2008 FOREIGN PRESS SCHOLARSHIP FUND HONORS AWARD RECIPIENTS
By Randy B. Hecht

“All good reporting is the same thing: the best obtainable version of the truth.”

With that single sentence, bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Carl Bernstein summed up the importance of the journalist’s work. The keynote speaker at the Foreign Press Association’s annual scholarship awards dinner, he began his remarks by stressing the importance of mastering the skills necessary to do that work well. “The values we get at the beginning of our apprenticeship in this craft are what sustain us,” he said as he congratulated this year’s scholarship winners on their achievements.

The event was held to honor those achievements. However, it unexpectedly took on another dimension when New York City Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler announced that the city was honoring the FPA itself. Mayor Michael Bloomberg had signed a proclamation declaring that day, May 13, 2008, Foreign Press Association of New York Day. FPA president Alan Capper and executive director Suzanne Adams accepted the proclamation. The organization is particularly grateful to have received this tribute as it commemorates both its 90th anniversary year and the 15th anniversary of the establishment of its Scholarship Fund.

Following the speeches, attendees had a chance to get to know this year’s scholarship award winners. Anup Kaphle, the first prize winner, was accompanied at the dinner by his parents, Loka Nath and Tara Kaphle, who were in New York on their first-ever trip outside their native Nepal. Having just completed his master’s degree at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, he will work this summer as a fellow at News21, a national multimedia initiative of the Carnegie and Knight foundations, for which he will report and produce multimedia stories about immigration and the 2008 presidential election.

“The awards dinner was a great way for me to meet some of the best in the business and interact with them. My parents said they were amazed at how much encouragement and honor young students get in the United States,” Kaphle said. “I hope to use the scholarship money to travel to Democratic Republic of Congo to work on a multimedia project on the ongoing violence. I feel that the violence in Congo has been vastly overlooked, and I hope that through multimedia, I can show what the conditions are really like.”

The organization awarded two second- prize scholarships. In accepting his award, Iraqi Mariwan Hama-Saeed recalled his four colleagues at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting who were killed in the line of duty since 2003. Despite that personal knowledge of the risks journalism presents, Hama- Saeed, who just completed his master’s degree in journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder, may return to Iraq to work, though he is being considered for positions in New York and Washington, DC. He and his wife, journalist Tiare Rath, are also weighing the option of a move to Maldives, where Rath has been offered a Fulbright Scholar teaching position.

Vinod K. Jose, also a second-prize winner, has graduated from Columbia and expects to return to Delhi by end of the summer. He hopes to have the opportunity to cover India’s elections next year for national media. In addition, he is doing some foreign correspondence on a freelance basis and working on a book proposal about South Asian politics. He attended the awards dinner with his wife, Saumya Varghese, who is at work on her PhD in medieval history.

Finally, awards were presented to the two third-prize winners. Lam Thuy Vo, who was born in Germany to Vietnamese émigrés, was the evening’s third Columbia graduate. Now a videographer at the Wall Street Journal Online and a web producer for News 21, she hopes to use her scholarship money to fund future reporting on the impact of the HIV epidemic in Vietnam.

Adeola Eunice Odalele, also a thirdprize winner this year, is enrolled at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in New York City, where her studies are concentrated on business and economic reporting. She expects to complete her studies in December and plans to return to her native Nigeria to begin a career in broadcast journalism.

The evening concluded with drawings for two door prizes donated to the FPA by British Airways and American Airlines, both of which are strong supporters of the Scholarship Fund. Each airline donated a pair of airline tickets. Their generosity helped to end a memorable evening on a celebratory note.