Reporters on the Job
from the October 24, 2008 edition
• Journalists as Ambassadors: Foreign correspondents who work for US-based newspapers are frequently considered ambassadors. When Sara Miller Llana was in Brazil last month, she watched the country's economic optimism fade as the global credit crisis hit (see story).
"Everywhere you went, people were talking about how much the currency had gone down. Unfortunately, I had changed my money at a 1.7 rate, by the time I left it was down to 2.2 to the dollar! A bank worker cornered me and insisted that this was my fault because I'm American," says Sara.
At the airport in Manaus, Brazil, she say people hovered around the television watching financial news. "When I got back to Mexico, it was the same thing. There's not a sense of panic here – people do believe they'll be better off than in the past – but the unbridled optimism is gone. And I continue to get cornered by people who blame me, as an American!"
• A Determined Healer: Staff writer Scott Baldauf found today's story about a doctor helping Congolese rape victims both challenging and inspiring.
"Of course, it's very hard to ask intimate questions of women who have gone through these things, and even harder for them to relive the experience. The degradation and cruelty they've experienced is very disturbing. Yet here's a guy who listens to this every day," say Scott.
He wanted to understand, too, what keeps this doctor going after handling 21,000 cases of brutality. "He was clearly discouraged because now he's seeing patients who've been raped a second time. But he cares deeply about the women he's treating and keeps track of them after they leave the hospital. He told me that he got more from them, than he gave them," says Scott.
– David Clark Scott
World editor
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