SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Reporting on a war can be a grueling job. Not only is it difficult editorially, it also takes a tremendous toll emotionally. And that is true for both reporters as well as audiences. It's fatiguing. It's upsetting. And oftentimes, the natural instinct is just to turn away, to turn off the radio. That is why the most powerful stories of war are not just of destruction and rising death tolls, but tell of humanity, of optimism and hope. NPR recently aired a story like that. It was from reporter Ari Daniel, who visited a clinic and captured a moving scene between a doctor and his patient - a young girl from Gaza.
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ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: It's clear in an instant - Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah is just really good with kids.
GHASSAN ABU-SITTAH: (Non-English language spoken).
KENZI MADHOUN: (Non-English language spoken).
DANIEL: Here at his weekly clinic at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, he's meeting 6-year-old Kenzi Madhoun for the first time.
KENZI: (Non-English language spoken).
DANIEL: Kenzi has eyes the color of dark chocolate. Her face is framed beneath a pink straw hat that covers a scar above her hairline. On her left hand, I see the drawing of a little heart. Her right arm, though, is missing.
DETROW: Kenzi Madhoun was brought to Lebanon to see Dr. Abu-Sittah. She and her family were hoping he could help her lead a normal life.
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ABU-SITTAH: The biggest question is, how can I improve the quality of that remnant of her upper arm? Because that is the determinant of the quality of the prosthetic that she'll get.
DETROW: But treating an injury like Kenzi's is complex, especially when it comes to treating children.
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KENZI: (Non-English language spoken).
ABU-SITTAH: (Non-English language spoken).
DANIEL: The doctor escorts the father and daughter into an exam room. Kenzi walks confidently with the group of adults. Abu-Sittah says that during his assessment he'll not just be looking at Kenzi as the 6-year-old she is today but also as the 18-year-old she'll become.
ABU-SITTAH: You are trying to reconstruct a moving object, which is the growing body that always outgrows the injured part.
DETROW: This story illustrates both the tragedy of war and the power of a child's voice. So for this week's Reporter's Notebook, I wanted to ask Ari Daniel how he struck that balance in his reporting and also his writing. He said it came down to finding the right characters.
DANIEL: Really, for this story, what I knew I needed to make it really work and for the dynamic that Dr. Abu-Sittah is trying to achieve with the kids here - you know, there's this - certainly, he's helping them medically, but he's also - he's accompanying them during a challenging time in their lives.
DETROW: Yeah.
DANIEL: And so I wanted to find a child where that relationship was evident. And that, Scott, that's a matter of luck...
DETROW: Right.
DANIEL: ...Because I didn't know who was going to walk through the door. And so I got my gear together, and I stepped into his clinic. And actually, while I was in the waiting room, I saw Kenzi out of the corner of my eye. I was immediately struck by her. She was wearing her pink hat, her white dress. She just had a kind of energy and personality. So then later, when I was in the room with her and him, and I saw that relationship emerging, I realized that Kenzi was going to be the perfect fit for this story.
DETROW: Yeah. Can you - like, when I'm reporting - and I know this is especially the case for you because you're covering so many sensitive topics. Like, I think especially I have this, like, responsibility when I'm reporting on somebody and telling the story of somebody who's not, like, a senator or somebody who's used to being reported on - right? - to be clear about what you're trying to do, to be transparent with them and try to be patient and to help them trust you to tell their story. And I think that's hard with anybody, but it's especially hard when you're covering children and you're telling children's stories. Can you tell us a bit about your approach of talking to Kenzi, talking to Kenzi's family and making sure you were doing this the right way?
DANIEL: A huge part of what I think about in terms of my reporting is establishing trust with the people that I'm interviewing and respecting what they're saying to me, what they're offering, and recognizing that whatever they choose to offer, that that's a gift - and especially when it comes to a child in these particular circumstances. I want to make sure that I'm sensitive to what they're saying, both verbally and nonverbally. And a big part of that is recruiting a team that I can rely on. And so I credit my interpreter, Angie Mourad (ph), with helping form that connection with Kenzi. Right out of the gate when we met her, Angie approached Kenzi and approached her father, Adam, and just started talking to them and explaining who we were, but also just being playful with Kenzi.
