My purpose at that time was to expand my experience of the world and to immerse myself as deeply as I could in powerful events that I thought would begin to help me understand the world, and myself, in larger ways. Looking back, it's difficult to imagine my life without the Congo now.

My own chief curiosity is to go into the world and explore as richly as I can, and as deeply as I can, and understand its richness as fully as I can, and that certainly will live on.

What I really intend to achieve is to be that fly on the wall, and to try and observe as much as I can without affecting what I've seen. I want to get a sense that what I'm seeing in a place would have happened had I not be there. Were I to make myself an important presence, that would be lost. The danger of a certain other kind of reporting is that people give you what they think you are seeking. People know what you want. When I was traveling in Congo and Rwanda and people asked me what I wanted, I would say, "Nothing. I just want to be here." And that immediately disarmed them.

The endeavor of being a foreign correspondent means that you will never be their equal. And that has its pros and cons. Were you to be an insider in a particular society, then you would be one of them, and the way you would write about that society would be very different. When you're brought up in a certain way, you have certain blind spots to the things going on in your culture. There is an illumination the outsider brings to a place or a situation that cannot be duplicated.

When people know what you want, they can then manipulate that to achieve the end that they seek. It's far more interesting and valuable to bear witness to a scene and make good relationships without explicitly seeking something. You're more likely to obtain a far richer and honest experience that way.

We are not held accountable for how the economy ravages Congo. Governments aren't held accountable for foreign policies that they exercise there. There are no institutional structures to render justice. The press is very limited. There's very little transparency. You find a symmetry in certain basic human tendencies, and these tendencies are not always noble or beautiful. I think we have an instinct to turn away from that, to not acknowledge it, while it is something that's a part of us. There's a certain tragic and sad side to human nature that, in our quest for beauty, we ignore.

My purpose at that time was to expand my experience of the world and to immerse myself as deeply as I could in powerful events that I thought would begin to help me understand the world, and myself, in larger ways. Looking back, it's difficult to imagine my life without the Congo now.