Being a Foreign Correspondent

Your book, Fragments of Grace (and you just explained the title) is an amazing joining of two themes. One is a personal journey, the story of your life and your commitment to journalism, but the main part of the book is about your assignments for the Washington Post in South Asia during a very important period of time, which we'll talk about in a second. I want to explore something that emerges in the book, which is what it means to be a foreign correspondent. Give us your analysis, drawing on your experience in this line of work, as to what it takes to do this. What are the skills you need? What is the temperament you have to have to be a foreign correspondent?

Somebody told me, just before I took my first assignment overseas, that being a foreign correspondent means taking off from airports with no one to say good-bye and landing in airports with no one to say hello. This was said half in jest, to sort of discourage me from going abroad, but it didn't.

I would say that [of] the main qualities you have to have, the most important [is] initiative. You are constantly in situations where you literally may land somewhere knowing no one. Not only are you responsible for finding out what's happening in that place -- often very quickly, and often, by the end of the day or at the most, two days -- you have to produce something that's authoritative.

As I always say, [journalism] is the first draft of history, not the second. But still, it has to be as authoritative as possible in a very short time. I give the example of the massacre of the royal family in Nepal, where all of us had to suddenly land, having never been there before, and find out what was happening in an incredibly difficult and hermetic condition, and then write about it within hours.

So, initiative, the ability to be a self-starter, to imagine, to hit the ground running, to think, "Now what do I do? Where do I go? How do you get information?" To have the imagination and the resourcefulness to just go wherever you need to go and get the job done. You have to have very sharp antennae, you have to always have all your senses on, you have to be a sponge. There, I've mixed a few metaphors. A sponge with antennas, how's that?

There must be a creature like that!

That's how I think of myself!

You just have to be very, very sensitive to everything that's happening around you. You know: the walls behind me are blue, that wall is green; you have a mustache, you're wearing brown shoes. I would remember that automatically because it's what I do, all the while thinking about what you're saying, what I'm saying; am I hearing birds outside, am I hearing a fire engine, is somebody going to come in and arrest us ... you have to be always thinking of everything at once. So, that's sort of "360 degrees" of senses you always have to have on.

You have to have incredible energy. You have to be able to survive under circumstances of great hardship, quite often, in places where there is no soft bed at the end of the day, where there is no hot water to wash your hair, where there may be no bar to have a drink. I wouldn't quite compare it to a military life, but it has aspects of a military life in many cases. I've gone for months and months without wearing an attractive set of clothing, for example.You have to become almost, in some ways, like a soldier.

What do you do with that part of the problem where you don't know the language, you don't know the culture? You've just been parachuted in. How do you manage the set of tasks of reporting not from Berkeley or from Providence but from Kabul?

When I first went to Afghanistan and there were no telephones; of course, there was no internet; there were no numbers on the houses, there were no government ministries, there were no spokesmen of any kind, and you didn't know what was happening.

And this would have been what year?

1998. Not only that, there was a hostile government which didn't want you there in the first place and had you under incredible scrutiny --

The Taliban ...

-- all the time, the Taliban authorities, with guides and guards, and all sorts of restrictions, terrible restrictions on what we could do. We weren't allowed to interview private citizens, weren't allowed to interview women, weren't allowed to take photographs, weren't allowed to go to private homes, weren't allowed to leave the hotel after dark or before the daylight -- very, very circumscribed conditions. So, you really were scrounging and struggling all the time.

A lot of what I did during those visits was -- I'd almost use the word "stealth." I would duck into a shop and talk to someone for five minutes and then leave. I used to keep my camera literally hidden under my veils. I wore lots and lots of veils, many layers of clothing to cover my shape, and I would hide my camera underneath and I would take a single photograph and then put it back again. I did that all the time, using all these skills that I never thought I'd need, spy-like skills of great unobtrusiveness and seizing the moment.

Of course, it became better once the Taliban left and the officials were no longer hostile, they were quite welcoming. But still, it was a very difficult culture. Once you're outside the main cities like Kabul, it's still very difficult to interview women. Even being a woman, I've often had to interview women through doors and through windows because they weren't allowed to see or to be with strangers. It was usually because I had a male translator, and the men in the home didn't want the women to be seen by the male translator, and of course, I didn't speak Pashto. I speak a little Dari but not much Pashto. So, it was always these logistical conundra that you had to deal with.

So, great challenges working in a country like that, and always having to rack your brains to find ways to do the basic task.

On certain reporting assignments you are dependent on translators. In Latin America you probably knew Spanish, but when you're traveling in South Asia where there are so many different languages in one country, you must really depend on translators.

You do. If I had any hesitation about working in the Middle East and in South Asia, it was language, because I don't like to be at a loss. I don't like to be in a mob or in a street demonstration where I can't understand the chatter around me. I don't like to miss jokes, I don't like to miss side comments, I don't like to do just formal interviews where you control it: yes sir, no sir, and what's your opinion about X. I like to be able to feel a society.

In Latin America I never had any problems. I could always find some language in common. In fact, one of my favorite -- this is an aside -- anecdotes about Latin America is I'm sitting on a beach in Rio de Janeiro interviewing some people about the upcoming elections and was pretty pleased with myself because I had sort of managed to turn my Spanish into Portuguese and was getting through just fine. And at the end of the interview, I discovered that they were tourists from Rome and we'd all been speaking Italian! It worked out.

But you know, when you get into Urdu, into Arabic, into Punjabi and Telegu, and whole new languages, you can't possibly do anything more than break the ice and learn how to say, "Hello, how are you?" So, [you] depend heavily on translators, which is a big problem, not because they're hard to find but because good ones are hard to find. You get a translator who says, "Well, this is an interesting man but he wasn't terribly articulate. Let me tell you what he meant." Well, that's not what I want. I want somebody who will tell me every word, every "um," every "uh," every aside. Some of the best things you get out of interviews are the things people don't intend to say or think you haven't heard or actually turn to their buddy and said when they thought you weren't listening. I want all that, and you need all that to be a good journalist.

Next page: Doing the Job as a Woman