Legitamate callers

The internet where I'm staying is a bit dodgy, so I wasn't able to post yesterday.

I had some actually compelling story ideas from callers today. I've learned that journalism these days isn't just cut and dry facts, but that you need a story (most likely a face) that personifies a greater issue, instead of just the issue itself. Both of these callers seemed like legitimate possible 'faces' for the problems they represent.

One was about a lady who adopts children from Bulgarian orphanages, which are severly underfunded. She described them as "holocaust camps for kids" because many of the children are extremely underweight when she picks them up - one ten year old she claimed weighed ten pounds when she arrived. She brings them back to the States for rehabilitation and hopefully for adoption, her blog is thesousabrownfamily.blogspot.com if you'd like to read more.

The second story came from an Iraqi vet who is finding civilian life very hard due to her PTSD. She doesn't recieve support from the military and she was recently fired from her job due to her anti-social behavior, so she lives at home off of meager support from the government. She doesn't want to be pitied, and doesn't want to be entirely supported by the government, but she doesn't know of anywhere to turn that could basically de-train her from being a soldier to being a civilian. She only gets 45 minutes of sleep a night, because she subconsciously waits for the alarms that would go off during active duty. However, the worse part, she said, is she never hears the "ALL CLEAR" that used to calm her nerves during those stressful nights of her tour. It's like she's in a constant state of combat stress limbo.

Hopefully one of these stories gets picked up (although they are both kind of downers) because I'd really like to help produce either one, considering I spent a good 20-30 minutes talking to each lady on the phone, getting a good mental sense of what they and their situations are like.