Lesotho's Mount Qiloane, the sun-baked symbol of the Basotho people. (Photo: mjj)

MASERU, Lesotho – At the U.S. destination of “Four Corners” – where the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah converge – flexible tourists bend over to be photographed with a limb in all four.

Today, I attempt a global Four Corners: as an American foreign correspondent, journalism teacher-trainer, and freelancing father of three striving for a simultaneous presence in southern Africa, Far East Asia, Central Europe and North America.

This blog, which I’d dubbed From East to East — as I oscillated between my home in post-Communist Eastern Europe and work in China — now swerves south into sub-Saharan Africa, to document a journalistic journey that includes writing from our new home in the “Mountain Kingdom” of Lesotho, teaching in Hong Kong and training in Prague.

Spliced in are my articles and photos for Foreign Policy, Christian Science Monitor, Harvard’s Nieman Reports, The Mantle and many others listed to the right.

Thank you for reading! … mjj

Budapest Winter: Can anyone stop the Putinization of Hungary?

BY MICHAEL J. JORDAN |JANUARY 17, 2012

A humiliation for many Hungarians. (Photo: Reuters)

With the European Union’s threat of a lawsuit against the Hungarian government for meddling with the independence of its central bank, the world is finally taking notice of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s aggressive recent moves to consolidate power.

But for some Hungarians themselves, the gravity of what’s happening in today’s fractious Hungarian political scene was driven home on Dec. 3 by the blurred-out face of the former Supreme Court chief justice, Zoltan Lomnici.

It was one thing for Orban’s muscular center-right government to replace the upper ranks of state television and radio with its own loyalists after winning a two-thirds “supermajority” in the April 2010 parliamentary elections — seizing control of state-run media by incoming governments still remains an acceptable spoil of political warfare in post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe.

But it was another when, in a news report, Hungarian state television pixilated the face of Lomnici — a one-time Orban loyalist who had recent fallen afoul of the prime minister — to conceal his identity from viewers. And that was the final straw for Hungarian TV staffers Balazs Nagy-Navarro and Aranka Szavuly.

Navarro and Szavuly say the Lomnici pixilation proved that the minions of Orban’s party, Fidesz, have taken media combat one step further: They are willing to manipulate stories, edit tape to suit their agenda, and instruct reporters on whom to interview and whom to ignore.

To Szavuly, these tactics epitomize Fidesz’s society-wide conquest. Step by step the party has gobbled up all forms of independence, opposition, and checks-and-balances in one of the EU’s newest members — reminiscent of the “salami tactics” of the late 1940s, when Hungarian Communists gradually hacked away at enemies like slices of salami.

Although Hungary was once “the best pupil in the class” of ex-Communist states striving to join Western institutions — a model of economic dynamism and political reform — wayward Budapest has become a political thorn in the side of a European Union already reeling from Euro-induced calamity.

Some Hungarians have grown so desperate at the fate of their democracy that tens of thousands regularly throng the streets in protest. It’s no longer unusual to hear Hungarians make straight-faced comparisons between their country and authoritarian Belarus.

After the pixilation controversy, Navarro and Szavuly — vice presidents of the Television and Filmmakers Independent Trade Union — demanded an explanation.

“We wanted an investigation, but didn’t get answers,” says Szavuly, 32. “There was this feeling that we have no other possibility, because all the doors are closed, with nowhere to go.”

So, on Dec. 10, the two journalists went on hunger strike — later joined by two others — planting themselves in front of Hungarian TV headquarters and subsisting for days off tea, juice, and watery soup. Navarro and Szavuly were fired on Dec. 27 and finally ended their 22-day strike on Jan. 1, unemployed. While the protest didn’t have quite the impact of the Tunisian street peddler whose self-immolation sparked the Arab Spring, it clearly stirred many Hungarians.

The very next day, after a brand-new Hungarian constitution authored by Fidesz — secretly, say critics, with no public debate — went into effect, as many as 100,000 demonstrators poured into the streets around the Budapest opera house, as Orban and other dignitaries gathered inside to toast a document that seems to seal Fidesz supremacy for years to come.

Beyond the fact that it’s a deeply nationalistic, socially conservative text — it protects a fetus from “moment of conception” and defines marriage as “union between man and woman,” though Hungary currently permits both abortion and same-sex legal partnerships — it’s also deemed to shackle or muzzle elements of the judiciary, the data-protection office, and the central bank.

“It’s a constitutional coup,” says Princeton comparative-constitutional expert Kim Lane Scheppele, who last month documented the dizzying array of new Fidesz-imposed laws and policies.

Brussels has taken notice, and Hungarian-European relations are rapidly deteriorating.

Last week, the European Commission condemned both the country’s new constitution and its fiscal policies for apparently violating EU treaties. Hungary, which was the first EU country to turn to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout in 2008, now likely needs a second, as it teeters on the brink of recession. A major breakdown in relations with Europe won’t help matters.

All three major ratings agencies now classify Hungarian credit as “junk,” the forint has become the world’s worst-performing currency, and Brussels projects that Hungary will boast both the highest debt and slowest growth in 2012. Yet with concerns for sapped independence of Hungary’s judiciary and central bank, the IMF and World Bank are shying away from doing business with Budapest again.

The situation is, in many ways, unprecedented in the history of the EU. As Heather Grabbe, former senior adviser to then-European Commissioner for Enlargement Olli Rehn, puts it, “The European Union isn’t only an economic union, but a union of shared values and norms. … We don’t have much experience in our lifetimes of a country heading in the other direction after it has joined the EU.”

Earlier last week, EC Spokesman Cezary Lewanowicz told me, “The Commission reserves the right to take any steps that it deems appropriate, including the possibility of launching infringement procedures” before the EU Court of Justice. On Wednesday, Jan. 11, the EC formally threatened Hungary with legal action if the constitution isn’t modified — and also warned that European development funds might be withdrawn unless the government takes more orthodox, belt-tightening fiscal measures.

