We see so many people everyday without giving them much though, many of the land unique lives and experienced things that we wouldn’t even think of. Writer’s fortnight showed me how diverse our lifestyles are, for example I didn’t know how one of our school’s teachers did a 6 day marathon of 230km, or how one of our councelors was working with UNICEF to protect the vulnerable children. Furthermore we got to try out the skills of being a journalist and asking questions right from the primary source, we also got guided by a journalist on how to ask questions and how a lifestyle of a journalist was. Perhaps one of my highlights would be the two contradicting messages I got from two different speakers.
My first talk was with one of the teachers from UWC who told us about his encounter with a racist man who was getting ready to fight with him, but he diffused the tension by using humour, it got him out of the tense situation and when later on he was joined by his boxer friends who managed to intimidate the racist guy and his group of companions and eventually leave him alone. He told us that “a fight is scary.” and that “it genuinely hurts.”, including that “ego is not worth it” which is the most important. however in the other talk where the speaker was a woman who grew up in South Africa during the times of racism and how violence against black people was a norm, she talked about how people would get beaten just because they were born a certain colour like one time when she was crossing the street she saw a couple of black people walking when suddenly police came up to them and started to beat them. She mentioned frequently how she wasn’t fond of the idea of being a bystander and that you should do something more than that, and what exactly she meant was hard to find. It’s hard to make a point without showing your power, which made me question if showing you power through strength was necessary in certain situations.
Overall in writer’s fortnight we got to hear many amazing stories, some were heartwarming while some were bittersweet. We got to experience the role of being a journalist and how it doesn’t seem as easy as you think and how you have to always come up with unique questions which should still connect to your main focus of the interview, hopefully in future we will get a chance to have more workshops that could show us the real world of English literature in the modern times.