In the rush to cover the war on terrorism, The Denver Post sent Gwen Florio as a foreign correspondent to Pakistan and Afghanistan — although she was fulfilling a life-long dream, there were many barriers to overcome in a hurry.

by Gwen Florio

When most newspapers appoint a foreign correspondent, they give that person up to a year to prepare — sending the reporter to language lessons and university classes on the part of the world he or she will be covering.

I got a long weekend.

“Do you have your passport with you?” Evan Dreyer, my city editor, asked.

“Um,” I replied.

I was in New York, as part of a cadre of five reporters and photographers dispatched by the Denver Post, as soon as the airports reopened after Sept. 11. It was supposed to be a five-day trip, but the enormity of the story grew by the day. As a result, we extended our stay, and I was now in my second week.

For days I had argued — hopelessly, I thought, given that the Post has only a single foreign-affairs reporter — that we should be making a similar effort overseas.

Now my words were coming back to haunt me.

As Evan rattled on about how the paper would Fed-Ex my passport to me so that I could take a next-day flight for Pakistan, I tried to figure out the best way to break the bad news.

“Um,” I said again, certain that my dream of being a foreign correspondent — a dream I’ve held dear for the entire 25 years of my career — was about to vanish.

“My passport expired a month ago.”

Evan didn’t miss a beat. He told me to go to a 24-hour passport place and pay whatever to get a new one. “And don’t forget your shots,” he said, entirely too cheerfully.

I got a break. Because it was a Friday, the new passport wouldn’t come through until Tuesday. That gave me the whole weekend to Web-surf like a maniac and download centuries of Central Asian history and politics into my increasingly addled brain.

On Tuesday, I boarded an Air Pakistan flight with my crisp, hours-old passport in hand and watched the smoldering ruins of what had been the World Trade Center recede into the distance. Except for Post photographer Karl Gehring, who had managed to get onto the flight at the last minute, I was the only Westerner among hundreds of people.

All around me were men — men in prayer caps, men in the baggy tunic-and-pants garb known as shalwar kamiz, men with long beards henna-tinted a violent orange. There were also a very few, heavily veiled, women. As the plane lumbered toward our London layover, the men around me bowed and murmured in prayer.

I sat stiffly, my head full of the images I’d acquired during my last-minute cramming — visions of crazed mobs made up of people who looked exactly like everyone around me screaming “Death to Americans!”

I was scared witless.

My worst fears surpassed physical danger. I wasn’t exactly sure how to do my new assignment. Foreign reporting is 80 percent logistics and 20 percent reporting on the good days. You need a translator — preferably one who speaks several languages. In Pakistan, the main language is Urdu, but the ethnic Pashtuns living near the Afghanistan border speak Pashto. So do many of Pakistan’s approximately 2 million Afghan refugees. But the Afghan refugees from the interior speak Dari, a form of Persian. So we’re up to — what? — four languages, now, counting English. Try to find somebody in the United States who does that. But in Pakistan, it seemed that nearly everyone we met had a half-dozen languages at their command.

Then, you need a driver. The Post’s travel agent, as befuddled by the assignment as I was, arranged for a rental car that she envisioned I’d drive away from the Islamabad airport. As if! Pakistanis drive on the “wrong” side, a legacy of British colonialism. They drive very, very fast, with much beeping and swerving. They share the road with huge, colorful trucks, donkeys, buses, pedicabs, swarms of pedestrians and the occasional camel. On my own, I’d have lasted about a minute. Luckily, Bruce Finley, our foreign affairs reporter, had already spent more than a week in Pakistan with photographer Cyrus McCrimmon and was ready to leave by the time we arrived. Karl and I inherited their driver.

That left us with the problem of how to get our stories and pictures back to the Post. Islamabad is a somewhat cosmopolitan city, but the electricity went out occasionally, and Internet connections were brutally slow. That’s where the satellite phone came in. But to run the sat phone, you need a source of power. In Pakistan, we were lucky: The electricity was reliable enough that we charged our laptops, the satellite phone and cameras straight from the wall outlets.

