frustrations

So the ending of the sewer story (see previous entry) is actually quite anticlimatic, for the 2.5 of you who were hanging on tenterhooks waiting for its conclusion. I'm sorry. The "to be continued" was fairly misleading. Basically, in point form, the conclusion of the story, and its subsequent after-effects:

- So yeah, I really did fall into a puddle that was also a sewer, right from the cab.

- Two older ladies and a man immediately pulled me out.

- They began to apologize profusely, despite the fact that I am actually the idiot who fell into the sewer in the first place. It is the Ghanaian way - well, with many Ghanaians anyway - to apologize for factors that are purely environmental, or in my case, stupidity-based. I begged them to stop, to no avail.

-As many pairs of hands wiped at my now very stinky clothes, I looked longingly towards the street leading to my house. The only street - now flooded with water that was no doubt sewer-y.

-Eventually a young Ghanaian woman who lives next door to me came by. She poked a little girl passing by, who gave us her umbrella, and together we skipped over the ankle-deep rainwater and piles of sewage; the absurdly perfect looking Ghanaian university student, clothes and hair still somewhat immaculate despite having just been soaked by an insane rainfall; and the soiled, disheveled, filthy, embarrassed obruni, who continued to trip over her own feet despite clinging to the other girl's hand like a wet dog to its owner.

So I got home, I showered, my phone was wrecked, and all my notes for work smeared, but so far, no health problems. (Thank you, typhoid fever/meningitis shots!)

Now for something completely different. I know some of you might be thinking, "Wow, all this person does in Ghana is fall in sewers and nearly get killed and then lie on the beach for awhile." While these things have comprised a reasonable part of my time here, there is also the small matter of WHY I'm here....and that's work. I realize I have not spoken of work in this blog at all yet. I think I'm afraid it'll bore people. It may very well. If you would rather hear about gross tales of the body and sewage and me saying "Jesus Christ!" in front of religious old ladies and beach parties and stuff like that, skip this entry and all those things will come later, I promise you.

So yes. I work at a radio station. It's called JOY FM. And in a country where radio is very big....bigger than TV, and rivalling print in popularity, well, my station is reputed to be one of the most popular, and certainly the most well-established.

Interesting, yes. Intimidating, most certainly. Before coming out here, I'd only worked in radio for eight months. Now I was expected to go into a newsroom full of intelligent, ambitious reporters, at one of the most popular stations in Ghana, a country I have never lived in, much less reported ON, and tell them.....well....tell them what, exactly?,

This part is tricky. As some of you know already, I have not been having the easiest time at work. That's fine - I had no illusions about changing the face of Ghanaian radio, or sailing by, or anything like that. And I don't want to go into specifics, as a) my newsroom can read this blog and b) my host organization, Journalists for Human Rights, can also read it. So I feel I must be judicious in my choice of words here.

Let me just say this: my job description, on paper, is "Human Rights Journalism Trainer." This, you might think, would ostensibly mean I would be training Ghanaian journalists in human rights reporting. You would, on the surface, be correct.

However, there is a slight incongruity between the job I am supposed to be doing and the newsroom climate I am working in. JOY is currently in a period of intense transition. The studio is under construction in a basement-like area. The newsroom is on a different floor than the studio (which makes the midday casts interesting, and certainly aerobic, as we race up and down flights of stairs with stories hot from the printer in our hands, waiting to be delivered into the understandably anxious hands of the newscaster/news editor/manager. But I digress.) The newsroom is also crammed - marketing people share desks with producers, and the news team is always kind of all over the place. It is fun and chaotic as a newsroom should be, but sometimes it feels out of control.

Anyway, another aspect of the newsroom's transition is that many reporters have quit, recently. I learned that this happened right before I came to Ghana. The reason is that reporters at JOY don't get paid well. They are also expected to work extremely long hours despite this and assume that the station's good name is adequate compensation in itself.

As a result, you get an understaffed team of a few exhausted reporters who work seven days a week in some cases, who have no time for leisure or family, and most importantly, no time to work on in-depth feature stories of their choosing. These are stories that go behind the politics that dominate the news world in Ghana ad nauseum - stories about vendors who lose their businesses because Accra is "decongesting" (or tearing down) areas that are considered ugly, for example. Or the female journalism student who is forced to skip classes and sell fried yams to her fellow students just to make her tuition. Or the young girls who are brought into Accra from other West African countries and given illegal passage through the country through bribes to be sent to Europe for the purposes of prostitution.

All these stories have come up in our newsroom. This is not the problem. My colleagues are all smart, passionate people and are keen to include them in the lineup. The problem is that of time, and depth - with all of these stories, the reporters were barely able to skim the surface. The treatment given to each of these stories would have editors at the CBC screaming for more more more. And it's not for a lack of effort, but rather a lack of energy, and a lack of other motivating factors.

This is where I come in. I have quickly learned that my role in the newsroom will be self-determined, with the occasional guidance of the news editor. Because everyone is too overwhelmed to deal with human rights workshops at the moment, I have put those aside, and considered what is needed in the newsroom, straight up. And what they need is an extra pair of hands, and a cheerleader. Basically, I'm the cheerleader. Or a wing man, or whatever sports analogy you want to use, where the sports-guy basically helps the other guys for the good of the team. I'm that guy.

I am absolutely fine with this, and happy to do it. Motivation is always a good thing, and if I can convince someone that doing a brief human rights story is in their best interest, it makes me very happy.

But it's made me realize how I much I have to figure out, and what an uphill battle this will be. For eight months, my job is to push, push, push. And it is completely different from the expectations I carried here with me, along with my (stolen) luggage. Very humbling....and sometimes, very difficult. I am hoping that that "rewarding" part I haerd about from my host organization will be coming along...you know...soonish.