* This is the second in a series of dispatches from Cape Town, South Africa, where five USC Annenberg students are working as interns for eight weeks. Journalism professor Erna Smith serves as a faculty advisor for the team, which will work for news publications and a diplomatic organization. *
We hit the ground running last week as our internships began. Tricia met the children and teenagers who participate in the Children's Radio Foundation workshops at Brooklyn Chest Hospital and in Mannenberg, a township created during apartheid for mixed-race or, “coloured,” families. She assisted her colleagues in teaching participants how to use radio as a form of storytelling. Her first radio piece, an interview with the art director of Live magazine, a free publication for and by South African youth, will be broadcast this Saturday on SAfm, the South African equivalent of NPR. You can read more from Tricia on her blog. Tallie spent her time at Cape Town TV primarily in townships covering stories on unemployment, food gardens, and education. For more from Tallie, check out her blog. Angela, who is working on the multimedia desk of News 24, put together pictures and video content to complement a variety of pieces.
These are some examples of her work (here and here). Lauren also had an exciting first week of work at The Weekend Argus. She was up 6 a.m. on Saturday to cover a woman running from Cape Town to Johannesburg – over 750 miles! – to raise awareness for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS, which we in America know as Lou Gehrig's disease. The story was printed on Page 5 of The Weekend Argus on Sunday. I am loving working at the Central Library’s American Corner. Beyond the eye-opening day-to-day contact with South African students looking for information about America and how to study in the United States, I went out to the Consulate this week to begin programming events here in the library that foster mutual understanding between our two cultures and countries. My superiors called it “information plus,” or engagement with South Africans beyond typical diplomatic information outputs. I am -excited to begin programming such events, which just last month included mini lunch-time jazz performances by students from the American School in Cape Town to honor National Jazz Appreciation Month in the United State. This is something I believe our ‘quiet’ libraries might be able to learn from.