Afghanistan would be a different story.

Somehow, incredibly, given what novices we were, we began to master Pakistan. I’m not sure I remember the moment things “clicked” — when, after reporting and filing one story, I thought, “Well the obvious story to do next is this. And then, after that, we should check into such-and-such.”

Similar to a regular stateside beat, people we interviewed and photographed spoke of other things happening around the country, and we would explore those angles. We’d been in the country only a few days when we encountered the mobs I’d feared. Members shook their fists in our faces, spit on us and shoved us. Little kids threw stones at us and surrounded our car, rocking it. Men groped me, and picked Karl’s pocket stealing $1,000 worth of camera disks. The night the United States started bombing Afghanistan a hotel clerk came and knocked on my door. “Please stay in your room,” he begged. He told me that when news of the bombing had swept the hotel, some of the guests had noticed a foreign reporter and chased him across the lobby.

But there were days and moments — when an old man gave me salt to counteract the effects of tear-gas at a demonstration, when young women smilingly showed me the proper way to fold and drape my duppata (headscarf) and painted my hands with intricate henna designs, when our driver invited us to dinner with his family in the tiny home they shared with their chickens, and especially when we went to his niece’s wedding — that were so wonderfully exotic and engaging that they transcended the difficulties and we got cocky.

As soon as we got back to Denver I went to my editors with a new proposal: “We need to be in Afghanistan.”

The initial military victory in Afghanistan came so quickly that it’s hard to remember what it was like when the air war first started. Despite daily bombing raids, the Taliban still held all of Afghanistan from Mazar-I-Sharif and Kabul south; the Northern Alliance was stuck in the same territory it had commanded for years.

The only way into Afghanistan was through Tajikistan, and then south by jeep down through Northern Alliance-held regions, then by truck or horseback through the mountain passes in the Hindu Kush. Reporters who took this grueling route were able to get to the front lines, within an hour or so of Kabul. Heck, they’d done it, I reasoned. So could we.

After just a two-week respite in Denver, Karl and I were camped out in shabby rooms in Tajikistan’s best hotel, part of a convoy set to leave at 6 a.m. for the day-long drive to the Afghan border.

A French reporter passed me in a hallway so dark that I had to use my flashlight. He caught my arm and asked if I’d heard about the journalists.

I shook my head no.

He told me three reporters had been killed that day in Afghanistan while riding in a convoy with Northern Alliance troops on the very road that we were to take in the next few days. The French journalist wasn’t sure of the details. At least one of the three had been shot, he said. “The others” — he drew his finger across his throat.I went back to my room and sat for a long time on my hard, narrow bed. I was shaking all over. I tried to imagine how my kids, both college-age, both of whom had begged me not to make this trip, would feel if their mom got her throat cut. The satellite phone, the phone I wanted to use to call Evan and tell him that actually, Aghanistan wasn’t such a good idea after all, was in Karl’s room. It was late. Karl was probably asleep.

In the end, an insane fear of humiliation — I was the only woman among the Post’s ever-increasing foreign contingent, and would be damned if I wussed out — defeated the quite legitimate fear of death.

The next day, we left for Afgha-nistan.

Maybe the fact that we made it alive put everything in perspective. The trip to Kabul, from which the Taliban fled just a couple of days before we arrived, while exhausting and frequently frightening, wasn’t completely awful. OK, so there was no running water, no electricity anywhere along the route. The lack of water was an inconvenience: cold bucket baths, while leaving much to be desired, were better than no baths at all. But we needed electricity to file, and — despite the fact that Karl and I each carried $6,000 in cash stashed in pockets, socks and money belts — we’d been too afraid of running out of money to spring for an $800 generator. We sucked up to reporters from bigger papers with fatter wallets, offering candy bars in exchange for hits from their generators. But, in a things-could-be-worse mantra that I recited daily, the snows held off long enough so that we didn’t have to ride horses over the pass, and we never had to sleep in the tent that I’d lugged along.

