Do Your Work, and Come Back When You Finish
With each new assignment—whether I was in Congo, Darfur, Afghanistan, or elsewhere—I felt more fortunate to be an independent, educated woman. I was thirty-one years old, and I cherished my right to choose my love, my work. I had the privilege to travel and to walk away from hardship when it became too much to bear. Most people on earth didn’t have an exit door to walk away from their own lives.
The trials I faced now seemed surmountable simply because I now knew there were people who had overcome much greater hardship. Suddenly my childhood in Connecticut, which I had thought to be the most normal childhood in the world, seemed lavish and full of opportunity. My mother had always told me I had no patience for anything—for waiting in line, for traffic, for my career to take off. Perhaps the years of working in the developing world, where daily frustrations and delays were an integral part of life, gave me the patience and perspective I never had as a young woman. The sadness and injustice I encountered as a journalist could either sink me into a depression or open the door to a new vision of my own life. I chose the latter.
And the more I saw of the world, the deeper my commitment to my family grew. Travel and distance meant it was difficult to see them regularly, but Christmas remained sacred family time. No matter what was going on, I knew I would get on a plane to spend ten days with the people who mattered most to me. It was the only time of year I would turn down covering the biggest news stories, like the 2003 Bam earthquake in Iran or the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia. I needed that time to recharge. I traveled more than ever, but the concept of home became more important, more essential to my sense of balance.
By 2005 I had lived in Istanbul for almost three years, the longest I had lived anywhere in my adult life, and the city had become my home. I rented my own apartment in the fashionable Cihangir neighborhood and for the first time actually bought a few pieces of furniture—a desk, a chair, a couch—and even some accessories, like silverware, coffee mugs, and carpets. My financial woes were behind me; I opened a savings account. In between assignments I had somehow created a life.
My social crowd in Istanbul felt as familiar and intimate as friends from high school or college. There was Behzad, a Marxist Iranian professor at Ramapo College in New Jersey, who spent his sabbatical in Istanbul writing books and dating beautiful women half his age; Ansel and Maddy, a young, witty American couple who had been living in Istanbul for about five years; Ivan, the NPR correspondent I had known since northern Iraq, with whom I could transition easily from working together in Baghdad to watching him play air guitar in his underwear in Istanbul; and Karl, the Washington Post bureau chief, who on the weekends invited all of us for sleepovers at his house along the Bosporus. There was also Paxton, an American filmmaker and writer from Connecticut, who had moved to Turkey fifteen years earlier to make a documentary about the Silk Road; and Jason, my weekend sidekick, who was inexplicably flush with cash. (We wondered if he was CIA.) Eventually an American journalist named Suzy showed up from New York, and we would effortlessly talk for hours—a reminder of how much I missed girlfriends with all the same New York references. Then came Dahlia (Sudanese) and Angry Ali (American and French, but from Palestine), career academics who moved to Turkey with a beautiful newborn daughter. That’s how we spent our weekends in Istanbul: sprawled out on my living room floor with a narghile and several bottles of wine, laughing and arguing and confiding in one another all night long.
So when Opheera, a reporter friend based in Sudan, asked me to look after Paul, the new Reuters bureau chief for Turkey, I was more than happy to induct him into our tight posse of friends.