Matt’s Reporter’s Notebook: Stuck in the Mud

By Matt Kielty

I was given specific advice before I left the country. Often, it was logistical – places to stay in Uganda, how to get around. And then there was something my editor, Didi Schanche, offered up before I left, which was this: Be patient. She repeated it a couple times, an anecdote attached to each repetition. Be patient.

The advice that Didi gave me was practical. Reporting in Uganda was by far the most challenging thing I’ve done in my short career. I spent days stalking the halls of the ministry of health, trying to snag an interview with an official, jumping through every bureaucratic hoop I was told to jump through to no avail. Up north, there were the roads – pure clay, pockmarked, topographically diverse. One day, my driver, five local Acholi men and I spent four hours getting our Land Cruiser out of a muddy ditch. Patience was less a virtue than it was a necessity.

And, I want to make a point here, hopefully without sounding scarily pretentious. And the point is that inherent in this fellowship – at its foundation, more or less – is this massive amount of patience, a patience that allows for chaos like the above to unfold without derailing everything. And then another sort of patience, one that I cherished the most, which was the patience for story.

This is where I’ll probably start sounding pretentious, misquoting Ira Glass. The quote I’m searching my mind for, I think, comes from Ira’s stump speech for graduation ceremonies. It was something about taking chances and hoping for luck, something like, “you have to walk around in the rain to get struck by lighting.”

In Uganda, I sat with a guy who gets paid by the government to spend two days a week catching black flies, the size of gnats, off his body with a small vial from sunup to sundown. I flew in a prop plane (“there are no regulations here,” our co-pilot said as he flipped some switches, then grabbed the yoke) and bomb dived the Aswa River as the pilot flooded the rapids with insecticide; I spoke to an herbalist. I spoke to child psychologists and read about mass hysterias. I ran at any scene or tape I could that I was curious about.

I guess to tie this together, what I want to say is that I feel like so much of the John Alexander Project’s mission stems from that sort of patience. It’s a rare and incredible thing for a young journalist to just have the chance to travel to a far-flung (using the foundation language!) or remote place and file a story, but even rarer to be given such a long leash, a chance to keep wandering around in the rain. —MK