Noah graduated from ISS in 2015 – she took IB Biology to learn more about ecosystems and the environment, and Spanish Ab Initio was where she first learnt Spanish, which soon became very useful to her. She started the ‘rainforest-linje’ at Sund Folkehøgskole in Inderøya. With her class, Noah went to Peru to look at the effects of the environmental problems on the local population and to experience living with indigenous families in the rainforest. This was the time she decided to study journalism. “Too much was going on which people didn’t know about,” said Noah. She reveals that she learned how to write at ISS and credits four years of English literature with Ms. Landis for forming a steady basis for this.

After that, Noah started a bachelor’s degree in Journalism at the Hogeschool Utrecht, the Netherlands, and after a year decided to do a second bachelors degree – Liberal Arts and Sciences at the Utrecht University. She went back to Peru as a teacher assistant for Sund Folkehøgskole doing her internship for Journalism studies. While staying there, Noah organised a trip to the goldmine which had been so destructive in the Cajamarca region. She quickly learned about the mercury spill that happened in the village of Choropampa 20 years ago.
“I had one day left in Cajamarca, so everything was unplanned and chaotic but I made it to the town and took two Folkehøgskole-students with me, so they would get an idea of how on-site journalism works. The interviews were amongst the most difficult I have ever done, the people were hopeless and ashamed of their illnesses. They pleaded for help, and asked me to not get bribed by the goldmine and not publish my article, like had happened to researchers and lawyers before”, told us Noah. The research for the article took very long and her phone was even tapped numerous times, but the hard work has paid off. Noah’s article on the long-term effects of a mercury spill from a gold mine in a Peruvian village was published in “The Guardian” recently, which made her very happy, especially for the villagers of Choropampa.