Reporters on the Job

• Rwandan Easter: Reporters, like most people, often draw broad conclusions based on their personal experiences. Correspondent Mary Wiltenburg admits that while covering the 10th anniversary of Rwandan genocide she was developing an anti-Catholic bias, until she met the Rev. Jean Bosco Gakirage. "Coming from Boston - where I'd reported on victims of Catholic clergy sex abuse - to Rwanda, where the same church played such a devastating role in the 1994 genocide, I had been starting to feel the church could do nothing right," says Mary. "My unsuccessful attempts to interview Bishop Augustine Misago, who Emmanuel Murangira claims sent him to die [this page], left me more frustrated.

"Then, I met Father Gakirage, a Rwandan missionary priest returning here for the first time since the genocide, after spending most of the past 10 years in the Amazon. His parents had been massacred in his childhood church in Rwanda. I am convinced that Father Gakirage has forgiven their killers as deeply as it is possible to forgive. Talking with him, I suddenly saw not only how the Catholic Church might have become so powerful in Rwanda before the killings, but what power for healing it might still have here."

• Safe in Karbala: Staff writer Dan Murphy marched the last three miles into Karbala Saturday (page 1) in the company of tens of thousands of Iraqi pilgrims. He and an American woman got a lot of funny looks, but were well-received - until they got close to the city, when militias affiliated with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani took them into custody. Their boss said: "We're not keeping you here because we don't trust you. We're keeping you here because we've decided Karbala is too dangerous for you." Then he assigned two militiamen to shadow the pair for the day.

David Clark Scott
World editor