Every spring, I venture out to the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and briefly become an editor to a group of young journalists. Given my Tomdispatch life, I teach a class fittingly called “Strong Words.” I always hope my students pick up something about writing — and especially rewriting — from me, while I learn much that’s surprising about our world (and technology I’ll never be able to handle) from them. It seems like a reasonable enough exchange.
For the last three years, the pieces from this class have taken over the San Francisco Chronicle’s Sunday Insight section for one week, as they will again this coming Sunday. I always get to preview one or two that best fit my particular Tomdispatch obsessions. Last year, for instance, I posted Chad Heeter’s “My Saudi Arabian Breakfast”; the previous year, Lisa Lambert’s “GodAssault, Morality as the Ultimate Game.”
This year, Meghann Farnsworth offers a window into journalism of a sort you don’t often see opened and I thought it well worth sharing with Tomdispatch readers. Tom
Girl on Fire
Confessions of a Former Journalistic Neophyte
By Meghann Farnsworth
I was the adult, a 25-year old journalism student on my first reporting trip abroad. She was the child, 16 going on 40. I had the translator, the driver waiting outside, a hotel room in the safest part of the city, a ticket out of the country in three days. She had her mother, fidgeting nervously in the waiting room, a multitude of STD tests, a house she rarely left in a violent neighborhood, and one of the most dangerous gangs in Guatemala City threatening her life if she talked.
A journalist’s job is to ask questions. Journalism school emphasizes the need to get “color,” “scenes,” “details.” Final articles are to be written in an authoritative, confident voice. And yet, what rules of engagement apply when a reporter — OK, in my case a young reporter — is faced with a source as vulnerable and traumatized as this girl?
Increasing violence against women in Guatemala City, that was what I had come down to investigate. Although I knew my subject, had read the literature, the government briefings and the daily local news reports, there was no way I could have prepared myself for the reality. Covering violence means being physically exposed to its final product: its victims, dead or alive.
![Daily Mail [UK]](http://i160.photobucket.com/albums/t193/Annamarie_033/mHead2.gif "British daily newspaper")
March 23, 2007 at 2:25 am |
Tomgram, Meghann Farnsworth, “I want you to print this…”
March 23, 2007 at 11:22 pm |
When you mention’ violence against women in Guatemala cit’y, I can’t help but remember this man I once met in a coffee shop in Saipan, named “Tico”, someone who dropped in to town one day, saying he had once been a Contra in Hondurus.
Saipan is really expensive and hard for the average hitchhiker. Of course, the place is touristy, but still not really a traveler’s center. People living there are paranoid and hard to get to know, just from having enough experience with weirdos, but Tico found it pretty easy to move around there, because he was, first and most importantlyl, a native Spanish speaker, and at least kind of young and handsome. It wasn’t long before he had found somewhere to live, the easy way, just moving in with some lady who’d have him.
I was living up on a mountainside feeling lucky to have a $500 a month shack, and a job at a rowdy high school that I pretty much hated, when a few months later Tico drops by my home driving someone’s car, with a Japanese lady in tow. He wanted to party with me, and he said she wasn’t the only lady he’d known, just a tourist from town. He knew someone else, he said, but taht I was not to tell anyone, of course.
I became enomored with this bright young friend Tico, and he seemed to like me enough, so I later hired him as my diving teacher, under the table of course. (oh yeah, he also got quickly hired as a diving instructor at one of the best diving centers in town.) We dove all the sites etc.
One day, I met his real girlfriend, “Ann”, a local Chamorro woman slightly older than he. She was the owner of that car . Ann worked as a secretary for a lawyer in town, but on her off-time was an avid potsmoker, (like the rest of us) and all around trying to be cool and accommodating to her friends, guests, etc., as well her newfound boyfriend Tico who she was completely taken in by. They always kept a lot of weed under her bed, -but I was not to tell anyone, etc.
We had some adventures that summer diving. I loved the sport. Then one day we dove, ‘the Grotto’ for the second time, but Tico had not put enough weights into my BC vest. After we already had dove out into the open sea, and were to head back in, I surfaced. I had to, I kept floating, and I couldn’t stay underwater on account of my lack of equilibrium. Tico had already gone back in ahead of me, but I couldn’t find my own way back in, even if I could get down that deep.
But, I knew the area well enough, having lived there already a year, so,- lucky enough for me-, I happened to know a beach to swim to. Grotto has only sheer cliffs immediately outside of it. That is how most divers die in mishaps at Grotto, because there is nowhere to swim to if you surface outside, except to be dashed against the cliffs. I avoided the cliffs, swam so a secret beach that I knew, but it took me nearly forty-five minutes to get to it. By then, the police were looking for me, friends were chanting eulogies, and Tico was facing involuntary manslaughter charges.
Later that night, I went to see him at his house, and Ann was there etc., and we were all ecstatic and all talking about it. For Tico it was like coming back from the dead. He didn’t want to dive with me again.
A few days later Tico said he wanted to go to Japan to buy more gear to start a dive shop of his own, said I could keep the scuba gear I already had. (I even paid him for it, I think). Ann drove him to the airport. Everyone was in a festive mood.
Then, he never came back.
What I didn’t know was that Ann was already about 2 months pregnant. I happened to have the address and phone number of his Japanese tourist girlfriend that I met the first day, and so we called her up. Sure enough, Tico had been there, but had moved on, so sorry. Ann was in torture, carrying that child for maybe five more months, then she miscarried (blessingly). I was there for the burial. I remember looking up and imagining seeing a spirit going into the sky.
People around there suspected I was up to no good with Ann, maybe even more trouble on her, just trying to be by her side through most of it, because I had happened to know Tico. But I would have never known Ann without first knowing him, just the shy type that I am.
And, you know, the irony is I don’t think anyone would blame Tico if he ever came back. I don’t blame him. Why? I’m just too nice and trusting, and I try to see the bright side.
But, I do know that the world is paranoid enough dealing with people who can’t clean up their own messes. I’m the one that gets to have to live in their wake, and collect the wrath on whatever they do. Thy just go ona and make even more trouble, not necessarily Tico, but the violent types, the even more desperate types…
March 24, 2007 at 1:18 am |
Thank you, John, for sharing this very poignant episode of your life and for being an obviously nice, caring person. Don’t change just because others may be unpleasant or paranoid. I don’t automatically mistrust people either — quite the contrary, I tend to be trusting. But I’d rather be this way than live in fear and paranoia.
I wish you well. Take care.
Annamarie