Working Days

I feel like I’ve lived a week in the last two days.

It took us an hour and fifteen minutes to get to work on our first day. Turns out there’s a lot of traffic going into Kampala at 7:30AM and even though our taxi (matatu, packed van) driver tried valiantly to pass as many cars as possible on the side of the road before cutting back into the slow-moving traffic (and then repeating the process), it still took us 30 minutes to drive what should have taken 5.

At Monitor Publications, we met Charles (the political editor who has been our contact in setting up this internship) who introduced us around and then left us with a senior reporter while he finished up some work. The reporter gave us copies of the day’s paper and then took us upstairs to meet the feature editors and writers. Flora (the editor of the weekly section “Full Woman”) sent us into the library to read old copies of the paper and get a feel for the different sections. I read through December 2007 and it was interesting to read about Kenya’s last elections from a Ugandan perspective.

Later, we met with Carol, the Features Editor, and talked more about the daily inserts and the features sections. Charles introduced to some more people and then announced that today he was too busy to take us to HR so we could leave for the day.

It was 12:40 so Zoe and I grabbed lunch at a small Ethiopian restaurant ($2 each for a meal and soda) on our long walk back to Kabalagaba and then caught a taxi to the Super Supermarket (the only landmark we know near to our road).

Today we caught a ride with a neighbor who works in town. He leaves at 6:30AM and since we didn’t have to walk or sit in traffic, we were at work at 6:49. We don’t need to be there until the daily news meeting at 8:30, so we had some time to kill. Looks like we can either spend an hour and fifteen minutes walking/taking a taxi/walking some more each morning or catch a ride with Michael and get to work super early but then have some personal reading/writing time before work…for now, we’re going to go with the early trip.

Everyone comes into work and reads the day’s paper first thing. At 8:30 all of the reporters, editors, and photographers piled into the newsroom to discuss the day’s stories and compare them to the competing paper (New Vision). Charles led the meeting and had a smart perspective on every issue; I’m so impressed by him! After we went through the paper, everyone had to report on what they were covering today. Charles assigned me to go with Isaac Imaka to cover the Africa Day of Civil Service and Public Administration.

The meeting/“workshop” was at the Hotel Africana and there were probably 200 Public Service officials (basically all sectors of the government) present. We were there from about 9:30 until 2 and then interviewed people afterwards to get their reactions to the proposals suggested. The keynote speaker was Dr. Aaron Mukwaya, a professor of Political Science at Makerere University. He talked about the importance of Ugandans returning to their traditional values and emphasized that Public Service is a state duty. Ugandans have a problem “mixing what is government and what is state,” he said. At the end , he said “I am not an Africanist. I’m an African who is writing on Africa.” I was inspired by him even though his speech didn’t end up being our primary focus in the article.

We took boda bodas back to the Monitor (my first boda boda ride of the summer) :) and pitched our angle to an editor. I had pages of notes on Mokwaya’s speech and the whole event, but the editor decided we should have 450 words and that was that.

It was fun to work with Isaac and interesting combining our ideas and writing styles and trying to do it as quickly as possible in order to meet our 5PM deadline. The writing style itself is very different here and some of the sentence structures and words in our article are counterintuitive to what I would have written if I was working alone.

We wrote the article in time and sent it in. I’m used to proofing and re-proofing but we didn’t even fully read it over before we sent it in. And that was that again. :)

Zoe and I bought bread and tomatoes on the way home. It’s been a challenge learning how to gauge grocery levels and know what quantities of everything we should buy at once.

We didn’t get home until after 6. Besides a bowl of cereal at 6AM, I hadn’t eaten anything beyond a piece of sweet bread and a cup of tea at the Hotel Africana. I was definitely hungry!

It was a long day but a good day. I feel like I saw and experienced so much since 5:30 this morning when Zoe’s alarm went off. I also feel more accepted and assimilated into the Monitor and am excited to get to know more of the people who work there.

And tomorrow I’ll have my first article in print!

Off to bed now. Getting up in the 5’s…

PS - Check out Zoe’s blog at zarichards.blogspot.com