Free Paul Salopek

There is a tradition in newsrooms that when someone does something outstanding, the entire staff---reporters, editors, copy editors, copy boys---rise and give a standing ovation.
In 1998 we all rose when Paul Salopek walked into the newsroom--just back from some far-flug region--when it was announced he had won the Pulitzer. I didn't know him except to say Hi, and a couple of brief email exchanges when he got a Knight International Press Fellowship --as a former Knight fellow, we were in contact about what to expect, where he was going, etc.
Salopek is one of our country's finest journalists, putting his life on the line to get at what's happening.
It's well known that he was taken prisoner in Sudan while covering Darfur, Sudanese officials claiming he is a spy (absolutely absurd).
What is sometimes under appreciated is what a gifted writer and reporter he is.
Here are some excerpts of his Pulitzer-winning material (he won two), reprinted by the Chicago Tribune on their site.



From "Basically, We Are All the Same," April 27, 1997, part of an entry that won a 1998 Pulitzer Prize:

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa.--In a beat-up refrigerator humming away in his laboratory storeroom, Ken Weiss is storing vials of human blood: the largest gene pool left of a tribe of people inexorably vanishing from the Earth.


The insides of the freezer, not much different from ones used by many people to store groceries, hold the DNA of 12,000 Yanomamo Indians, a fierce Amazonian tribe that lives in Brazil near the watershed of the Orinoco River. The blood samples were collected by anthropologists a generation ago, and there are now more vials in the nondescript room at Pennsylvania State University where Weiss is a researcher than there are Yanomamos still alive.

Like many remote populations, the Yanomamo have been ravaged by Western diseases and, in this case, the shotguns of invading gold prospectors. Their rain forest home is scarred by airstrips and mines. Of a population numbering in the tens of thousands at the turn of the century, fewer than 10,000 remain.

So it is that Weiss' storehouse has become one obscure if vivid example of a genetic quest so vast, controversial and unprecedented that even those who know of its existence can't agree on its principal goal.

It is the Human Genome Diversity Project, a title that has proved confusing because it is so close to the more famous Human Genome Project that is mapping the entire code of human DNA.

By contrast, the Human Genome Diversity Project, over five years and at a cost of $25 million, calls on geneticists at universities worldwide to collect 10,000 blood samples from at least 400 ethnic groups ranging from Afghans to Apaches, from Basques to African Bushmen.

In short, it is the first genetic survey of humankind, a painstaking portrait of how and why members of the human species duplicate or differ from one another.

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From "Plagues of old reclaim continent," Jan. 9, 2000, part of an entry that won a 2001 Pulitzer Prize:

IBBA, Sudan--The mad people of Ibba hardly seem the harbingers of a health crisis consuming Africa.

At first glance, their insanity almost seems understandable, the human fallout from 16 grinding years of civil war.

There are the two farmers, grown men, who have regressed to childhood, playing together with sticks and pebbles in nearby mango groves. There is the young mother who has gone berserk, chasing villagers with a rusty machete. Lost souls stroll through the surrounding woodlands stark naked.

And one villager, a shy young man, has had to be tied to a granary wall by his family. Inexplicably, he was setting neighbors' huts on fire.

"About five years ago, when all this started happening, some people laughed at it," said Anthony Badagbu, a health worker at Ibba's thatch-roofed hospital. "Now people are crying because we know it kills. People go crazy, fall into a coma and die."

If not exactly weeping, global health experts are certainly stunned by the bizarre outbreak of dementia in Ibba and dozens of isolated villages like it in rebel-held Sudan. The madness is late-stage sleeping sickness, a lethal, long-vanquished foe from the age of Stanley and Livingstone, and its baleful reappearance is just the latest sign of Africa's seemingly unstoppable slide into a health disaster of historic proportions.

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From "The bride was 7," Dec. 12, 2004:

THE CENTRAL HIGHLANDS OF ETHIOPIA--Tihun Nebiyu the goat herder doesn't want to marry. She is adamant about this. But in her village nobody heeds the opinions of headstrong little girls.

That's why she's kneeling in the filigreed shade of her favorite thorn tree, dropping beetles down her dress. Magic beetles.

"When they bite you here--" Tihun explains gravely, pressing the scrabbling insects into her chest through the fabric of her tattered smock "--it makes your breasts grow."

This is Tihun's own wishful brand of sorcery--a child's desperate measure to turn herself into an adult. Then maybe, just maybe, her family would respect her wishes not to wed. She could rebuff the strange man her papa has chosen to be her husband. And she wouldn't have to bear his dumb babies.

Tihun kneels in the dirt, eyes closed: an elfin figure whose smile is made goofily endearing by two missing front teeth. She holds her small hands over her nipples. She is waiting for the bugs' enchantment to start. Seconds pass. But nothing happens. Eventually, she starts to giggle. The beetles have escaped--by crawling up her neck.

"It doesn't work!" Tihun says, disgusted. She heaves an exaggerated sigh and squints out across the yellow-grass hills surrounding her world: "I will just have to run."

But this is childish bluster. Tihun's short legs can't carry her away fast enough from the death of her childhood. Her wedding is five days away. And she is 7 years old.