Adam Greiner

After two months living at a Buddhist monastery, I felt I had much more clarity going into my journalism role with Spotlight News Magazine. The editor was keen for me to pursue topics that interested me as well as those that utilised my previous work experience. With that in mind, I wrote several articles about the religious festivals occurring that month, which gave me an excellent excuse to return to my monastery and celebrate Tibetan Losar with the monks. I was also asked to write stories about expats and spent many Saturday mornings speaking with the vendors at the Farmers Market, whose charitable reasons for coming to Nepal were inspiring.
 
I found that my role as a journalist made me much more adventurous whilst living in Kathmandu, and I met several NGOs and gate-crashed a UN conference in order to write an article about the current mental health system.   This led to a splinter story about the mental health of Nepalese who are forced to go abroad to work under slave-like conditions, which brought me all the way to Pokhara to interview a charity CEO and meet those traumitised by their experiences. These stories need much more public attention and I was very appreciative for the opportunity to do raise such awareness through Spotlight.
 
Spotlight Magazine, hard copy edition, is quite politically focused so I had presumed my articles would go straight to the more widely circulated online version. I was very grateful to see four of my articles published via hard copy in three weeks. I had never thought I would see my name with the word ‘journalist’ beside it.