Like many of her fellow villagers, 22-year-old Khampheng Manivone first heard about  community radio when letters were sent to different villages in Khoun – one of the poorest districts in Laos – asking for volunteers to be part of the Khoun Community Radio Development (KCRD) project.

Khampheng jumped at the chance to apply as one of the first few volunteers to join Khoun Radio in July 2006, more than a year before its  first test broadcasts in late October 2007.

The station, which reaches out to community groups through local programming, aims to  improve the people’s access to information and increase residents’ participation in development-related decisions, today broadcasts seven days a week, seven and a half hours a day, in three local languages – Lao Lum, Hmong and Khmu.

“Before I joined the station I was very shy, I couldn’t speak in front of many people, even with people in the village. But now, I can speak in public with confidence. And when I join outreach activities organised by the station, I can speak with people and work with people and I have learnt many things,” said Khampheng, a delegate at the Mekong Media Forum being held in this northern Thai city until Dec. 12.

The volunteer broadcaster now also heads the Khmu programme production group at Khoun Radio, a project put up by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) with the support of Laos’ information and culture ministry and the Xiengkhouang Province Department of Information and Culture.

“We are a people who do not like to talk too much, because we don’t want to hurt people,” said Vongsone Oudomsouk, project manager of the Khoun Radio project, of the popular stereotype of the Lao people. “But 50 percent of volunteers are now made up of villagers, who act as representatives of their communities.”

Production of the radio programmes are done in collaboration with the villagers, Vongsone explained, emphasising on the importance of community involvement at Khoun Radio. “Villagers actually take part in decision making processes, what to produce, when to broadcast, in how many languages, and so on.”

And it is this inclusive approach, and the airing of topics relevant to the community, that has resulted in positive change for the people of Khoun district.

Speaking at a satellite session, ‘Empowering Local People Through Community Radio’, held on Dec. 10 at the Forum, Vongsone recounts anecdotal evidence that points to the success of Khoun Radio in assisting development in the district. For example, some doctors he spoke to had previously tried – unsuccessfully – to promote vaccination for babies, because villagers did not understand it and were not receptive to the idea. But after the airing of radio shows discussing this issue, these doctors have reported an increase in vaccination rates.

The Khoun Radio project is part of plans by the Laos government to introduce community radios in all of the 47 poorest districts of the country by providing a platform for the community to discuss issues of local interest, including agriculture, health, and education.

On top of the improvement in information flow and increased community involvement in development issues, delegates at the session here also discussed the importance of community radio as compared to mainstream media.

Cai Yiping, executive director of women’s rights group Isis International, explains that the content in community-based media is often more relevant and useful to the audience. “In community radio, because the audience is also the producer, they are the ones who know what information they need,” she said.

Forum participants also turned the spotlight on another difference between the two media models: unlike mainstream media, non-commercial community radio struggles to stay financially sustainable. For example, Vongsone says, the station had previously turned away advertisers for motorcycles and milk powder because of concerns within the communities over the socio-cultural impacts these products might bring.

To this end, Vongsone hopes for the station to be able to work out some form of “partnership strategy” with organisations that share “the same aim of getting the Khoun area out of poverty”. He is also looking to set up a “volunteers fund” to offer financial assistance to Khoun Radio volunteers, who currently receive only a small allowance for their time and services.

But for some volunteers, like Khampheng, it matters little whether she is paid. More importantly, “it’s something that I like, something I’m interested in, and I want to be part of the development of my community,” she said.

CHIANG MAI, Thailand, Dec 12 (TerraViva) – “It’s not a matter of ethics, this is survival!” a Laos-based journalist in the audience raved, as he disclosed details of instances where he – and others he knew – had received monetary reward from businesses for writing stories that presented these companies in positive light.

The issue of ethical reporting took centre stage at the ‘Learning and Relearning Journalism’ Talk show session held on Dec. 11, as panellists and participants at the Mekong Media Forum discussed how different histories, political systems and societies have shaped different education systems when it comes to media and journalism in the Mekong region.

The four-day forum, which brought together some 200 participants from across the six-country region, ended Saturday in this northern Thai city.

While formal journalism education is useful as a starting point, panellists agreed that it was not essential.

Jeff Hodson, a journalist and regional media trainer, said it “will have to be incorporated in any form of journalism training programme. How can you report the news fairly and without bias unless you do have ethics?”

But other speakers disagreed. “If ethics is something that you only start learning about in journalism school, and only there, then I would say it’s too late and too isolated,” said Daniel Hirschler, project manager and country coordinator in Laos for DW-AKADEMIE, German broadcaster Deutsche Welle’s training institute.

“Ethics, you learned when you were a child. You don’t take money from people if you don’t deserve that. You don’t learn this at school, and you don’t learn this in the newsroom also,” said Nguyen Ngoc Tran, a journalism professor at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Ho Chi Minh City.

