Pew International Journalism Program

Journalist's Survival Pack: Faith and a Good Pair of Sneakers

By Sarah Wildman, Spring 2003 Pew Fellow

In November 2001, The Washington Post South Asia Bureau chief Pamela Constable was barreling through the hinterlands of Afghanistan when her convoy of taxis was attacked. Four journalists, traveling in cars just minutes ahead of Constable's on the rutted highway outside of Kabul, were ripped from their vehicles and executed. With the conflict brought viciously into her lap, this twenty-year veteran of countless skirmishes, wars, and military actions was made suddenly very conscious of the choices she has made to get her story. That consciousness, and the soul-searching personal article that came out of it, led her back to Washington on a Pew Journalist-in-Residence fellowship, to work on a book about her experiences in South Asia.

Small insights into Constable's stories gave a taste of some of the varied, colorful and, often, disturbing experiences that have shaped her career. In one, a "life long friend" was made in Haiti after he, "a total stranger," threw his body on top of Constable's when the military opened fire at a protest. Often, Constable admitted, "I really, really try to pretend to be a man" while out on reporting trips, wearing baggy clothes and no jewelry. She differentiated for her listeners which dangers were acceptable and where her choices diverged from those made by other reporters. When the case of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl came up, Constable described her own self-protective "antennae" - related both to being a woman and an American - that cause her to refuse to meet new contacts anywhere that isn't brightly lit and filled with people. "Being based in Delhi," Constable explained, if you're in Pakistan on a story "you are always under suspicion." She was quick to point out that "public danger is different from private danger," which means she is more apt to run into a "street filled with angry people who hate Americans" than a "dark alley" to "meet a guy I've never heard of."

When reporting overseas "you have to be open to hearing things you don't expect and you don't agree with," Constable advised the journalists in the audience, as she recounted her forays into Afghanistan while the Taliban were in power. To her surprise she found that many Afghanis would literally "thank God" for the Taliban because the fundamentalists had cracked down on the "rapacious warlords" who had ravaged the country.

This is not Constable's first book and, given the varied stories she produced in her lunchtime lecture, it's likely not to be her last. The sixth Pew Journalist in Residence at the Pew International Journalism Program, Constable has lived for twenty-seven years outside of the U.S. She has served as a foreign correspondent for both the Baltimore Sun and the Boston Globe, living, at various times, throughout Central and South America, and the Caribbean. She joined the Washington Post in 1994, covering immigration until her assignment to the subcontinent. Since 1998 she has been based in New Delhi, and from there she is assigned to stories in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Constable's talk to the SAIS community touched on everything from the nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan and war time coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan to the precautions she takes as a female investigative reporter in some of the toughest places in the world. The audience was fascinated by her stories of life on the road, asking her for tips on reporting.

Her advice to the groups was to know when to leave a situation, and when to leave quickly. "I run a lot. I always wear sneakers," she said with a laugh. But perhaps one of the most important lessons Constable has learned in conflict zones is to try to create balance in her life. "Everything in doses," she says, "and compartmentalized. I try to not spend more than a week at a time covering a horrible thing�. I am constantly trying to find new adjectives and adverbs to describe the same nouns and verbs." Finding that balance sometimes means seeking out places of worship wherever she finds herself. For Constable that has meant church (including the Protestant church that was bombed in Islamabad last year), but it has also been various Sufi shrines in Kashmir, Peshawar, and Lahore. In these places of beauty, Constable finds the "spiritual serenity and peace" that enables her to keep writing her stories for her audience at home.