Lorraine Alvares
I had just finished
secretarial college when I was offered the job of trainee reporter on the Nation newspaper. On my first day when I walked into the newsroom, it was
bustling with reporters either busy on the telephones getting information for
their stories or they were tapping furiously on their typewriters putting them
down in print. Yes, it was typewriters
in those days, it was the sixties, and I was 17 years old.
I was guided to the
Women’s section of the office, where I was going to work on the Feature pages
regarding women’s issues. At first, I
had to shadow the experienced journalists when out on a job, but quite soon
after I was on my own. My first
assignment was to cover the Kenya Homes Exhibition. To my surprise, when my story appeared in
print in the newspaper, I had my own by-line – By Lorraine Saldanha (my maiden
name).
From then on, my work
on the Women’s Feature pages covered a variety of topics. I was given the task of compiling a weekly
series of international cuisine, going around
to all the foreign embassies and high commissions requesting them to provide
their country’s National recipes. Another series, titled Meet the Chefs, was
to visit the top Nairobi hotels requesting their chefs to impart with their
favourite recipes.
I also worked on the
fashion pages, the teenage page and another weekly series show-casing different
career paths for young people.
To my discredit on one
occasion, I was asked by the News Editor to cover a current news story. A Minister of the Government was going to
open the new premises of the Maendeleo ya Wanawake Handicraft Centre, a
self-help women’s group that made hand-woven baskets, jewellery, tie-dye
materials, clay pots for sale. Many
of the women who made these items came to Nairobi from up-country for this
event. The Minister arrived and
started his speech. In Swahili. I don’t speak Swahili, so it was a non-story
on my part. When I got back to the office, the News Editor was not pleased, to
say the least. The photographer who
was assigned to the event also failed to get a picture of the Minister who was
stuck in the lift on his way out. The News Editor, however, managed to retrieve
the contents of the speech from the Kenya News Agency, and the report was in
the newspaper the next day.
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