Disturbing Disappearances

I have been perturbed by a handful of unrelated events lately. Figured I might as well lump them all into a single post.

The Trees It must be two weeks ago now, the house that backs on the property next to our compound started chopping down all of its trees. They had quite a number, and they seemed quite old as well, tall with thick trunks, making plenty of shade. This is the same property where they burnt charcoal for the first few weeks I was here, so it occurred to me that they might be planning on turning all of their beautiful trees into fuel. It just sat there for over a week though, with branches and debris piled on the lot and the covered sewer that I use as my sidewalk, forcing me to walk in the road and risk being run over by taxis who would certainly continue honking to gain my custom while they did so. Then, finally, two days ago, a truck came and carted most of it away. Who knows to where. There are still a few big unsightly stumps scattered throughout the property, and my sidewalk/sewer has an annoying covering of leaves and twigs, but beyond that, no evidence remains of the lot’s past greenery.

The President President Kufuor disappeared.

Writing the Wrong?

JHR’s slogan, in English at least, is “Write the Wrong.” I’m starting to think many Ghanaians see this as the primary role of journalists, even if it’s a wrong they could right themselves. Twice now I’ve found myself working with reporters on stories where injustice was being perpetrated more as a side effect of poor communication than any kind of malice or even neglect. Our involvement in the stories ended up looking more like mediation or counseling than reportage.

Informed Consent

So, I totally forgot to mention something else that happened while I was in Tarkwa. Well, maybe happened is the wrong word. After the days’ workshops, Afua (my hotel roommate) and I would invariably collapse exhausted back in our room and watch tv. One of the nights, I don’t remember which now, we were watching GTV (the government owned television channel) and the news came on. One of the big stories was that a group of about 20 women from villages in the north had traveled to a major city for fistula examinations. A fistula (at least in the cases of these women) is a tear in the vaginal wall usually resulting from childbirth that results in a passage of sorts between the vagina and other organs, for instance the rectum or the bladder. Not nice.

As a public health awareness raiser, I thought the story was well motivated, but I was squeamish that these village women were talking about their fistula examinations on national television. I didn’t necessarily get the sense that they knew they didn’t have to share their private medical information with Ghana’s TV watching audience if they didn’t want to.

And then it got worse.

A Career in Journalism?

My third column for the Ghanaian Observer is published here, and posted below:

I thought journalism was a career. A career in journalism was a goal I worked toward, planned for, and focused on for years. The friends I made once I entered the field had similar goals and had followed similar paths: working for student newspapers, taking journalism classes or degrees at university, interning during the summer.

Once we parlayed those experiences into real journalism jobs, we had new goals: to edit magazines, to write for major newspapers, to win Pulitzer prizes for our investigative reporting.

Now I am in Ghana, and I still have those goals. But I find that I am no longer part of a community of young people planning to conquer the world of journalism over the course of lengthy careers. I have met many young journalists from a number of stations and publications since I arrived, but to a large number of them journalism is not a career. It’s a stop along the way, an interlude before their ultimate career in another field. I’ve met cub reporters with plans to go to law school, promising investigative journalists with dreams of jobs in public relations, corporate communications, and human resources.

Baby’s First Press Conference

One of the things I’ve had to do since arriving in Ghana is establish (for myself and others) just how long it is that I have been “a journalist.” Since I am here to train journalists, and especially since I did not attend journalism school, it’s of vital importance that I can quickly convince reporters, editors, and interns that I have enough experience to be worth listening to. It’s a question I still don’t quite feel I have an accurate answer to, though I’ve settled on something that seems to do the trick.

It doesn’t seem right to say 3 years (the time since I started working at National Geographic), as I had a fair amount of reporting under my belt before getting that job. I could start the counting from my first semester at Bryn Mawr, when I began writing for the college news. It feels a little arrogant, though, to count my first school paper scribblings as journalism. For the purposes of Ghana, I’ve settled on the summer of 2003, when I interned at the Vancouver Courier, as the beginning of my journalism career. As I said, I’m not entirely comfortable with that, as I think I did some pretty good reporting before then, including a couple of pieces I’m still proud of, but it does the trick. As far as Ghana is concerned, I’ve been working as a journalist for 4 years.

No matter how many years it’s been, though, I had never attended a press conference before arriving in Ghana.