On The Road

I’m in the middle of a long trip so why don’t we talk about travel. I’m having trouble finding an organizing thread to this post. I also started it in Bogota and finished it in Asuncion, Paraguay. Consistency issues? Here goes:

I’m writing this from a hostel in Bogota, where I’ve been for the last few days waiting for my visa to Paraguay to come through. I mentioned last post that I just landed three new assignments: two in Brazil, one in Paraguay.

As (lousy) luck would have it, both Brazil and Paraguay require entry visas from U.S. citizens (most Latin American countries don’t, which is one of many privileges we enjoy and often take for granted when traveling abroad; if you want to see reciprocal  justice in action, check out Brazil’s very up front reasoning for requiring visas of U.S. citizens: link). Since the visa process usually takes 3-5 business days, over which period you have to surrender your passport, getting two visas is both time intensive and expensive (embassies for both countries are located in Bogota, which, for me, means room and board while waiting for approval). Since you’re never sure exactly how long the process will take, it’s risky to book airline tickets too close to the date you submit your visa application. That risk is doubled when you’re talking about two visas. I didn’t have two or more weeks to pad around Bogota. That’s one reason I’m splitting these trips up. I’m on my way to Paraguay now and plan to travel to Brazil in late January.

The other reason is the mind-crushing avalanche of logistics. It’s hard enough to travel as a tourist. When you’re traveling as a writer on deadline, you’re also trying to set up interviews, fill daily schedules that account for taxis, bus trips, airplanes, cross town or cross country meetings — all things that are difficult or impossible to schedule from afar with any degree of accuracy. You’re also trying to keep the evolving shape of your story or stories in mind throughout. Those things quickly fill the mental cubby holes and leave you an exhausted mess.

And then there are the little things that seem so … trifling. Like the fact that I don’t speak Portuguese. Which means I’ll need an interpreter for every exchange in Brazil. One of the Brazil pieces is about agriculture, which means finding interpreters in rural areas (I got some great advice from colleagues to look in university English departments for all my affordable big city interpreter needs, but rural areas are tougher).

Add to all this the fact that Brazil and Paraguay each take about 15 hours to get to from Colombia (no direct flights to Paraguay, few to Brazil). That’s two full travel days at either end of a couple weeks of research for three very different stories. My last post was about communicating with your editor. The ball of stress I became trying to figure out how to do all this in one trip was my impetus for reaching out. I’m glad I did. Now my single odyssey is two much more manageable trips. So to Paraguay I go.

The most salient tip I have in this post is to do as much logistical work as possible before traveling (note: this part I’m writing from Paraguay as I wrap up my research). If you do nothing else, make sure you fill up your first day in the field with interviews, tours, appointments, and meetings (as much as is logistically possible, which, again, is often tough from afar). You’re freshest on your first day, you’re excited, and it’s best to make the most of that energy. You’ll also buy yourself some breathing room. There’s nothing worse than to be left expectantly waiting to land crucial interviews toward the end of your trip, a plane trip looming. If something goes wrong, you may miss an important opportunity. That’s not the kind of fear you want to carry around throughout the research phase.

I worked hard and got my first day-and-a-half pretty well booked. There were some barriers to that, though. My story is about self-organizing in an impoverished community on the outskirts of Asuncion. I’d read several articles from various Asuncion periodicals online and had read what few articles in English had been written about this community (mostly passing references). The community group itself, which is called CAMSAT, didn’t have any presence on the web. It’s amazing how dependent we’ve come. Contact information was incredibly difficult to come by. I got a few hopeful leads from online postings about year-old events, some of which included contact information. But none of those yielded solid contacts either (after several calls went unanswered and several emails bounced back, I started to get discouraged).

So I began to work around CAMSAT. Many other organizations are active in Asuncion, some of which were mentioned as co-sponsors of events in which CAMSAT participated. I reached out to those organizations. One thing I’m particularly happy I did was to avoid over-defining the subject of my story when getting in touch with these orgs. I simply said I was writing a story about community self-organizing in certain neighborhoods of Asuncion, that I wanted to learn more about their organization … and, oh yeah, do you happen to have any contact info for CAMSAT? I think organizations were quicker to respond than they would have been had I said, “I’m doing a story about CAMSAT; can you help?” And I’m also finding ways to use these organizations to make my story much richer. I was invited to a local prison, toured informal settlements that provide great comparisons to the community I’m focusing on, and ended up getting all the contact information for CAMSAT I needed. Tomorrow I’m also going to go help build a house for a family outside of Asuncion. Whether I use that in the story or not, it’s pretty cool.

Next post I’ll go into how this assignment emerged and I’ll include some correspondence with my editor. But here’s a final thought: I’m a new freelancer, I don’t have the experience or the record of clips that veterans in this gig have. I also don’t have the preexisting personal relationships that often open doors. So, without going into specifics, how did I get an editor to agree to shell out thousands of dollars in expenses … twice?

Good fortune, certainly. But there’s also this: I worked very hard on my first story for this editor and made sure to meet and exceed my obligations. I stumbled on this current story, did as much research as possible, and then confidently told my editor that I was capable of pulling it off. The other stories developed from ideas he had. I took his ideas, which he only mentioned in broad form, researched the hell out of them, and gave him coherent proposals that again suggested that I was the one qualified to write them.

Am I? I have no idea. Or rather, I have a good idea how to approach this research, and within that scheme I know I’m capable, but I’m also traveling 3000 miles for each story, landing in countries I’ve never been to (one, Paraguay, where the Spanish is notoriously challenging, the other, Brazil, where I don’t speak the language), and committing myself to writing about people that I’ve had only fleeting contact with. There’s something a bit foolhardy in that. And I’m anxious, bordering on outright scared. But there’s also a recognition, I think, that this is my time to be a freelancer, to take chances like these, and to make sure that if/when I fall on my face, it’ll be doing something ambitious. A bit of recklessness is a good thing in the freelance gig. I guess the trick, as in all things, is figuring out how to balance the recklessness with reality. Speaking of which, I’ve got some transcribing to do.

(Note: the photo that corresponds to this post was taken in the stairwell of the headquarters of CAMSAT (Centro de Ayuda Mutua Salud Para Todos), a community activist organization doing incredible things in the impoverished Paraguayan barrio of Bañado, Tacumbú. Camera: Lumix GH-1)