Very few people outside of Arab News actually know this, but for around five years from 1989 to 1994, the Washington-based National Council on US-Arab Relations ran a very important internship program in which recent US journalism graduates were placed for three months at English-language newspapers in several Arab countries.
Arab News was lucky enough to be the chosen newspaper in Saudi Arabia for this program, which was designed to give first-hand experience of the Arab world and Islam to budding American journalists. The unintended consequence of this program was that we at Arab News also gained much from the interns, enjoying having their fresh talent in the newsroom.
We enjoyed being a part of the program as we knew that Saudi Arabia was one of the most mysterious and misunderstood countries in the mind of the average American, and hoped that by giving these interns a first-hand experience of this country would change their outlook forever. And we were not too far off the mark. Today, we remain in contact with most of the journalists who interned with us.
As the youngest editor and reporter at Arab News in 1989, and being half-Saudi and half-American, it was my responsibility to take the interns under my wing, show them around Jeddah and try to explain to them some of the complexities of Saudi life and culture.
And it wasn’t always easy. For some reason, the council always sent us interns in the summer, the hottest time of the year here, with temperatures easily reaching 45 degrees centigrade. That plus the culture shock that the interns felt when they first arrived in the Kingdom, were the major problems that we had to deal with.
I still remember spending hours talking to the interns, hanging out with them in their rooms at the Al-Khaleej Palace Hotel near Arab News, and walking to Pizza Hut at the nearby Shaker Center to have lunch with them. But, I’m sure that most of them don’t regret having come here, and probably actually look back on the experience as one of the most valuable ones they have ever had.
“Working at Arab News in the summer of 1989, when I was just out of US grad school, gave me invaluable exposure to Arab culture on many levels,” said Peter Sisler, who later went on to work at The Washington Times, United Press International and Deutsche Presse-Agentur, in an interview from Washington, D.C.
“I was fortunate to be given the job of assistant editorial page editor for several months. I often had the task of framing up editorial arguments for a readership that I knew was very different in outlook from my last newspaper in Colorado,” recalled Sisler.
He later worked for Arab News in the US when the paper covered the traveling exhibition “Saudi Arabia: Yesterday and Today” in 1989.
“We traveled across the US and published a special edition of Arab News for each location, Dallas, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and New York. It was a great experience as we got to see first-hand how many people in the States appreciated getting a glimpse of Saudi culture,” said Sisler.
The first interns that arrived at Arab News were Scott Larson and Greg Myers. Sisler came next followed by Aldo Svaldi in the fateful summer of 1990. Kuwait was invaded in August 1990 by Iraq and Svaldi was soon forced to move out of the Al-Khaleej Palace after the US military requisitioned it for their troops. As usual, the unfailing hospitality of Filipinos came to the rescue of Svaldi, with Bernie Refuerzo and Bong Generoso of Stallions Records allowing him to move in with them. Svaldi later was able to gain first-hand experience of the war in Kuwait when he entered a liberated Kuwait at the end of the first Gulf War, accompanying Arab News Editor in Chief Khaled Almaeena and the rest of the Arab News team.
One of the interns that has remained especially close to Arab News is Afshin Molavi, who is now a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington. After interning at Arab News, Molavi joined us first as a reporter in Riyadh for a year. He then became our Washington correspondent, while simultaneously finishing his master’s degree in international relations from John Hopkins University. He later worked for Reuters in Dubai and then lived in his natal Iran for nearly a year doing research for his now published book “Persian Pilgrimages.”
“My experience as an intern at Arab News was truly a formative experience in my personal and professional life. I had a unique opportunity to explore Saudi society — in all its diversity — up close, something few Western journalists ever do,” said Molavi in an e-mail from Rabat, Morocco, where he is on assignment.
“This experience, this sustained engagement with Saudi Arabia, has proved extremely valuable to me as a Washington-based Middle East analyst in a leading think-tank. In our post-Sept. 11 world, where Saudi-bashing has become a common Washington pastime, I’ve been able to offer some nuance to the debate on Saudi Arabia,” he added.
Many of the interns remain close friends of mine, people with whom I can meet again whenever I go to Washington, and pick up our conversations as if we had just seen each other the week before.
Frank Fuhrig is one of those interns, who now works as a news editor in the Washington bureau of Deutsche Presse-Agentur, the German press agency.
“I made many great friends at Arab News, and I loved the environment of working with people from many countries,” said Fuhrig in an e-mail from Washington. “It seemed like the Pakistanis especially embraced a young American who was very far from home, and whenever I ride in a DC taxi with a driver from Pakistan, I fondly remember Arab News.”
All of the interns were bachelors when they came to Arab News for the first time, and most of them are now married and have children. Molavi is married to an Iranian-American woman; Sisler married a Turkish-American woman and has a young daughter, and Fuhrig married his college sweetheart (who by the way is a journalist too) and has just recently become the proud father of twin boys.
“I enjoyed many things about Saudi Arabia. I’m still looking for a shawerma sandwich that compares to ones I ate at the Palm Beach restaurant,” recalled Fuhrig. “As a Midwesterner whose idea of landscape was corn and soybeans, I fell in love with the desert landscapes outside Jeddah. I can still see the dry, dusty red hills where the Hash House Harriers would go running.”
Unfortunately, no young American journalists since Fuhrig have been able to discover the beauty and complexities of Saudi Arabia. The generous donations from US corporations that funded the internship program have dried up, which caused the termination of the program.
Hopefully, new funding will be found in the future by the head of the council, John Duke Anthony, to restart a program that goes so far in giving a good impression of the Arab world to young American journalists, and forges ties of friendship and professionalism that last for decades.
(Senior Editor Rasheed Abou-Alsamh specializes in American affairs. He joined Arab News in 1988.)
