Arriving in Phoenix, Arizona and my first introduction

All the fellows, except one arrived in Phoenix, Arizona on December 1st 2020. Yes, we traveled in a COVID time, where we all had to wear masks, do a COVID-test and socially distanced ourselves. We arrived, got to our quarantine hotel, stayed for 7 days and had to take a test at A.E England Building in Downtown. These 7 days we had Zoom sessions, virtual introductions, about attended classes, food, our funding's, speakers to interest us in the different subjects within ASU.

There are 9 fellows participating in the 2020-2021 Hubert H. Humphrey fellowship. We came from across the globe. I am from Suriname, a small South-American country, situated in the middle of French-Guyana, Guyana and Brazil. The language I speak is Dutch and some native languages of immigrants. So, these fellows are from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Pakistan, Romania, Bulgaria, Botswana & Russia. Mind you, there is only one guy in this group. Yup, he is the king.

One of the Zoom sessions was dedicated to introducing a fellow. I had the greatest honor to introduce Elma Velic from Bosnia & Herzegovina. My idea was not to do a PowerPoint presentation but to do a whole report on her. Just how I would have done a report for my previous newsroom. It wasn't easy, because people who get interviewed tend to get nervous about almost ANYTHING. I put down my phone and started recording, by the time she came to her senses that I was filming, I already was talking to her for more than 10 minutes. Interviewing isn't the hard part, the difficult part is to edit the footages into a nice piece with good information. Googling and 'hunting' for b-rolls to use as inserts for her story. When I collected all my material, the editing had to start. I have struggled for more than 2 hours to figure out how I could format my iPhone footage into a mp4. The edit software I use is Movavi for my Windows laptop. I did not like the pressure and the stress formatting gave me. Finally after Googling and figuring out- I helped myself through my own struggles- the editing started.

This is the final product of such an easy job! :P