The Foreign Service Journal, January 2004

reports, “I am not the original Alex but I can say I am the copy Alex Belida, VOA News, Nairobi.” Where A VOA Correspondent Should Be Of course, life for a VOA cor- respondent overseas is not always that amusing. I have been shot, shelled, harassed and threatened while covering stories in Africa from 1993 to 2000 (after more sedate, if not more prestigious, assignments in Europe and at the White House). But a continent like Africa, where there are actually listeners and a never-ending supply of human dramas, is, in my view, the best kind of place for a VOA corre- spondent to be working. It gives you a chance, as VOA historian Alan Heil has written, to be “a voice for the voiceless.” And you have the most extraordinary expe- riences in the process. In early 2000 there were thousands of flood victims in Mozambique. While covering the disaster, I one day flew out with the crew of a South African military res- cue helicopter, a BK-117. It was not a particularly large helicopter. Its stated capacity was eight people. On the last mission of the day, there were five on board to start — the pilot, a co-pilot, two crewmen and me. We flew out to a field of mud and water where a group of Mozambicans were huddled on the steps of a building in which they had taken shelter. After a slog through the field, first a woman with a baby and suitcase climbed on board, followed by an elderly man with a water-logged bag of clothes. Then more bodies piled in. Soon it was so crowded that it was impossible to distin- guish whose arms and legs were attached to which bod- ies. I was crammed deep in the back of the passenger compartment, my body forced into a U-shape by the curve of the fuselage, my eyes barely able to look up and survey the contorted scene in front of me. The BK-117 groaned as it strained to take off. Slowly, painfully, it gained altitude and struggled back to an airstrip near the town of Chibuto. When it landed, it was anything but grace- ful. The helicopter slammed into the ground and slid a hundred meters on its skids before stop- ping. In all, there were 26 peo- ple on board — on an aircraft with a normal capacity of eight. I was astonished, but even more so when I later learned the record during the flood relief effort was 32 aboard a similar chopper. Street Prospecting Equally amazing, though for a different reason, was an incident that occurred in Burundi in 1994. I was driving through a residential area of the capital, Bujumbura, when I spied about half a dozen men in tat- tered shirts standing knee-deep in the waters of a drainage ditch with shovels, plastic basins and metal pails. I stopped and discovered they were panning for gold. How absurd, I thought. But what made the effort worthwhile was that the waste water they were working in originated behind the walls of a villa housing what was said to be a secret gold and gemstone processing operation run by a local businessman. The businessman, the gold diggers told me, bought raw gold-bearing ore that was smuggled across Lake Tanganyika from what was then called Zaire. After he crudely refined it, the gold was sold to buyers outside Africa. In the finishing process, though, tiny amounts of gold dust got washed away — and the street prospec- tors of Bujumbura recovered it. They told me they found about two grams of gold per person a day — not a lot, but enough to provide them with an excellent source of income in a country where most people got by on subsistence-level farming. But for every entertaining story I have written over the years, there have been far more disturbing ones. The Rwandan genocide, clan warfare in Somalia and the civil war in Sudan are among the turmoils I covered F O C U S J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 31 I have had my name recognized at an airline ticket office in Ethiopia and at passport control in Uganda. I’m told African babies have been named after me. Alex Belida is a senior correspondent with Voice of America, currently assigned to the Pentagon, who has spent more than 30 years in international broadcasting. He is the IBB representative to AFSA’s Governing Board.