Charlie Bird has had enough of Washington, but many foreign correspondents experience homesickness and loneliness, writes DENIS STAUNTON, Foreign Editor
CHARLIE BIRD’S candid documentaries about his unhappy year in Washington have drawn plenty of uncharitable comment, much of it from critics who have never spent more than a few weeks away from home.
How could the RTÉ correspondent find himself at such a loose end in the most powerful city in the world? And as a reporter with a ringside view of American politics at one of its most exciting moments, why did he end up feeling so fed up and lonely? In fact, Charlie’s experience is less exceptional than you might think. Just as diplomats sometimes discover that they don’t really like foreigners, more than a few foreign correspondents find they don’t enjoy being abroad.
A German colleague who was posted to Washington at around the same time as me became so unhappy that he refused to leave the house and had to be called home after a year. After six months, he had grown a beard, given up washing and spent most of his days watching re-runs of I Love Lucyon TV. At home, he was a highly respected political and economic commentator, his columns studied eagerly every morning in the chancellor's office and in embassies across Europe. But in Washington, nobody returned his calls. It wasn't just that he couldn't get through to members of Congress, he couldn't get through to their press secretaries. Not even the rent-a-quote experts at the city's numerous think-tanks bothered to get back to him.
Years before, in Berlin, I had known correspondents who couldn’t speak any German or who were too shy to interview anyone – so they made up most of the quotes that appeared in their reports. Others were so homesick they would trek halfway across the city to buy the previous day’s English newspapers, which they would read for hours at home over cups of tea, the BBC World Service humming softly in the background.
The German word for homesickness is Heimweh, but the language also has a word for the opposite condition, Fernweh, a yearning to be far away, or a heavy dose of wanderlust. For some of us, nothing feels more comfortable than being a stranger in a foreign place and the sense of not belonging that made Charlie so unhappy in Washington is part of the attraction.
Even the difficulties he found so frustrating, such as lack of access at the highest levels, are the kind of challenges that make reporting abroad more interesting for those who enjoy it. In fact, although Washington is hierarchical, it is also a sociable city, and the most unlikely connections can lead you into rarefied political circles.
Knowing influential political figures is useful, but it’s at least as important to get to know a broad range of people from different backgrounds and levels of society. If you go out a lot, you end up meeting a lot of people and, for most of us, an energetic social life is enough to flesh out the more formal professional contacts of office hours.
Some correspondents have taken this fleshing-out process to a different level, however; one journalistic Lothario in Brussels got an unusually good handle on EU enlargement by working his way systematically through brief encounters with women from each of the new member states.
No matter how deeply embedded into a society he or she becomes, speaking the language perfectly, sending the children to local schools or marrying someone from the host nation, the wise foreign correspondent remains an outsider. It’s a mistake to get too attached to any place because, sooner or later, it will be time to move on and start the whole procedure all over again in some place you don’t know a soul and where nobody knows your name.
Denis Staunton was foreign correspondent for The Irish Timesin Washington, Brussels and Berlin