Heeding the warnings, Hungarian officials have taken a more conciliatory tone in recent days, with Orban himself suggesting that some middle ground exists. Last week, a leading Fidesz member of the European Parliament, György Schöpflin, told me Budapest is prepared to compromise.

“What the Commission has to do is come up with very concrete legal points about what its objections are and where it believes European law is being flouted,” said Schöpflin. “If they have legal validity, I’m sure in that event the Hungarian government will bring in the necessary amendments.”

How much Orban is willing to cede remains to be seen, as he has long been renowned for his pugnacity. He first became a star during the waning days of communism, as an earring- and blue jean-wearing anti-regime activist. In 1989, at a public commemoration for the heroes of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, he was reportedly the first to call on Soviet troops to pack up and shove off.

Later, he veered rightward in pursuit of votes. As one of Europe’s youngest premieres during his first term from 1998 to 2002, he enabled a toxic political climate by tolerating the hurling of vitriol on the parliament floor at the ex-Communist Socialist Party and other rivals.

But Orban fell victim to unfulfilled promises and expectations and was defeated in 2002 — part of a pattern across the post-Communist sphere, as disappointment and disillusionment saw elections swing from left to right, with ruling parties rarely winning re-election.

Once back in power, though, the bumbling, corrupt Socialists fueled voter rage, peaking in September 2006 when Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany was caught on tape admitting that his party had lied to the public “morning, evening, and night” about the country’s financial health in order to win re-election earlier that year.

The revelation sparked street protests, including flashes of police brutality, which burst onto CNN screens worldwide. The riots galvanized a new far-right movement, Jobbik, which re-introduced an ancient coat of arms that, not coincidentally, was also embraced by war-time Hungary’s fascists. Jobbik then unveiled its own paramilitary force, which marched about intimidating the country’s sizable Roma and Jewish minorities.

The turn to the right mirrored Hungarian attitudes that became more hardline in the wake of the global economic crisis. The Pew Research Center has found that, of Eastern Europeans, Hungarians are the most disillusioned with free markets and most nostalgic for the communist era. A more recent survey suggests that many Hungarians would swap democracy back for authoritarianism if it ensured prosperity.

Thus, it wasn’t particularly surprising that in the April 2010 elections, the Socialists weren’t just swept out of office — they were decimated, claiming just 19 percent of the vote. Orban’s Fidesz snared 53 percent, while Jobbik scored an astounding 17 percent– a high-water mark for any xenophobic, anti-minority party in the two decades of the post-communist transition.

Just as significantly, electoral rules awarded Fidesz 68 percent of the seats in Parliament — surpassing the two-thirds needed to pass any law at will, even to rewrite the constitution. Fidesz has boasted that this supermajority was a popular mandate for “radical reforms.” Fidesz quickly went to work consolidating its power, brooking no dissent and wreaking vengeance over even some of the smallest battles, like re-naming an airport over the modest objections of history-minded geographers.

Orban and his appointees have been increasingly preaching God and country, not to mention the lingering spiritual wounds of World War I, when the post-war Treaty of Trianon cut down the Kingdom of Hungary both physically and psychically.

Anna Kende, a Hungarian mother of three, says she grew concerned when incoming education officials began to speak of the need for children “to learn to think in a Hungarian way” and “get a good Hungarian education.” She and her Dutch husband decided the time was right to take a break from Hungary, moving to Holland last fall.

“It’s probably best for my children, even if they grow up in Hungary, that they have a broader perspective and see things more critically — what may be normal in Hungary, may not be considered normal elsewhere,” said Kende, during a New Year’s visit back to Budapest.

Princeton’s Scheppele suggests Orban is following in the footsteps of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. “It’s hard to call them ‘dictators,’ but they really don’t want to share power or be governed by anyone else,” says the scholar, who has studied the constitutional courts in both Hungary and Russia since the 1990s. “They’re the 21st-century form of political control freak.”

The constitutional crisis with Brussels, in fact, is actually the second strike against Hungary in the EU’s book. Last year, it was the country’s stifling new media law, which European institutions denounced as “unprecedented” in Western democracies. Budapest eventually climbed down and revised the law, but only modestly, as a politically appointed “Media Council” continues to loom over the industry.

The Fidesz-appointed council, for example, offered no solace for hunger-strikers Navarro and Szavuly, even after they were unceremoniously fired.

With Hungary steadily drifting toward democratically elected authoritarianism — and a reputation as the most unruly of the EU’s 27 members — the question is how much longer Brussels will put up with it. While Hungary’s expulsion from the EU seems unimaginable, isolation does not. Grabbe says the “nuclear option” of suspended voting rights, recently levied at Greece, remains on the table.

Unusually, even Washington has weighed in. In a Dec. 23 letter to Orban, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed “significant and well-founded” concern that Hungary should maintain “a real commitment to the independence of the judiciary, freedom of the press, and transparency of government.” There’s even talk of reviving Hungarian coverage at Radio Free Europe, the U.S. Congress-backed service that was curtailed once the Cold War ended and the Iron Curtain parted.

Hungary’s fellow communists-turned-EU-members are eyeing whether the union will back up its words with actions. The Balkan states that aspire to join the union, such as Serbia and Macedonia, will also watch closely to see if they will be held to higher standards than current members are. Farther afield, the Hungarian example could become an irritating riposte in the future, whenever the EU lectures others, like China, about democracy, rule of law, and checks-and-balances.

Unfortunately, the domestic opposition to Fidesz is feeble and discredited, say Hungarian activists. Meanwhile,”The entities that normally counterbalance executive power have been invaded, weakened, or in some cases abolished by the government, so outside pressure is very important,” says Andras Kadar, co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee. “If you can’t do it at home, you have to go outside.”

As for Szavuly, the hunger-striking Hungarian journalist, she wonders how many other complacent Hungarians will be inspired by countrymen daring to take action. “We didn’t talk any more. We did something,” she says. “If you always just complain to your neighbor about how bad things are, but don’t do something about it, things will never get better.”

Michael J. Jordan was a Budapest-based foreign correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor from 1995-2000. He now lives in Maseru, Lesotho. His reporting can be found at http://jordanink.wordpress.com.

