Risky Business

By Yarden Maoz

Far away from the lens of most Western television cameras hundreds of thousands of people are barely surviving. Others are dying violent and anonymous deaths. Their stories of human tragedy, once widely unknown, are beginning to make news. Journalists, like New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, are traveling to these death zones in an effort to inform us of the brutal atrocities.

Kristof, who has been suspected of being a spy and interrogated by government officials, held at gun point by drunk militia men who finally let him go, believes that the benefits of reporting from and about dangerous places often outweigh the risks.

While many of his colleagues are risking their lives covering the war in Iraq, Kristof has found his journalistic mission in very dangerous places like Sudan, remote areas of Cambodia and China. Why does he do it?

"It always seemed that you had Washington analysts that would talk to each other and come to all kinds of conclusions about places ," says Kristof, "[but] they never really managed to check with the people in those places themselves. So I decided that journalism should be very much about not only going to the places you write about, but also leaving the capitals and the nice hotels and talking to people other than prime ministers or shoe shine boys."

It is in Darfur, the western region of Sudan, for example that Kristof has spent a lot of time reporting on untold human stories. "You have hundreds of thousands of people facing death in the coming months," he said. "They are so remote that you kind of read about it and it goes in one ear and out the other. But if you can talk about some particular kid there- who has had parents butchered in front of him and his siblings tossed into a well and now he doesn't have anything to eat, then people actually care about that individual. So a lot of what I am doing is trying to find individuals with names and real faces that I can write about and connect upon."

Last winter, Kristof went to Cambodia, where he reported on the rampant sex slave market interviewing a couple of teenage victims, Srey Neth and Srey Mom. He literally bought their freedom: Srey Neth, cost $150 and Srey Mom cost $203. Both young women feared the shame and rejection of their families so much that they hesitated about whether it was better to stay sex slaves, or go home and risk being ostracized by people in their village.

Can the work of one person make a difference? If Kristof is an example, then the answer is yes. "You really do get a feeling of pride that you are kind of making a difference by forcing Americans to pay attention to things that are kind of ugly and really aren't very attractive," Kristof said. "Last year I wrote about a hospital in Ethiopia that was dealing with a child bearing ailment and the victims are about the worst off people in the world, pariahs in their own villages. [They are] peasant women nobody cares about. And this hospital was always getting by on a shoestring. Since then it raised about two million dollars, which is going to make a huge difference in the lives of these people. That kind of thing really does make you feel good."