Katya Cengel

@kcengel

Katya Cengel has covered everything from TB sniffing rats in Mozambique to retired child soldiers in Burma. Her work has appeared in Newsweek, National Geographic News and Foreign Policy among other publications. A World Affairs Journalism Fellow, she earned a second place Society of Professional Journalists Green Eyeshade Award in 2006 for her series on the wives of Sudan’s “Lost Boys”. More recently, she was a 2014 ICFJ/UN Maternal and Newborn Health Mozambique fellow and a 2015 International Reporting Project Guatemala fellow. Her University of Nebraska Press book “Bluegrass Baseball: A Year in the Minor League Life” was a 2013 Kentucky Literary Award finalist. When not reporting from far flung locales, she teaches journalism at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. In 2018, Katya published her University of Nebraska press book "Exiled: From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to California and Back."

Highlights

Reporting

| Katya Cengel

DRC: Mobile courts deliver justice to remote areas

Bunia, Democratic Republic of Congo – Court started on Tuesday afternoon, a day-and-a-half late. The three-day mobile court hearings focused on sexual violence cases began with the first defendant entering barefoot and wearing dirty trousers…
| Katya Cengel

What It’s Like to Be Married to the Men Doing ‘the Most Dangerous Conservation Job in the World’

It was 2006 the first time Aline Burasa fled her home. The second time was in 2007 or 2008, she can’t remember which. In 2012, she was forced off her land a third time. It…
| Katya Cengel

A Sudden Breach in Uganda

But the security guard was sure it was my client. He recalled how we arrived late the night before. He described my client, a divorced American man in his 60s, outfitted in khaki shirt and…
| Katya Cengel

In Rwanda, female ex-combatants face reintegration challenge

“Some of them, they will tell you frankly, that the only way of living (in DR Congo) was going to take somebody’s food in the field” at gunpoint, said Kanamugire. It falls on him and…
| Katya Cengel

A long road to reintegration for Rwandan ex-combatants

Serugendo Deo, who returned in 2001 and is vice chairman of Mathieu’s cooperative, was one of the first to pass through Mutobo. After completing the three-month program at Mutobo, which familiarizes foreign ex-combatants with the…