Book Review: No Ordinary Assignment: A Memoir by Jane Ferguson; Part One
This is an extraordinary, exciting memoir written by one brave badass woman. And when I use the word badass, I in no way imply disrespect. To the contrary. I mean it in the sense that the Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines it as “of formidable strength and skill.” Ferguson is a war reporter, and she has plunged into extreme danger in pursuit of stories in violent hotspots such as Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Egypt, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Iraq, and Afghanistan. During these adventures she is sometimes terrified, but she nonetheless remains steadfast in her resolve to do her job the best she can. In an author’s note at the beginning of the book she says: “I wrote No Ordinary Assignment with one main purpose in mind: to answer with total honesty the question, Why do you do this work?” The answer she provides is not only thrilling, but it exposes the horrifying human cost of war and the insane and selfish motivations that prompt the conflicts in the first place.
Ferguson initiates her tale with a tense prologue in which she is among the final group of journalists to leave Kabul in 2021 and is in danger of being captured and killed by the Taliban. She then flashes back to her youth in Northern Ireland, during which she and her family, relatives, and friends were in constant danger of being maimed or murdered by bullets and bombs. She managed to obtain a scholarship to study in the United States. Later, after a stint working in a filthy chicken factory and a brief internship at the BBC, an aunt provided the money to allow her to travel to Sana’a in Yemen to study Arabic. During this and subsequent stays there, she came to think of Yemen as a second home and as one of the most beautiful spots on Earth. As I read her description of the pleasant challenge of learning the Arabic language, I recalled my own stint of studying Bengali at Dhaka University in Bangladesh. I too had to learn a new alphabet as well as a new system of grammar, but at least Bengali reads left to right instead of right to left. And at that time in the 1970s and 1980s, I felt safer and more secure on the Indian Subcontinent than on the violent and unstable streets and cities of the United States. I think that at least some part of this feeling has to do with destiny, with where you are meant to be.
Ferguson’s first gig as a journalist was with Gulf News in Dubai. However, she quickly became disenchanted with her assignments to report on cricket matches, fashion shows, and celebrity parties. She had an epiphany moment while on a story at a car dealership in Dubai and decided instead to travel as a freelance journalist to Kabul, Afghanistan, which was in the midst of civil turmoil and attacks from the Taliban. She managed to obtain an arrangement as a freelancer with CNN, and after Afghanistan she headed to Yemen, which was in the midst of a civil war, traveling deep into the rebel zone to visit camps full of Yemenis displaced by the conflict. When she returned to Dubai she was fired by Gulf News after CNN aired her reportage from Yemen. This did not slow her down. She continued her freelance work, including a period embedding with African Union troops in war-torn Mogadishu in Somalia.
Throughout her accounts of these adventures, she is often frightened and vulnerable as she encounters life-threatening situations, but she never wavers from her determination to do her job of exposing the truth as best she can.
(To be continued)
