Second Day

This is my second post about my internship. As I mentioned before, I was interning at the Office of the President of Maldives. There’s almost always a lot going on there. But the period when I initially joined, was every busier than usual. For the very first time in the history of Maldives, local council elections were being held, in each island and also for each atoll. So there was a lot of political turbulence, campaigning, media coverage and media monitoring going on.

I joined in the midst of all this, so it was a bit different from routine work. My first day of work, the election had taken place, and ballot counting was underway, with preliminary results being announced as they come. There was a need to have the information available at a glance and in an organized manner. I was assigned with one other guy and we had to keep an eye on the results being announced, assemble the information in to a summarized form, and make the whole thing fit to be filed.

During this time, I was supervised by Husham, who was acting as a coordinator of sorts, for media and communication at the President’s Office (PO) for the election period. Husham was an experienced journalist before his move to the civil sector, and he had excellent connections and a lot of know how. As you must know, this comes equally useful in Public Relations as well.

It was not challenging work, but time consuming and studious, and we had to really pay attention to detail. Most of the day and part of the night was spent working on gathering and arranging and finally filing the data. But this was still only a preparation for the actual public relation events that was soon to follow. More on that in the next blog post.