She reported from 25 of the 40 countries she covered in Africa and, on average, was on the road about 170 days a year, with Johannesburg as her home base.
“I was always away or coming back,” she said, adding that she was constantly armed with a mini-DVD camera, a laptop and satellite telephones. Sara would shoot the stories, do a rough edit on her laptop and at night, hook it up to the satellite phones and send the ABC five five-second shots, as well as her voice commentary. “As long as you can charge your batteries every couple of days, you can do it from anywhere,” she said. including from Darfur or Chad.
Now Sara is in Boston as the International Women’s Media Foundation’s 2007-08 Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow. She'll study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other Boston-area universities, and possibly spend time at the Boston Globe or New York Times.
Sara has recuperated from the extreme exhaustion she felt when she left Africa and looks forward to building on her on-the-ground knowledge about Africa to learning more about the historical roots of today’s crisis situations and consulting specialists in the Boston area about solutions.
“When you’re a journalist on the ground, you rarely get to trace problems back to their source,” she said. “You’re dealing with discrimination of these women, in that village. But you don’t know how it started, how it might be turned around. I want to know more about how you cope with things, how they change it, has it been changed in the past.”
She is still working on slowing her workaholic pace: “I can hardly talk to someone without thinking of a sound byte,” she said. “Even when my Mum calls, I’m taking notes.”
After Sara left Africa, she spent a year working on a book about women in Africa – called Gogo Mama – which was published in July. Until recently, she anchored the ABC’s national rural news program, Landline.
Sara came from a town of 800 in rural Australia and started her career in community radio out in the bush for Outback Radio. She moved to the ABC in 1993, where she covered agriculture and then went on to report from Adelaide and Melbourne and then to Canberra to cover national politics. In 2000 Sara became the first woman to be appointed to the ABC's Africa bureau. She had no desire to fight to get to London or Washington.
“No, I’m not a political animal,” she said. “A village makes a lot more sense to me.”
Knowing about agriculture helped immensely on stories about food security and drought, about areas where chemicals had wiped out nutrients in the soil, where HIV/AIDS had killed the productive farmers “and a grandmother is trying to scratch a living from what she can on the land.”
In addition, Sara said, covering agriculture in a country as vast as Australia was good preparation for being a foreign correspondent. “You’re on your own; you have to generate your own stories.”
Sara did that and then some. Asked about drawbacks or problems, she cited only one: solitude. “If you see hugely disturbing things, you have that with you for weeks and weeks before you can get back to a home base and talk about it with colleagues.”
That was especially true with a genocide story in Rwanda. Sara had covered parts of the story before and seen many human remains. But on this trip, the caretaker of a school that now is a memorial site to the massacre threw open the doors to a classroom containing hundreds of bodies and told her to film what she wanted.
“I filmed 45 minutes of these bodies still in position – mothers holding babies…you could still see their hair. People holding their child who had a bullet hole through the head…I got a very strong reaction to that. It was very unsettling. If you’re filming that story, you’re looking down the lens of that camera, and then you’re back to it at night and editing it.”
As always, Sara used recreational running to help relieve the stress. But what helped most was “writing the story and getting it out,” including talking about it on a weekly ABC spot where correspondents could describe behind-the-scenes events.
Asked how she regenerated herself, Sara said, “I had a very strong sense of purpose on why I was there. ...I never felt this was stupid or a waste of time. I always had that to hang onto.”
“And you’ve got an outlet all the time for what you see,” she said. When upset at what she found, she could stifle her anger at officials and tell herself “I’m going to get this story out. Listen, while you sleep, I’m going to beam the story out to Australia, and you can’t do anything about it.”
Sara had her own rules of the road. She traveled light, with just a backpack. “And I’d pack my underwear over the satellite phones,” to conceal them. “I would separate my gear so they couldn’t ever see the whole thing.” In recent years, locals have accused foreign correspondents of endangering their safety by insisting on going into places the locals knew were hazardous. Sara said she hired local interpreters and drivers but if any one of them “didn’t feel comfortable about going this road we’d just pull the pin and not do it.” She kept in close contact with Sydney and said if “it was really dicey,” she would go in with “someone else, like the BBC or Sky News.”
Looking back, she says her own “lessons learned” include “to be very passionate about what you do. Give it your best shot. If your basic skills are there, you’ll do well.
She talked to producers regularly, picking up signals on how stories were going. Another key rule: never be afraid to ask “if you weren’t sure about something.”
Sara expects to take another foreign assignment after her Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship. She looks toward the coming year as a rare break from tight deadlines to replenish her skills and expand her knowledge.
“That will be just fascinating to me,” she said. “It will be great to bounce some ideas around, just to talk about what you’ve seen, with some experienced journalists.”