Ali and a classmate in central Prague
Ali Balunywa in Prague, Czech Republic
I was honoured to get an invite to attend multimedia-training course in Prague conducted by a worldwide-renown veteran photographer and multimedia journalist. The training took place in Prague, the capital city of Czech republic, a former member of the Eastern Europe allied to the Soviet Union till 1989. From the Western propaganda (oba propasoga!), we were led to believe that people living in Eastern Europe were suffering without modern infrastructure and amenities.
Before this trip I could never spell the word Czech leave alone Czechoslovakia! I searched for information about the country online. Whatever I was coming up with gave me a different picture from what I held before!
Transitions Online (TOL) a nonprofit organization in Prague, Czech Republic, which organized the training, was established in April 1999 to strengthen the professionalism, independence and impact of the news media in the post-communist countries of Europe and the former Soviet Union. This is done through a combination of journalism and media training programs, and the publication of Transitions Online magazine.
The January 2011 training was an intensive international one-week multimedia-training course. The course’s objective was to assist journalists to learn how to capture still and moving images, work on them and use them in their day today work of informing the public.
The lead trainer was Dean Cox, an international photojournalist and multimedia specialist whose outlets include The New York Times, Eurasia Net and the International Herald Tribune. The other was Nikolay Pavlov who is a reporter, producer and multimedia specialist currently working for RFE/RL Prague
16 participants attended the course; from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Romania, Slovakia and Uzbekistan. http://www.tol.org/client/training/course/21791-multimedia-reporting-january-2011.html (I appear in first and 3rd photo)
The intensive, one-week course was a mixture of classroom training sessions and practical shooting and editing. Participants worked in teams to produce their own multimedia reports by the end of the week.
My partner was called Petru Zoltan a journalist from Romania. Petro and I chose “The Holocaust Commemoration Day” as the assignment to cover in Prague between 22 and 28 January 2011 in fulfillment of the requirements of the Multimedia course. January 27 marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest Nazi death camp. In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated this day as International Holocaust Remembrance Day (IHRD to honor the victims of the Nazi era.
The Jewish community is located in the Centre of Prague. We discovered that it is a difficult community to penetrate. The chief Rabi denied us permission to film or talk to any Jewish community for security reasons. We were however able to talk to Mgr. Miroslava Ludvikova, the head of the Jewish Education and Cultural Centre and Ondrej Cihak of the Reference Centre and we were fortunate to get unsolicited information from Keith, a tour guide.
We learnt from them that:
- Out of 118,000 Jews in Czech Republic, 77, 297 lost their lives during the holocaust and in Europe 6 million
- Prague has 10 Synagogues
- There are 3,000 registered Jews in Prague
- There is a Cemetery with over 10,000 bodies
- There is an Education Centre and museum
The headquarters of the Jewish community was built in the 14th century and it has two clocks, one with Roman figures depicting European time and the other in Hebrew depicting Israel time.
We were able to make a short film, take photos and write a small article about it.
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