Dave and I took this as fantastic news, because it meant we'd somehow edged out the tsunami in Asia and the genocide in Sudan in terms of ab- solute misery. The announcement did wonders for getting my stories printed in American papers. If the story had a heady lead of cannibalism, endangered gorillas, or little girls being raped with machetes, then it might have big enough wings to survive its journey across the Atlantic. Every- thing else was like punting in a hailstorm. Stories left the desk and crashed straight into a watery grave, where a half-century of dispatches of bothersome African despair boils at the bottom.