Reporters on the Job

• Child-Friendly Community: As the mother of three children, all under the age of 8, correspondent Isabelle de Pommereau found herself drawn to the German "green" community of Vauban. "It would be great to be able to let the kids roam, to ride their bikes in the street, and not have to worry about traffic," she says. "There are many more children there than in our neighborhood in Frankfurt – and they're welcome."

The other aspect she found appealing was the urban setting. Often, family- friendly communities are isolated suburban outposts. "Vauban is not on the moon. It's one neighborhood among many in the city of Freiburg. It's an ecological experiment in an urban area."

• Israel's Gatekeepers: Staff writer Ilene Prusher visited the Palestinian refugee camp of Shuafat four times in the past two months for today's story. One day, she went with an interpreter and a photographer to see Ahmed's route to school. She got a taste of the fickleness of the Israeli gatekeepers.

The gate outside Ahmed's school is closed most of the day, but opens at the end of the school day to let kids through. But because Ilene stayed to talk to his teachers, they arrived 20 minutes late. The gate was already closed.

"When we got to it, a group of older Palestinian women were standing at the gate, and the soldier was telling them it was closed in Hebrew and Arabic," she says. "But when we arrived, dressed as foreigners and clearly journalists, the soldier reluctantly opened the gate. The Palestinian women stared at us and we looked at them sadly, and the soldier rolled his eyes and relented, letting the whole lot of them through. I tried to ask him what the policy was about the gate, and why the women weren't allowed through. He simply yelled 'Zuzu kvar!' (Move already!) And so we did."

David Clark Scott
World editor