Reporters on the Job
• Sudan Safety: In a displaced-person camp near the Sudan-Chad border, correspondent Dan Morrison found former residents of a village called Gokur. The villagers said they'd been living in the camp for two years - since abandoning Gokur during a wave of janjaweed attacks. They were afraid to go home.
The next day, Dan visited Gokur. Instead of a ghost town, he found another group of displaced Sudanese living there. They, too, had fled an attack. After running for a night, they reached the abandoned village, where the Sudanese Army had by now set up a camp. "The Army told us, 'stay here, we'll protect you.' So we did," said Adnan Mohamad, the leader of Gokur's new residents. "The complexity of the problem here is illustrated by this one village," says Dan. "Two years later, Mohamad's group of janjaweed victims lives safely in Gokur, while the original residents are afraid to return."
• Tea not Terrorism: Correspondent David Montero says that while he was reporting today's story about radical Islamist groups in Pakistan's earthquake area, he was struck by their hospitality. They insisted David stay for tea. His interpreter was nervous and told David to say he was Canadian if asked. But he was only asked his nationality once. "It's hard to say no to hospitality in general in Pakistan, but more so with these guys," David says. "This was the heartland of jihad in the past, and foreigners wouldn't have dared to sit and have tea here. But a lot has changed, and hopefully it's permanent."
David Clark Scott
World editor