 ‘… There’s little interest in what Slovak journalism refers to as publicistika: serious news features, profiles and analysis. It turns out such stories can be bad for business.’

By Michael J. Jordan Foreign Reporting

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia – Katarina Jenkutova was the sort of student who makes teaching worthwhile. Two years ago, she was one of my 30 Slovak journalism students at the University of Saints Cyril and Methodius, in the provincial but historic city of Trnava.

They were cute and bright, yet also shy and sometimes lethargic. I had to scold several not to surf online or message friends during class. Yet Jenkutova stood out among the handful who seemed genuinely attracted to the kind of reporting I taught—serious, pound-the-pavement news features and personality profiles. I had high hopes for her future in journalism.

Then this past year, while sitting in a smoky Bratislava café, I was tickled to see her appear on the television screen hanging from the ceiling. Reporting, live! The volume was muted, but no loss: my Slovak-language skills would’ve only caught every fifth word. It felt great knowing she was out there, in the business.

For this article, I contacted her to hear where she is today—and why. Via blotchy Skype-video, she explained that she’s been reporting at the national news network for a year, as a correspondent from her postcard-perfect hometown: Kosice, Slovakia’s second-largest city. The good news: she makes enough money to survive. The bad news is that she wants what so many young reporters across the industry want: guidance, for both the gratification of improving themselves and the desire to sharpen their (very marketable) journalistic skills.

The context, though, is very different in post-Communist Central Europe, where an authoritarian reflex toward the media is often visible in Slovakia and Hungary.

Jenkutova graduated from a university that stubbornly insists on a heavy dose of old-school media theory, taught by old-school professors who eschew roll-up-your-sleeves practical learning. She landed in a TV job for which she was expected to produce a piece per day, though she had little hands-on experience and desperately needs coaching. However, her young, overworked editor, who is based in the capital, Bratislava, 500 kilometers away, does not have time to provide each staffer with professional development (by e-mail, phone or in person), such as how to ask the tough question, or to challenge the authorities.

“Once I read about the morning staff meeting, where it was said, ‘Katarina didn’t do a good job on this.’ I asked for more about this, but there was nothing else,” she tells me. “I know I’m a young journalist, doing many things wrong. But if no one ever tells me what, how can I learn to do it better? Sometimes I feel very frustrated, even crying, like the only thing that keeps me going is the money.”

Retaining Good Journalists

Why would it matter if a bright young Slovak like Jenkutova were to burn out and flee the profession, as so many others before her have done? It’d not only be a loss for Slovak journalism, but another blow to the country’s democratic evolution. The European Union’s ex-Communist members need watchdog journalism more than ever.

Disillusionment with democracy—and nostalgia for the past—is rising across the region, according to a 2009 Pew poll, fueled by climbing prices, dogged joblessness, nasty politics and pervasive corruption. And the Spring 2011 issue of Nieman Reports spotlighted how corruption-sniffing reporters and news outlets across the ex-Soviet orbit face an array of threats, including political, economic and legal pressure. Farther to the east, they even suffer acts of violence. Forms of censorship not seen since life behind the Iron Curtain have been revived.

“Most censorship is of an ‘inner’ nature,” Polish investigative journalist Beata Biel wrote in the Spring 2011 issue. “Journalists self-censor because they are aware of their employer’s political position and thus do not submit stories in opposition to it.”

Yet one element lacking in that Spring issue was a closer look at the failure to effectively nurture journalists for futures in the industry. The shortcomings begin during their university education, then extend into their impressionable early years in the field.

While my lament is about what happens to young journalists, the media’s situation is actually a microcosm of so much that ails post-Cold War Eastern Europe, even 22 years into its painful transition from dictatorship to democracy. Not enough money, not enough staff, not enough time, not enough training —and not enough strength to resist external political and economic pressures.

I’ve experienced this firsthand as a foreign correspondent reporting from this region since 1994, then while teaching journalism for two years at universities in Slovakia and the neighboring Czech Republic. Recently, I heard this in the grumbling of former students now working as journalists. I also learned more about it this spring as a panelist at a World Press Freedom Day event in Bratislava, “Journalism Education vs. Media Practice.”

At this gathering, I met Lukas Diko, who is editor in chief of Slovakia’s TV Markiza, the largest news channel in a nation where TV is the largest media source. At 31, he is already steering Slovakia’s most influential news content. In the West, he’d likely be a wunderkind junior editor. Diko knows his relative youth illustrates the state of Slovak journalism, as regime loyalists were forced out. He recalls his self-consciousness at a 2010 global journalism conference, where he was seated among editors 20 and 30 years his senior.

“I could see how young I was for this job,” he says.

Diko told me that graduates show up at his offices looking for jobs. But in talking with them, their motivations become apparent. They speak of the allure of being in front of the camera in this news-as-entertainment era or of getting the job as a steppingstone to a more lucrative opportunity in politics or business.

Despite hundreds of applicants to choose from, Diko complains, “It’s so difficult to find qualified graduates.” While he and a clutch of colleagues are gripped by sense of mission, much of the new generation “goes for the glamour, rather than the hard work of journalism,” he said.

Reconnecting With My Students

This conversation inspired me to find out how glamorously my students live today. The short answer is, not very. In the fall semester of 2007 and 2008, I taught journalism across the Slovak-Czech border, at Masaryk University, the second-largest Czech university, in Brno, the second-largest city.

One of my 2008 students, Andrej Slivka, left his central Czech hometown of Pardubice to study something “cool and prestigious”—journalism. Rather than gravitate to the capital city, Prague, he headed the other way, to explore the Moravian city of Brno, with its quintessentially Mitteleuropa architecture, watering holes, and winter market. In my class, he was clearly drawn to the local music scene, so he produced a profile of a Czech beat-box musician.

He’s since gone on to write some 200 music-related items for the Czech website, Superbeat.cz. He isn’t paid for it, but at least gets into concerts for free. He still doesn’t want to go to Prague, which he describes as “too fast, all about hype, and you can be beaten up in the metro any time.”

