I remember surfing in Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, even Madeira, when local fishermen had never seen a surfboard before, and refused to believe that we could ride a wave on one.

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.

Hawaii is the birthplace of surfing, and many Hawaiians or part-Hawaiians surf, but in the rest of the United States it's a pretty white sport.

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.

Poor-country surf communities can be complex and, to some extent, leveling. The fisherman's kid is competing head to head with the plutocrat's gilded son. Your father can't buy you a good frontside hack.

There are big surfing communities in every country with an ocean coast that I know in Central and South America. Same with Mexico, Bali, and nearly every island nation that gets waves in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. But that's a relatively recent development in most places.

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.