Background (for those who don't know)

Life is weird. Through a series of events that started over 2 ½ years ago, when I was driving home from my internship at a newspaper and thought “maybe I’ll go to grad school,” I find myself in Swaziland, a small kingdom on the northeast border of South Africa, doing yet another internship.

How did I get here?

Well, I decided to go to the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, which requires a summer internship as part of its curriculum. Therein, I chose the international reporting track, which requires an overseas internship. The problem is that the roads to those internships are not yet paved and after soliciting the usual suspects (AP, Reuters, NPR, Telegraph-Herald, McClatchy, etc.) and getting shot down for budget, liability or other reasons (perhaps me being not good or persistent enough), I chose to apply for a formalized internship that I heard about with International Bridges to Justice.

IBJ is a non-governmental organization that works with authoritarian governments all over the world to improve their criminal justice systems and bring them up to humanitarian snuff. They started hiring journalists as interns in order to document their ground efforts in these countries. By the time I realized I might not have an internship with a real news organization overseas and applied with IBJ, the only remaining openings they had were Swaziland and Zimbabwe.

“Zimbabwe,” I said, but I was later told that the print journalist assigned there backed out because the country was too unstable (Re: Mugabe, election fraud, economic and health catastrophes, etc.).

“Swaziland,” IBJ said.

So a few months and a $1,300 plane ticket later, here I am in the most unlikely of places: Manzini, Swaziland.

I'll let you know what happens next.

Take care,

Nick