Speaking generally, I think it's useful to acknowledge explicitly the power imbalance between a journalist and the protagonists in a story about poor people, even to make that imbalance part of the story - and to redress it, narratively, where you can.

Even wars, big conflicts that have drawn a lot of news coverage, sometimes seem to me to have a center that hasn't been described, that might yet be glimpsed if approached from some odd angle.

The differences between the received wisdom, the standard version of events, and the facts on the ground may be subtle or they may be stark, even profound.

I'm trying to find out what's actually true, which is nearly always something, if not a world of things, that you can't read in books.

I need to conduct myself differently in different communities. In my experience, the journalistic conventions - you know, I'm the reporter, you're the subject, the interviewee - actually tend to hold steady much more consistently in rural Africa than they do in the American inner city.

It's completely different, for instance, to report on poor farmers in Africa than it is to report on, say, poor African-Americans. The familiarity of my readers with the terrain, and their preconceptions, are quite different in those two cases, and their perspective, as I imagine it, has to be taken into account at every turn.

It's so much harder than it looks - to conjure a fictional world that some passing wolf of skepticism can't just blow down in one breath.