Rwandalust

After a Christmas and New Year characterised mainly by staring at my watch waiting for the night shift to end, i’m finally enjoying the reward that I (debatably) deserve.

No, not the promised extra Christmas pay, but a three-week trip to Rwanda, to assist with the training of journalists at the Great Lakes Centre for Strategic Studies.

The GLCSS is a London based think tank with offices in Kampala and Kigali, which reports on the political, economic and security situation in Africa. At the moment it’s a relatively small organisation operating out of Kigali, Rwanda, but they produce some fine analytical work and are looking to expand in the not-too-distant future.

My job is to train the Rwandans who work here in journalism techniques, which is no easy task given that I only left Cardiff Journalism School six months ago.

The tutors who awarded me my fairly average marks at Cardiff would be spluttering into their milky tea if they knew I’d been entrusted with teaching journalistic techniques, and I can’t really blame them. But let them splutter all they like, because we’re actually making some real progress here.

At first I worried it would seem highly patronising to give classes to people who are older and more experienced than me, simply on the basis that I work for a British daily newspaper.

But three days into it and we’re rolling along at a rate of knots, discussing proper editing procedure, structuring of articles and interview techniques, amongst other things.

At the moment, the Rwandan contingent in the office numbers just four: Faustin, James, Fidel and Asimwe. All of them go about their work with enthusiasm and no shortage of raw talent and they seem more than willing to let a 23-year-old upstart like me make suggestions.

This afternoon i’ll be introducing them to blogging, so watch this space for links to their new sites.

In the meantime, check out the GLCSS newsletter to see some of their work.

Festive cheer

Apologies for the period of hiatus, but it's been an energy-sapping festive period.

First, i found myself working both Christmas Day and New Year's Eve, updating a website which contained virtually no news. In these times in which journalists are treated as the least valuable commodity in the industry, there was no food, little extra pay, and barely a scrap of tinsel.

I could have coped with that, but for James Brown's death on Christmas day. For maybe the first time ever he got his timing way out of whack, ruining my day and rendering my copy of 'James Brown's Funky Christmas' forever unlistenable.

I needed cheering up by now. Cue the farcical execution of Saddam, which if you haven’t seen it already, turned up on YouTube about 3 hours after my blog entry predicting it would.

Excuse the rant, but I have just one more thing to say on that: If the Iraqi authorities had really cared whether or not proceedings were carried out in a dignified and humane (ha!) manner, would that mobile phone footage really have come out?

It’s what you might call an anticipated accident, and it is sickening to feel oneself compelled to watch the end of a man’s life, no matter what he may have done.

All of this made for a pretty depressing few weeks. So, i'm countering this by heading off to Rwanda tomorrow to work for an organisation called the Great Lakes Centre for Strategic Studies (more of which to follow).

I'll be working with journalists out there in the hope that my experience of sitting at a desk until 2 am trying to make a headline fit into 15 characters will somehow prove useful to them.

Check here to see how it goes.