Coastal TV's central mission is to promote development in Ghana's central region and give people a stronger sense of pride and identity. The station is supported by a German Charity organisation called DED and it is open to amateurs, semi-professionals and professionals and depends heavily upon the work of volunteers.
The 1st day of my internship proved this last point very well. From the get go, what you contribute to the station depends wholly on your current ability, or on your ability to teach yourself very quickly how to film, report, script and edit. Learning at Coastal TV doesn't really have a lot to do with demonstration and instruction. Rather, you find yourself in the middle of it all, surrounded by a wide range of people each doing their thing, and under a management that has a very open-minded approach to content.
This freedom certainly has an appeal about it but the main drawback of this, not uncommon to this country, is things can move very slowly at times. In my first week, I worked alongside another volunteer named Uta from Germany and we've already had a few hits and misses. Using her video camera, we conducted an interview and did some filming for a story about a dance theatre group and it made for an exciting start. But then it took around three days for another employee at Coastal TV to give us Adobe Premier (video editing software). And we're still waiting for him to convert some footage for us so that we can actually edit it. In the meantime, the station's main transmitter is broken and many of the staff are busily moving a lot of equipment to second but smaller studio located in the city centre.
Nevertheless, as is the case in this country, things do eventually get done. And so, in the next week, we hope to start editing our footage and turn it into a completed piece. If all is successful, we will keep filming and see where it takes us. My feeling is that whatever we can come up with in the next few weeks, Coastal TV will put on air. The first thing I saw when I switched on the station at home was a 5-minute cartoon of Santa break dancing - and this was at 6pm.
On that note, yesterday was Christmas. Ghana is very Christian country - intensely so - and so the 25th of December began with a lot of people heading to church, some very well dressed. Aside from this, the day felt like any other in Ghana, and businesses stayed open. In the evening, there were some festivities and lots of fireworks. Small ones compared to what I'm used to at home but they went on all night long.
