It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (34 page)

Minutes after I hung up the phone, it rang again. The number showed a Chicago area code and I thought it might be the fraud department of my credit card, telling me for the millionth time they had blocked my card because it showed usage overseas.

I picked up the phone, exasperated.

A man’s voice: “May I speak with Lynsey Addario, please?”

“This is she.”

“This is Robert Gallucci, the president of the MacArthur Foundation.”

“Hi.”

“This is the first of such phone calls I have to make in my new job as president of the foundation, so I will just go ahead and begin: I would like to tell you that you have been selected as a MacArthur Fellow.”

I was silent. Every year I combed through the announcement of the year’s MacArthur “genius awards,” people from all professions who got the famous “phone call out of the blue” telling them they had won $500,000 “with no strings attached.”

“Hello? Are you there? Do you know what a MacArthur fellowship is?”

“I think so,” I said, wanting to be told again.

“We will give you half a million dollars, with no strings attached, over the course of the next five years, in quarterly deposits of $25,000. This is not based on work you have done in the past but to help further your work in the future.”

“Are you sure you have the right person?”

“Your name is Lynsey Addario, and you were born November 13, 1973, in Norwalk, Connecticut, correct?”

“Yes, that is me.” I felt my chest tighten with emotion.

Mr. Galucci offered a brief explanation of how the next few weeks would unfold in relation to the announcement, passed on the name and contact details of the head of the fellows program, and congratulated me once again. He then asked me what I thought of the situation in Afghanistan, and I was so overwhelmed, I used some lame word like “quandary” and then wondered if he was going to take the money back, thinking, “She isn’t really a genius.”

Our phone call ended, and I put my BlackBerry down and stared at the phone. I was sure “Robert Gallucci” must be Ivan playing a practical joke on me. I looked at the caller ID and entered the number into Google: MacArthur Foundation. It was true.

I sat down on our couch, alone in our happy, sunlit apartment, and wept with joy. I wouldn’t have to worry about money for the next five years. After years of traveling from country to country with no home, of trying to bring attention to injustice, of witnessing war, funerals, and hunger—the MacArthur Foundation had recognized how devoted I was to this work. All that time, sacrifice, and commitment had been worth it.

I had promised Mr. Gallucci that I wouldn’t tell anyone other than my husband. I walked to the metro stop in Taksim Square, where I knew Paul would eventually surface from among the throngs of commuters, and hovered over the subway exit for almost an hour before he came out. When he saw me, he was confused by what could possibly have brought me to meet him at the subway for the first time since we had met.

He spoke first. “Are you pregnant?”

It may not have been the good news he wanted, but Paul was overjoyed. My success was his as well. Paul, who understood the limitations of fast-paced breaking-news journalism, had always encouraged me to work on longer-term projects, which, he argued, would allow for more artistic freedom as well as a chance to go deeper into a story. Larger independent projects also often become exhibitions, which are a way of connecting with a world outside the news and media. Only something like the MacArthur fellowship would allow me that kind of time for my work, without worrying about where my next assignment would come from. And yet I decided to continue working with the
New York Times
,
Time
, and
National Geographic
because I believed in those publications, and their readership reached a wide audience. Part of me recognized that there was little point in doing this work if no one saw it. So while the MacArthur changed certain aspects of my professional life, it didn’t change everything.

 • • • 

T
WO MONTHS LATER
our lovely existence in Constantinople ended. Paul and I moved to New Delhi, where he took a job as the new India bureau chief for Reuters. I hadn’t realized how attached I had grown to my life in Istanbul over seven years—having Ivan as a neighbor, colleague, and best friend; enjoying Mediterranean salads topped by grilled halloumi cheese with Suzy, Maddy, and Ansel; spending summers drifting around the Aegean on a sailboat with my dad and Bruce. I was a married woman, and for the first time in my adult life, decisions about where I would live and how long I would stay were no longer determined by which war I was covering or which correspondent I wanted to work with. These decisions were going to be determined in large part by the fact that Paul had a staff job at a large company, and Reuters had needs.

An Afghan woman, Noor Nisa, stands in labor on the side of the mountain in Badakhshan Province, Afghanistan, November 2009.

The death of a U.S. Marine in southern Afghanistan, 2010.

Maternal mortality in Sierra Leone, 2010.

Iraqis watch a 3-D movie in Baghdad, 2010.

I sank into a depressed state. I had lived in India nine years before and was fine with all the noise and chaos then, but I had grown into a different person in my thirties. In an easy, home-base city like Istanbul, simple things felt like luxuries: that I could walk from one location to another without having to rely on taxis or drivers; that I could run out and meet my friends for a coffee in a hip neighborhood; that a flight to visit my family in the United States wasn’t sixteen hours long. After Istanbul, Delhi seemed isolating. The only nice gyms were inside five-star hotels. I couldn’t really walk anywhere; every excursion required a car. I worked almost three hundred days a year in difficult places, and I craved simplicity and ease at home. My little amenities were a fundamental part of my sanity.

Paul was also busier than usual. Our relationship usually worked well with consistent two- to three-week breaks after assignments, because we both felt that the distance kept our romance fresh. But his demanding new job kept him extrapreoccupied those first months. So I traveled incessantly. Rather than see the MacArthur as an opportunity to slow down, I saw it as encouragement to go even harder. From the end of 2009 until early 2011, I was traveling more than ever—from embeds in Afghanistan to stints in sub-Saharan Africa. With every return home, Paul argued that we didn’t know how long it would take to get pregnant and that, at age thirty-seven, I might be running out of time. I was terrified of losing my independence and refused to admit that he might be right.

Instead I always responded with the same argument: I had sturdy southern Italian genes, and each of my sisters had gotten pregnant the first time she tried and had healthy pregnancies. The Addario women were made to reproduce, I argued, knowing deep down that my case could be very different from theirs. I finally brokered a deal: I would stay on my birth control pill until January 2011, and then we would let biology and our libidos decide when we got pregnant. I didn’t want a child then, but I knew how important it was to Paul. And a small part of me did worry that I would run out of time.

January came and went. I stopped taking the pill, as we’d agreed, but planned back-to-back assignments that left me little time at home for conception: I hopped from South Sudan to Iraq to Afghanistan to Bahrain in less than two months. I was in Iraq for
National Geographic
in late January when David, my editor at the
Times
, called me in Baghdad and asked whether I wanted to go to Egypt, where there appeared to be a revolution under way. I was dying to go, but I couldn’t leave my
National Geographic
assignment half-completed. By the time I finished my work in Iraq, the
Times
was well staffed in Egypt, and David sent me to Afghanistan. But the more I watched the news—the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and apparently now Libya, too—the more I realized how historic this Arab Spring would be. All my colleagues from my Iraq and Afghanistan years had been reporting and photographing from Tahrir Square, and there I was, drinking tea in Kabul, watching a pirated DVD of
Up in the Air
.

I couldn’t take it anymore and got on a plane. I was headed to Libya.

PART FOUR

Life and Death

L
IBYA,
N
EW
Y
ORK,
I
NDIA,
L
ONDON

Children play around a burning car in a residential neighborhood in Benghazi, in eastern Libya, as the uprising gathers momentum, February 28, 2011.

CHAPTER 11