AP Reporter Traveled From Here To Africa To Be Your Guide To The News

Live your last moments. You are going to die.

A Zairian soldier spoke those words to Associated Press reporter Karin Davies and photographer Jean-Marc Bouju last fall. "We believed him," says Davies, a Seattle-area native.

It wasn't the first time she had faced danger on the job. In just the past year, she had been detained at gunpoint three times covering war-torn Central Africa.

Nonetheless, speaking to a national convention of newspaper publishers last week, Davies joked, "A rebel army makes me a lot less nervous than all of you out there."

During each annual meeting of the Newspaper Association of America, AP President Louis Boccardi assembles a panel of reporters to share their insights and experiences with the publishers. Despite her disclaimer, Davies positively stole the show last week in Chicago as she calmly talked of the rigors and risks of her work, the fine line between life and death in a war zone.

Having attended several of these sessions, I've always come away inspired by the hard work and dedication of these AP journalists and the organization they serve. Even more so this year, because one of the panelists was a longtime friend.

Davies knew she wanted to be a journalist when she was 6 years old and published her first bylined article for a newsletter at Arrowhead Elementary School in Kenmore. She continued to work on student newspapers at Kenmore Junior High and Inglemoor High, and covered Little League Baseball for the North Shore Citizen in her early teen years.

At the University of Washington, she worked for the Daily. She served a legislative internship in Olympia for The Seattle Times. She served another internship at The Times after graduating from the UW in 1979.

From there, it was off to Alaska, where Davies worked for The Associated Press, the Juneau Empire and the Anchorage Daily News. The Daily News assigned her to cover Washington, D.C., where she later signed on with United Press International, covering Congress.

Her time with UPI included two years covering politics in Boston and three years in London covering everything from the royal family to the crumbling of the Eastern Bloc. In 1991, she joined The Associated Press bureau in London, one of 236 AP bureaus worldwide which employ 2,600 reporters, editors and photographers.

Davies told the publishers in Chicago that she was supposed to be covering the sidelines of the Wimbledon tennis tournament in 1994 when she got a call to go to war-torn Rwanda. Not wanting to worry her parents, Hal and Pride Davies of Kenmore, she decided not to tell them about the temporary assignment.

Within days a photographer at her side was shot, and both were knocked down. The photographer would survive, but Davies didn't know that as she cradled him in her arms, covered in his blood.

"I was afraid he would die if I didn't do everything right," she recalls.

Another photographer captured the moment on film, and the picture was transmitted to newspapers around the globe. Back home, a friend called her mother to say Karin's picture was in The Seattle Times. "And my mother said, `Oh, at Wimbledon?' " Davies said.

She says the moral of that story is, "Never go into a war zone without telling your parents, because they're going to find out."

Davies says she fell in love with Africa on that trip. Covering the exodus of refugees, she wanted to be based there full time to talk to people directly and help tell their story.

Just over a year ago, AP assigned her to the bureau in Nairobi, Kenya. She and Jean-Marc Bouju live together there, but they have traveled throughout the region for stories and pictures. It is a tough life in a world of civil wars, fetid refugee camps, starvation and even an outbreak of the Ebola virus in 1995.

It's hard to imagine the challenge of witnessing, much less writing about genocide. Davies recalls the sickening, sweet smell of a thousand corpses rotting in the sun, a landscape of tangled limbs.

Doing the journalism is about 10 percent of the effort; the rest is just surviving. She and Bouju, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work two years ago, have suffered malaria and dysentery. They have been weak from hunger and thirst more than once.

"There are no rules in Africa," Davies says, explaining how she has come to be detained at gunpoint. One minute you have permission to enter an area; the next minute your gear, passport and press credentials are stripped from you. Extortion is common.

In Zaire last fall, Davies and Bouju were cleared to be at the front lines. But as rebels advanced on the town of Goma, undisciplined government soldiers became terrified. When a mortar shell landed close by, one of them slapped Bouju and screamed, "You Americans, you French, this is all your fault."

They were taken to a military camp where angry soldiers called them mercenaries, took their belongings and forced them into a tent. That's when they were told to prepare to die.

Fortunately, a commanding officer who recognized them happened by and said he would try to help. They were freed unharmed about 10 hours after the incident started.

Davies is philosophical about the hardships and risks. "I signed up for this. I never expected to be doing what I'm doing now, but I really love it. I love the stories that people have to tell and being a guide for people who aren't there."

Those stories have included Somalia's right of passage, the circumcision of young girls; the fight to stop poachers and to save the African black rhino in Kenya; the role of cattle in the lives of the Dinka people in Sudan; Zairian Boy Scouts who do good deeds although they must meet secretly because the ruling dictator has banned their association.

Stories like these are made known throughout the world because of journalists such as Karin Davies and Jean-Marc Bouju.

They are two reasons AP is the world's greatest news service.

Stories like theirs are why we have added space to the A section of The Seattle Times. It's been a week since we started giving you more national and international news. Let us know what you think.

Inside The Times appears each Sunday. If you have a comment about news coverage, write to Michael R. Fancher, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111, call 464-3310, or send e-mail to: mfan-new@seatimes.com.