most important thing in my life, a source of comfort and stability.

Both of my parents lost their parents when they were young -- just a little bit older than I am now. My mother lost both of her parents before the age of 25 and my father lost his dad when he was only in his 30’s. As I grew older I saw how much time my parents wanted to spend with us, of course because that’s what parents do but also because they didn’t get enough time with theirs.

I feel a deep sense of loss for the people whose homes were destroyed and family members killed or swept away by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. I put myself in their shoes and feel terrible when I think about someone losing something so special to them.

I cannot wait to embark on this journey. I want to connect with these people who are experiencing loss and uncertainty in their lives. I know that this international reporting project will put me in a variety of uncomfortable situations -- and I’m excited for that challenge because that is where I learn the most. Whenever I have been in trying times I have always had to tell myself to push through and make it to the other side.

This trip will be the biggest learning and growing experience I have ever had in my life.

Home is the place where family lives, it is the one place that always remains the same in my eyes no matter how much change happens around it. I cannot wait for the experience to tell the stories of people redefining their sense of home, people whose stories deserve to be heard.

Zachariah Bryan

Grad Student / Reporter

Growing up near Mt. Rainier in Washington state, I’m used to warnings of natural disasters. Any day, we’re going to experience the “really big one,” I was told. Even the New Yorker wrote about it. I frequently passed by volcano eruption evacuation route signs. I practiced earthquake drills in elementary. My dad would always bring up a map of safety zones and noted our house, perched on top of a hill, would be safe from lahars. But, if we were anywhere else? We’d be mudsicles.

I remember the 2001 Nisqually Earthquake, which had a magnitude of 6.8 on the Richter scale. I was in the 6th Grade at Rocky Ridge Elementary School. I recall the sound of the earth rumbling, my vision going up and down, students looking at each other, unsure if this was real or imagined. My teacher suddenly remembered all of those years of practicing crawl-under-your-desk drills and ordered us to get down. It didn’t last long, and we survived, though our hearts were racing.

I remember seeing the aftermath. Cracks in buildings and bridges that exist to this day. Unreinforced concrete buildings turned into rubble. And my Aunt’s prized china cabinet became a mess of porcelain shards.

Still, it was nothing compared to the 2011 Tohaku Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan. I can never truly imagine what it’s like to lose my home. Many people in Japan have had to experience that tragedy, and continue to deal with it. In Fukushima, the government has been lifting evacuation orders on towns contaminated with radiation after the nuclear plant meltdown, and encouraging people to move back to their old houses. Except the home, the community they would be returning to is almost unrecognizable.

The UM to Fukushima trip is important, because we will report on how a natural disaster doesn’t end when the earthquake stops, or when the tsunami turns back into serene ocean. Disasters persist, physically and mentally. As students, we will learn a lot by talking to people who have shown great resilience in the face of complete upheaval, and hopefully, we will be able to give something back by sharing their story with the world.

Katy Spence

Grad Student / Reporter

Home didn’t feel like home until I moved 1500 miles away.

I grew up in a small Kansas town. I was too quiet for the country roads, and people didn’t understand how anyone could think as much as I did. Home for me was wildflowers in ditches, books on rainy days and hot summer air on dusty gravel roads. Home was solitude.

As I grew and moved away for college, home transformed. Home became the feeling of belonging, of finding camaraderie in crowds who understood me and I them. As I learned more about myself and began to embrace my identity, I found it difficult to go back to Kansas, to the house I grew up in. Like two magnets, we flew apart from each other with the sense that maybe we never fit together in the first place.

But as I continue to grow, I continue to learn more and more about what home really means to me. It’s about accepting who you are and who others are. It’s about being open and loving, but at the same time challenging yourself and others to do better. It’s about forgiving yourself for thinking you were a mismatched piece of the puzzle when maybe you’d fit all along— no one realized you were simply upside down.

And now, home for me is a mixture of feeling confident in my own skin and being able to rest my heart in places without expectation. Home is in Montana, where I have built a life and my own identity. But home is also in Kansas, where those I love and who love me accept me without question, regardless of which phase of life I am in or how I see them.

Those displaced by the 3.11 triple disaster may not get the chance to re-experience home the way I have. Perhaps they've found a new home or long to return to the one they've lost. Their stories will deepen my own appreciation of home, and I hope that sharing their stories will do the same for those who read them.

Home didn’t feel like home when I left at 18, but I am grateful that I can always return.

Jana Wiegand

Grad Student / Reporter

Even before entering the nomadic college years, the concept of home has never felt as permanent nor as reverent to me as it is in Japan, where a family home can trace the lives of generations.

