From Dean Yates — Since becoming head of journalist mental health and wellbeing strategy in May 2017, nothing has troubled me more than how to make this campaign mean something for local staff in hostile environments. Having lived and worked in Baghdad during the worst of the Iraq War, I got an inkling of what it’s like for these men and women and their families.

Nick Macfie, a veteran Reuters journalist, did a stint in Kabul in 2018. He offers a snapshot below on the lives of our Afghan colleagues. But our challenge applies not just to war zones. My homeland, Australia, has a broad social safety net and a growing acceptance that it’s OK to talk about mental illness. But many countries don’t. How can we make our mental health push work for everyone in Reuters? How can we do more for our staff in hostile environments? Do we take the time to listen to them?

As Nick said to me in an email: “(My Afghan colleagues) really seemed to enjoy talking and appreciated my taking the time. There is an avenue to pursue there, methinks.”

Read on for more from Nick. 

*Please note, this blog contains a visual image of injury and death*

By Nick Macfie

Afghan journalists live with suicide bombings and other attacks on an almost daily basis and have done so since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Before that it was 22 years of artillery and rocket-propelled grenades reducing the city to rubble.

They have lived their whole lives with war. They have seen loved ones or friends killed or wounded. And they get on with their lives, laughing and joking with colleagues, shrugging off concerns about their emotional welfare and leaving me wondering how they cope.

Photographer Omar Sobhani explained how he miraculously escaped death in April last year in a bomb blast in Kabul that had killed Shah Marai, chief photographer for rival news agency Agence France-Presse, standing next to him.

Omar lost an old friend and a piece of shrapnel had entered the back of his shoulder and poked out the front. Yet within seconds, he was taking pictures of the journalists killed in the second of two explosions which he had escaped because he was standing in front of a concrete pillar.

The shrapnel was taken out in hospital and he was sent to India where he underwent physical and psychological treatment for 10 days. He returned to Kabul and three days later was back at work.

How does he do it day after day? What about the debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that we hear so much about in the West and that can take a lifetime to control, if not cure?

“Our whole life is war,” Omar says. “We were born and grew up in this conflict. In my opinion I am normal. For the specialist, maybe I am not.”

“We are not 100 percent normal because we have not seen good things, especially as agency photographers. We have to confront these incidents. We have seen pieces of humans. We have walked in the blood of humans.”

Omar has not heard of PTSD and does not take drugs or alcohol to get through the day. Nor do his colleagues, he says. But he admits he can get angry easily.

He was given medication for the healing of his wound and to relieve stress.

“It doesn't help,” he says. “We have to manage ourselves. There is no choice. Lenin said a man is a hero if he survives the revolution. We have survived four decades.”

Reuters reporter Rupam Jain, who has been based in Kabul for nearly a year, says as an Indian, she recognises the stoicism.

“All these problems like PTSD are problems the First World can afford to have,” she says, adding that the number one topic for conversation among visiting journalists was security – does your house have an armed guard? Do you have a safe room? Do you have grills on your windows?

“People in South Asia think that if you admit to having mental or emotional issues, you are seen to be weak or fragile. People don't understand emotional vulnerability is as important as physical vulnerability.

“In this side of the world, people don't see a breakdown, suffered in private, as a problem. In the West, people do. I am in the middle. I am sure people do have breakdowns here, but they will keep them to themselves. In front of the bathroom mirror.

“In public they will just become very quiet and lose enthusiasm.”

Colleague Qadir Sediqi has stepped on body parts and seen smoke rising from bodies on fire.

“I don't see any difference in me,” he says. “When I think about the incidents, I feel sad. But I don't see any negative impact.”

Sometimes when he is with family or friends, he says he finds his mind wandering. He doesn't know if it is stress-related.

“My attention is somewhere else. Just for 30 seconds or a minute. My family says: ‘Why aren't you listening to us? What are you doing?’ I don't know where my thinking goes, but it is very deep.”

Afterword by Dean Yates

How does he do it day after day?” Nick writes of Omar. It’s a good question. One of the things that struck me in the hostile environments I worked was the sense of mission among our local staff. They wanted to chronicle what was happening in their homeland and they wanted to world to know about it. Having that sort of purpose, I suspect, helps colleagues like Omar do what they do.

Omar also talks about the notion of normality. Our local colleagues in war zones, failed states and crisis-torn countries try to adapt. What other choice do they have? That doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy life. Iraqis loved to have fun. Coming together to eat Baghdad’s famous Masgouf fish was a regular dinner treat during my time in Iraq.

Reuters couldn’t cover Afghanistan or Iraq if it wasn’t for our local staff. The same goes for countries such as Venezuela or Zimbabwe. Our local staff are the bedrock of our journalism.

Nick Macfie has been a copy editor on the Asia Desk since 2009, often helping out in bureaux when a big story is breaking or when short-staffed. He spent three weeks in Kabul in June last year, his first visit since shortly after the fall of the Taliban in 2001.

This blog post first circulated internally on March 26, 2019.

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