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The story behind Good Morning Pakistan | JSK

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AELA CALLAN ('14) | Jun 10, 2016 | News & Notes

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Tayyeb Afridi (left) and Aela Callan (right) in Pakistan. Afridi and Callan were JSK Fellows in 2014.

When I entered Tayyeb Afridis oce at the Tribal News Network in Peshawar, Pakistan, I remembered a
brainstorm we once had with a group in the JSK Fellowships about the future of news. We had used Post-it
notes to congure a complicated matrix of ideas that were going to solve the digital problems we faced in
our newsrooms.
It seemed a world away as I read the colorful Post-it notes stuck to Tayyebs wall. First-Aid box, one read.
Listener Survey, read another. How to tell breast cancer story.
It struck me then, how his problems were much more fundamental than those I faced. After our fellowship
ended in 2014, my days were spent working out how to get audiences to watch more documentaries online
for a major broadcaster. Tayyebs were spent setting up a radio network in a highly conservative part of
Pakistan.
He had grappled over how to bring news bulletins to villages with no electricity, where women are not
allowed out of the home and where people cant read. He worried about funding, about the safety of his
reporters, about how to craft an important story on breast cancer so as not to insult ultra conservative
listeners.

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He navigated a precarious space where reporting the wrong thing about the military, the government, the
Taliban or any number of other armed groups would be life threatening.
I nally understood how distant his work environment was from our experience in Silicon Valley. I felt
admiration, but also a pang of guilt. Could I have been more help to him earlier on? Was I helping or
hindering him by making a lm on TNN, two years later?
People have asked me why I went to Pakistans tribal areas, four months pregnant. How could I justify
risking my safety in a place where foreign journalists need special permission to visit and at least 15 armed
groups threaten reporters? It took 8 months to get the paperwork and security team in place. Dozens of
people said I should abandon the idea, it was too dangerous.
But I was determined to show solidarity to Tayyeb in the best way I knew how by shining a light on the
incredible work that he, his co-founder Said Nasir, and their team of reporters do. The risk that I took was
nothing compared to what they face every day.
Beyond that, I also thought a lot about a conversation Tayyeb and I had on a balmy evening in June 2014, as
we celebrated the end of our fellowship year at Dawn Garcias house.
Dont forget me, he said. Never, I replied. When TNN is a huge hit in Pakistan, Im coming to make a lm
on you.
It was a promise that I reiterated in the panicked days after the Peshawar school attacks in 2015, when
Tayyeb feared for the safety of his children. How will I be able to make a better future here for my
daughter? he despaired. You are already making a better future for her, I assured him. But I could hear in
his voice that he wasnt sure, that he didnt feel like his fellowship project had become a huge hit at all.
For me, telling the story of TNN was essential because it proved to us both that the most satisfying
achievements of our post fellowship careers lay in helping others to succeed. Womens voices would not be
heard throughout the tribal areas of Pakistan, if it were not for his tireless work. Few in the rest of the world
would know anything about it if I had given up and stayed home.
It can be disorienting to embark on something that genuinely brings about change. Whether you are in
Peshawar worrying about rst aid kits, or in a major newsroom worrying about digital strategy. It often feels
like you are wading through mud to take very small steps forward.
Tayyeb has shown me that those small steps, when you look back after two years, have actually carried you
a very long way.

Good Morning Pakistan: Journalists Under Threat - 101 East

101 East Good Morning Pakistan: Journalists Under Threat. A lm by Aela Callan for Al Jazeera English.

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