Espresso in a war zone
Adventure or misadventure, a roving correspondent finds enlightenment in a life of travels
Travel is broadening, enriching, and sometimes a pain in the butt. Over the past few decades, I have been blessed to be able to see much of the world. I have ridden camels in India and donkeys in Jordan, and “flown” aboard the U.S. space shuttle simulator. But I cannot drive a car, an inconvenience at times and occasionally a downright pain in the rear. As the woman sent with me to Saudi Arabia as the producer for coverage of the first Gulf War resoundingly complained over the phone to our foreign desk, “You have sent me somewhere women cannot drive with a reporter who happens to be the one American male who doesn’t have a *&%# driver’s license!”
I did drive a Land Rover once, in the Serengeti. The guide of our expedition following a zebra migration invited me behind the wheel on my birthday. “What can you run into?” he said. “It’s empty and flat for miles.” Within minutes, I almost ran our vehicle into a gully and had a close call with an innocent wildebeest. The encounter only convinced me that the world is a safer place because I do not drive.
But I have bummed rides with many engaging people and been able to see all 50 states, the Hindu Kush mountain range, Bamiyan’s Valley of the Gods, the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China, the Northwest Passage, and, no less awe-inspiring, the 1-ton fiberglass cow statue that presides over Janesville, Wisconsin.
I’ve endured innumerable flight delays and bumpy bus rides. I’ve had my winter coat stolen after an emergency landing in Halifax, Nova Scotia, during a snowstorm. I’ve slept on airport floors, thoughtfully carpeted, in San Francisco, Miami, Cleveland, and Newark, New Jersey, while waiting for flights to be rescheduled, and on the floors of train stations and hotel lobbies for various reasons.
Yet during all these years, despite occasional bumps in the road, I’ve also been welcomed by so many people, especially in war zones and areas contending with great suffering and strife. I’ve met inspiring people and seen extraordinary places, from the Taj Mahal and the bustees of Kolkata, to space shuttle launches and a tunnel of survival, dug by hand, shovel, and pick, under a field in Sarajevo that helped the Bosnia and Herzegovina capital survive its four-year siege. It’s time I put pen to paper on some of those tales.
I got lost in a jungle in El Salvador. I was covering the civil war there when the production crew and I drove to an area called Chiltiupán, southwest of the capital, to try to see the Salvadoran military’s bombings of jungle villages that harbored rebels. We came off the road to wander into villages and soon lost our way. This was before Google Maps, which may not show those villages to this day. It was also before mobile phones. One or two people in each village seemed to have a phone, but whom would we call? The Salvadoran military about which we were trying to report a story?
Getting lost is often the first in a series of unwelcome events, as was the case on this expedition. Our engineer fell below a waterfall, broke her arm, and caught a bad cold. We wandered through jungle for two days, slept on tall grass (not as blissful as it sounds), and grew so thirsty we finally drank pond water, which is an essential ingredient of typhoid. Once when I interviewed villagers along the way, I felt a thousand small bites being taken out of my legs. Fire ants! The folks we were interviewing stripped off my pants — bless them (true hospitality can take many forms) — slapped off the ants with rags, and doused my burning legs with vinegar. “Don’t worry,” a woman told me. “I do it to my children,” which is not the kind of reassurance a grown man, bright red with embarrassment, wants to hear.
Finally, we somehow got to a road and hailed a ride on a truck carrying coffee plant workers, who thought our whole story was pretty hilarious. We went to an ER back in San Salvador, where the staff put our engineer’s arm into a cast and told us, “I think you are not cut out for life in the country.” About a month later, I was one of several journalists whose name was put on an “enemies list,” and I didn’t even get a lousy T-shirt. As our engineer said, “You can’t even keep ants out of your pants.”
I’ve stayed in a few five-star places, with crisp sheets and deep baths, and in a barely roofed hostel in the Tigray region of Ethiopia in the late 1980s toward the end of a long civil war. Truck drivers transporting vital relief supplies would overnight at the hostel, exhausted and thirsty, and wind down with a mug or more of traditional tella beer. Wind down all night, it seemed to me and my producer, as we heard the drivers singing mournful Amharic ballads as we tried to sleep. The blankets looked as if they’d been used to smother fires, which they probably had, and we were told to pull them over our heads. “Won’t it be hard to breathe?” we inquired. The roadside hostel proprietor told us, “Yes, but that way, the rats won’t bite your faces.” Well then, enough said.
Yet as we learned, the rats were drawn by the presence of food. Therefore, they were oddly welcome visitors. I remember hearing tiny steps scuttle overhead and calling out to my producer, “Reindeer, I’m sure.” But we did not have to fall asleep hungry, like so many Tigrayans, or fearful. Travel can often remind us of what we cherish at home.
A few weeks later, we traveled to a camp in Eritrea that sought to give refugees food and shelter. We were walking through lines of people, handsome and looking haggard and worn from long journeys. We smiled and quietly asked them to tell us their stories.
Soon, I smelled coffee. My mind is playing tricks, I thought. It’s an effect of traveling in a war zone. I’ll just ignore it.
Then, I heard the distinctive gurgle of an espresso machine and was sure I heard pops of coffee-scented steam. “My nose and ears are playing tricks on me now too,” I told staffers from an international aid group who oversaw the camp. “I think I smell espresso.”
