No room for shyness (in journalism).

When I was in first grade I was so shy that when my family moved from one town to another I would only hang around the edges of the playground at my new school. I dared not try to invade a circle of youngsters I didn't know. Gradually I lost some of that shyness, but as late as my early teens I dreaded the start of school for the talks I'd have to make in English class.

With the help of some of my teachers, I suppose, and the growing knowledge that if I wanted to be a journalist I'd have to be a lot more outgoing, I lost more of my shyness. Even speechmaking became easier. By the time I entered university I was able to speak well enough to be exempt from the freshman course in oral communication.

Later I found a new motivation--to work for a better society based on seeking God's will and on aiming to live by the highest moral standards. I found that caring for other people became an important concern, and at this point any remaining shyness fled.

I thought of this in connection with a new friend I met earlier this year when my country was agonizing over the 24 Navy personnel being detained on Hainan Island off the coast of China. Chiyung Wang, a young journalist, was having breakfast in a National Press Club restaurant in Washington the morning I sat down near him. At the time I knew nothing of his background. Turned out he was from the area of the Yangtze River where China is building a massive dam.

We talked. He told me he was a graduate student in the University of Missouri Washington journalism programme and, as such, wrote for a Kansas newspaper. We got on well. I told him something of my experience of inner change; and how I found it far more satisfying to write to heal and reconcile than to feed the fires of conflict as I once had done. He asked me to participate in research for his master's degree thesis. I happily agreed.

The key to forging lasting friendships, I think, is to be genuinely interested in the other person. And to listen. At least that's been my experience. Take, for example, the student journalist, Erin, I met in Los Angeles three years ago when she turned up at a workshop of the International Communications Forum. Thrilled with the workshop, she told me about her aspirations. I listened. Last year I joyfully accepted her invitation to speak to journalism students at her university and to attend her graduation this May.

As a journalist I violated a rule of some reporters by making friends with the politicians I covered. I wanted to know them better. I tried to give readers a fuller picture of what their elected officials were doing and wanted to accomplish. It didn't mean office-holders were always happy with what I wrote. One powerful politician objected strongly to columns attacking his efforts to control an agency charged with choosing school textbooks. But I refused to believe my sole task was to expose public officials' wrongdoing. Better for them and their constituents to try to inspire them and draw out their strong points.

In this regard, it was a joy to meet recently E Gyimah-Boadi, a Ghanaian political science professor who is executive director of the Centre for Democratic Development in his country. At the International Forum for Democratic Studies in Washington, DC, he outlined Ghana's long struggle for democracy--which led to the peaceful transition of power after the presidential election last December.

Gyimah-Boadi outlined how a free and independent media in Ghana had helped `level the playing field' by reporting impartially on the election. Such a media could also help immeasurably to heal the wounds from a hard-fought election.