DON GONYEA, HOST:
I want to start this next story with a recording from more than 30 years ago.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: In a tiny outdoor kitchen, Aimable Uwurukundo makes dinner for her husband, Emmanuel, and their young son, Christian (ph). They're Tutsis, the minority ethnic group in Rwanda.
GONYEA: You're hearing NPR's Jackie Northam in Rwanda in 1994, back when she reported for the CBC. She'd hitchhiked there just days after the genocide began. The tape survived on a cassette she recently rediscovered while packing up her office ahead of retirement.
NORTHAM: Emmanuel knew that, being Tutsis, he and his family were in danger.
I guess, in many ways, I got my real start because I covered the genocide in Rwanda, right from the very beginning to the very end.
GONYEA: For this week's Reporter's Notebook, we're listening back with one of NPR's longest-serving international correspondents about how she got there, what kept her going and why some stories never really left her.
NORTHAM: Well, I got to tell you, I've never had any formal education in journalism. I had no experience when I set off from northern Alberta, Canada, to London. But I was determined, Don, to be a foreign correspondent. It was just - that's who I wanted to be. I wanted to be where the action was. And whenever I saw an opportunity to forward that, I would grab onto it.
GONYEA: Jackie followed history wherever it unfolded, from the fall of communism in Eastern Europe to the first Gulf War in Saudi Arabia, then Cambodia, Kenya and even the Arctic.
NORTHAM: When I started, there were no cellphones, no internet. You sent your material back by unscrewing the mouthpiece on a phone and using...
GONYEA: Oh, yeah.
NORTHAM: ...Alligator clips, you know. And then many years down the road, they had satellite phones, but, you know, they were size of a compact car.
GONYEA: You walk in some business or some office, and you beg them to let you use your phone.
NORTHAM: Or the military. Yeah (laughter).
GONYEA: Exactly. I'm sure people wonder how you do what you do. Can you pick a big story you were deployed on and maybe give us some of the nuts and bolts? How did you get there? How did you get in? And how did you get out? How did you file?
NORTHAM: I think it would still be Rwanda. I had just moved to Nairobi. I'd been there about two months, just enough time to find a place to live, and CBC - Canadian Broadcasting Corporation - called me and asked me if I could go into Rwanda. A plane carrying the presidents of both Rwanda and neighboring Burundi had crashed, and at that moment, it unleashed a long-planned, and let me say, well-orchestrated genocide. Militias from the majority Hutu tribe were slaughtering Tutsis, and they were using mostly machetes, and they were clubbing people to death. So this was in 1994. It started in April. And I went in four days after it started.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Crying).
NORTHAM: A young woman suffering from deep machete wounds to her arms and stomach lies on a bloodied stretcher in a makeshift hospital room. Around her are almost a dozen other injured people who've just been carried in by Rwandan government soldiers.
We actually had to hitchhike in from Burundi. They had closed the airports in Rwanda, and we flew into Burundi. We found a French priest who would take us into Rwanda. It was an extraordinarily dangerous assignment.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
NORTHAM: Each day brings at least another 40 seriously wounded patients.
The rule of law had completely disappeared. We were vulnerable, as much as the Tutsis were at that time, the minority group that was being slaughtered. But, you know, once I got out - that first time I'd had a machete held to my neck - it was really dangerous. It was really disturbing, just slaughter that was going on, came out, went back to Nairobi, and at that point, I really had to decide, do I want to go back in? And it's difficult because it was so dangerous in there. But I just felt that if I'm sitting here in Nairobi and I want to pretend - I want to be a foreign correspondent, you know what? And that story is happening next door, and there's so few reporters going in that I had to go back in. That really has - was the most difficult place to operate in, as you can imagine.
GONYEA: In the middle of that answer, you just said, along with other things, that you had a machete held to your neck.
NORTHAM: Yeah. Yeah.
GONYEA: How did that happen? What were the circumstances? Talk about that moment.
NORTHAM: Yeah. Well, we had traveled up, after we hitchhiked in - somebody rented us a car. The four of us - myself and three men - you know, when we were going in, we just saw this wave of humanity going the other way. They were trying to escape. And that really says something about what you'd do for a living, when you were going one way and, you know, the sea of humanity is going the other. But we started seeing roadblocks, checkpoints all the way up and a lot of dead bodies on the side of the road. And as we got closer to Kigali, the capital city, we were stopped. And they surrounded our car. And they thought that I was Belgian. I'm blonde and blue-eyed. And they hate the Belgians. They'd colonize Rwanda brutally. And, yeah, they wanted to kill me. And, yeah.
GONYEA: How did you get out of that? Did you have a Canadian passport or...
NORTHAM: I did. It took me a long time to try and get that out of my jean pockets - I - my shirt. My fingers were completely numb, and couldn't - I was shaking so badly, of course. But what saved me was one of the guys I was traveling with Jean-Marc (ph). He was AP -Associated Press photographer, and he was French, and they loved the French in Rwanda. And, you know, he just kept talking to this Hutu militiaman with his - you know, with a machete to my throat and just (speaking French). He was just laughing, joking with him, keeping it going, just trying to make friends with them. And it worked. I got my passport out. He saw I was Canadian, and Jean-Marc did his magic, and he pulled back, and we went through. Yeah.
GONYEA: Did you ever seriously reconsider your career choice after that point?
NORTHAM: No.
GONYEA: No.
NORTHAM: No, no, no, no. I've never ever reconsidered my career choice.
GONYEA: So there's a recent study that says global conflicts are on the rise, the highest level since World War II. How does that impact the work that you do? - the fact that there are so many conflicts affecting so many people in so many places.
NORTHAM: Well, it's tough. I mean, if we look at just recent things with the war in Gaza, it's very difficult at the beginning. All eyes are on that. Everybody's interested in it. They want to know all the bits and turns that go on. The problem is it's a protracted conflict, and fatigue sets in, whether it's, you know, for the listeners or the viewers or the readers in that, where it becomes incremental. And they don't lose interest, but they tune out in some ways, and the challenge is to find ways of, you know, informing people without making it sound repetitive. But, you know, it's really hard when you do these stories - and I've been doing them for so long - you know, just to - that it can get to you. It really can. You just see suffering. You see sort of senselessness. You see cruelty, that type of thing. It is a challenge to report on this stuff.
GONYEA: It's almost like you can take cover under the fact that you have a deadline, right? But then you hit the deadline, and then it hits you. Is that kind of what you're saying?
NORTHAM: It's even more than that. I mean, it's 40 years I've been doing this stuff. It becomes cumulative. You know, it builds up inside you. And I just - I was telling somebody the other day, frankly, I have no capacity for reading or watching or hearing anything sad, certainly anything violent or that. I can't do it. It's hard to read a newspaper because there's just so much bad news, isn't there? You know? And it just doesn't seem to be going away.
GONYEA: Well, Jackie, I thank you for your work and for your friendship.
NORTHAM: Yeah. Thank you, Don. It's been great working with you.
GONYEA: That was my longtime colleague Jackie Northam, who's retiring this month from NPR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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