Common Language Project: Multimedia that Matters

Fear Factor: Pakistan

By Sarah Stuteville March 31, 2009

I’ve become terrified of my email. I’ve always been a little skittish of the inbox, never knowing what that first login might bring to my day - an outraged critique of a recent article, a facebook request from a long lost ex-boyfriend - but in the weeks leading up to our departure my crowded inbox has set my stomach lurching in newly anxious ways as I sift through daily accounts of the chaos that has touched down in Pakistan.

As I sit here in my spacious Seattle kitchen, sipping tea and listening to my roommates play video games in the living room, the mosque bombings in Peshawar, kidnappings in Northwest Frontier Province and most recent attacks in Lahore are fuzzy nightmares slowly pulling into focus. Usually, by this time in trip preparations I’m all buttoned up and ready to go. My backpack should be neatly set beside the door, my immunization card tucked into my passport and my little plane snacks safely in zip lock bags.

But judging from the mash up of stomach meds and headscarves piled up in my bedroom sadly trying to pass for a first draft of packing, I can only draw the conclusion that there is a part of me that doesn’t want to leave on that Emirates flight tomorrow, a part of me that is very afraid.

Journalists don’t talk about fear much. It goes against the grain of the culture; the lone wolf, the impassive observer, the tough guy in tough places telling tough truths. But, as many reading this know, I’ve never really passed as any of those things. Actually, I’m pretty sure that more often I come off as a socially needy, manically impassioned dork.

Impassioned dork or not I’m headed to one of the most tumultuous regions of the world and it’s time for me to shore up exactly why.

Fortunately, even as the violent emails have mounted, I’ve also experienced a fear factor antidote in Seattle’s Pakistani community. In the past month of reporting, young programmers at Microsoft, education advocates from Boeing and University of Washington students have all articulated to me how desperately the United States needs to rethink its view of Pakistan and how essential a new kind of media approach is in reshaping that view.

Whether lamenting the lack of coverage over Pakistan’s recent and historical Long March (usurped almost immediately by news of a suicide bombing in Islamabad), discussing the little explored depths of wealth stratification in the country or rhapsodizing about Karachi’s bountiful seafood buffets, I’ve been gently reminded that I’m going to Pakistan exactly because it is a place that frightens so many Americans.

I’m leaving tomorrow with the desire to humanize a region currently defined in America by rage and instability, with the goal of contextualizing a complex country whose fate has become intertwined with ours (and now specifically with mine) and with the hope of introducing Americans to the people behind the violent headlines that now glow menacingly from my gmail account.

It’s difficult once you’re immersed in a country--and in the competitive editor-pleasing-world of pitching and selling stories--to not follow the pack by reporting on the stories that already exist, even harder to remember how eager people back home are for a new kind of news.

This entry will be the first of weekly first-person behind-the-scenes updates and reflections from my travels in Pakistan and I’m hoping our readers can help keep me on point (see lofty intentions above) and communicate what elements of Pakistan’s culture, politics, and people you’re interested in hearing about. So together we can face down the fear factor and start finding out about what really is going on in the world.

Now time to logoff, shut down and sort through those headscarves upstairs.