Welcome our summer intern
June 9th, 2008, 9:03 am · Post a Comment · posted by Aaron
My first week as an intern at the Desert Dispatch has been interesting to say the least.
On Monday I came in after deadline expecting a quick meeting to discuss what I would be doing for the summer. The first thing that city editor Aaron Aupperlee said to me was, “Hi, so do you want to tour an abandoned halfway house or attend a meeting of the Barstow origami club?”
So much for a quick meeting, they put me to work right away.
Tuesday was an election day and possibly the longest day of my life. I spent the morning going from one polling place to the next, asking the same question, “How many people have voted so far?”
The answer was usually the same, “not very many.”
I spent 10 minutes in the parking lot of the community center, just waiting for a recent voter to interview. Nobody came.
That afternoon, as I was writing my story on low voter turnout, I got a very strange news tip. An anonymous caller told me that someone had told him that a woman in Mojave claimed to have a relative with the SARS disease. I then spent the next hour on the phone with just about every health official in Kern County.
To my knowledge and theirs, there has been no such case in that county or any surrounding areas. They did, however, ask me quite a few times for the name of my source. I hope I didn’t cause a health scare.
That evening it was back to the polls, where I almost had the police called on me. As far as I knew I had to stand a legal distance of 25 feet from the polling place in order to ask people who they just voted for. According to one poll worker I was campaigning, and I had to stand 100 feet away, which would have been out of the parking lot and up the street. He said that if I didn’t leave immediately he was going to call the police. Without getting into exit polling vs. campaigning, lets just say I had all the information I needed anyway so I left quietly.
On Wednesday I went out to Fort Irwin to watch training exercises at the Madina Wasl village. I was born and raised in Barstow, and until this week I had no idea that there were Iraqi villages out in the Mojave Desert (albeit simulated ones).
I was just there to tag along and take notes while Aaron and photographer Aileen Humphreys got a story about Barstow contractors who play the part of Iraqi villagers in training scenarios. We missed most of the action by a few hours, but it was still a fun experience for me to see everything that goes on out there.
I’ll be here in the news room until late August, when I have to return to CSU Stanislaus for my second year of college. I just hope the next few months will be as entertaining as the past week has been.
Andee Goodwin | intern