And so I did. The Zerai family had been forced to flee their home near Massawa, on the Red Sea, one night a few weeks before, carrying only the clothes they wore, a few family photos folded into pockets, small pieces of jewelry to offer as bribes to corrupt local officials along the way — and a small steel espresso pot.
“You must join us!” said the father, who pressed a small clay cup into my hands. The brew was sharp, dark, and fresh. Yes, I felt revived.
We sat down in the circle of their family: sons, daughters, an aunt and uncle, a cousin or two. They ground a few more blackened beans into a small stone bowl and boiled water from a relief jug. They told us their stories: the roar of bombs in Massawa, the gashing of treetops by regime artillery, the quick consideration of what they truly needed to dash into a strange and dangerous night to survive.
But soon, they began to ask about us. Where were we from? Why would we come there from fat and peaceful America? Did we know a cousin of theirs who was said to be in Oakland or Indianapolis?
“The coffee — it’s good?” they asked. I had another cup, and one more.
In a matter of minutes, our relationship changed. We were no longer reporters interviewing victims or refugees. We were guests being welcomed by a family. They were hosts, not refugees. We were travelers, sharing a few moments of — dare I suggest as much in the midst of a war, in the misery of a refugee camp? — rest, diversion, and even friendship.
Travel can put the most unexpected people together, in the most improbable places, and help them see how we’re all made of the same human clay.
I was going through customs at the U.S.-Canada border one February night when we were told the facility had to shut down. Immediately. There was audible grousing, even from Canadians, who are famed for their extraordinary courtesy.
When we noticed on the overhead screens that it was the final minutes of the Canada-USA men’s hockey gold medal match for the 2010 Olympics, grousing travelers became engrossed fans. Canadians and Americans went back and forth with each another. “That’s a great shot,” Canadians agreed as Team USA scored a goal to tie the game, forcing the match into sudden death. And then when Canada’s Sidney Crosby took a pass to score 7 minutes and 40 seconds into overtime, Canadians cheered, and Americans smiled. “Whaddya gonna do?” we asked. “It’s Sid the Kid.” That stalled customs arrival hall had suddenly become a place travelers were all glad to be.
While making our way to Bosnia to cover the siege of Sarajevo, a recording engineer and I noticed that the border guards of one Balkan nation in particular would help themselves to several small items on the top of our cases. Not jewelry, which we would not bring into a war zone in any case, but razor blades, socks, or toothpaste, which were hard to locate during war.
In time, we learned to pack extras on top, all but gift wrapped for official pilfering. But on one trip in, my entire toiletries case was nabbed. I despaired at borrowing spare items from colleagues for months on end. I mean, do you think reporters are a reliable source of fine grooming supplies? And so we went into a Sarajevo street that had carefully been turned into an informal market for personal items. People opened bags and cases to offer old or half-used tubes of toothpaste and antiperspirant, quarter-full bottles of shampoos and soaps, many of them likely left in the rubble of apartments shattered and bombed. A man looking to buy toiletries joked — at least I think it was a joke — “Hey, that’s my aftershave! It was a Christmas gift!”
For a moment, we felt less like travelers and journalists and more like Sarajevans, whom we so admired.
Our family now often travels across borders with our dog, Daisy, who rides in a carrier that fits under a seat. She is not a service animal, although that is honored service, but a member of our family.
Daisy, who is a French poodle, travels with a record of her inoculations in an EU document the size of a passport. As it includes her photo, we call it her EU passport. French border agents almost never fail to open Daisy’s passport and admonish her through the glass panel: “Look right, eh. Now left, eh. All right, it is you. You may proceed.”
This is advice easier to dispense than to live by, but unless you’re on your way to a wedding, funeral, or open-heart surgery, it is often wisest to see travel delays as spontaneous opportunities: to read a book, talk to those nearby, or simply take a breath and ruminate.
Our family missed a flight home from Arizona once because of a time zone mix-up. The airline booked us for the next day. But that meant a day of missed school, homework, meetings, work, memos, pickups, drop-offs, business email, and our whole array of quotidian responsibilities. We grumbled and whined about losing a day from our busy lives and spent it ... well, by a pool. With a waterslide! Playing, laughing, eating nachos, imitating the arms-out pose of saguaro cacti, and feeling that, in fact, our daylong travel delay had somehow added a day to our lives.
One of the most cherished memories of my life is landing in Chicago after an overnight flight from China, with our (now oldest) daughter in our arms, whom we had just adopted from an orphanage. We were dressed in stretchy gym clothes. The families alongside us in passport control, from Poland, Ireland, Nigeria, and elsewhere around the world, tended to dress in suits and dresses for the occasion. A man in a big-brimmed brown hat called out, “Simon family!” which was the first time we’d heard the phrase for the three of us. He checked and stamped our paperwork, then put his large hand under our daughter’s small, soft chin. “Welcome home, sweetheart,” he said, and we melted.
Scott Simon, a writer and broadcaster, is the host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday. He has reported from all 50 states, five continents, and 10 wars, from El Salvador to Sarajevo to Afghanistan and Iraq. His books have chronicled character and characters, in war and peace, sports and art, tragedy and comedy. In the August 2022 issue of Rotary, Simon, a die-hard Chicago Cubs fan, wrote about baseball’s growing appeal around the world.
This story originally appeared in the December 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.