Youth Alive! goes to press- on time

Trip Start Mar 27, 2008
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Trip End Oct 01, 2008


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Flag of Ghana  ,
Monday, June 2, 2008

This past week my boss at CHRAJ and all the senior staff in the office were attending a week long conference in Accra. This meant that not only was the office very quiet, but that I had to give the nursing lectures on Tuesday and Thursday on my own. Luckily one of the National Service guys, Martin, agreed to accompany me and help me field questions. We also got two more volunteers this week, both of whom will be working at CHRAJ. One is an American, David, from the west coast and the other is a Canadian from Ottowa. They're both university students and here for 8 weeks.
 
While my boss was away I gave the two nursing lectures; I had been fretting about this for weeks as the class size is 200, and young women aren't always the easiest people to lecture to, but it went really well. They have now gotten used to my weird American ways and the two lectures were really successful. I was most pleased that I didn't have any stage fright, which has been a problem with my public speaking in the past.
 
The rest of the week I spent at Abusua copy editing, chasing adverts and typesetting. By Wednesday things were really up in the air; the copy had not been finalised and we were still missing all our ads for the issue. But put in perspective of what I used to have to deal with in my Blackwell days, I fretted not. This was not an insurmountable problem, we'd just have to work harder and later over the next few days.
 
By Friday afternoon I had finally received the last advert from ATL radio, the typesetting was finished and I had tracked Sossah down so we headed off with the final approved issue for the printers. After about an hour at the printers, negotiating terms of the print run and approving a printed version of the issue, we left triumphantly. Sossah and I congratulated ourselves with a couple Star beers at the local 'spot', the petrol station at Pedu junction. It wasn't the best issue we could have produced and there's still a lot of work to do on the upcoming issues, but we managed to print it on time and to budget. In the past two months we had helped to get a group of Ghanaian youth together to create a new newspaper, and we printed their articles in a good looking publication.
 
I spent most of Saturday at the June Youth Alive! workshop and gave a presentation on human rights in Ghana. I was hoping to fire some of the reporters up by showing them that human rights violations are taking place here in Ghana. It's not only in countries like   Zimbabwe and South Africa, but violations of basic human rights are happening on our own doorstep, and they should be writing about it. I think some of them were genuinely interested; I only hope it gets them to write on more important topics than whether gospel singers in Ghana are dressing appropriately. But as always, it's up to the editors to decide the content of the newspaper.
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