Mary Fowles wins $20,000 internship

By Barbara Black

Journalism Graduate Diploma student Mary Fowles, 25, has won a $20,000 scholarship to intern for six months at a weekly newspaper in Morocco.

The award is from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), created by the Canadian government in 1970 to help developing countries.

Her class was given the opportunity to apply last term by the directors of the Graduate Journalism program. The application process was extensive.

“We were asked to pick any developing country where we wanted to work, and design, from scratch, a project that would aid a media outlet in that country and focus on issues central to the development of that country.”

“The successful application for last year [Susan Font’s, to go to Cambodia] was huge. There was tons of research involved, and it was discouraging at first.”

However, Mary is used to challenges. She grew up on Salt Spring Island, the famously upscale-granola community in British Columbia, and when she was 18, she spent time in California with an 85-year-old silent monk. When he went back to India, she went with him, and worked for three months in his orphanage.

She came to Montreal four years ago to take a bachelor’s degree at McGill in religious studies and cultural studies, then entered Concordia’s intensive 12-month journalism diploma program last spring.

Fowles says she was given a secular upbringing and does not practise a religion. “My interest is more philosophical. I see myself as a mediator, and that is what I hope to pursue in my work as a journalist.”

For her IDRC application, she looked for a project in an Arab country, and chose Morocco because it is known to have the freest press in the Arab world. The magazine where she will be working, Le Journal Hebdomadaire, in Casablanca, won an international Press Freedom Award last year.