The teenagers with AK-47s who threatened to arrest us when our jeep got separated from the main convoy and ended up lost in a remote mountain village finally — after an hour’s intercession by a Northern Alliance soldier who’d bummed a ride with us — let us go. I learned that one could indeed survive for days by just eating energy bars, that “Handi-wipes,” used liberally, are a fine substitute for a shower, and that modesty — on a trip with hardly any other women, through barren, rocky country with no bathrooms, and no trees or bushes, either — is highly overrated.

Once in Kabul, we rented rooms in a private home that was positively luxurious compared to the booked-solid Intercontinental Hotel, where news conferences were held by candlelight when the electricity failed, and where reporters toted buckets of water up and down the stairs.

We slept on the floor in our house, and the toilet was the squat-style Turkish variety. We had (cold) running water, electricity almost every evening, and use of a generator when that failed. And, the women in the house — who ducked out of sight whenever Karl appeared — were fabulous cooks.

Clean (relatively; bucket baths were still the order of the day), with a good night’s sleep and full bellies, we ventured out into a tragic ruin of a city where to walk two steps in any direction was to trip over a heart-rending story. We found stories everywhere: families crowded into pitiful city apartments who traveled to Kabul’s outskirts to gather firewood in vineyards that turned out to be the estates where they’d formerly lived. Rows of maimed, blinded children in hospital beds, victims of a countryside salted with land mines during two decades of war.

Young women, their burqas defiantly pulled back from their faces, striding into Kabul University to register for the classes they’d been forbidden from attending during Taliban rule. Young men hammering coffee cans flat and riveting them together to form satellite dishes to sell to a population famished for television. A blind, moth-eaten lion who was the main attraction at the wreck that was the Kabul Zoo, and whose survival through waves of fighting by the Russians and the Taliban had made him the pride of the city.

The stories stacked up; every one we did seemed to lead to three more. We could have stayed for months. Except we really couldn’t. It cost us nearly $500 a day to function in Afghanistan, and we had already spent a total of about $5,000 just to get from the northern border down to Kabul. Our money melted away. Christmas was approaching. Our families, when we called them on the satellite phone at $7 a minute, sounded increasingly frantic. Another four reporters had been killed, one of them in a town where we’d stayed the previous week.

It was time to go.

You don’t realized how quickly you’ve acclimated to a place until you leave. Karl and I paid $2,500 apiece for seats on a cramped United Nations flight to Islamabad — the only safe way out of the country. As the plane circled Pakistan’s capital, a city we’d once found depressing for its dirt and poverty, we elbowed one another in wonder.

Paved roads! Power lines! And look at all those cars!

In the airport, we gaped at the Pakistani women, whose bared faces and forearms looked almost indecent after weeks spent among ghostly, burqa-clad forms. At the hotel, we rushed into our respective bathrooms and twisted the taps. Water gushed hot and plentiful — a miracle.

Today, people ask me if I miss the excitement of foreign reporting.

Gosh, no, I say. Indoor plumbing is all the excitement I need.

Truth is, I miss it terribly.

It was an enormous privilege to be sent to Pakistan and Afghanistan — and, as part of a Post project on the continuing war on terrorism, to Somalia and Sudan in January. By the time I got back from my most recent trip, my four-month-old passport was wrinkled and worn, its pages completely filled with stamps and visas. And it was an awesome responsibility to try to educate Post readers, even as we educated ourselves, about the dauntingly complex issues of those regions.

If there has been any good in the aftermath of Sept. 11, it’s been the fact that we’ve realized the risks in ignoring what’s happening in the rest of our world. We all benefit when news organizations realize that foreign reporting is no longer a luxury. It’s a necessity.