Yet in Brno, he juggles his career ambitions with the quandary of living in a small country and working in an equally small media market. Ideally, Slivka told me, he’d write about music full time. But in a country of only 10 million, the 23-year-old observed, “maybe only six or seven music journalists are paid enough to support a family.”

He also considered a narrower niche—one I didn’t know even existed—reporting about poker. The card game has grown in popularity, yet Czech poker journalists “aren’t good at understanding the game,” he said. Either specialty, though, would require a move to Prague.

Life in a small country with fewer opportunities creates pressure to choose a path wisely. To broaden his horizons a bit, Slivka stayed put at Masaryk for a two-year master’s degree in international relations.

“If you just have a bachelor’s degree, you’re nothing in this society,” he says. “I can’t tell you right now I want 100 percent to do this with the rest of my life, but I’m trying to take time to make the best decision. I’ll definitely find some job, but I’m not too optimistic about finding one I’ll be happy in.”

He is not my only former student now studying international relations. Martina Dockalova was the most serious-minded of Czech students in my 2007 class. She was hooked on newspapers at age 15. As she grew older, she told me, “When my friends wanted to go to the pubs, I’d say, ‘Wait, let me finish the paper, then we can go.’”

Now, she isn’t drawn to the grind of daily deadline, but wants to delve thoughtfully into foreign affairs. She speaks Greek, interned at the Turkish Daily News in Istanbul, is a part-time editor at Valka, a Czech-language quarterly on war history, and recently wrote a long essay on Alexander the Great. She watched some of her classmates dive into newspapering in Brno, but they didn’t last long at their jobs.

“They started at an extremely low salary, like 600 euro per month, which is really nothing when you pay 300 to 400 euro for a small one-bedroom apartment,” she said. “Also, the work is exhausting.”

At 25, Dockalova keeps her options open: she may pursue a PhD, take a full-time position at Valka, or perhaps operate from the foreign desk of a national paper. Money, she says, is not as much a priority as finding the right platform: “To be heard, where everyone is reading your article.”

Even when my students land in journalism jobs, I wonder what wisdom, if any, they’ll absorb from their youthful elders. Diko says he offers modest training to help launch them. Down the road, there will be less time to further develop them—or do what it takes to retain them.

In his newsroom of 60, he explained, “We don’t have the time to teach staff, to lead people, when it’s easier to just write an e-mail.”

This is something I want to ask Jenkutova about when we finally reconnect through Facebook. Before our Skype-video chat, she sends me a link to a recent sample of her work: a very clean, professionally produced piece of her reporting in a downtown Kosice park. A small group of neighbors and environmental activists were protesting a city plan to chop down some trees and sacrifice a precious green space for some new development. It’s a straightforward, daily news story, reporting that something happened today. It’s a good start, but I see greater potential.

“You could dig even deeper,” I suggested, perhaps with too much of a lecturing tone. “Use this event as a window onto how environmental activism feels so empowered two decades into the post-Communist transition. Or, as a window onto civil society, and what progress has been made two decades into the post-Communist transition.”

It’s my view that journalism can inform and educate Slovak society about how far they’ve come—and how far they have yet to go—in their unprecedented transformation from Communist dictatorship to capitalist democracy.

She accepted my advice, then politely set me straight about what is realistic.

“Thank you for the muza,” she said, using the Slovak word for inspiration. But her bosses want a story per day, every day. There’s no money, no staff, no time to invest in such reporting. Even worse, there’s little interest in what Slovak journalism refers to as publicistika: serious news features, profiles and analysis. It turns out such stories can be bad for business.

“If I do something on the activists, and they criticize someone, that person can sue me and say it wasn’t balanced,” she told me, her frustration palpable via Skype. “Then I look like a bad guy. There are many cases where reporters tried to go deeper, but it costs the company a lot of money.”

The inevitable consequence is empty, superficial reporting, far from the meaningful truths about Slovak life today—another symptom of democracy’s ill health in this part of the world.

Michael J. Jordan has reported from 25 countries during the past 17 years for the Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy and other publications. He is a visiting scholar at Hong Kong Baptist University, teaching in its international journalism program, and has taught reporting at the University of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, Slovakia; Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic; and Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York. He blogs at http://jordanink.wordpress.com/ and can be reached through e-mail at mjjordan23@earthlink.net.

She has a head for business: peddling peaches among traffic. (Photo: mjj)

LADYBRAND, South Africa – An unexpected surprise about living here in Lesotho is that we’re also sampling small-town South Africa – within the agricultural “breadbasket” of Free State province. In particular, the farming town of Ladybrand is a scenic 10-minute drive from Maseru.

Historically, Ladybrand was a base first established in the 1860s by the Dutch-pioneer “Voortrekkers” while warring with the Basotho people – who now comprise Lesotho – and later used by the British against those same Dutch farmers during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. Today, it’s perhaps best known to foreigners in Maseru as a pleasant place for weekend brunch. On this occasion, road work enabled us to stop and soak in the view.

If it weren't for road construction, no pause to enjoy Ladybrand below. (Photo: mjj)

MASERU, Lesotho – I’ve bemoaned my struggle to learn the language of countries where I’ve lived, be it my horrid Hungarian, survival Slovak or café Cantonese.

The Sesotho greeting of "Hello, brothers!" facilitated this photo of young Basotho cattle-herders at rest, minutes from our home in Maseru. (Photo: mjj)

But there’s no denying an irrefutable fact: mastering a few words in any country will garner you grins and goodwill. This is particularly crucial for a foreign correspondent like me.

For starters, Hello, Thank you, Goodbye. Or gimmicky responses like Delicious! (Even if the food is nothing to blog about.) Or Really? (To appear more engaged than you could possibly be.) Or No problem! (When things go awry, but eliciting a smile is the best response.) Or Cheers! (Which requires no explanation.)

So it is I’ve begun to study Sesotho: the language of 2 million Basotho, known individually as Mosotho, who live mostly in Lesotho, and just across the border in … South Africa. (The rhyming ends there.)

