Beautiful Bermeo

Olga Brajnović

12 years ago

Tell us about a situation where you’d hoped against all hope, where the odds were completely stacked against you, yet you triumphed. Be sure to describe your situation in full detail. Tell us all about your triumph in all its glory.

My life is so normal and my memory so short! I can’t remember such a situation. No big triumphs with a flair of glory. Only little achievements unnoticed.

Against all odds I write every day hoping something worthy to tell will come up. But my stories are so negative and so sad that I get discouraged.

Usually when I’m going against all odds I end in frustration. They say I’m jinxed. When I was in my first year as a reporter (I think I was 17 or 18) my boss in Bilbao sent me to do a report about the tuna fishermen in Bermeo, a beautiful town near Bilbao. It was a saturday and he told me to go there to do some interviews and write a full page for that same day.

I went to Bermeo, in a glorious day, full of hopes to do a great report, only to find out that all the fishermen were on the high seas, so there were nobody to talk with for my interviews, only some women who talked in basque so fast there was no way to understand them. I went to look for the mayor and other authorities as an alternative, and I found out that all of them had traveled precisely to Bilbao, because there was a big demonstration organised by their political party.

I had to come back to Bilbao defeated, empty handed, to face an angry boss who had an empty page waiting for me. I did something with what the women had told me and some big pictures of the beautiful port, and saved the day, but without glory.

I had had previous problems with that same boss who had sent me to do impossible reports more than once. My visit to Bermeo to interview fishermen when the whole fishing fleet was on the high seas was the last. When the editor knew about it, decided to assign me to another boss. That was my little triumph.

Daily Prompt: Against All Odds.
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