This Monday night I was fortunate enough to go to a showing of, “The Waiting Room” a documentary telling the story of the various families and individuals who seek help from Oakland’s Highland Hospital Emergency Medical Care center. I loved it. I felt right at home, even though it was in the Capitol Hill’s screening room, I felt like I was in Oakland. I felt passionate motivational anger and love. this type of documentary is telling of the untold story. It’s not a political statement and it’s not simply coverage of an event, And it’s not just the screening, it’s part of the project giving individuals the chance to share their stories. This is a concept that DC audiences had a hard time accepting. In the panel that followed individuals struggled to give it a political bias, they couldn’t accept that there wasn’t a clear bad guy. My bad guy is the lack of consumer’s participation in the reconstruction and modifications of our healthcare system, which is such a hot topic on Capitol Hill. It reminded me why I’m here, in DC.
I am kind of having a hard time in my internship. In an internship, because you’re not expected to make decisions that affect the organization in a large way, it becomes all about me, my learning experience, my interests and my opportunities. It’s not a very comfortable situation for me to be in. I’m used to working on projects with large responsibilities. these responsibilities and passion for what I’m doing and knowing that I’m doing a good job are what keep me going. I don’t have those here.
Doing things I don’t know how to do isn’t very fun. Especially when it’s in front of other people. It’s hard for me to learn, and that’s embarrassing, so I’m used to learning on my own. When I needed to know how to edit video I taught myself, when I wanted to swim I taught myself, when I needed to be an advocate I taught myself, when I wanted to be a part of technical theater I taught myself the equipment, even though there was a class that taught the skills available to me.
That being said, I’m learning a lot at my internship by observation and short informational interviews. Some things I predicted were behind the news broadcasting business and there’s been many things that I learned go into news broadcast that I didn’t before, giving me more insight into why the news covers what it covers.
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