English is actually one of two national languages in this ex-British protectorate. But relying on my mother tongue wouldn’t be much fun, especially since we’ll be here three years. It’s a wise decision, says my Sesotho tutor, for learning some of the language is more than a question of being polite and respectful.

“It’s also important to know how to get yourself out of certain situations,” she tells me. Like, if I have to repel the advances of mooching cops, scheming prostitutes or superstitious witchdoctors.

Witchdoctors?! Missed that bit in my guidebook. The tutor now has my undivided attention.

To begin with, the Basotho are big into greetings. In fact, the Mosotho author of my language book advises readers to “use greetings as much as we possibly can, because we do not only get surprised but somehow disturbed if someone simply walks past without greeting.”

I wondered if these mountain folk, who long fended off raiders of their cattle, horses and land – and did a fair share of marauding themselves – viewed greetings as vital to determine “friend or foe” early on.

Most Mosotho light up the moment you offer a respectful greeting. (Photo: mjj)

Another new Mosotho acquaintance helped clarify: “Greetings are the key to everything here. In the home, the village, everywhere. The Basotho are different tribes, and greetings are the only thing that brings us together. If you offer greetings, it shows you come in peace – and have peace within you.”

Greetings begin with essential terms of respect. Address men and women as ntate or mé – “Father” and “Mother.” I’ve noticed most Mosotho I come across initially eye me with skepticism, perhaps suspicion, as if awaiting my first move. They’re typically mum until I hit them with a Dumela, ntate! (Hello, father!) Or Khotso, mé! (Peace, mother!) Then an immediate smile, and they return the greeting with sincerity.

To younger Basotho, I’m delighted to learn a goofy white guy like me can get away with cheerfully greeting them as “brother” (abuti) or “sister” (ausi). Without, you know, it being awkward. I’m not sure how this would play in my old haunt of downtown Brooklyn, where I taught journalism at Long Island University. To my former LIU students – most of Caribbean origin – I say: Dumela, brothers and sisters!

Back in Lesotho, the greetings go well beyond “How are you?” and “How are you living?” It’s perfectly acceptable here to even inquire about a Mosotho’s slumber. U robetse joang, ntate? (“How did you sleep, Father?”) U tsohile joang, mé? (“How did you wake up, Mother?”)

I shall try this. Not that I’m so curious about the REM stages of the Basotho, but for the simple pleasure of a smile. For that, I’m also teaching my kids. Oh, you should’ve seen the crowd reaction the other day, on the check-out line at a Maseru supermarket, when my daughter, not yet 3, uttered Kea leboha: “Thank you.” How the Basotho women melted! I may start to drag around my little girl as a prop.

Yet my tutor reminds me that beyond the cross-cultural connection – and flirtation – there’s a darker side to the need to learn some of her language. She’ll clue me in, but doesn’t want to be identified in print, because friends and neighbors may be cross with her for divulging “Basotho secrets.”

“You see, the way we perceive you, your white skin means money,” she says, matter-of-factly. “Make sure you are direct with the language, with everything you say. Be strong.”

Another Basotho cattle-herder I found receptive to a Sesotho greeting. (Photo: mjj)

She teaches me Ha ke na chelete: “I don’t have money.” It’s certainly hard for me to say no, when our family has so much, and so many around here clearly have so little. Offering a few coins of Lesotho maloti – or South African rand, which is used interchangeably around here – has so far seemed pretty harmless.

Just the other night, our family ate out at an Indian restaurant in town. We parked, and a local Mosotho offered to watch the car. I thought it’d be worth a few maloti to have him do so. By the time we got back, he’d voluntarily washed the windshield. So I offered him 10 – or 1 euro. He demanded 20. Fine! Take it.

“We are living in a very deep poverty,” my tutor continues. “The means of getting a job is difficult. Someone may ask you for money, they may ask for your cellphone. They may stab you, shoot you.”

Then there are the women of a certain persuasion. Prostitutes.

“A woman may sit down next to you, start to caress your leg or put her hand on your head,” says the tutor. And this would be a bad thing? “Just be very serious,” she continues, “and tell her, ‘Ha ke rata – I don’t like it.’ If you say go away, they may never go. Just to be safe, move away.”

The hand-on-head maneuver, she warns, may not be because the woman is drawn to my silvery, George Clooney-like mane. No, she may want a few strands for herself. Basotho can be superstitious, and witchdoctors claim the hairs of a Caucasian, mixed with traditional medicine, can bring wealth.

(Certain witchdoctors make more nefarious assertions, like intercourse with virgins will rid you of AIDS. This has spurred some men to rape infants, which even touched a nerve for Britain’s Prince Harry.)

Indeed, my tutor, who’s taught a great many Westerners over the years, recalls that a neighbor in Maseru once whispered to her: “You work with white people; may I ask you to bring me one or two of their hairs?” She messed with the wrong Mosotho.

“I am not a witch!” she shouted. “How can I do such a thing? You’ve insulted me. Should I report you to the chief?” (That scared her off, as local chieftains continue to run much of Lesotho.)

Which raises a question. My hair’s grown unwieldy. The summer’s begun, and I need a haircut. What will come of my snippings? Will the hair salon dispose of it? Or auction to the highest-bidding witchdoctor?

“Someone may sell it, but very quietly,” says my tutor. “Many of us look down on these traditions.”

Articulating a few lines of the language could be just the talisman to ward off any such misfortune.

“If you speak some Sesotho, the people will take you as part of them,” she says. “They will respect you, even protect you. If you drop ten rand, they will pick it up for you. If a foreigner here speaks nothing, they can be easily attacked. But if you speak some, it doesn’t matter how much, the Mosotho may think, ‘He knows everything about me. He knows where to go, what to do. So I may get into trouble.’”

I sampled this, naively, on just my second day in Lesotho. My Dutch neighbor had taken me for a drive in the countryside. After stopping for lunch in a small town, a Mosotho police officer in a sparkling white uniform approached our car. The Dutchman affably rattled off some Sesotho. Smiles all around. Then the cop leaned in through the window, glanced around, and spied our nearly drained sodas. He said a few more words to my friend, who responded in kind, and the cop bid us farewell.