Here in America, home feels more like a colloquial phrase. It affords us the conversational convenience to fast-forward through family history as needed, but during story-time, it’s easy enough to hit rewind.

My first home was in a blue, four-room cottage in a town where Wisconsin marshlands met a metropolitan lake. The summer before kindergarten brought a series of moving vans to our dead end street. The new family arrived with Texan drawls, three girls and a cat named Mittens, making their home much more exciting than my own.

But the next summer my mom and I had to pack our bags and take our turn as the new neighbors across someone else’s street. Today that house still bears the name “home,” and it’s remained more or less the same, give or take some refrigerator magnets and woodpecker holes.

Yet I learned there was just as much home to be found in Mother Nature as in the walls that protected me from her. Years of camping have rendered me equally at ease curled up inside a tent, listening to coyotes cry and cedars sigh, as I have in my childhood bedroom with its glow-in-the-dark skies.

So what is home? Where is home?

Home hides somewhere in the lands where memories mix with dreams. It’s a place where you’ve memorized which floorboards creak and the doors that squeak. It rises with the smell of baking bread in a kitchen where you’ve never tread. It’s in the tease of your mother tongue and the lilt of a new language into which you’ve flung. It waits with the teddy bear missing your squeeze and the sneakers ready to take you wherever you damn well please. It’s in the horizon’s familiar silhouettes and the full moon rising across from a foreign sunset.

As we pack our bags for Japan, I imagine we will forage our own sense of home within each other. Comfort comes from those moments of shared laughter, wonder and inevitable cultural blunder.

However, the days of deadlines and translation woes will surely spark times when we echo Dorothy’s famed Wizard of Oz line. There’s no place like home, she said, but at least you’ll know our adventures won’t be all in our head.

Rehana Asimi

Senior / Reporter

I don’t really get attached to places. My family is scattered across the United States and overseas. We moved pretty far from my relatives when I was younger. My mother’s family is settled east of the Mississippi. My father’s is in Karachi, Pakistan. I grew up in Seattle but I wasn’t born there, so I wouldn’t say it’s somewhere I’m eternally bound to. It was more of a place to start from.

I decided to become a journalist because I wanted to go out into the field, in the thick of the action and bring back stories. I have learned skills -- how to interview people, to write concisely, to understand a culture and customs -- that will let me connect with people in different places, in different cultures. I minored in anthropology because it, too, is about human connection.

I wear a necklace that I treasure because it connects me to the people I love. The small, silver pendant shows a lion sitting back on its haunches atop an unfurling a banner that says “Spero” -- “I hope,” in Latin.

I received this necklace from my parents five years ago, at a point in my life where I had many paths to choose from. I was both excited and anxious to go out and see the world. I would soon be off to college at the University of Montana, living the majority of the next four years away from family. When I get nervous, I toy with the pendant, twisting it around the chain and feeling it warm up against my fingertips. It’s an old habit that comforts me whenever I feel out of my comfort zone.

Home has always been the people I return to or the people I write to when I’m away. They are the tether, the anchor, that keeps any place locked into my mind. I remind myself of this when I wear my silver necklace and its small, but noticeable, weight reminds me of the people I have waiting for me in different states and across the sea.

Ryan Wozniak

Junior / Team member

When I first came to the University of Montana as a sophomore in 2014, I had a Japanese roommate named Isaac who was half Japanese and half American. We clicked from that first day; I got the chance to know him as he did me.

But for me, it was more than getting to know a great roommate. I felt something astounding: The more I got to know him and hang out with him and other Japanese students, the more I realized how small my conception of the world was. I learned about Japanese culture, history, the land, and the people of Japan. The more I learned, the more I wanted to travel and be involved with international students and studies.

I started joining groups at UM such as the Japanese Student Association, Global Partners, Conversation Partners, Intervarsity. I became a member, then vice president and, since fall 2016, president of the International Student Association.

Although I came to UM to major in physical therapy, I am a Japanese culture major. I am one of the non-journalism students going on this trip. I learned about it when I saw a flyer in the library. Once I understood what what we would be doing and where we would be going in Japan, I did not look back. For three weeks in Japan I will not be a tourist or an explorer. I will be a journalist for the first time in my life and my first report will be on a nation with a rich and beautiful history and culture that I admire.

We will help tell the stories of people who are making a new home -- physically or emotionally. The message I want to show in our stories is that our world is one giant home, and we should do all that we can to make sure we find ours, and appreciate what it takes for each person to find their own.

