* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
I would have never thought over a year ago that I'd return to London as a journalist. Not even in my wildest dreams would I have thought I'd be training with Reuters, in the words of my colleague, Bassem, the trusted news agency par excellence and by far the reference in the media world. I was lucky the Thomson Reuters Foundation selected me to follow the Writing and Reporting News course in March 2012.
Over a year ago I never nurtured the idea of becoming a journalist or even less a citizen journalist, commonly known as a blogger. Then came the Tunisian Revolution, the first spark in the new Arab World Order, the Arab Spring, the Arab Awakening as it were. I started to learn the basics of journalism: how to be objective, fast, reliable and straightforward. The Thomson Reuters Foundation training was like a “déjà vu” journalistic experience for me; as I already have spent the last nine months with Tunisia’s first English speaking news website Tunisia Live, working on the skills required to become a good journalist.
What the TR programme offered me was something new in my budding experience as a journalist: how can a journalist be fast and deliver objective and accurate news. That was the biggest challenge I've yet encountered as a journalist. I loved learning, absorbing, sucking in and devouring the plethora of information from world-class trainers Bob and Mathieu. What have I learnt most? How to keep a cool head, be humble about one’s achievements as a reporter, an investigative journalist who endeavours to develop, sharpen and build skills to be a successful journalist.
I feel blessed to have experienced London as a journalist. It was refreshing to be back in my favorite Western city and enjoying it again. It looked even more exciting, colourful and welcoming to me than in 2005, when I landed at Heathrow a month after the London bombings and headed straight to Scotland to be a teacher in Glasgow. East London looked even more “cool” in 2012 than in 2003 when I used to study in the Docklands Campus of the University of East London, lived in Poplar and would day-dream, contemplate and at night gaze at the HSBC building and say to myself: “if only one day I could be in that building or at least in any of the Canary Wharf buildings, even for a visit”. I'd never entertained the idea of becoming a journalist at the time. But thanks to the newly-acquired freedom in Tunisia after 14th January 2011, the date former Tunisian president Ben Ali fled the country and people became free to express their views (and open their mouths, not to go to the dentist, but to speak out as in the words of a Tunisian activist from Kasserine, one of the strongholds of the Tunisian Revolution). Thank you Thomson Reuters Foundation for making it possible for a novice in the media world to tap and dig into her long-time repressed writing skills. Now, I feel whole again as a citizen journalist.