“What was that about?” I asked.

“He wanted a drink,” says my friend, “but saw ours were almost finished.”

“What do you mean, ‘wanted a drink’?”

“Sometimes they’ll want to give them your drink. Or they may see your sunglasses and say, ‘Hey, give me your sunglasses.’ But if they see you speak Sesotho, they’ll know you live here and leave you alone.”

Despite all of my tutor’s admonitions – which, I hope, are merely the worst-case scenario – speaking some Sesotho with the Basotho remains at its core an issue of respect and appreciation.

“The Basotho are a very easy people,” she says, concluding our session. “Why should you live here and not even know how to greet me? Just give us a little something – to show you’re interested, that you care.”

Of course. As we say in Sesotho, Ha ho na mathata. “No problem.”

Young Basotho raising awareness of HIV prevention on Dec. 1, on the streets of Maseru. (Photo: mjj)

MASERU, Lesotho – For most of us, AIDS in an abstract affliction. In southern Africa, it’s an inescapable reality. In fact, the world’s top four infection rates are found down here: topping the list is Swaziland, followed by Botswana, Lesotho and South Africa. Lesotho, at 23 percent, is my home for the next three years.

So today when I happened upon a demonstration in downtown Maseru today to mark World AIDS Day, it resonated that much more. The young people out in force weren’t only chanting in support of their parents, siblings and friends struck down by the infection – they demanded vigilance by their peers. With good reason: their generation is disproportionately affected.

A young Mosotho spreads the word to a passer-by. (Photo: mjj)

[More photos posted inside.]

Flashing the red card. (Photo: mjj)

Organized by the anti-HIV sports program Kick 4 Life, they handed out football-referee-like “red cards” with the telephone number of a free HIV textline – accessible even if a phone is drained of units — plus warnings against what I assume is the riskiest behavior down here.

As the card reads, Give someone a Red Card for putting themselves or someone else at HIGH RISK of getting HIV.

Red Card Fouls:

*Having more than 1 sex partner;

*Using sex to get things;

*Giving things to get sex;

*Drinking too much alcohol;

*Hitting a woman or forcing sex;

*Girls having sex with older guys;

The red card includes a free HIV textline. (Photo: mjj)

On this World AIDS Day, as the pandemic enters its fourth decade, the United Nations and U.S. President Barack Obama renewed pledges to “end AIDS” and “beat this disease.”

From my new perch in Lesotho, I’ll be watching to what degree those antiretroviral drugs trickle down to the most remote of victims.

Helping stamp out HIV in Lesotho. (Photo: mjj)

MASERU, Lesotho – There’s so much to say, I don’t know where to start. So how about with a Sesotho-language greeting: Dumela!

I moved to Lesotho just one week ago; it’s too early to explore themes and spout theories. (There’ll be plenty of time for both.) I’ll stay humble, knowing I have a hell of a lot to learn about these people, this country, this region, this continent.

On the Lesotho side of the South African border, a poster warns of human trafficking. (Photo: mjj)

Instead, I’ll stick to what I’m seeing and what I’m hearing, the experiential and the sensory, about the look of the place, the look of the people – and our dramatically different lifestyle amid both.

Lesotho is a deeply troubled place, plagued by poverty and HIV, violence against women and human trafficking, alcoholism and obesity, among many other afflictions. Nothing is more telling than the fact life expectancy for both men and women is a measly 42 to 43 years … my age exactly.

Lesotho is ravaged by the world’s third-highest HIV rate. A country of 2 million is home to an astounding 100,000 AIDS orphans. Five percent of the population? Or much higher? The scale of tragedy is unfathomable.

Funeral homes are certainly ubiquitous around Maseru. Today I asked a wiry-looking guy for directions; up close I realized he was downright skeletal. On the first day I met our housekeeper-babysitter, I asked if she had any children: “I have one son … but I had three children.” I froze, afraid to probe any further.

So, let’s turn for a minute to the positive.

Basotho beauties abound. (Photo: mjj)

The Basotho boast beautiful women, handsome men, charming children with pearly smiles – all receptive to a wave hello or hearty Dumela! from a fish-out-of-water like me. At the international school, our three kids – accustomed to a heavy European flavor among friends from our posting in Slovakia – now have a rainbow of classmates, from Lesotho, South Africa, Uganda, Ethiopia, Somalia, and elsewhere.

Then there’s the topography. I can’t overstate how stunning it is: from horizon to horizon, a craggy canvas borne of tectonic aggression, framed by the enormous blue “African sky” I’d only heard about. In every direction I drive – even here in the capital – is the potential for another spectacular vista, of red-rock cliffs, or a volcanic rise, or an outcropping sculpted by wind and rain.

Lesotho, according to my Southbound Travel Guide, “is the only country in the world situated entirely above 1,000 meters,” with the “highest low point in the world” – 1,388 meters. I can’t wait to drive into the range a few hours eastward: the Drakensberg, which is Afrikaans for “Mountains of the Dragon.”

Landscapes like this, in Thaba Bosiu, are just 30 minutes from our home. (Photo: mjj)

Makes me wish I’d paid more attention during my geology class at university. I’ve tried a few times to take photos, but was frustrated by my inability to capture the panorama. Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s my gear, or maybe it must be seen first-hand to fully appreciate it.

Then I look street-level, and begin to fathom the unfathomable: some 40 percent of Lesotho lives below the international poverty line of $1.25 per day. Unpaved shanty towns abound, with corrugated-metal walls and roofs pinned down by large rocks. Roadsides are a booming grey market for fruits, vegetables, toiletries, clothes and other products – displayed in rickety stalls propped up by metal poles, covered in canvas or tarpaulin. Every dusty street corner is a barbeque waiting to happen, delivering cheap bites for carnivorous passers-by.