Amanda Price

Senior / Reporter

Initially I thought that writing about “home” would be simple, but after beginning an essay, writing a sum total of five sentences then realizing that I don’t think I have a home, in all honesty most of the time I don’t even know if I have found who I am, or when I will. Home is still just a blip somewhere in the periphery. Home, for me, is not something easy to find, when I think of what it could be I imagine a small place that feels like the whole world is crammed inside. A place where all dreams can live. A place you can go when you need to hide from the world outside. A place that makes you happy. This place that has not yet shown itself to me.

So for now I will carry my home with me, my home will become the feelings, smells, and sounds that are attached to memories that make me smile, cry, and laugh. Like the thought of my rats greeting me with happy faces when I return to them, or the warmth of my boyfriends hand when it grasps mine. The way my dad’s eyes sparkle when he smiles, or the way the smell of cinnamon rolls reminds me of my mom. Things that can turn my cynical thoughts to hopeful ones. These things shape little strands that I can follow to find my way. To help me find the place where I finally feel that life is enough, or it will lead me to the end of that road with questions still left unanswered. I realize that my “home” is different from the person I pass on the sidewalk, and the person I sit next to in class but to everyone home is a place you feel you belong.

As I travel to Japan I want to use the opportunity to widen my own horizons to see what home means to a culture beyond my own. Maybe if I am lucky this journey will be a way to learn from others how to find my own “home”, maybe I have just been walking past it but never noticing, and who better to learn from than those who have lost what I have not found, but have had the courage to carry on and rebuild their own places in the face of adversity.

Rene Sanchez

Junior / Designer

When I was very young, my father would take me with him to the beach when he went surfing. He would sit me on a towel with a bottle of water and a lunch box and reminded me not to talk to strangers or go into the ocean. Then he would take his board and run into the waves.

As soon as he was out of sight, I would hide my lunch under my towel and sneak off to the tide pools. They were magic. Each teemed with starfish, crabs and sea anemones. Every wave crashed against the rocks and sent a blast of ocean spray into the pools and over my hair.

These tide pools were the wildest things I knew. They hinted at what lived in the blue wilderness in front of me. Looking west across the sea, I thought that kids on the coast of Japan must feel the same sense of wonder as they looked out at the ocean -- in my direction. When I go home and visit the tide pools now, there is less life than there used to be. It breaks my heart. I can’t imagine how it would feel if the coast I know and love was dramatically altered or if I wasn’t allowed to go back.

THE TEAM

Bowen West

Senior / Reporter

I’ve never been out of the country. I’ve lived in a comfortable, albeit safe life. In Spring 2017 I’m taking the biggest leap of my life yet - graduating college, and traveling to Japan.

This coming spring the citizens of Fukushima will stop receiving a monthly stipend and will be forced to return home. We will be writing stories about people who have to return to homes that they don’t feel safe in. Stories about people who can never return to their ancestral homes.

So for the first time I’m leaving my home, I’m going to find out what home means to the people in Japan.

Sydney MacDonald

Senior / Photographer

I've always wanted the opportunity to immerse myself in different communities and observe various cultures on a global scale as I pursue my passion for journalism. As an aspiring professional, I want to cultivate an understanding of the mandate we have as journalists to truly see and share the daily human experience. To have an opportunity to continue to grow and change as a global storyteller is a lifetime challenge. Pursuing that opportunity with UM School of Journalism's trip to Japan this spring will be a profound challenge that will advance my skills as a visual storyteller and international reporter.

Through my undergraduate years at the University of Montana, storytelling has become more than just a passion, it’s a way of life. I’ve been able to apply my desire to understand different groups of people and daily life through this medium, and I’ve gained insight about myself through writing and photography. I know I'll put all of those skills to the test this coming spring in Fukushima. Our group will work to understand how life after the 3/11 disaster in Fukushima has come to define a sense of what 'home' means for so many Japanese families.

Tate Samata

Senior / Photographer

I decided to pursue journalism because although I haven’t always been certain about my passions, academic strengths or skills, I’ve always cared deeply about people. Just before I was born, my mom started a nonprofit organization that helped individual children in the most dangerous parts of Chicago, who lived in an environment of violence and hardship. Unlike myself, these children didn’t have financial support systems or emotional safety nets. I spent many of my birthdays and Christmases shopping for winter coats for children who couldn’t afford them, and distributing soup at homeless shelters. Through these experiences, I developed a deep sense of empathy. I was young when I had the realization that everyone has their own stories, each as valid, complex and important as my own. These qualities, married with my love for photography, led me to where I am today: on a path to discover, document and share the stories of others. I’m excited beyond words to experience my first international reporting opportunity, and learn about the culture and lives of people living in Japan. The traumatic stories that surround the devastating disaster of March 11, 2011 deserve to be heard, and my hope is that sharing their stories will not only educate our audience, but also aid healing for those we encounter along the way.

