We spent June and July of 2023 working as journalists in Eastern Europe. For three weeks, we covered Ukrainian refugees moving into Slovakia. We spent the next two weeks writing about Russian immigration into the country of Georgia. Together, we reported from a total of six different cities, performed over 25 interviews, and took hundreds of photographs.
We published a story in The Colorado Springs Gazette each week and even took an impromptu trip to Sombor, Serbia to report on Nikola Jokić’s return home after the all-star led the Denver Nuggets to win the NBA championship. And, when Yevgeny Prigozhin marched Wagner troops towards Moscow, we wrote about the event’s effects on the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
As students at Colorado College, we are active in the campus’s writing community. Lloyd served as Co Editor-in-Chief of The Catalyst, Colorado College’s independent student newspaper, in 2022. Braithwaite is currently serving as one of the 2023 Co Editors-in-Chief. Both of us continue to write frequently for the publication.
We are journalism minors and both took Radio Journalism, a renowned course taught by the longtime NPR producer Peter Breslow. Beslow’s class inspired us to produce a total of four audio pieces after our return from Eastern Europe.
We first hatched the idea of traveling abroad while taking Alan Prendaghast’s class on crime reporting and narrative nonfiction during Block 1 of our junior year. CC clubs and classrooms instilled in us a passion to seek out unique opportunities in foreign correspondence, but it was the college’s grants that enabled us to achieve the goals we set. To fund the opportunity, we applied for, and received, a Keller Family Venture Grant and a Sheffer for Roman Catholic Studies.