There are some proper buildings, of course, like government ministries, the king’s palace, the prime minister’s mansion, a handful of strip malls and office buildings, the compounds of various embassies and international relief agencies, the city’s lone shopping mall and cinema, and the two neighborhoods where local elites and foreign expatriates live behind razor-wire-topped walls with security guards.

Expats like us. We live cloistered in our cocoon, with our “staff,” asking the security guard to slide open the iron gate whenever we want to drive out. It’s shaping up as a 21st-century British-colonial existence. Our only disturbances so far are the crack-of-dawn yodeling of the roosters next door, and the tinkling of cowbells from the cattle grazing in the fields behind us.

How poor are most people? On the streets, many look as if their wardrobe was pulled from a charity care-package. In a local eatery, after plowing through the spinach and carrot dishes, I left a heap of the maize-meal staple, known as papa. An old man sitting nearby motioned for my platter, then polished it off – even using my plastic spoon. Later, when my nine-year-old son placed a pair of torn sandals beside the garbage, our housekeeper asked him if she could take it. Quite a wake-up call – for all of us.

I returned from Hong Kong with my suitcase missing the handle and one wheel broken; I was planning to toss it out, but now I’m wondering: should I offer it to the housekeeper or the security guard?

Down at the shopping mall – where I’m currently writing this in one of Maseru’s two cafés – plenty of people are dressed stylishly or elegantly. The Pick-n-Pay supermarket here is also where these urban elites – and fellow expats – do their food-shopping. The Shop-Rite in town, I’m told, is “where the blacks shop.” I’ll have to check that out for myself. We were also advised not to walk the streets at night, even at dusk. And with Christmas approaching, we’re warned to expect a spike in break-ins.

How exaggerated is the threat? I dunno. But as I have throughout my foreign-reporting career, mostly in post-Communist Eastern Europe, I’ll try to resist the stereotypes, generalizations and fear-mongering.

I haven’t even explored the countryside, where 80 percent of the populace lives, mostly as subsistence farmers or herders of cattle, sheep or goats. For the Slovaks and the Hungarians, among whom I lived for five and six years, respectively, one favorite pastime is to gripe about their lot in life. Try walking in the beat-up shoes of the Basotho, who may trek hours, even days, to the nearest health clinic.

At least that’s what I hear from my new acquaintances: one is a young Dutch missionary, a registered nurse who drives into the mountains each week to the clinic he set up two years ago; another is an American-missionary pilot, flying one of five Cessnas into the mountains to ferry emergency cases to regional hospitals or even back to the capital. And after recovery, they’re flown back home.

Both the Dutchman and the American have invited me to join them on forays in the near future. There’s no way I’d miss out on such opportunities. My Lesotho education has only just begun.

One of my new Basotho friends, grilling meat roadside in Lesotho. (Photo: mjj)

MASERU, Lesotho – Surreal. It’s a shopworn term – defined as unbelievable, fantastic or incongruous – that is thrown around way too casually in the Anglophone world. By me, included.

But how else to describe my sensations this past week, as I stumbled into the next stage of my life: here in remote Lesotho, the “Kingdom in the Sky” of the Basotho people?

Just two months ago, I wrapped up 17 years as a Central Europe-based foreign correspondent. The place may be rife with cobblestones and castles, age-old hatreds and poppy-seed strudel, but the post-Communist world is also perched on the doorstep of wealthy, industrialized Europe – and hitched to the fate of the European Union.

Then I spent two months in China, mostly in the hyper-developed, hyper-kinetic and hyper-counterfeiting mega-cities of Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. The Chinese seem hell-bent on proving to the planet – and to themselves – that they’re worthy of the mantle “the next global superpower.”

A mere 36 hours later, via plane, train and automobile, I arrived in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho. Courtesy of my wife’s job in international development, I find myself with our three kids, for three years, in one of the world’s poorest, least-developed, and worst-HIV-ridden countries.

Yet after so much flatness of Central Europe and squashed-like-sardines density of Hong Kong, the dominant view is an open, unspoiled landscape of red-sandstone mesas and breathtaking volcanic-rock formations.

Blur your vision, and it’s not difficult to imagine the dawn of life and civilization. A stone’s throw from Maseru, the capital, are 200-million-year-old dinosaur footprints. Elsewhere is evidence of Homo sapiens traced back 100,000 years, and Bushman “rock art” thousands of years old.

Vistas like this pump the adrenaline. (Photo: mjj)

Take any road out of town, you’ll still find cow-dung-packed huts, known as rondavels. (Though, corrugated-metal shacks and cinderblock homes are more common.) In predominantly rural Lesotho, we’ll also have to beware of roaming cattle, sheep and goats, occasionally meandering across country roads.

Across the border in South Africa, at least, the many Afrikaner farmers are careful to fence off their vast properties. (They may have greater fears than loss of livestock, however.)

Lesotho, like Swaziland, is completely surrounded by South Africa, so we get the two-for-one bonus of tasting two countries at once – including one of the continent’s heavyweights. With the South African border five minutes away, I’ve already crossed it three times.

Surreal, indeed. I’ve been dropped into a real-life National Geographic video. And though tiny Maseru boasts just two bloody cafés — neither of which offers Internet, a serious crimp in my lifestyle – there’s plenty to inspire my chronicling of this African adventure.

HONG KONG – Last Friday, I would’ve been within my right to sleep in and relish a break from Hong Kong Baptist University. For six weeks, I’ve slavishly tutored another 79 of Asia’s brightest journalism students – mostly mainland Chinese women. (They’re worth it, but my right eye has gone blurry.)

Most of HKBU's 2011-12 class, with the author lurking in back. (Photo: Robin Ewing)

Instead, I woke early to hydrofoil across the rocky, sun-soaked Pearl River Delta, back to the English-language United International College in Zhuhai. In a sauna of a classroom, before 20 (mostly) wide-eyed journalism undergrads, I sweat through three hours of my Parachute in! The Adventurer’s Guide to Foreign Reporting lecture: how I broke into freelancing 17 years ago, and how I’ve done it ever since.