Parker Seibold

Senior / Photographer

Anyone who knows me could tell you my dream has always been to become an international photojournalist. When I was getting ready to graduate high school I realized how long I had been holding

on to this dream. I was going through a box of my old elementary school projects and I found one of those “about me” posters from the fourth grade. In the space where it asked what I wanted to be when I grew up I wrote: Photojournalist.

I’m from Mound, Minnesota, is a small town about 30 miles west of Minneapolis. Growing up in a small town like that sometimes made this dream of mine seem out of reach. However, this spring I will take

my first big steps toward achieving it: I will graduate the University of Montana with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and a minor in Native American studies. And I will travel to Japan for my first ever international reporting experience.

I am beyond excited to travel with such a wonderful group of people and to tell the stories of those affected by the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant meltdown and the natural disasters that preceded it. It is stories like these that I have always hoped to have the opportunity to tell.

This once in a lifetime experience will give me the opportunity to test the skills I have acquired throughout my time at the University of Montana. This trip will give me the opportunity to gain real-world experience reporting in a foreign country. It will push me as a journalist and force me out of my

comfort zone unlike anything ever has before. Most importantly, I hope this trip will be that start of a lifelong career in international journalism.

Andrea Bruce

Senior / Team Member

I've always been interested in Japanese culture, even before I was aware that it was a culture different than my own. My mom taught me how to eat with chopsticks at the same time I learned to eat with a knife, fork, and spoon, and frankly, I preferred chopsticks.

When winters got cold, she would transform our kitchen table into a kotatsu (a table with a large blanket draped over it and a heater underneath to keep your legs warm). The first cartoon series I watched was the anime Sailor Moon. In middle school I found out about manga and devoured them all through high school since my high school’s library had a massive collection. My mom even included random Japanese words and phrases in conversations that I never even noticed weren't English until later.

Then, when I got to college and had to choose a language to study for my general education requirement, my first instinct was to take Japanese. I quickly fell in love with it and made it my major halfway through my first semester.

My love for the Japanese language and culture led me to decide to study abroad in Tokyo for a year. When I told my mom about my plan, she told me that she had spent six months studying in Okayama back when she was in college. Those six months had been the inspiration for my multicultural upbringing.

When I left for Japan, I thought that my home was the redwood forests of California, the Monterey Bay, and raging winter storms. I thought that home was the Santa Cruz Mountains. And while a part of me can never feel truly at ease in the absence of big trees, studying abroad made me realize that “home” isn't necessarily a place. Rather it’s a status you can give to the people who mean the most to you, regardless of location. Now I can take “home” with me wherever I go.

Sammi Queenan

Senior / Team Member

Hi, my name’s Sammi Queenan, and I’ve been given the opportunity to go on a life changing trip to Japan with the University of Montana Journalism Department. This trip will be reporting on the lingering effects of the triple disaster (earthquake, tsunami, nuclear) that hit Japan in 2011.

Because my family has been involved in the nuclear industry my entire life, it’s important to me to help accurately portray the nuclear industry. I’m also curious to see what the recent nuclear meltdown in addition to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have done to the Japanese view of nuclear power. They are likely to have an entirely different view on nuclear power that will hopefully add perspective to my view on the subject.

Similarly there are many things that the Japanese view rather differently than Americans do that I would like to see the merit of firsthand. Many of the customs Americans find strange in Japan serve an important purpose and I would like to weigh the pros and cons of both, because no society is perfect. Because experiences like this that show you things you’d never see if left to your own devices and learning to use what you see there in everyday life is what makes well rounded individuals. And the skills I will have the opportunity to learn for the journalism project will be just as beneficial in my everyday life.

Some of you don’t know me very well, but I really really enjoy opportunities to learn new skills and see things from other people’s perspectives, so I’m really excited about those aspects of the trip in addition to the new experiences of being in Japan for the first time. It’s really a wonderful opportunity for growth, but it’s not something I can do alone. As much as the introvert in me wants to do it all by myself, that’s just not possible with a trip of this magnitude, not only do I need the support of everybody who goes to Japan with me, but also the support of people back home to read our stories, help us network, financially support us, and hopefully find a way to support the Japanese people who are still affected by these things. I know that’s a lot and not everyone can or will want to help, but this trip honestly doesn’t work if everyone doesn’t play their part.

Denise Dowling

Associate Professor

When I think of home, I can smell it. That may seem like a strange thing to say, but it’s remarkable how much my sense of smell is wrapped up in my sense of home.

