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Sunday Nov 19, 2006

Journalism - why I love it and why I shouldn't

 

Right, I really will sort myself out sometime about this whole 'posting once a week' thing... There's so much that doesn't get mentioned just because too many other things have happened by the time I get round to it. Like I still haven't talked about when we went out to the desert to find a herd of wild horses with one of our friends who's a photographer. It was amazing, when we sat really still just watching them they came to see what we were, and actually came so close they were touching us. It was such a strange experience to be that close to a completely wild animal.

 

A couple of weeks back we went to the desert festival in Solitaire, that was an experience and a half, too. It's a really strange concept. Solitaire is a tiny place in the middle of nowhere, but once a year people come from all over Namibia for a big party there with live music and, of course, huge braais. It was a really spur-of-the-moment decision to go, we didn't even have tents, but slept in sleeping bags on stretchers, under the stars. The sky here is so beautiful, in England it was a rarity to have a really clear night when you could see stars clearly, and here it's every day. On the way back we got a puncture and due to various complications ended up stuck in another tiny place called Maltahohe for another night, which actually turned out to be pretty fun (though I hadn't anticipated that long away from the flat so we were all badly in need of a change of clothes!).

 

Today we were talking about how strange a career journalism is. In the paper that's about to go to print we were really happy that we had 3 interesting stories that all could have been front page news – but it can't be right that I'm happy about 3 engineers dying in a ship fire, a 14-year old girl getting raped or a man being stabbed to death in the street. The stabbing was early this morning; we got a call from a woman who runs the hotel next to where it happened. Me and Bozena ran out with a camera to get pictures of the scene of the crime, there'd been a big fight so there were lots of smashed windows, a smashed up car and when we got there there was still a large bloodstain on the pavement. We were shocked and everything, but we still took pictures. There's something disturbingly voyeuristic about it all. It also struck us as odd that the police weren't even at the crime scene, let alone had it cordoned off or anything.

 

Apparently the police had been called before it happened by a security guard, but didn't turn up. A local took the man who'd been attacked to the hospital in the back of his bakkie (pick-up truck type thing) but he died before they got him there. He was only visiting Lüderitz on business, he lived in Cape Town. We actually met him on Thursday night – our desk officer from Project Trust had come to visit so we'd gone out for a drink together, and talked to him and his friend in the bar. Lüderitz is a little place, so chances are you'll know most people here, it's just odd.

The thing that's strange from the 'journalism' point of view is that I find myself getting irritated that I couldn't get a good enough picture of devastated people at a memorial ceremony for the men that died at sea last week, or thinking, "My god, I'm getting some good quotes here" while talking to a guy who's in tears because his friend just died...

 

I apologise that I'm not ending this on a very happy note. Don't worry, Lüderitz isn't that rough, it's just been pretty crime-filled recently. Which is good for the paper of course, which brings us back to the whole moral dilemma... But hey. Whether I should or not, I love working on a newspaper!

Posted by Lucy Hayes ( 8:38 PM )
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