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Photo: Christopher Waddell

 

At just 23 years of age, Katie Lewis has seen a hippopotamus, traveled to Germany, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, and the Sudan, and is now the inaugural winner of the Diane King Stuemer Fellowship.

 

Jointly administered by the Canadian Association of Journalists and CanWest Global Communications Corp., the fellowship is awarded annually to a graduating journalism student at Carleton University. It provides the opportunity to report on international issues for a year at The Ottawa Citizen.

 

Lewis, who is also the 2006-2007 recipient of Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Award for International Development Journalism, says she’s thrilled, because the fellowship will help further her career goals.

 

“I love to travel, and journalism is fantastic that way,” she said. “You can travel the world and do what you love best. I’m really lucky, because I picked the right career.”

 

 

As part of her fellowship, Lewis will be able to travel anywhere in the world to report on a story of her choosing. Lewis says she’d like to chronicle the history and effects of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) civil war, which ended in 2002. More than 3 million people were killed during the war that devastated the country and its population. In the midst of the DRC’s first democratic elections, held in July 2006, Lewis flew into the country for 48 hours from Uganda.

“I think it’s one of the worst humanitarian disasters ever, and it’s totally off the map for people,” she said. “Those are the stories I always look for. I don’t want to go to Iraq, and I don’t want to go to Afghanistan. I want to go to places where there are equally compelling stories the world doesn’t know about yet.”

Lewis garnered experience chasing these types of stories while working on a radio documentary about the use of DDT to fight malaria. The disease, she explains, kills more people in Uganda than HIV/AIDS, a fact unknown to North Americans.

 

“It’s an ignored disease, because it’s not here the way other diseases are,” she says. “It’s not really in North America, so we don’t have the same connection with it. It’s preventable and extremely treatable, and it’s possible that we can wipe it right off the map if we have the desire to do so.”

 

            

Her professional experiences in Africa were not limited to working exclusively on her documentary. While there, she also worked as a journalist for the Uganda Radio Network, the country’s only independent radio news agency, and covered the peace talks between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Ugandan government in Juba, Sudan. The LRA, a Ugandan paramilitary group, has been at war with the Ugandan government since 1987.

 

Lewis says she enjoyed her experiences in Africa so much, that when finished with the fellowship, she’d like to go back and freelance there.

 

“We all have this image of what Africa looks like in our heads,” she says. “But when you get there on the ground and you see how people actually live, it’s so different than what you picture. Most Africans whom I met have this amazing ability to be incredibly positive no matter what comes their way. That’s a lesson I definitely took home with me.”

 

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