Big Event Back at OU on April 2nd to Help the Greater Norman Area

The original Big Event began in 1982 at Texas A&M when students felt the need to give back to the Bryan-College Station community. After the success of A&M’s Big Event and the passage through their student senate, The Big Event was officially and annual spring community service project. The Big Event is now an annual spring project at more than 60 major universities across the U.S. and has been successful for 24 years.

            The University of Oklahoma adopted the idea and had its first official Big Event in 1999. Since the first community service day many of the student groups have required their students and members to attend The Big Event. It continues to grow each year and the university is planning for record breaking numbers for 2011 and has high hopes for the helpful and giving students.

            OU’s Big Event meets each year in the spring between the months of March and April. This year’s event will be held on April 2, 2011 and sign ups are in process. Due to the hard economic times many schools, churches, nursing and assisted living areas, child and family advocacy groups, animal shelters, food pantries, hospice services and the list goes on have been requesting assistance. The university has named Big Event as the official day of community service for OU.

            Big Event strives to make acquaintances with the surrounding areas and shows students what they can do for their community. The Event lasts 4 hours and each group is broken up into 20 students that will find out their location the day of the event.

            A local public school has participated in Big Event for the last several years and last year students built and upgraded an outside play ground, cleaned out flower beds, enhanced the look of the school and helped stuff bags for their family Multicultural event. They plan on having another well-rounded group of students to help out with similar upgrades, cleanings and set-ups.

            The next step for Big Event is to top 2010 and have over 4,500 student, faculty and staff volunteers. Learn how you can get involved at the Big Event website, bigevent.ou.edu. Sign ups end March 4^th so make sure you apply ASAP. Applications are preferred through email to bigevent@ou.edu.

The Pearl Project

       Daniel Pearl was a brave American Journalist who served as the South Asia Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal. He set out on his mission to Pakistan on January 3, 2002 as part of an investigation linking Richard Reid and Al-Qaeda. He was later kidnapped and beheaded by his captors. Daniel believed that he was going to interviews but instead he was being set up and shortly was directed to his own death. Osra, Daniel's partner at the time, who after his death wanted to finish the investigation on the beheading of her beloved friend. Osra started her research back up in the Spring of 2007. They had hardly any money and the investigation took them three years to complete.

Daniel Pearl was just like any other American Journalist, curious and fearless. He felt that his job was to be an ambassador to all the complicated issues in the world. Mohammad Hashim Qadir bated Danny saying that he had connections to the information that Daniel needed for his story and then sent him to 7 other men who ended up be a trap. This project was so important and effected many people. A sense of closure put the team of journalist to peace although Danny was brutally murdered. After the investigation was complete four men were convicted, five are dead, four are still detained or missing and 14 are still free making this a total of 27 men playing some kind of role in the events surrounding the kidnapping and murder.

Most journalist today have to take extreme precautions when traveling abroad to retrieve news. Unfortunately this is our normal now as journalists. Normal in the early 21st century was being able to freely travel and  not worry about your safety and whether or not you were going to be bait for a murder, but of course those are always thoughts to keep in the back of your mind. To many Americans surprise, this occurred significantly close to the terrorist attack of 9/11. As journalists should we attempt to report on such a touchy subject during a time of crisis? Could they and do they have reasonable doubt to think that we are not American spies trying to figure out their reasonings behind things? My answer to this is we should probably not report on such issues during time of war and yes they have every reason to believe that we are spies trying to find our main suspect in such a case.

While Daniel showed amazing heroism throughout his journey in Pakistan, so did Osra and her group of young journalist that risked their lives trying to find answers. Although they never traveled to Pakistan to personally find answers, they did much research, made numerous phone calls across the world and even bravely showed up at houses of potential information givers. A total of 32 students spent countless hours and sleepless nights on finding the reasons behind his death and who were involved. The amount of time spent getting past the language and cultural barrier alone cost the young investigators an extreme amount of time. "I remember taking the first five minutes of the phone conversation just saying, "Hello, hello, hello can you hear me?" and once we got past the echoing and outside noises I then had to worry about whether or not they could understand me or if there was some way I could get enough out of the conversation to lead me to the next person" Jess said.

The group plans to travel and tell Daniel's story. They are relieved that they are finished with the investigation but not necessarily thrilled about guilty men still being on the loose. What these students and Osra have done is opened up many opportunities for future journalist to follow their dreams and to never give up on something they believe so strongly about. Their hope is to tell The Pearl Project and gain peace for the loss of the American Journalist, Daniel Pearl. You can read more information on their online book at http://treesaver.publicintegrity.org/node/63.