I had been doing a lot of traveling, had traveled through the Middle East, and in particular had gone — this was 1982 — had gone to a town called Hamah, in Syria, where about 30,000 people had been wiped out as part of a suppressed insurrection. The center of the town had been completely destroyed. It was rubble, this big, huge, vast area of rubble. And I found some survivors who wanted to tell their story. I couldn’t speak any Arabic, they couldn’t speak any English or any French, so we couldn’t communicate. That experience really made me think that if I wanted to become a journalist, that one of the key skills that would help in that career would be Arabic language, ’cause so few journalists speak it, yet a lot of things happen in the Arabic-speaking world. And so I had applied to study Arabic in Cairo, at the American University in Cairo, and the same week that program came through — my acceptance there came through and Harvard Law School came through. The Cairo program would essentially take me toward a career in journalism, I thought, and the Harvard Law School to a career maybe as a law professor. So I thought about it, agonized about it, and then decided that Cairo sounded like a lot more fun.