Today I was asked to write a piece by Cynthia, one of the writers on staff. She was reading an article on My Joy Online about police mishandling contraband. She told me to research the story and write an editorial about it.
Turns out that the Ghanaian police department has been having a pretty decent sized problem with 'misplacing' large quantities of confiscated cocaine. There was a recent internal audit looking into an old investigation that found several bags of cocaine missing from one of their crates; several other bags had been replaced by flour; and on top of all of that, they couldn't even find an entire crate of cocaine.
I'm thinking that someone in the police department must be taking these drugs and selling it back into the streets, fueling the very crime and social destruction that they are supposed to be fighting. That's what I wrote my price about.
Sadly, the editorial I wrote never got published. When I checked the editorial page the next day, I saw a piece about police mishandling cocaine, but it didn't look the way I remembered. It didn't even look like it could have been a result of being ripped to shreds and rewritten by the paper's editors.
I was nervous since I'd never worked at a paper before, never written anything for a paper and I wasn't even a journalism major. So, I asked Cynthia what she thought of my piece. She said it was well written, that was a relief. What it lacked, though, was depth in analysis. It was then that I realized how tough it was for journalist on foreign assignments. Here I was writing a piece about what I thought was an isolated event, and it turns out that it was an institutional problem. I thought I had done my research about the subject, but I guess I had just scratched the surface.
From this day on, I decided to start each day off by scouring the previous day's news.
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