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.

Some of the more interesting articles I’ve written lately:

15 Oct 08, in The Star

• 15 Oct 08, in The Star: Kids playing soccer out in the desert! Printed version (JPG, image at right).
• 24 Oct 08, in the Mail & Guardian: A couple of SA scientists win Gates Foundation grants for some cool AIDS and TB research. The last column is the interesting part. Printed version (JPG).
• 31 Oct 08, in the M&G: A favorite article about tasting expensive whisky with evangelizing connoisseurs. My favorite version (PDF); printed version (web page).
• 7 Nov 08, in the M&G: A couple of articles about mental health prevalence and stigma in South Africa, with some fancy graphs. Printed version: Page 1 (JPG), page 2 (JPG).

And a few articles that I helped with:

• 22 Aug 08, in The Star: A rather ho-hum piece about sketchy land deals in a city near Joburg. This is part of a long-term investigation I was helping with, and it was also my first introduction to skimming hundreds of pages of mind-numbing legalese for interesting tidbits. Printed version (web page).
• 17 Oct 08, in the M&G: A balding multi-million-dollar international drug smuggler named Robert Lottman testified against a bunch of small-time low-lifes in a trial also involving a former national police commissioner and a big-name mafioso. Meanwhile, the kindly looking Lottman–alias Lesley Curtis, alias Christopher Howells, alias Bob the American–is out of jail after just 16 months, following a shady plea bargain. Filed my first story by phone from the courthouse steps for this one. How journalist-on-the-run romantic! Printed version (web page).
• 14 Nov 08, in the M&G: Aaak, crisis! The US offers emergency AIDS drugs to an SA province that ran out of money. Printed version (web page).

So far, writing stories at the two papers where I’ve worked has been more about trying to make myself useful in the newsroom than actually following my project — as my project is more about shadowing other journalists and visiting j-schools and NGOs. But I’m glad I’ve had that chance to write, too—adventure, experience, fun. The soccer story in the image, for instance, involved a chartered plane, catered food and lots of corporate pandering.

Oooh, I felt like the real media!

By the Way …

For more general news about what I’ve been up to, check out my first Watson report, below.

At a busy intersection outside a McDonald’s in the Rosebank neighborhood of Joburg, where I work, I decided to take out the recorder for a quick interview with a 17-year-old homeless guy named John. Some of it’s tough to understand, but some is interesting–and he was very candid. He collects trash from people’s cars for tips, as they wait at the robot (stop light), and he uses the money to take care of himself and his elderly grandmother, who lives far away.

He buys his food at a nearby garage (gas station), and he sleeps on a piece of cardboard behind a electrical box with a few tattered blankets. When asked if he feels lonely, he says he actually wishes fewer people were around to bother him.

He has big dreams for the future, but, at least when speaking to me, he is unbelievably not upset by the obvious unfairness of his situation. He doesn’t appreciate other homeless folks who steal his stuff or cops who harass him–because they think he’s associated with local prostitutes–but all the rich folks living in mansions 100 meters away get a free pass. Nice cars and houses are simply things to strive for through hard work.

The Communist Party may be part of SA’s governing coalition, but Micky D’s Capitalism won this country’s hearts and minds long ago.

Listen to MP3

Listen Hear, a radio show I helped start at Grinnell, ran this “audio postcard” yesterday:

Listen to MP3

I’ve pasted the transcript below, too.

September 22nd, 2008

Dear friends,

I’m writing you this postcard from an agitated newsroom in a northern suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa. As you might know, there’s been big political news here lately-which means, thankfully, a brief reprieve from US election coverage. President Thabo Mbeki’s party just ousted him from power, and the press is chattering about nothing else.

I find myself in Joburg, I should say, because I’ve recently started a Watson Fellowship related to investigative journalism, and I’m interning at newspapers, non-profits and journalism schools for several months here. I’ll be doing the same thing in India next spring. I mean, that’ll be India’s spring. See, being in the southern hemisphere at this time of year, means that I’ll have three springs in a row this year, before hitting an autumn.

Apparently Johannesburg got snow earlier this winter-a rare sight for this scrubby high-desert area-but 4AM at my suburban house has sounded like spring ever since I arrived.

[birds]

I’m away from our house for most of the day, however, and I’ve been getting a good feel for the city. In face-to-face conversation, you’d think that Joburg was a little town in Iowa, actually, not a brash megalopolis of nearly 8 million busy, busy residents. But in the car, all the friendliness normally offered to strangers flies swiftly out the window. Drivers have flashed me the bird more times in the past month and a half than in my other four years of driving combined. Changing lanes in traffic can be trickier than Twister, and pedestrians be damned.

