My first real job in media was holding a microphone up to strangers.
At Delta Broadcasting Service, part of my work was vox pops, those short street interviews where you stop people mid-errand and ask what they think. Fuel prices, elections, flooding, whatever the day's story was. Most people assume the hard part is getting strangers to talk. It isn't. The hard part is actually hearing them.
A market woman doesn't talk about climate change. She talks about tomatoes spoiling faster, about the rain that came wrong this year. A keke driver doesn't mention emissions. He mentions the road that floods and eats his profit every September. Nobody I ever interviewed used the words "resilience" or "adaptation." They described their lives.
That gap has followed me into every communications job since. Organizations write in one language and communities live in another, then we wonder why campaigns don't land. The report says "climate-vulnerable populations." The person says "my shop was underwater." Same fact. Only one of them makes you feel something.
Good communication is mostly translation. Not dumbing things down, translating in both directions. Carrying the market woman's tomatoes into the boardroom, and carrying the funding decision back to her street in words that mean something there.
The microphone taught me that people will tell you everything you need to know about a crisis. You just have to stop broadcasting long enough to ask.
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