I’m a daddy’s girl. I never would have admitted that when I was a young adult, but now that I’ve been out of my parents’ house for almost four decades, I can come clean. For me, there was and is nothing better than snuggling up with my dad on the couch. When I was a kid, I would tell him everything. As a teenager, neither of us had much to say, but I still took every opportunity to get physically close to my dad. When I left for college, I took one of my dad’s sweaters with me. I wore that thing until it was threadbare. It still smelled like Dad.

My mom always held a full-time, professional job while making a home for five children. I remember us kids lining up outside the bedroom when she got home from work. She’d just be trying to get her pantyhose off in peace, but one by one she’d bring us in to talk about whatever was on our minds.

When my mom put on Arpege perfume, we knew it was going to be a good night. That smell meant Mom and Dad were going out on the town. They’d get dressed up and Mom smelled so sophisticated to me when she dabbed that perfume behind her ears.

In my sophomore year in high school, I lived in France for three months. Now when I smell oranges and diesel fuel, I think of that home. I would take the bus into Lyon for classes every day, and every day a woman would be peeling and eating an orange at the bus stop. It’s not often that particular smell combo comes up now, but when it does, I’m right back in Meximieux.

My husband and I have lived in three different homes since we’ve been married and I had a bunch of different living situations before that. But, for me, home isn’t a place, it’s a smell. And when Mom’s perfumed up, and Dad’s arms are open, I’m home. Wherever that may be.

Nadia White

Associate Professor

“Homa sicku?” Onesan said, peering down at me.

"Watashi wa home sick,” I said in my mangled, teary-eyed Japanglish. “Homa sicku.”

“Ah, homa sicku!” Okaasan said. She showed the dictionary to her sister-in-law who swept me into her bosom with a familiarity that was absolutely un-Japanese and exactly what I needed.

I had come to Japan to teach English after college. It was the first time I had ever lived on my own, away from my friends in Maine or my family in New Jersey. I missed my parents and my dog and my boyfriend. I missed macaroni and cheese and being able to read street signs and having stockings that pulled all the way up to my waist. I missed home.

The Yamazaki family had insisted that I spend time with them. I was reluctant at first. I did not want to build my social life around a childless salary man, his young wife and his older sister. Their English was as bad as my Japanese. But they were persistent. And loving. And they slowly, but surely, patched the terrible hole in my home-sick heart.

Their tiny traditional home was not a convenient distance from my warren of an apartment, but I regularly made the trek to their house, where Onesan (the older sister,) had created a space for my things in her armoire -- my own futon, pajamas and toothbrush. I even had my own tea cup.

They embraced my need to be outdoors and entered me in half-marathons and hiking expeditions that created family trips to the countryside. And when my year was up, they waited a few months and then came to visit me in the states.

That was 30 years ago. The Yamazaki family has since passed on, but their love and compassion inspired my affection for Japan and the stalwart Japanese people. My heart ached for the lives lost and swept away in March 2011.

This spring, I hope our reporters will have an opportunity to step inside intimate spaces and share a sense of the emotional fortitude of people who are rebuilding their own homes and hearts with such determination.

I embark on this trip in loving memory of my Yamazaki family: Eki, Chikako and Nabori.

Andrea Bruce

Senior / Team Member

Sammi Queenan

Senior / Team Member

Denise Dowling

Associate Professor

When I think of home, I can smell it. That may seem like a strange thing to say, but it’s remarkable how much my sense of smell is wrapped up in my sense of home.

Nadia White

Associate Professor

“Homa sicku?” Onesan said, peering down at me.

"Watashi wa home sick,” I said in my mangled, teary-eyed Japanglish. “Homa sicku.”

“Ah, homa sicku!” Okaasan said. She showed the dictionary to her sister-in-law who swept me into her bosom with a familiarity that was absolutely un-Japanese and exactly what I needed.

I embark on this trip in loving memory of my Yamazaki family: Eki, Chikako and Nabori.

Keiji Fujimoto

In-Country Director

Hometown: Hiroshima

Since I graduated from the University of Montana School of Journalism in 2008 I have walked through many parts of the world, taking my time and pursuing photo stories with compassion for people who live under the physical and psychological shadows of oppression.

When I arrived in the suburbs of Nairobi, there were forget-me-nots blooming and falling everywhere. These innocent flowers reminded me of my friends who are sexual minorities and who live under strong social discrimination everywhere, including the places they would call home. In the language of flowers, the tiny forget-me-not is akin to true love. True love (and a bit of perseverance) is the main theme my current photo project—[Forget-me-not]— which focuses on sexual minorities living in east Africa.