Day 01 - Of Renegade Child Stars

*Cross-posted from http://lfs.jmtuazon.net*

So today I get to start my internship.  I woke up at the ungodly hour of 8am (it is if it's summer), and read a text from my co-intern Claire that we were scheduled to meet Marlon, our trainor, at Camp Karingal at 12nn.  Thinking that 12nn is some few hours away, I decided to get some more sleep.

At 10am I got ready and packed my stuff: camera, recorder, extra batteries, planner, pens, notepad.  Yes, I was extra prepared, like it was the first day of school all over again.  Later I would learn that I wouldn't need over half of what I brought (lesson learned, so it'll be an easy pack tomorrow morning).  First problem came to mind:  I didn't know where Camp Karingal was.

So I fired up trusty Wikimapia.org and looked for Camp Karingal on the map.  Sadly, it wasn't registered when I typed it on its search engine, so I looked for some information over Google and found out it was situated at Sikatuna Village, Quezon City.  I looked for Sikatuna Village on the map and guess what--Camp Karingal was merely three blocks away from where I currently reside!

With that information in mind I grabbed a light snack by the nearest convenience store, called up a tricycle and headed to Camp Karingal.  Little did I know that the trip wouldn't take more than 5 minutes, tops.  It was 11:30 am.

Since I was dead early, I surveyed the area first.  The camp was quite huge, and I found out that there were several settlers at the rear part of the camp.  Reading a notice posted on the gate of the camp, I found out that these settlers homes' are to be demolished because the land was a property of the camp.  Later on I would find out that Sir Marlon did a story on the demolition a few days back, and it stopped momentarily because of the promotion of a certain official (was it Gatdula?  I couldn't remember).

12:00 came and there was no sight of my trainor, nor my co-intern Claire.  I texted my trainor and he told me that he's on his way to the camp and that I should wait for him over at the CIDU (Criminal Investigation and Detection Unit, I would later learn).  I went over to the front desk and asked the policeman on duty where the CIDU is, and he politely pointed me to the right direction.  At least some policemen are nice, I thought.

Vehicles of different media companies started arriving soon after, for god-knows-what event.  A policeman sitting by the front door told one reporter that FG (Mike Arroyo) has been there earlier, to address policemen's problems about--get this--false teeth.  So yeah, I thought, the First Gentleman definitely has a lot on his hands right now.  I totally feel so safe and secure.

Anyhow, I went over to the CIDU where I waited for Sir Marlon and Claire.  Several minutes have passed before they arrived.  Sir Marlon gave me a mini-tour of the station, where, he says, the cases involving deaths are investigated.  Ooh, sounds really interesting, in a morbid kind of way.  He showed me the blotter and some other police documents.  We went upstairs to talk to some officials but unfortunately, they were out for something that day.

A few moments later and Claire arrived, drenched because it was raining.  Sir Marlon had gone off somewhere we didn't know, so we hung around the station for a while and watched TV.  A few moments later Sir Marlon came, interview and quotes in hand, and we then proceeded to the NUJP Headquarters to type the stories (Sir Marlon is a member of the Board of Directors of the NUJP).

Sir Marlon gave us three photocopies of blotter cases to turn into news stories.  The first two was about two security guards who died early in the morning, albeit on separate instances.  This was the one I wrote.  The second one, which Claire wrote, was about Niño Muhlach being involved in a vehicular accident somewhere in Panay Ave.  This got both Claire and I thinking--really, what is it with former child stars and law-breaking?  Haha.  We definitely saw a pattern there.

Anyway, after writing our stories in Sir Marlon's cutesy cutesy cellphone-notebook-PDA-tablet-I don't know what it's called (and I'm supposed to be the techie dude, huh?), he evaluated and edited them and hopefully, they'd come up in the papers tomorrow if the editors see fit.

Earlier in the day, Claire relayed to me that she wasn't getting enough hours during her coverage of the Police Beat last week (she started earlier than I), so we thought of transferring departments to get more hours, so we could finish by or ahead of the deadline (which is May 14).  We texted Sir Yambot's secretary and she told us to call that afternoon.  When we called, I got to talk to Mr. Yambot and he very nicely suggested we report at the Main Office after our beats to help in the Research Department.  Wahoo!  That was a very nice compromise for me and Claire, so we agreed.  We'll report there tomorrow afternoon, after we write our beat stories.

So yeah, basically, we'll be working two shifts every day--Police Beat in the morning/afternoon and Research Department in the evening.  I think that's fine with me, since I want to finish internship early.  The only letdown is the travel--ugh, that's Makati, and it's so far.  And I've somewhat grown a dislike for commuting.  But I'd have to put up with it anyway.

So there.  Hopefully there'll be no blood and gore tomorrow when we cover the Kamuning Police Station.  We report at 9am, so I gotta go sleep early tonight.  Buh-bye!

Hours covered today: 5 hours