Milica Trpevska - Summer 2009

Milica TrpevskaAt the age of 7 I had my first crisis - wanting "to bring peace in the world" but not being able to. In a conflicted city, Tetovo, like many others during that troubled time in Macedonia, I so desperately wanted to make peace happen that I asked my primary school teacher whether I could do something about it. After a silence, she came up with an answer that encouraged me: "You can become a journalist," she said. "You can inform people and make them aware that war is not the way for them to get what they want." Though I didn't fully understand at the time, I took it for granted that becoming a journalist would give me a chance to convince people that there is nothing better than living in peace.

What bothered me then were the horrors of the war that was raging in Bosnia and Croatia, states that once were part of the same federation as my country. Being exposed to the Serbian media, whose news I was often following, I realized to my dismay that journalists weren't able to bring peace to the world since they couldn't wipe out the wrongdoers, who, according to what I thought back then, were the Croats and the Bosnian Muslims.

Fast forward to age 14, when my hometown became part of the news. The  curse of nationalism did not bypass Macedonia, a country that was considered a peaceful exception in the Balkans until the moment when the conflict broke out. That was the time when my illusions about journalism and what journalists can do began wearing away. I couldn't stand listening to the news. Much of the highly regarded Macedonian and Albanian media spent more time interpreting and qualifying the news than reporting facts. They reported false casualty figures, going so far as turning the circumstances of an incident in favor of one of the parties in the conflict.

But at the point when some believed that the ethnic conflict in Macedonia would turn into a large-scale civil war, in English I could then barely understand, I heard a CNN reporter interviewing a Macedonian woman who lived in a mostly Albanian-populated village. I heard her voice in Macedonian gradually fading together with the voice of the translator saying, "What we want here is the war to end, so that we can live peacefully, the way we did before." This news fragment changed my view of journalism and of the healing role of a journalist covering conflicts.

At 17, as I started seeing more and more such stories in our media, stories that spread a new, hopeful perspective of the life prospects in my country, my enthusiasm for being a journalist began to return.

By my high school graduation, I had already formed a clear image of what I wanted to accomplish in my professional career. I was determined to become a journalist and help my country lay a foundation for unbiased reporting. Slowly but surely, I hoped, the highest standards of reporting could both improve our native journalism and also sow the cultural seeds for building a Macedonian multiethnic society.

But Rome was not built in a day, nor is my current journalistic know-how. Studying journalism and working as a student reporter in Bulgaria and Macedonia has helped me become dedicated to the opportunities  the media can provide for an enthusiastic reporter as well as her publication. Along the way I've learned the power of a clear sentence and the magic of a poetic observation.

As I am approaching  my final year at the American University in Bulgaria, I'm seeking the chance to put my skills to real-world use and to get strong feedback from professionals in an English-speaking country. That's why I am so attracted to the Scripps Howard Foundation internship, an opportunity that will not only enhance my writing and reporting skills, but will also help me accomplish my career objective: to make Macedonian citizens aware of the constructive power of the media in a  country that is very likely to become a fully consolidated democracy in the near future.

**