Wanja Njuguna

Friday

I wanted you to see Wanja Njuguna, the media studies lecturer I helped during March. A formidable Kenyan who is an Obama fan and a single, divorced mother of a seven-year-old, Wanja is tireless, but even she was feeling the burden of teaching four classes and advising the UB Horizon student newspaper this semester while trying to make sure her son had proper attention. She looked as if she had received a Christmas gift when I showed up on March 2 and said, "Tell me what I can do to take a load off your shoulders." She happily unloaded a lot of tasks and teaching. I'll describe more later about the UB experience. But for now suffice to say that Wanja and I were struck by how we had similar paths: She wrote about domestic violence and won "the African Pulitzer" (CNN's African Journalist of the Year); she was a hospice volunteer; she got a major U.S. journalism fellowship (the Knight at Stanford in 2002-03) and was an intern at Time magazine, as I was in 1992.
We said goodbye yesterday, but I feel sure we'll be in touch or have our paths cross again before too long.