Swiss Intern!!

Heyy blogsville,

Hope you have all enjoyed the easter break and royal wedding fiasco as much as I have. Unfortunately I could not make it to the wedding, but I am sure you have seen all the wonderful pictures. I wish them all the best and hope they have a better ending than Diana and Charles.

So the big news has finally fallen into place. I got a 3 month internship with the International Labour Organisation in Geneva to do an internship on the elimination of child labour, which was the topic of my masters Dissertation. Yipeeeeeee!

I will be forever be grateful to my Labour Law professor in Warwick because he made it such a relevant and practical subject and I fell in love from my first lecture. He was also my personal and dissertation tutor and let me tell you all NEVER under estimate the power of a good teacher. He was a hot shot lawyer so was always jet-setting, China today and Prague Convention tomorrow, and thus never put too much pressure on me which was perfect because I wrote like 4 chapters of my 8 chaptered dissertation in one week even though I had 3 months! He really inspired my interest and I will be forever grateful for him.

My dream when I was younger was to be a journalist but my dad used to say that journalists are poor/are always persecuted in Nigeria. I still love journalism and writing but there were very few female journalists in Nigeria to actually look up to. There were no Nigerian Christiane Amanpour and Becky Andersons when I was growing up. By the time I discovered Funmi Iyanda, I was already half way done with my law degree.

Law was a natural second choice because I used to love to debate in school and was asked to make countless presentations for the school.

However, I found law, as in the real law that 80% of firms practice to be really dull. It is nothing like Ally Mcbeal or Boston Legal and is mostly paperwork and research. I have worked in 3 law firms and the only part I enjoyed was criminal law which is too much work for too little pay.

I also found that unless I could work for the CPS(Crown Prosecution Service) i.e the state, defending criminals really goes against my morals. Most of the clients I worked for in the London firm were guilty, they were illegal immigrants, tax evaders, all in various levels of criminality. Their guilt were usually established and I spent my time researching precedent and case law to get them off or onto a lighter sentence. It just did not agree with me.

Don't get me wrong, Criminal Law is really very exciting, it is just like Law and Order, going to prisons, barristers chambers, court, picking juries, filing motions and knowing a person's liberty rests on how well you work has a mad adrenalin rush.

This made me decide not take the bar exam here and do a masters. I wanted to do human rights law but Warwick offered a good International Economic Law program which is how I fell in love with Labour Law.

That is the genesis of this internship. I have dreamed of being a diplomat or working for the U.N for a long time now so I am hoping this internship will take me one step further towards achieving that. There is so much I feel I can do for Nigeria especially regarding child labour. I am from Kaduna where the almajiri culture means child labour is an epidemic of astronomical proportions and education is still a distant dream for 70% of children.

Anyway lets not get carried away, I am no Mary Slessor but I am excited at the prospects of what I can learn. I am now in Geneva and tomorrow is my first day so fingers crossed. I will be bringing you all the juicy gist of my whole internship experience.

Switzerland is very beautiful, with the usual European architecture and organisation and so far I am glued to my google translator because everyone here speaks French and German so I hope I can improve my WAEC French as well. I will also be posting pictures of my journey as I hope to go to the alps and visit a few cities around.

Enjoy

xoxo or as we say here Bisous!

Miss B

P.s- you all need to check out North of Lagos. Its an awesome blog about an American girl learning yoruba in the University of Ibadan. I am hooked! I am hoping I can blog as often and in as much detail as she does over the next 3 months!