Foreign Intrigue in Cedar Falls, Iowa   

Talk show on foreign topics finds a home on Iowa campus.

The world doesn't know much about tidy little Cedar Falls, tucked into a cold, corn-dense corner of northeastern Iowa, but its 35,000 residents can keep close tabs on the rest of the globe.

Cedar Falls has Anelia Dimitrova, evangelist of all things international, a driven dervish of a woman who moved from Bulgaria to the Midwest and eventually to Cedar Falls. Upon arrival, she sized up the place and decided it could support a twice-monthly, hour-long television show featuring people sitting around a table talking about topics like women in Afghanistan--before the embattled country dominated the news. Or a journalist's trip across China. Or Rwanda.

Dimitrova, 42, an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Northern Iowa, approached the local cable channel with her idea, and an executive there asked if the local people would be interested. She said, "I don't know. If I read the research, I would say no. But I'd like to find out."

And so she did. "Here and There" debuted in the spring of 1999, the title of its first episode, "Violence at Home and Abroad: From Columbine to Kosovo," aptly summarizing Dimitrova's angle on international news. The point, she says, is to connect the dots between events on the other side of the world and people locally. Bring the two together, she says, and the rest of the community will listen, learn and care.

"I can't send correspondents to cover the world," she says, her words thick with her native accent. "But I can look into the globe that my community has become, and I can tell you that I find people and connections between every corner of the globe in Cedar Falls, Iowa. It's surprising if you start digging how many people you find and how many stories they carry that are otherwise untold."

The budget-free show may lack the bells, whistles and pyrotechnics that knit together standard news programming, but it has managed to establish at least some modicum of repute in the state: Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack, for example, sat down on the show in September 2000 to talk about immigration.

Dimitrova worked as a teacher and freelance journalist in Bulgaria before moving to the United States in 1991. In Bulgaria, she wrote a novel, "Robinson My Friend," about a sculptor's torturous experience in a society in which he cannot express himself.

Students say she regularly proselytizes about the value of real-world experience, giving just about anybody a shot at contributing to the show, or to a Web site she created for students called www.kollegeville.com, which among other things hosts Webcasts of all the programs.

Valerie Jennings, 22, a senior who worked with Dimitrova on many of the more than 40 shows that aired, says her favorites were on back-to-back, one featuring interviews with students who grew up in Palestine, the other students raised in Israel. When the episodes aired last February, relations between Israelis and Palestinians were particularly volatile.

Christopher Martin, 38, a colleague in the communications studies department who teaches electronic media, says he frequently watches the program as do lots of people, including the university president. Dimitrova's approach--using nontraditional sources and addressing issues that people are talking about but that aren't being reported in the mainstream news--is classic civic journalism, Martin says. The community angle, he says, "brings issues to the table, at a local level."

Edited by Jill Rosen