In 2008 I was fortunate enough to participate in the Rallye Aicha des Gazelles. The rally is the sole women’s only rally challenge in the world – across Moroccan terrain teams navigate with nothing but a compass, ruler, and 1950s survey maps to seek out checkpoints. The rally is not a speed challenge – but rather a strategy game and true test of physical and mental toughness. The winner finds all the checkpoints with the shortest covered distance. There is also a winner for the least amount of petrol used / most checkpoints found. It is a tough tough challenge.
While we did the rally, we had two American reporters follow us for a few days. Marissa Katz was freelance reporting for ESPN, and Lynsey Addario joined her as a freelance photographer. Lynsey took the assignment as a “respite”, as a break from her usual work, which is photographing war zones.
For me, the rally was extraordinary and life changing. And it gave me the opportunity to meet some incredible people, including Lynsey. Lynsey is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin Madison and picked up photography after graduating, with no formal training. She is one of the top war zone photographers in the world, covering Afghanistan under the Taliban in 2000, Iraq as an embed in 2004, and visiting countries and conflicts most people rarely pay attention to (such as Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Since I met her in 2008, she has been a part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, she was named a MacArthur Fellow, and she made Oprah’s list of the top 20 women of influence.
Sometimes you meet the most extraordinary people in the most unusual of circumstances.
To me, Lynsey is the photographer who captured my rally partner Caroline flying over the dunes of Merzouga. She photographed us surrounded by children as we handed out of military ration food. She is someone with whom I shared a laugh over a campfire, who understood how tough the rally was, who saw firsthand how the rally changes people – she witnessed how the rally made me a stronger person.
Me and Caroline (Team 147), as photographed by Lynsey, somewhere in Morocco, March 2008
Lynsey said to us that the Rallye des Gazelles was one of the hardest jobs she had ever undertaken, far harder than being an embed in Afghanistan, for example.
But that was in 2008 – well before her current assignment covering the civil war in Libya for the New York Times.
In an interview only a week ago, Lynsey said that the conflict in Libya was the most dangerous she had been in to date.
This morning I woke up to the news that Lynsey, along with three other journalists from the New York Times, had gone missing in Libya.
It is through press freedom that we learn about the world around us, the ways that conflict is developing, and the ways in which conflict influences decisions and actions – be it the actions our governments take, or in my case the actions and thinking that I need to bring to my job, to anticipate the way in which conflict will impact energy markets and trade. On Monday this week I woke up lamenting the fact that the government of Yemen had expelled journalists working in the country for “visa problems”.
Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims a right to freedom of expression:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference, and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.”
What would our world be like without press freedom? What perspective would we lack? How would we be able to judge the actions of our governments? How would we be able to make the “right” decisions?
People like Lynsey gives us the tools to see the world, the perspective to make our decisions.
Please keep her and the other captured journalists in your thoughts.
I am in awe of women like Lindsey who feel so passionate about their life work to risk their own life to do it. I will keep them in my prayers, please keep us updated with information. With all that is happening in the world right now I struggle to keep up to date with the overwhelming amount of news and fear that important stories like this one is getting lost.
Donna, thanks so much for sharing this post. I have been following the Libyan developments and noticed Lynsey’s pictures – I was nervous and sad when I heard of the capture and very much relieved when they were released. I especially loved Lynsey’s NYT blog post following the article all four journalists wrote post-release – she asked not to have more sympathy than her colleagues, because everyone was treated just as badly. Because of all the muckracking and sensationalist media we see, it’s easy to forget that journalism IS an honorable profession, where people do work many don’t in the name of knowledge and information sharing. We all enter journalism school wanting to be reporters like these, and not all of us make it.