Montana was my first trip out of the Dayton, so it made me a little nervous. Everybody kept telling me it’s so different from Dayton and yet nobody told me what to expect. I therefore assumed I was going into a cowboy zone. I arrived in Missoula safe and sound to a different environment but not a cowboy zone as I had anticipated, that was disappointing.
Missoula has large tracks of land, sparsely populated, but with a warm feeling. Right from the airport I felt welcomed to the town. Some folks I flew with were curious as to what business I had in Missoula. I guess they don’t receive many African visitors; one woman guessed right when she said I must be visiting the university of Montana, because it’s the only thing in the town, which attracts many foreign visitors. Well, she was right. I was there at the invitation of Denise Dowling, a broadcast journalism professor, who with her students are producing and hosting the “Footbridge Forum” on KBGA 89.9, a campus based FM station. The took the opportunity to see other media houses in Montana - the KPAX TV Station, the student-run radio station KBGA, and KUFM the public broadcaster.
KBGA 89.9 FM reminded me of my days at Radio Univers, a campus radio station on the University of Ghana when we were the masters of the airwaves with our “Campus Exclusive” program Monday to Friday from 7-7:30AM. The “Exclusive Team” was made up of Thomas Kwesi Tieku (now a political science professor in Canada), Stephen Tetteh Quao (the only trained journalist on the team at the time who now lives in UK with his family), Martin Joe Pinto, a Freight Forwarder and myself. We were a solid team that made it our objective to inform students of what was happening on campus as “objectively” as we could. On hindsight, I don’t think were very objective. The entire team was made up of student politicians who had their own agenda. The last time I checked, Campus Exclusive is on air making the program almost a decade old. My apologies for digressing, I can’t help talking about the good old days on the University of Ghana campus, I relish them.
Now back to the Footbridge Forum which I had the pleasure of sitting in during a live broadcast. The University of Montana id separated from the Missoula Township by a bridge. So, what the Footbridge Forum does is to attempt to close the gap between these two geographical areas through deliberation. The students each semester select an issue that interests both the Missoula community and the university campus and then hold a series of live forums around with views of exploring difference and widening the communication between the two. The ultimate objective is for the two groups to find a common ground.
I observed the production of a program on whether college is for everyone. It was interesting how the expert panel I observed talked about the benefits and costs of getting a college education, alternatives to college education, the job market demands in Montana and beyond. This was a sequel to an earlier program that featured citizens who expressed their opinions on the subject. The Footbridge forum handles citizens separately from the experts, so for each week’s program a citizen or expert panel of up to 5 people appears on the program. Each semester’s forum begins and ends with a citizen panel.
Missoula is a lovely, serene city of sidewalks with a hitching trail if you like to hike. After the first day I walked back and forth from the University of Montana campus. I must say the weather though was erratic, within a span of two hours we had strong winds, rains, hail then snow, highly unimaginable for this tropical girl. Interestingly I understand that there are 5 Ghanaian students at the University of Montana but I didn’t get to meet any of them.