All this, for free. For a friend. For the students … Ah, who am I kidding? I did it for me. As I returned home Friday night, thoroughly wiped, I thought to myself: “You may have an addiction to China.” Or, more specifically, an addiction to teaching Chinese journalism students.

The weekend didn’t cure me. On Monday morning, I volunteered to rise at another ungodly hour and represent our Master’s program in International Journalism at the graduation of last year’s students. I’d trained them twice: for six weeks in Hong Kong, then one week in Prague.

On stage, I enjoyed a bird’s-eye view as dozens of beaming young Chinese heard their names called and – before family and friends – marched across to receive the hearty handshake of a pair of HKBU dons.

I can’t deny it: China and her young Chinese have cast a spell on me. This country matters. Economically, diplomatically, militarily. The world’s emerging superpower is so endlessly fascinating, I’m dizzy with all that I want to write about it. Then there’s the teaching. I now hear myself utter over and over again, to anyone who’ll listen: “China matters – which means my Chinese journalism students matter, too.” The apple of my eye today is HKBU’s current crop of students.

From the very first moment I met them I placed a burden of responsibility on their shoulders: China needs you. The world needs you.

(To our handful of Southeast Asian students, sprinkled in among the mainlanders, I modified my pitch: Burma, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam need you, too.)

Some think I’m joking. I’m not. By producing their own journalism blogs — in English, which is their second, third, or even their fourth language – they unveil a new breed of young Chinese: the ones most like us. English-speaking, Western-influenced, well-traveled and, in our Information Age, Web-sophisticated. With the right software, they hurdle the “Great Firewall” of Beijing’s censorship. They mind their step, though: dozens of journalists and bloggers rot behind bars.

In the future, as the old guard dies off and China seizes its superpower status, the world will need Chinese partners with whom to dialogue, to nurture mutual understanding of positions and policies. They’ll want to find this generation of Chinese journalism graduates, their feet planted firmly in both worlds – largely because of their ten months in Hong Kong. The ex-British colony is not only the lone beacon for freedom of expression in China, but a haven for mainlander critics who escape the pressure.

This is the mission that drives me, as I enter the final hours of my third stint in Hong Kong. Over six weeks, I’ll have coached 14 groups of five or six members, for three tutorials apiece. That’s 42 sessions, mostly two per day, with each session stretching two-and-a-half to three hours. They should be only 90 minutes. (This may be why one student tagged a Facebook photo of me as “our super crazy coach.”)

Overall, I’ve had three objectives:

1)      Help mould young journalists who embrace the universal (not Western) journalistic values that society needs watchdogs to hold people – especially leaders – accountable for words and deeds.

2)      Help them get a job. With Chinese journalism schools churning out thousands of graduates – I was told in Shanghai that the city itself has 15 such university programs. Their blog will separate them from the pack, as a platform to show, not tell, editors and producers what they can do.

3)      Help pave that bridge between China and the Anglophone world. Teach them to write the way I write as a foreign correspondent. For any reader who discovers their blog, open a window onto China, bring it to life, humanize the place with vivid story-telling. Make it accessible to all.

After two months, their blogs reveal a compassionate curiosity for people very different from them. In their first reporting assignment, most students opted for working-class stiffs at the bottom of Hong Kong society, especially the elderly still toiling because the pension isn’t enough. Their most recent reporting, on any minority or disadvantaged community, ranged from ethnic-minority grunts like Filipina maids and Indian construction workers, to the tiny Zoroastrian community, and the travails of autistic children, still-closeted lesbians, street-sleepers, neglected refugees, the jobless blind, and many others.

After editing two posts from each student in the program, nobody knows their reporting like I know their reporting. The good, the bad, the ugly. Like when I rant for half-an-hour in each tutorial that they must proofread, then see some of the same amateurish sloppiness reappear next time around. Or the often-exuberant writing style, where they can’t help but insert themselves in a story and root for the underdog. And finally, the occasionally campiness of their “About Me” pages. I’ve heard the Just-a-girl-from-the-mainland narrative so many times, I could fabricate an online personality.

Far outweighing all that, though, is how the students inspire me with countless moments of poignancy and appreciation. For example:

*The Beijinger who after our very first tutorial confided that he “struggles” with the question of whether to return to a China laced with landmines of censorship and imprisonment – or stay put in Hong Kong.

*The young woman who somehow finds the time to shoot B-roll and interview her classmates and me for a documentary she wants to make about their collective future.

*Another young woman unsure if she should expend the effort to become China’s Carrie Bradshaw, sharing her insights into modern Chinese relationships. (I’d even help her find a spot on The Mantle!)

*The young fellow who last month expressed genuine concern for my health after a run of marathon tutorials – only to keep me an extra hour and pick my brain because he wants to freelance like me.

At such a critical time in Chinese history – and in my students’ lives – can you blame me if I swoon?

Yet there’s one final reason why these Chinese matter: After they graduate, how they fare in the mainland’s restrictive media is a canary in the coalmine for what sort of superpower China has become.

HONG KONG – I’m not a professional photojournalist. Yet as a freelancer in the field, I recognize the value to being able to offer clients what I humbly refer to as “decent, usable” photos to package with my articles.

This semester, among the hours I spent with 14 separate groups of mostly Chinese students – cramming in myriad advice on how to professionalize their journalism blogs – I included a quickie tutorial on how to snap a no-frills portrait of their subjects. With their IPhone.

After all, if you’re off in an interesting place, interviewing interesting people, odds are your client will not muster the resources to send a photographer to retrace your steps. A headshot, at least, will a) make the story more visually appealing and b) help readers connect with your subject. Oh, and it may put a few more dollars in your pocket.

Two essential tips, then, I was taught long ago. First, turn your subject 45 degrees – get some angularity in their pose, rather than a straight-shouldered mug-shot. And second, like a hunter, don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes – the proverbial “window onto their soul.”

Naturally, I experimented with a guinea pig in each tutorial, to show the others. The result, it turns out, is a cherished memento for me – and a photo essay of the next generation of Chinese journalists:

Thirteen more below …

(For diversity, a Burmese student.)

(This one for gender diversity!)