Background

Pamela, welcome to Berkeley.

Delighted to be here.

Where were you born and raised?

I'm from Connecticut, a New Englander for the first half of my life, and then moved to the Washington area a long time ago. I've actually been living in the greater Washington area now for about half my life.

Looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world?

That's a good question. I would say that the most important values that I received from my parents were two things: one, compassion for others. The other was, not only can you be a success and should you be a success, but because you come from a background of great privilege, you owe it to the world to do something with the gifts you've been given. That was very strongly a part of my upbringing, that responsibility comes with privilege.

Tell us a little about your education. Did you have any teachers or mentors in high school that pointed you in the direction of journalism and writing?

I had two, but they were before that. My sixth grade English teacher, Wally Ramsey, who lives in California, retired at Pebble Beach some years ago, with whom I'm still in close touch, and my ninth grade English teacher, Bill Merris, who passed away some years ago but who remained a faithful correspondent of the written word with me until he died. They instilled in me a very early love of language and of writing, and I consider them to be mentors more than the professors and teachers that I had after that.

The story of your writing, and of this book which we'll talk about, is the linking of these two things, compassion and the word, the importance of telling the story.

That's right. Throughout this book, whatever I'm writing about, whatever country, whatever situation I find myself in, I try to find a moment, or a person, or a situation that's redeeming, that has some beauty, some grace, some nobility to it, particularly in places of great conflict, and turmoil, and suffering, and cruelty.

Where were you educated? Where did you do your undergraduate work?

I went to Brown University and graduated in 1974. Many people ask why I didn't go to journalism school. The answer is that I didn't particularly think I needed to and I don't really believe in becoming too much of an expert. I'm a firm believer in middle-brow journalism. I think we really ought to be dilettantes. We ought to be jacks-of-all-trades rather than experts. And I was eager to set out on my working life.

Was it very clear to you that you were going to go to journalism by the time you graduated?

Oh, yes. I worked on student newspapers since I was in ninth grade and all the way through high school and college, and all my summers in college I worked on newspapers, the Brown Daily Herald, I was an editor there. My first newspaper job, the summer of my sophomore year at Brown, I worked as the only reporter, as a semi-replacement reporter, for a tiny, little newspaper in western Massachusetts, and I was hooked.

Then you went to the Boston Globe. Was that your first job as a journalist?

No, not at all. After graduation, I started at a small daily newspaper in the capital of Maryland, the Annapolis Evening Capital, and then went on to the Baltimore Sun where I worked for a number of years, and then went to the Boston Globe in 1982, and then changed to the Washington Post in 1994.

And your first major foreign assignment was in Latin America for the Globe.

That's right. My first overseas assignment was El Salvador. I went to El Salvador in 1983, and then covered the rest of Central America in numerous visits -- Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala -- and then branched out to South America, and then also to the Caribbean and visited those countries repeatedly.

Next page: Being a Foreign Correspondent