But Hirschler argues that the ethical dilemma in reporting is not unique to the Mekong region: journalists in developed countries in the West face the same issues. He related an incident where a Swedish journalist exposed a fundamental mechanical flaw while test-driving a new Mercedes Benz motorcar, which the company had tried to cover up.

“The reason why this came out quite late is most of the motor journalists in Europe are usually sent to Arizona with a detour to the Las Vegas casinos to test those cars, with I don’t know what (other incentives),” he said.

“The motor journal that this journalist was working for in Sweden had a clear code of conduct, a clear policy on this. If you don’t have this policy in the university where you study, or the radio station you work for, or in the country you live in, then it would be difficult to establish strong ethics in journalism.”

On top of ethical concerns, the session also surfaced issues surrounding the inadequacy of journalism education – even at top academic institutions around the region – in dealing with real world challenges.

Hodson voiced a worrying trend where fresh journalism graduates were well-versed in the basics of journalism such as proper fact gathering and balance reporting, but were not practising it in the newsroom. “There’s a quota system that motivates reporters to fill their five stories for the week, so why get three sources if they can just get one and meet their quota?” said Hodson.

It is also important, Hodson said, to try to teach journalists that they “own the story” and can “create and shape the news as well instead of just always reacting to it”.

But panellists agreed that the socio-political situation on the ground in many of the countries in the Mekong region makes real-life newsroom experience and on-the-job training more relevant than academic training. Hirschler, for example, said “critical thinking” is more important than “any kind of curriculum that you can have or have not in any communications or mass media department”.

Vannaphone Sitthirath, coordinator of the Mekong Media Forum and a journalist from Laos, lamented the state of the media environment in Laos. ”That’s why I quit,” she said.

She attributed the situation in part to “economic pressure,” saying Lao journalists earn less than 100 U.S. dollars a month. “It’s sad that Lao journalists take money from organisations that invite us to do stories. It’s really sad. But how can I blame them?”

She confessed she had tried to quit her profession. “I asked myself, ‘Am I going to work as a journalist in Laos?’ It’s sad. So I gave up many times,” she said. But she kept coming back, she added, to rousing applause from the audience.

Vannaphone expressed hope the journalism course at the National University of Laos would bring much-needed changes to media ethics in her country while echoing in the same breath the opinions of the panellists at this session. “I don’t believe it will train you 100 percent to be a good journalist … I think a good journalist is in here,” she said, her hand gesturing toward her heart.

Beek is an adventurer, and, being passionate about life, it will take more than a few stitches to stop him from kayaking down the next river he sees.

Since moving to Asia, he has authored 23 books and 42 documentaries on Asian cultural, with particular interest in the beliefs attached to rivers and how they relate to the way these bodies of water are used or abused.

“One of the questions we are asked at this [Mekong Media] forum is how the Mekong region is perceived by the outside world, and the question I would ask is, I don’t think we are,” Beek, who is now based in Thailand, said during the Talk Show session, ‘Our Mekong: Inside and Outside’, held on the opening day of the Forum on Dec. 9.

The event brings together media professionals, comprising mainly of journalists, and a mix of other participants from different parts of the Mekong region and Asia on various media and development issues.

A Fellow of the Explorers’ Club – a multidisciplinary, professional organisation dedicated to field exploration – Beek has paddled the length of the major rivers in Thailand and is currently writing a book on the upper Mekong entitled ‘The Mekong Nobody Knows’.

He speaks to TerraViva about his desire to “infect other people with my love of, and appreciation of, and realisation of the vital importance of water”.

TerraViva: How did you begin your love affair with rivers?

Steve Van Beek: I was fortunate enough to have a house on the Chao Phraya [Thailand], on stilts, opposite the Grand Palace, for 11 years. That house was then torn down later, and it became the Supatra River House restaurant. And that used to be my view every morning.

Every day, I saw something new on the river. I wondered where all the water came from. It seemed to be telling a story, telling its history, of what it had seen in the past. So I asked questions, I looked for books, and I couldn’t find any. I realised, people told me later, that nobody had ever gone down the river.

In late 1997, I went to the headwaters, Dong Nam, up on the Burmese border, and I walked for three days. When the water was deep enough, I said, “Ok, I need a boat”. The only experience I had was with a rowboat, but I had the boat built, took it back up, started paddling, and 58 days later, ended up in the ocean.

I love the fact that in many cases, because nobody would go by boat, you could see people as they were, because once they saw you, it changed. So that appealed to me. I love talking to the old people who understood what I was doing. The young guys would stand by the riverbank sometimes and say, “Why don’t you put an engine on it, stupid ‘farang’ [colloquial Thai term for ‘foreigner’]. You could put an engine on it and be in Bangkok in a day or two.”

But old people grew up with the river and understood that the important days had gone by. For them, they understood and we could talk. I would say that the first trip that I took, I probably learned more about Thailand than I did in the previous 20 years, because books didn’t tell me the same thing.

TerraViva: What is it about rivers that has kept you fascinated all these years?

