This week, team Rahman shares how interview subjects take repetition to warm up and react to Muslim Matchmaker, the reality dating show mentioned last week. Follow along each Friday through May with this J-Corps Audio Journal.
Priyanka Deo: Hey guys, and welcome to another week of our very exciting project. I'm Priyanka Deo. I'm serving as editor here. We have made some fantastic progress this week. It's only week six, right? Amina, Hafsa, I know we are heavy into transcribing, and you almost have a skeleton script ready, right? How's that going?
Amina Rahman: The script has been really helpful. It's helped me to focus my questions, especially when I speak to people to keep that in mind. I don't always follow it exactly, but it's really useful to have that plan ahead of time.
Obviously, when you plan better, you do better. So that's been helpful. This week I was busy with some community projects actually. We had a civic engagement training with the Muslim civic coalition. It's a statewide organization that also does national civic engagement work. It was interesting cause we we're having discussions about why people don't engage in civically.
I mentioned to them, we have a project in our community we've been working with, Helping Hands pantry and providing meals every Friday. There's like a whole bunch of community members dedicated to this. Every week they're coming up with the money. They're cooking the food sometimes themselves. They're delivering the food. They're very engaged in this issue, which is not just for our community, like the Muslim community, but it's for the broader Springfield community. I was asking , "Why are we not as organized and eager to address this on a political level or on a social engagement level, other than just providing the food?" and everybody was, "Yeah, that's true."
It's nice to get people realizing that engaging with the community is not just helping out and participating, but also looking at the bigger picture and who else is working on this.
Priyanka Deo: It's interesting to see how that all starts at the local level, at the root level, then that's how you get a big national movement at times. That's super cool that you're discovering that. If any of you ladies want to talk about what you learned so far in this process, because I'm sure as you are now transcribing — as you're going through what you have in the material that you have — you're probably finding a lot more voices, like that person also may be good or this organization also may be good. How are you cyphering through that process as a citizen journalist?
Hafsa Rahman: I haven't been able to do much of the editing yet, I've been contacting some people if they want to be interviewed. My mom was a little more in the editing and transcribing process.
Priyanka Deo: Amina, are there any issues that our audience, our listeners, would want to know about that you've discovered?
Amina Rahman: There are issues. That was one of the questions I was asked by one of the members of our community. Are there studies about why people don't engage and projects at a community level, like in organizing?
We didn't really come up with any answers, but there are some people who have fears about engaging on a broader level in the community. Sometimes there's fear about backlash, or sometimes there's racism, and sometimes it's just feeling they don't have the skills or the abilities that they need to do that kind of engagement. I gave them a lot of examples of moms who are involved with the parent teacher organization or, volunteering for different projects. There's a lot of ways to engage, grow your awareness, and grow your familiarity with other people.
That's one of the things I love about this project. We're trying to represent our community. At the same time, I'm becoming more aware of other communities and other sub communities within our community that need representation. When you become more aware, you can make better choices, make better decisions, engage better.
Priyanka Deo: Are you looking forward to the editing process or are you having fun talking to people?
Amina Rahman: I did a little bit of editing on my computer , the first time it took a little bit of understanding, like, how do I tackle this? It's fun because as you listen and cut things you become more aware of the message of the person you're interviewing, or what they're interested in, and it all starts coming together as a story within a theme.
Priyanka Deo: What are your takeaways for this week? It's a lot scarier than it looks. I experienced that as well. Once you actually sit and edit the thing, you're like, "Oh, okay." Then when you finish it, you're really proud of it.What have you learned through this process so far?
Hafsa Rahman: I've learned a lot about how these little things that seem really simple to us every day in our community, they're part of a bigger story. We wouldn't consider it a big news story because it's a simple thing, but often people don't know what goes on in our communities.
Also, as we're interviewing people, it's interesting to see how their response can start a bit surface, and then as you have more of a conversation, it gets deeper, and you start understanding the roots of where they're coming from and what they're talking about.
Amina Rahman: Me, it's been having people come up with things that I didn't necessarily think of and challenging my perception of what the story is. Last week, Randy talked about Muslim Matchmaker. I didn't even know about it, but I decided to watch it because I was, "Oh, I don't know about this." It was actually really great. And I've watched other shows like Mo and Rami. There's other shows that represent Muslims that, maybe it's not like how I necessarily live my life as a Muslim, but it's a different perspective. And I think it's really interesting to include this whole gamut of stories for me to understand my own community better and for other people outside the community to understand too.
Priyanka Deo: I was looking for something new to watch on Netflix. So maybe I will go ahead and watch that tonight. That concludes this week's episode. We are well on our way. I'm really excited about the finished product.
Press Forward Springfield is awarding its first project grants. NPR Illinois along with the Illinois Times and Capitol News Illinois are each receiving funding to report on different untold stories in our community. The three reporting projects will be posted in May.
Community Foundation for the Land of Lincoln in collaboration with the Field Foundation and the Illinois Department of Human Services are leading this project as part of their Healing Illinois program.
NPR Illinois is using the grant to test its vision for community reporting and journalism training — the Journalism Corps or "J-Corps."
