Remember what I said about the odd suspicion the people at RTV had with us working in their newsroom? It came to light on one particular day in which both I, and the other student at RTV Kristen, had opportunities to put together our own stories…
August 2, 2007 –
Today I went out for a story with Placide. He’s a bright guy, just finished his time at the journalism school in Butare. Here was the story: the ever-charitable Rwanda Revenue Authority, along with others donated a big oven and a truckload of baking ingredients to help a little bakery pull in some extra bucks. The bakery is near a community in Kacyiru where 110 families of genocide survivors live. Forty-seven of those are headed by children. Incredible, eh? Anyway I had a great story lined up for my TVR on-screen debut (and a decent stand-up after “several” takes).
However, Kristen tells me there’s a message from the TV boss: interns are absolutely NOT to do any on-camera reporting or reading stories. Shock! Why? No explanation. We’re still allowed out and we can still write scripts. It’s just ridiculous that we don’t know why. Was it Dimmock’s blog? Was it because we’re not Rwandan? We didn’t expect to be on camera anyway. I’m upset because the English version of that story won’t have a stand-up to show that oven. We’ll live, but the work might be less fun.
Hopefully we can still put stories together to bring home… or use as examples.
andrewng.media 