Nicholas Kristof Interview (page: 7 / 7) Journalist, Author & Columnist	Print Interview

The fact that you traveled to Syria while you were studying at Oxford is unusual for Americans of your generation. You must have already had a lot of curiosity about the Third World.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Nicholas Kristof: I have a lot of wanderlust. I had found, really when I was at Oxford, just the excitement of entering different worlds, different cultures. On my first vacation from Oxford, that's when I got stuck behind martial law in Poland, and then at the end of that trip I went to Morocco. I remember waking up in the morning and hearing the call of the muezzin from the mosque, the call to prayer, and just feeling it was really a different civilization, being really excited by that. So I tended to do a lot of traveling from Oxford, and I found it in many ways a better learning experience than anything that I had done in the classroom. And that was one of the -- again -- the attractions of journalism. The sense that if you want to learn about the world, that one of the best ways to do that is journalism, rather than through the academic route.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

When did your bout with malaria occur?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Nicholas Kristof: There was one trip I made to Congo in 1997 to cover the civil war there. The UN had agreed to fly in a bunch of reporters. They didn't want to use one of their own planes, because it was a war zone, but they found a private plane and a Texan pilot, a wild and crazy Texan who had been flying drugs in from Colombia into the U.S. at a hundred feet above sea level. And finally that got too hot for him, so he relocated to Africa to fly into war zones for anybody who would pay him. And we ended up crashing. We ended up being in a plane crash flying into the Congo and that was scary, because we knew, we had about 20 minutes when we were losing control of the plane, lost hydraulics. You couldn't dump fuel, because you dump fuel with the hydraulics. Finally we crash landed. I was okay. But then I thought, well, maybe when I leave the Congo, I'm not sure I want to fly with some crazy pilot again. I looked at the map and there was a road going out that had recently been repaired by one of the rebel armies to go in. So I went, I know, I'll drive out. So I hired a vehicle. We tried to drive out that way. This road was just in the middle of nowhere. No nothing. Three wars going on. Three different rebel armies fighting their way along this at various times.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

And then I was chased by one of these rebel groups for a week, trying to leave on that road.

A week?

Nicholas Kristof: For a week. They had one vehicle and they chased us, and we had a slightly better vehicle, so we managed to stay ahead. In the course of that I got malaria. It was a quite adventurous three-week period in the Congo.

How were you treated for malaria? Did you have to stay there?

Nicholas Kristof: Actually, I had just returned to Tokyo where I was based. Then in the evening I felt the classic symptoms of malaria. Since I'd just come from the Congo, I knew that I was coming down with malaria.

What are the classic symptoms?

Nicholas Kristof: A fever, cold sweats, and kind of aches. And given the circumstances, I knew that it must be malaria.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. So I called up our Tokyo office manager and asked, I said, "I think I'm just coming down with malaria, can you just try to check around what hospital in Tokyo might be able to treat malaria?" And he said he would do that. Well, half an hour later I hear these sirens in the distance, and they come closer and closer, and I see them stopping at my building. A little bit later there's a pounding on the door, and these guys in these bio-hazard suits come up, and they say, "Is this where the person with the tropical disease is?" The thing had gotten a little exaggerated, so they took me off to a hospital that evening. But the person there at night had no idea how to treat malaria, and they sort of looked at me and decided I probably wasn't going to die overnight and told me to come back the next morning. By that point the bio-hazard guys had disappeared, so I had to walk home. It was a wild time.

How do you treat malaria?

Nicholas Kristof: If you're wealthy, then you have a little pill, Larium or Methoquin, and you take that, and normally you get better pretty quickly. That's what happened with me. I was hospitalized for about a week and I was okay. The problem is that if you're anemic and your defenses are depleted, and you can't afford $10 worth of medicine, as happens in much of the world, then you die.

Is it highly contagious?

Nicholas Kristof: It's not contagious at all. It's transferable only by a mosquito biting you, and then biting somebody else.

It must have been a pretty miserable week.

Nicholas Kristof: Actually, malaria isn't so bad, because the ratio of sympathy to suffering is pretty good as diseases go. I wouldn't recommend it, but it's not particularly to be feared as long as you've got the money for the medicine.

You've visited all of the countries in what President Bush called the "Axis of Evil." What was that like?

Nicholas Kristof: I think I'm one of the few Americans to visit each of the "Axis of Evil" countries multiple times. I visited North Korea in 1989 and maybe 2005. I visited Iraq, under Saddam, and then during the war itself, and since then. And then Iran I visited in 2001 and then in maybe 2005.

So are they as evil as all that?

Nicholas Kristof: I'd have to say they really are. They're each evil in their own way.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. North Korea, I would have to say, is a world apart from any others. Saddam's Iraq, or Iran today, feel like the free world compared to North Korea. There's no country, I don't think, in history that has ever been like it, because it marries complete totalitarianism with modern technology. For example, you go to any home and there's a speaker on the wall, and the speaker wakes you up in the morning with a patriotic word of what's happening, and it puts you to bed at night. It completely controls you. Radios in North Korea, they don't have a dial that you tune, they have pre-set stations. You can listen to this station or that station or that one, but you can't tune it yourself. Everything is just completely and utterly controlled in a way that I have never seen remotely in any other country.

Could you tell us what the American Dream means to you?

Nicholas Kristof: I think it means two things to me. A combination of upward mobility through education -- and I think that's one reason why we have to do much, much better in improving the education system. I think we need to disaggregate it a little bit. In general, we talk about the American education system as a whole. The reality is that white suburban schools do a pretty good job of educating their kids. It's the inner city schools that are a disaster. We in America should be absolutely ashamed, with all the riches we have around us, that we can't bridge that gap and apply the necessary resources so that a child of color growing up in urban Chicago can get a better education. The second part of that, I think, is empathy. It's so important that kids growing up, and that all society, has some empathy for those who are less advantaged. It's often hard to figure out how to address these problems, including education. But you can't begin to address those problems unless you have some empathy for those who are less advantaged. I think with that combination of education and empathy we can hugely progress in quality of life all across the country.

You've had such a colorful and effective career so far, and you're still young. What would you tell a young person interested in journalism? What kind of advice would you give them?

Nicholas Kristof: Journalism has a very uncertain future right now. We need a business model. We know how to practice journalism, we don't know how to make money doing it. I've had such a wonderful time. I've learned so much doing this. It's a way you really can make a difference. I would encourage people to figure out nontraditional ways of practicing journalism -- video, sound. I'd also encourage them, if they go into it, not just to stir the pot, writing about "he said this" and "she said that" and of politics as a horse race. The real power of journalism isn't in just interviewing famous people and writing about it. It's in the spotlight that we have, in the shaping the agenda. The power that I think we should do more with is to highlight issues, illuminate the things that aren't getting the attention they need. That would be my advice.

Thank you for spending this time with us today.

You're welcome.

Nicholas Kristof Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7