Today marks the one-year anniversary of my Fellowship in Haiti. It was a challenge-filled year and the path that has led me to a place where I have a new vista on journalism in Haiti has been strewn with obstacles and even a few dead ends. My overall experience has been one of tremendous personal growth that encompassed the full gamut of emotions. Ultimately, it has been so positive that I’ve extended the Fellowship. I can say with all honesty that that I am looking forward to building on my past successes and achieving new ones with renewed energy.

To say that Haiti is full of surprises is kind of like saying that summers here are hot. Surprises are as numerous as Haiti’s contradictions: two hundred dollar a night hotels across from tent camps, five-star restaurants facing water distribution points.

Many of the surprises provoke mixed emotions, like when I turn the corner only to find myself in a traffic jam because a pickup truck is finally removing rubble.

This past weekend, 22 journalists in the southern town of Jacmel received a certificate of completion for 36 hours of training in investigative journalism. The four women and 18 men who participated on a volunteer basis are, I hope, the first of many throughout the country who will benefit from this course thanks to a generous donation from a group of anonymous donors.

Editor note: Knight Fellow Edem Djokotoe discusses contrasting philosophies between a government bent on prosecuting the charcoal industry and a rural population dependent on its profits.

Two weeks after he returned from the UN climate change conference in December, Malawi’s energy minister, Grain Malunga, made a controversial public pronouncement: “Arrest all charcoal sellers.”

Prosecuting them, he argued, would save the country from the devastating effects of deforestation and deter others from chopping down trees for charcoal.

There is nothing like interviewing women with fistula to realize, in your heart and in your bones, what fistula does to women: the humiliation, marginalization, loss of self-esteem, and depression. Fistula is an orifice resulting from ruptured tissue between bladder, rectum and vagina that provokes permanent incontinence. Feces and urine flow through the vagina.

Obstetric fistula is caused by early and repeated pregnancies, long and complicated deliveries without proper medical care, delays in reaching hospital, clandestine abortion and violent rape.