Very early on in our interaction in the clinic, Angie showed Kenzi a trick where she can balance a pen above her lip, between her nose and her lip. And Kenzi watched with wide eyes and then immediately duplicated it and was parading around the room and showing off how she could also hold the pen just like that. And she did it for long enough that when it finally dropped, we all laughed and applauded. I didn't have that on - I mean, I was recording, but I didn't have that well miked because part of what I was doing was hanging back at the beginning to allow us to establish a rapport with Kenzi and her dad that didn't involve me immediately having a microphone, you know, an inch from their faces. So that really helped create that trust.
DETROW: I'd like to listen to one moment from the piece together and then talk about several decisions that you made and how you were thinking about this important moment in the story, how you wrote about it, how the listener heard it. This is the scene where Kenzi is recounting the moment where she lost her arm in an airstrike.
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DANIEL: Kenzi tells me she was sitting in the garden with her grandfather in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza.
KENZI: (Through interpreter) We heard things, and then we thought it was fireworks, but it wasn't.
DANIEL: It was an airstrike. The force of the explosion propelled her into the air.
KENZI: (Through interpreter) The missile took me up.
DANIEL: Kenzi felt like she was flying, like a superhero.
KENZI: (Non-English language spoken) Superman or Batman.
DANIEL: When she landed, she lost consciousness. Her father, Adam Madhoun, wasn't with her, but a journalist friend called to tell him of the attack, that Kenzi had been pulled from the rubble.
ADAM MADHOUN: (Through interpreter) They told me that Kenzi died.
DANIEL: Madhoun rushed to his daughter and arrived an hour later to discover Kenzi was still alive...
MADHOUN: (Non-English language spoken).
DANIEL: ..."Like a phoenix," he says.
MADHOUN: (Non-English language spoken).
DANIEL: But she was severely wounded - a fractured pelvis and skull and a missing arm.
DETROW: I just thought that was a really powerful piece of radio. And the way that you start out with a kid's point of view, I think, made it especially powerful. The way that she says she was - well, you're paraphrasing that she said she flew like Superman. You know, this is a horrifying moment, but we're hearing about it through the eyes and mind of a kid.
DANIEL: Yeah. Scott, I think this particular moment in the story, it's a key piece to understanding the whole arc of the story. We learn early on in the piece that she's missing her right arm, but we don't know why until this moment.
DETROW: Yeah.
DANIEL: To me, there are a few words in this passage that leap out. One of them is the word garden. It just - it conjures a scene of tranquility, a scene that's about to be upended. That word was important - that she was with her grandfather, where she was. The part about her being a superhero - for me, that was very powerful because this was a way that a little child understood what happened to her...
DETROW: Yeah.
DANIEL: ...How she perceived the force of an explosion, which is that she was lifted into the air. And the way she made sense of it in her little mind was that she was flying like Superman or Batman. And in that moment, she says Superman or Batman, and I knew that the listener would understand those words in English...
DETROW: Yeah.
DANIEL: ...And so I made sure that we hear her say that. With radio, sometimes you just need a couple of key visual words. And in this scene, I feel like those - the words I just described really, for me, lifted this into a very precise, painful and memorable moment.
DETROW: There's a lot of things I've been thinking a lot about in how we cover this ongoing war and how we get this story to our listeners. And I think this next question kind of hits on them. I hit pause listening back to the story, and I noted that this description of the initial attack that injured her takes place five minutes and 30 seconds into an eight-minute piece. Why did you decide to backload this critical information so late into the story?
DANIEL: There are lots of different ways to structure a story. There's no one right way.
DETROW: Yeah.
DANIEL: For me, I didn't think I needed to be specific at the beginning of the story with how she got that injury.
DETROW: Right.
DANIEL: And, in fact, I think that by delaying it, I'm also hoping that the listener wonders a bit about what happened, wonders whether we're going to share what happened, and so then they're encouraged to listen further. The other thing, I think, that's important is that Kenzi isn't just a person with a missing arm. She is a girl with interests and personality. I think the power of journalism and certainly radio storytelling is to bring an issue to life through the lens of a single person or a couple of people. By fleshing their story out in detail, one can try to understand better the broader situation.
DETROW: Ari Daniel, thank you for talking to us about how you put the story together. I really appreciate it.
DANIEL: It was my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me, Scott.
(SOUNDBITE OF TAEYEON SONG, "I (FEAT. VERBAL JINT)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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