Exonian Profiles
|
Quil Lawrence ’89: Our Man in Afghanistan
As the horrific events of September 11 were unfolding, David Aquila (“Quil”) Lawrence ’89, at the time on assignment in Nicaragua, wanted to get to where the news was happening as soon as possible. “Like most journalists, I have the opposite instincts of everybody else,” says Lawrence. “When something like September 11 happens, we all rush towards it as fast as we can. As soon as I heard about the attacks, I was on the phone asking to be sent to New York, Washington or Kabul.” Lawrence is a radio correspondent for “The World,” a daily news program produced by BBC World Service, Public Radio International and WGBH in Boston, MA. He landed in Washington, D.C., within a week of September 11, and covered the war on terrorism from that vantage point for the next several months. On December 10, he left for six weeks in Afghanistan. “I was based in Kabul, but did a fair amount of traveling,” says Lawrence. “I went up to Mazar-e Sharif, through the Salang Tunnel in the Hindu Kush mountains, out to Herat in the west, down to Bamian. Kabul is by far the most devastated place I have ever seen in my life. There are neighborhoods where it looks like somebody took a piece of artillery and knocked down every single building, brick by brick.” Lawrence says the country as a whole is suffering on almost every possible level. “You could talk forever about the problems in Afghanistan,” he says. “And they all feed into one another: Lack of education means poor hygiene; poor hygiene means poor health; an ongoing drought means malnutrition and the threat of starvation.” Add to this a new interim government and a lot of political positioning by previously hostile warlords, and you have a combustible situation in which things “could explode at any minute,” he says. Despite the volatile climate and several instances of violence directed at journalists (including the kidnapping and murder, in neighboring Pakistan, of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl), Lawrence says he never felt he was in any personal danger. “By the time I got to Kabul, there was no more front line, just very specific raids going on,” he says. “I was surprised by the uniformity of pro-American feelings. The Afghans are happy that the international community is there. They see this as the best chance they have had in decades.” Using an interpreter, Lawrence traversed the countryside reporting the news as it was unfolding before him. “I just tried to talk to as many people from as many different walks of life as I could,” he says. “I’m lucky, because the show I work for isn’t perpetually obsessed with breaking news, so I had time to do actual reporting. That’s one of the things I like about journalism, collecting primary voices.” A native of central Maine, Lawrence followed both his father, Richard Lawrence ’62, and uncle, David A. Lawrence ’64, to Exeter, and earned his B.A. in history from Brandeis. A longstanding passion for travel and writing eventually led him to journalism, and Lawrence moved to Colombia, where he reported for The Los Angeles Times, NPR and the BBC from 1996 to 1999. The following year, he was awarded a Pew Fellowship from Johns Hopkins University, which sponsored trips to Iraq, Kurdistan and Syria; a series of freelance assignments followed, taking him to Cuba, Sudan and Morocco. He joined “The World” as Latin American correspondent in 2000. While his career takes him to points far and wide, Lawrence still calls Maine home. In fact, with the help of several fellow Knight House alums—Dan Kehler ’90, Jonathan Blossom ’88, Gus Schepens ’91 and Nick Unger ’90—he spends what little free time he has working on a stone house he is building in the woods of Benton, Maine. —Bill Ewing |