[honking cars]

Because I do a lot of driving, I also listen to a lot of radio.

A plethora of stations overlap each other’s frequencies and mix awesome music with news, talk and the occasional weekend drama.

[radio samples]

One of my favorite stations, whose tagline is, “good music, good friends,” also does its own news and broadcasts a prime-time talk show hosted by a prominent journalist. And I listen to a lot of talk shows here – because they’re actually informative and balanced.

[more radio samples]

Naturally, other parts of this country could use more balance; South Africa competes with Brazil for the highest income disparity of any country on earth. On one side of the divide are the fancy cars and slick malls of San Diego. On the other side are the dusty streets and tin shacks of Tijuana. And they’re often separated by little more than an invisible line in the dirt. I live on a quiet, tree-lined avenue, in a suburb that looks every bit like middle-class America, albeit with six-foot walls and razor wire, rather than hedges and picket fencing.

[sounds of a suburb at night]

Ten days ago, on a whim, I decided to break out of the big city for a while. Jacob Zuma, the popular leader of South Africa’s ruling ANC party and almost surely the country’s next president, was going to be in the High Court in Pietermaritzburg, and I wanted to see some drama. Zuma has been mired in corruption charges of late, and the court was ruling on whether a technicality prevented him from facing trial. Zuma’s supporters, meanwhile, said he was just a political target of President Mbeki, after defeating Mbeki in the ANC’s internal elections last year. In the end, the High Court judge would side with Zuma, by the way, and Mbeki’s political downfall over this past weekend certainly has something to do with political score settling in reverse.

Anyway, it sounded exciting. So I got on a double-decker, Greyhound sort of bus at the station downtown, and enjoyed free coffee, free biscuits and blissful silence for the six hours to Pietermaritzburg. The next morning I followed the sounds of commotion and music to the courthouse. Before the judge’s ruling was piped over speakers, there was live singing and pounding beats.

[Man standing next to me:] “Can you dance with this music? … Just do like this.”

I walked around to do a few interviews, and talked to Zuma supporters…and skeptics. At one point, I started talking to two guys who said they were members of the ANC and Communist Party youth leagues, which have been under criticism for their militant support of Zuma and less-than-civil comments. These guys didn’t disappoint, saying they were prepared to die for Zuma and that his trial was not only masterminded by the President but by Western governments as well.

As we talked, Zuma’s theme song, “Mshini Wam,” came on in the background, and it fit It’s an apartheid-era protest song, which the international press is quick to mention and translate in news reports. “Mshini Wam” means “Bring Me My Machine Gun,” and it’s a relic of the days when armed resistance seemed like the only way to bring down an oppressive and uncompromising regime. Now, “Mshini Wam” does little more than remind voters of Zuma’s anti-apartheid credentials…and inspire dancing.

After we’d talked for a while, the youth league guys shook my hand. We wished each other well and went to listen to the ruling. In SA politics, I think, bark is usually bigger than bite.

No one was allowed inside the courtroom without a press pass, but being outside among the crowd was much more fun anyway. As the two-hour-long judgment was read out, some people continued dancing, selling ANC gear and cooking food, but most of the one or two thousand who’d gathered were listening quietly. Given that the previous night’s rain-the first of the season-had made the ground soggy at best, the crowd’s endurance was impressive, as were the quantity of historical and literary references in the judge’s ruling.

[Judge Chris Nicholson:] “The great Greek historian Thucydides in the fifth century BC wrote that the question of justice only enters where the pressure of necessity is equal.”

And:

“Like a blinded Samson he threatens to make sure the temple collapses with him.”

And:

“These allegations are a modern echo of what the Cardinal Richelieu, Chief Minister of the French King Louis the Fo- Thirteenth, once said in the seventeenth century when he observed that in matters of state, ‘the weakest are always wrong.’”

And:

“There is a ring of the works of Kafka about this.”

After standing for two hours in the mud, the crowd was rewarded with a favorable judgment.

[Judge Nicholson:] “I therefore grant the following orders: A, It is declared that the decision taken by the National Prosecuting Authority during or about 28 December 2007 to prosecute the applicant [Zuma], a copy of which is annexed to the applicant’s founding affidavit as Annexure A thereto, is invalid and is set aside.”

And, just like theatre, Zuma and his chums came out for a bow and there was more singing, chanting and foot-tapping music.

[Chants:] “Amandla!” “Viva ANC, viva!” “Viva Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, viva!”

I did a few more interviews, wiped off my shoes and walked down the street to my hostel. The owners grilled up some delicious braai, which means barbeque, and I soaked up the afternoon sun in the garden.

I don’t envy your cold fall winds, Grinnell, but I’ll miss you in the spring.

With love,
Linn