Even though I know that my current lifestyle may seem a bit extreme for some people, these past weeks have reached a new level – even for me. Usually, it’s easy to follow my travels more or less on social media, but for the past three months I’ve been less active in the online world. On the one hand, it’s all been trips focussed much more on journalism than on travelling per se, while on the other hand, I got a bit tired of trying to keep up with everything on social media.

Meanwhile, I absolutely agree that keeping a neat social media profile (whether it’s just for fun or as a tool for self-promotion/marketing) is to some extent a job on its own as well. And even though journalists like to claim a blog is a good tool for self-promotion too, in my case it’s probably more a way of procrastinating really, so since some of my friends (and even my mum…) desperately lost track of where I am and what I’m doing, I thought I’d write a little update.

Impression from my work in Myanmar.

After my three and a half months in Myanmar where I was working at the local magazine “Frontier” as part of a programme of the Department of Foreign Affairs of Switzerland, together with the biggest journalism school in Switzerland (which I didn’t attend), I came back home in December for… one week!

My brother had offered our family a trip to Ireland for Christmas, which was a great idea since I’d rather use the time over Christmas to discover something new with my family than going through the same procedures at home as every year. No articles from Ireland though, just leisure time.

Hiking in Ireland.

This time, I got back to Switzerland for… two weeks. One of the problems, if you not only study international relations but also have international relations, is that your friends are scattered all around the world. So occasionally it might occur that you get an invitation for the 30th birthday of a friend in… Finland. But since it was during the rare periods I was actually in Europe, and since I work independently, there was no reason not to go and I was absolutely happy to meet my friend and another good friend from Stockholm in Helsinki.

We’ve all been studying together in Stockholm in 2013 and still keep in touch today. As I (obviously) like to work from different places, I stayed a few days longer and while my Finnish friend, also a journalist, was at the office, I worked from different cafés in Helsinki, finishing my last pieces about Myanmar and starting to prepare my next trip to Sierra Leone.

Frozen sea in Helsinki.

Yes, back to Africa! The reason: There is a student’s organization in Switzerland called IFIL – Initiative for Intercultural Learning – which organizes study trips to interesting countries once a year. The organizers are usually students or young graduates who have a special link to the country. As a student, I’ve been on one of their trips to Tanzania back in 2014 and absolutely loved this mix of meetings with officials (for example from the African Court of Human Rights, the Department for Youth and Sports, the Swiss embassy etc.) or people from civil society (for example from NGOs, orphanages or the university).

This year, there was a trip to Sierra Leone – a country I didn’t know much about, but which had somehow caught my curiosity. My plan of course: First the ten-day study trip with the group, and then staying another ten days on my own to do some research for articles.

Backpacking in Sierra Leone.

If you’re the only journalist in the group and there is a blog that needs to be written, you know whose task it’s going to be. So I won’t write about our experiences here again, but will point you to the link to the blog (which is in English too): Sierra Leone travel blog for IFIL.

After this fun trip with a fantastic group, I researched on various topics such as the catastrophic landslide that occurred in 2017, the role of radio during the Ebola crisis, the problem with bushmeat and endangered chimpanzees, and the role of telecommunication companies as bank substitutes for money transfers. I also spontaneously climbed the highest mountain in West Africa, Mount Bintumani (1945m), which was definitely worth it even though I managed to hurt my foot.

Hiking through the jungle.

Back in Switzerland, I only had one week before my next trip to Belarus. This one was a press trip, meaning a Swiss NGO working on human rights in Belarus and Ukraine had organized a trip for journalists around the topic of human rights and repression, with a focus on the situation of homeless people.

I was curious to discover the probably least-known country of Europe, and especially topics related to human rights. It was a very intense time full of meetings with highly interesting people, projects and organisations and we also visited cities in the east and the west of the country.

Research in Belarus with a group of journalists. Photo: Marco Fieber.

While I usually don’t buy a return ticket if I don’t need to, for this trip I’ve booked the return ticket even before I booked the ticket to go to Minsk. The reason: I’ve received an invitation to speak at a journalism conference, with the aim to share my experience as a freelance journalist in Myanmar.

It was not the first time I was invited as a speaker, but usually, it was for smaller organisations in a more informal way – this time, I was going to get paid for it and they would even print my face on flyers, wow! Of course, I didn’t do it for this reason – as you might imagine, such conferences are always a great opportunity to network, which in journalism – especially as a freelancer – is very important.

Coffee and passion helped me through this day, after having slept only two hours since I’ve had to catch the earliest flight possible back to Zurich Switzerland, in order to be able to arrive at the conference in time. Nevertheless, the whole conference was very interesting and definitely worth it. A short conversation I had when I arrived and people looked at my luggage with the airport tag actually pretty well sums up my last few weeks:

“Oh, are you coming directly from Myanmar?”

Me: “No, no, from Belarus.”

Someone else, looking at the splint on my foot: “Oh, so did you hurt your foot in Belarus?”

Me: “No, no, in Sierra Leone.”

…my life as a travelling journalist in a nutshell.

Working at the beach in Sierra Leone.