Dispatches from Darfur
From a piece by Stephanie in The Washington Post:
For the past 10 years, Awatif Ahmed Isshag has handwritten monthly dispatches and commentary about life in El Fasher and hung them on a short, wiry tree that scatters shade along the yellow-sand lane by her house.
Working in her new office -- a cement-floored, cracked-walled space in a building with faulty wiring -- Isshag dismissed the notion that she was doing anything unusual.
"Journalism is a profession of risk," she said matter-of-factly, her voice echoing slightly in the nearly empty room. She also said, "I will fast to get the story."
She estimated that 100 people a day stop to read the newspaper on the tree as they make their way through the neighborhood of dried-mud walls and painted steel doors. She refers to it casually as "the world paper."
A note from Mark Binker: "Next time I hear anyone in our business complaining about their job, I plan to send them that."
Journalists, complain?
If she attached a blank piece of paper beneath her dispatch and a pencil on a string to the tree, she'd have a 20th-century blog.
