Interviews are not always easy, especially when you are on the phone speaking with a native speaker at thousands km away from where you are at 9:30pm or when you are in a hotel surrounded by wild crowds and gunshots. In fact, some international media got in touch with us – thanks to Foko and Lova, to know more about what’s going on here and to have interviews if possible.
Unfortunately, I can’t tell everything about all of them. What I’ll share here is the couple of times we met with Christina Corbett from BBC/IRIN.
We met her first on Mar.5 for she planned on making report about the Malagasy blogosphere’s role during the ongoing unrest. We decided to meet next to Colbert Hotel Antaninarenina with 6 of the FBC bloggers, only 3 were able to make it though. A little while after we started a panicked crowd moved up towards where we were. All the shops around Antaninarenina immediately closed their doors. The 5 of us set up our mind, we had to find a safer place. We ended locked up in Colbert Hotel. It was the first time I went in and it was during an unusual circumstances. The interview went well even if Christina could record some gunshots mixed with our voices.
The second one (Mar.26) was far better. It was in a cyber café, still in Antaninarenina. Yes, we like this corner of the city. For this time she will do it for the BBC radio. So we (pakysse, andry and I) took turn to answer her questions in both Malagasy and English while enjoying our soda (we like it too). We found out it’s pretty close to movie shooting. “Cut, could we please turn down the sound of the TV because it passes Indian songs. We are supposed to be in Madagascar.” she said while laughing. Yes, details are much more important for an audio interview. We were done a hour and a half later. Christina said she would fly to London the next day but would email us the audio record. Looking forward to having it.
To sum up, these interviews are now among the many experiences we’ve had as part of the FBC and we are sure better ones are yet to come.
[note: some published interviews are available here , congrats Foko!]