First Steps in a New Place

You're saying, in a way, that every place is different for a foreign correspondent and you have to have the skills of opening all your senses up and finding your location in many different senses. I'm very curious as to what way your work in Latin America, where you went to all sorts of places, you were covering the most developed areas, and also places in turmoil and chaos, like Haiti; in what sense did that prepare you for your experience when you became the Washington Post South Asia bureau chief in the late 1990s, but in what sense it didn't?

It is a good question. As I said, everything was completely new: language, culture, religion. I was totally unprepared for the degree to which religion dictated the daily lives of people that I was suddenly dealing with. I went from essentially a very secular part of the world to a very religious part of the world. No matter what the religion was, I had never understood the degree to which religion was going to dominate my work. I'd almost never written about religion. So, that was very different. But as I said at another event today, being a professional, being out on the road, being on your own, being in difficult places for many years prepares you for anything.

I could be in China tomorrow, and I would do the same set of things that I would do if tomorrow I was sent to Antarctica. I'd look for the nearest newspaper office and ask to talk to a local reporter to get help from them, I'd probably invite [them] to dinner if I could, and get some contacts and get a sense of the lay of the land. I would make a point of spending a few days, if I had the luxury, of just going out, going to local restaurants -- there're a number of things you automatically do as a journalist to get a sense of where you are. In an emergency, there are certain kinds of people that you have to contact. Obviously you have to contact embassies, you have to contact local journalists, you have to contact, very often, local politicians or police.

In a place like Afghanistan, I can't tell you how many times I have been to provinces and districts that were completely strange to me, where I was going because there had been a bombing or a massacre, or some problem. The first place I would go would be the police station, and usually that's where I slept because there were never hotels in these places, no such thing. Invariably, the police chief and the local district authority would have a room with cushions on the floor, and so anybody who came through, whether it was the tax collector or me, that's where you stayed. So, you get used to that. You get used to going to certain places for help when you don't have a modern society with cell phones, and spokesmen, and offices, and hotels, and all that. You find substitutes.

Next page: Religion