Linn’s Year Ablog

"Together we can flip HIV to HI-Victory!"

Two more clips from my time at the Mail & Guardian in Joburg. I’ve included both my preferred original version as well as the chopped up (but official) printed version.

• 28 Nov 08, in the Mail & Guardian: Some awesome, awesome anti-HIV PSAs have been running on TV. My favorite version, with a few bonus notes (PDF); printed version (JPG).
• 12 Dec 08, in the M&G: Two colleagues and I took a two-night trip last week up to a town called Musina at the Zimbabwe border, where a cholera outbreak has filtered into South Africa with Zimbabwean refugees. These refugees, meanwhile, sleep for weeks on a dirt field called the “show grounds,” without sufficient food or shelter, as they wait for South African officials to process their applications for asylum. The part about the show grounds was my contribution. My favorite version (PDF); printed version (online, scroll down for my section).

A few more words on the 12 Dec 08 piece –

If some of my other stories had been frivolous, this one was exactly the opposite. It was a trial by fire in reporting on crisis situations, and it was significant enough that I can imagine writing a retrospective journal entry about it some day.

It will point to our Musina trip as my first real-life encounter with foreign correspondence — and correspondents. It’ll include a poignant anecdote about being surrounded and watched by a crowd of two-dozen men — young men, old men, students, factory workers, professionals — and feeling that all of them hope desperately that a few words in a newspaper somewhere will better their situation. It will discuss my personal dilemma with whether to give money or food to interviewees, and my personal difficulty in speaking to women.

And it’ll include social commentary and rhetorical questions. Why were aid agency medics and their souped-up pick-ups doing the work of the SA medical service in Musina, it will ask, while thousands died of cholera in Zim? Can a journalist typing pool-side accurately relay the feelings of someone sitting and sweating in the dirt? But if rich professionals didn’t have pick-ups and pools, it will counter, would they bother to come to Musina? What then? And so on. It will be very emotive and dramatic.

Until I’m a middled-age nostalgic, however, I’d just like to say something quickly about the article itself –

At Grinnell last year, I took a class on media and ethnic conflict, taught by a well-respected Polish journalist, and I was reminded of one of his comments while in Musina. One day in class, he was telling stories about reporting on the Siege of Sarajevo (1992-96) during the Bosian War, and he was making, as usual, lots of forcefully opinionated statements. He praised some of the writing of his fellow correspondents, and he trashed others’ as exaggerated, haphazard, lazy or otherwise simply bad. According to him, the main determinant for the quality of reporting in high-stress situations was — no surprise here — experience.

Unfortunately, however, some editors purposefully send younger reporters out into war zones and humanitarian disasters. It’s because they’re eager and willing, he said, or because older reporters have commitments, families or a sense of mortality. When the young journalists get into tough situations, they’re overwhelmed and produce crap.

“Maybe I’m old-fashioned,” he said, “but I think reporters should start out writing obituaries and doing the police beat. They shouldn’t be out ducking shrapnel and sniper fire, no matter how exciting that seems to them.”

Well, there were no snipers in Musina, but none of the three of us are experienced journalists — and this wasn’t the police beat. I recalled the Sarajevo lesson several times last week, often accompanied by a chuckle and a slight shake of the head. In my future journal entry, I would say something witty about the irony of it.

In the end, I came away from Musina with a mixed self-evaluation. The article has a number of serious problems — e.g. its one-sidedness, its overuse of nameless sources, its lack of background research and its severe lack of direct quotes — but I think there were good things about it, too. The aid workers and government officials absent from my story are often over-quoted in others, and the people I did talked to — several dozen refugees at the show grounds — are often sought out only for pithy remarks or cheap emotion. Yes, I neglected to get names or lengthy quotations from many of my interviewees, but hopefully I at least produced a rounded summary of their situation.

If you get a chance to read it, I’d love to hear feedback.

Finally, a post-script about Musina. It is a city in flux like none I’d seen before, and it’s itching for sociologists like nowhere on earth. Illegal immigrants from all over the continent are flooding into the city at a rate of perhaps 500 people per day. If no one left Musina for a month and a half, the city’s population would double. Most, however, pass through the city within a few weeks of arrival, on their way to Johannesburg or another Promised Land, leaving the place with a feeling of frontier transience.

Before Zim spilled over, the area around Musina was already poor. Before the cholera epidemic, it was part of the small sliver of northeastern South Africa where malaria is endemic. Local residents are feeling the crunch and report higher levels of petty crime; some, we were told, are picking up and leaving town.

But the residents we met had remarkably few hard feelings toward the immigrants. Our waiter at the local faux-American steakhouse, for instance, said that his house had been robbed three times since October, but that he only “felt sorry” for the people who did it.

“All three times nothing heavy was taken, so I believe it was Zimbabweans who were hungry and wanted something to eat,” he said. During the second break-in, “when I walked toward the room that the guy was in, he just ran away and only took some money. I’m sure he meant no harm; he was just desperate.”

“He was just desperate?!” Say that in Joburg and people will think you’ve gone bonkers.

Meanwhile, Musina’s shopkeepers are doing brisk business with border crossers in both directions, and journalists are filling guest houses to the brim. Our B&B host said she’d turned down fourteen people in the previous afternoon alone, and she could only accommodate us if the photographer and I slept in a flat down the road. We saw a German guy with a notebook at breakfast, an AFP camera crew around lunchtime and an English freelance photog in the afternoon.

Why? Well call me cynical, but Musina is the perfect one-stop-shop for an Africa-in-crisis story. There are cholera patients at the hospital, good samaritans at the churches and starving refugees at the show grounds. And if all that runs out, the worst horrors of Zimbabwe are just across the border. Bing, bang, boom, email a flashy story to the editors and jump back in the pool. At least that’s what we did.