SVB: I was interested in understanding how the river thinks, what happens when you do things to it: take sand out of it, for example, or build dams across it. I’m still trying to answer a question: What is a river?  Many cultures have ideas about water, but not many of them think about rivers, and I find that interesting because there are so many rivers . . . . Most people look upon the river as an obstacle. I was interested in the belief systems. In other words, do the people who live along the side of it see the river as a beneficent force, or as malevolent?  And how does that affect the way that they use it, or abuse it?

TerraViva: How have rivers dealt with this abuse?

SVB: When people go in and they say, ‘My real estate is disappearing, I’m going to build a wall’, the river is not going to let the wall stand if it’s not strong enough. You’ve done something to the river by channelling it; it’s no longer flowing as it should. Rivers seek their own levels; they understand harmony and balance. If you start taking sand out of the river for construction purposes, the river is going to try to fill in that hole. Where is that sand going to come from? It’s going to come from collapsing farms and riverbanks upstream. There’s no other place for it to come from.

Left to itself, the river will regulate itself. It’s only humans who get in there and say, “Oh, we’ve got to control it.” Well, I’ve seen very seldom that we’ve actually been able to control it, so maybe we should listen to the river. We’ve built dams for flood control purposes — and we still have floods. Eventually the river will assert what it wants to do.

I think the problem is people look upon rivers as an exploitable resource, not as something with its own integrity and should be preserved for itself. I’m not anti-development, but how much electricity do we really need, and for what purpose?

TerraViva: There was heated discussion in the Talk Show session, ‘Our Mekong: Inside and Outside’, during the Forum over China’s dam projects on the Mekong River. What are your views on this?

SVB: I don’t want to go into the politics of it. Zhu Yan (senior editor from China Central Television, one of the discussants) was surprised by how angry people were. I mean, you heard it, people were angry. This tells you something about the reporting about the river in China. They are not hearing – forget about listening, they are not hearing – what their neighbours are thinking about it. At the end of the discussion, I said to him: “I’m sorry you became the target here, and it’s not your fault. But there’s your story! Why are your neighbours so upset and nobody in China knows about it?”

I feel that we have to address these questions because I feel it is water, not energy, that is the issue of the 21st Century. One billion people in the world do not have access to drinkable water. Yes, it is important to come up with alternative energy – solar power, wind power, and so on – and a lot of work is being done, but we’re not pouring nearly the amount of money into water as we are into alternative energy research.

(END/TERRAVIVA/IPS/AP/HD/DV/AE/JC/TBB/09)

CHIANG MAI, Thailand, Dec 12 (TerraViva) – Yasmin Tang, executive director of Probe Media Foundation that co-organised the Mekong Media Forum, promised a “visual treat” to wrap up the proceedings at the end of the forum on Dec. 12. And a visual treat it was, as the Chiang Mai-based performing group Wandering Moon presented a theatrical extravaganza entitled ‘Reborn’.

With ingenious play on colours, lights and shadows, the troupe kept the audience enthralled as the four-day forum was brought to a close.

To be sure, the performance was as abstract as it was fascinating. Weaving lights in a multitude of striking colours; dancing cardboard cut-outs expertly wielded by puppeteers behind a shrouded veil; and a performer springing from her hiding place, an impossibly tiny light-box that lay in the foreground inconspicuously until that moment, midway through the show.

It was a shadow-puppet show with a difference. And it was a perfect, very appropriate, ending to the Mekong Media Forum. While considerably less abstract, the forum was no less fascinating.

Over the past three and a half days, a steady stream of participants – including sponsors, supporters, partners, speakers, delegates, fellows, volunteers, documenters, translators, technical staff and organisers – thronged the rooms and common areas at the conference venue. Comprising people from the six countries in the Mekong region – Burma, Cambodia, China, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam – as well as a healthy dose of participants from outside the area, the myriad of different cultures and languages guaranteed discussions were often vibrant and colourful.

Behind the scenes, a flurry of activity as organisers scrambled to ensure the sessions ran smoothly. From translators and documenters, to technicians and volunteers, each quietly going unnoticed about their duties, preferring to let the speakers, delegates and issues take centre stage, in front of the spotlight.

The issues laid out during the Mekong Media Forum were important; these are issues that affect us directly. But, like the light-box in the foreground during the performance, these issues are often overlooked, especially by external audiences, but often, even by ourselves, as we get caught up in the more exciting, mainstream activities that demand our attention. And so we forget the marginalised, who lie unnoticed, even though they are right in front of our eyes.

‘Reborn’ speaks of unknown horrors, of bleeding hearts and free-flowing tears, reflecting the challenges faced by Mekong journalists. And as we turn the page, the pain and suffering transforms – with a little help – into joy and the freedom to take flight, like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon.

Likewise, the Mekong Media Forum has been a step forward, towards creating a desirable media environment at a time of social and economic change. Hopefully, it has inspired us to be “reborn”, as with the closing performance, in our struggles to overcome challenges facing the media in the region.

As the curtain closes on the Mekong Media Forum, we look forward to the birth of a new venue, from within, for Mekong journalists.