Trading Places
by Omatie Lyder
Fisher Fellow 2002/2003

Imagine. Eight months away from the hustle and incessant bustle of a newsroom with no editor breathing down your neck.

Or, if you're an editor like me, a chance to escape from errant reporters and meeting the dreaded press times.

The Gordon N Fisher Fellowship offers all this and more. It is a dream for the journalist who has become jaded. There are no deadlines to be met, no stories to chase after, no newsroom to manage. And you get paid to boot!

You sign off with permission of the powers that be and you recharge your run-down batteries. This time you're looking after your own interests. Your education. Your intellectual development. You get to step back and take stock of where you are and where you want to go. You have all the time in the world now to read and read and read, not just newspapers, but the books that were covered in cobweb beneath your bed and the ones you'll find in the intimidating Robarts Library and the numerous other libraries in the campus of the University of Toronto.

Each year, one lucky mid-career journalist from a developing Commonwealth country is selected for this prestigious fellowship, tenable for one academic year at the University of Toronto. For the first time in the history of the fellowship, two journalists were selected last year as Fisher Fellows. I was one of them. And what a privilege it was!

The journalist is afforded enviable accommodation at Massey College, the graduate residential college in the University of Toronto. I say enviable because each journalism fellow (the Fisher Fellows, as well as the Canadian journalism fellows whose programme is run simultaneously with the Fisher programme), is assigned a senior suite with a fireplace. The Fisher Fellow, who invariably comes from a hot country, will need it in Canada, which is like a deep-freeze for the better part of the academic year. He or she will also need warm clothing, which is generously provided for as part of the fellowship funding.

As a journalism fellow, you are allowed to audit any number of courses at the University of Toronto. You can do graduate or undergraduate courses. Among the courses I chose were Creative Writing (taught by Canadian author Rosemary Sullivan), Caribbean Women Writers (by Trinidadian writer Ramabai Espinet who lives in Canada), Politics and the Media (a seminar-type course taught by a former journalist Prof Geoff Stevens) and Hindu Myth (taught by Prof Arti Dhand). I also audited a course on Human Resource Management at the prestigious Rothman School of Management.

Apart from auditing courses, the journalism fellows select knowledgeable speakers who are invited to chat informally with them over a scrumptious lunch on a Thursday or wine and cheese on Mondays. Among the distinguished speakers this past year were James Orbinski, former president of Doctors without Borders who received the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of his organisation in 1999, historian/author Margaret MacMillan (Paris 1919), former opposition leader of Canada, Preston Manning and award winning author George Elliot Clarke.

Whether you're from Nigeria or Trinidad and Tobago, how many of us get to meet such famous personalities in our day to day work?

Massey College, which has a rich intellectual life of its own, also invites speakers from time to time to deliver lectures to the student population and other guests and the journalism fellows get to participate. We got to see and hear people like Nobel Laureate John Polanyi; Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, and Daniel Libeskind, architect with the winning design for the new World Trade Center in New York.

The journalism programme also involves a bit of travelling. This year were were off to Quebec in November for talks on the still burning issue of separation and the United States (New York, Washington and Miami) in February where were met experts on water management as it related specifically to the Everglades in Florida. We toured the Everglades, the world's largest wetland, coming face to face with alligators, birds and other beautiful wildlife, a once in a lifetime opportunity for many of us.

And at the end of the programme each April, the journalism fellows travel to Finland courtesy the Finnish Government. In Helsinki we met experts in EU and Russian relations as well as Members of Parliament from several different parties who came together to have lunch with us.

From Helsinski we flew to Rovaniemi where we had a ball doing extraordinary things like fishing in the frozen Kemijoki river (although we caught nothing!); laughing wildly while huddled together in reindeer driven sleighs through an icy path at the Arctic Circle Reindeer Park and howling at the spectacle of the Northern Lights standing on a hill at midnight.

Then, we reluctantly said farewell to our sponsors, our hosts at Massey College and the University of Toronto as we each prepared to go back to our respective jobs.

It has been a rewarding year for all of us. How we wish it didn't have to end!