COVERING WAR
Get used to long days and strange food, Denver Post correspondent tells J students
Plumbing, PowerBars and phones can make your day

By Lindsay Henderson
J-School Web reporter

Gwen Florio really liked the barbecued camel she ate at the She-Camel market in Omdurman, Sudan. That is, until she saw a camel being chopped up in a nearby alley with a rusty ax.

She threw up for two days. Even so, she still says the meal was terrific.

"You have to learn to get comfortable with your own discomfort," said Florio, national correspondent for the Denver Post. "Everything goes wrong every day."

Florio was in Missoula last month to cover the recent arson of two lesbians’ home and the Nathaniel Bar-Jonah trial in Butte for the Post. Journalism professor Carol Van Valkenburg asked Florio to swing by the J-school to talk about her recent adventures overseas.

Late last year, she was dispatched to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Africa, where basic amenities are few and the challenge isn’t finding the story, it’s everything else that gets in the way.

Without electricity, Florio and her photographer teammate learned to rig their laptops to car batteries. After arriving, they had to find their own translators and drivers, which proved tricky. They couldn’t drink the water, there wasn’t plumbing, and they lived on PowerBars for weeks while putting in 18- to 20-hour days.

"We spent 80 percent of the time on logistics and 20 percent of the time reporting and writing," said Florio. "There was a huge sense of satisfaction in dealing with things and actually getting stories printed that were coherent."

There were no phones and no Internet. At times they had machine-gun escorts and other times they retreated because people threw stones at them. They identified themselves as Canadian or Swiss while reporting, because hostility against Americans was so high.

"We were Canadians," said Florio. "We were proud Canadians."

They were isolated from news around the world. When she was able to contact her editor she had him read her the headlines to learn what was happening.

In a world where women are literally sheltered, being a female reporter wasn’t easy. "Men would grope me," said Florio. When that happened, she and her photographer simply left. Florio donned local dress during demonstrations, but her hiking boots gave her away.

"People were just mystified by me," she said.

Florio’s two college-age children weren’t happy about their mom taking off into such dangerous territory after Sept. 11. When she could contact them from Afghanistan, she said, they’d tell her, "Get the hell out of freakin’ Afghanistan, Mom." Florio would have stayed longer, but it was close to Christmas and she thought her children had gone through enough.

Florio said the worst thing was never being able to relax.

"We were constantly in a bad situation," she said. They traveled with expensive equipment, Florio said, and no one looked after them. While she was there, a Swedish journalist was robbed and killed. Most recently, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was also killed.

But if her paper needed her to, she would happily go again tomorrow, she said.

Being a woman helped in some respects. When their driver invited them to a family wedding, Florio became close to one of the women. "We bonded by bitching about men," she said. The family dressed her up in traditional wedding attire and took her along. It turned out to be one of her favorite experiences.
Despite the waves of trying situations, being a foreign correspondent is a coveted position, she said, one that takes a long time to achieve. Her advice for aspiring foreign correspondents is to develop a huge tolerance for discomfort and the ability to live with uncertainty.

And, she said, "Never underestimate the flush toilet."

An article by Florio on her experiences will be featured in the 2002 Montana Journalism Review. To see some of Florio's pieces in the Denver Post click on one of these links.