War correspondent, author talks life overseas

Dozens of Charlotte residents met in the Charlotte library Saturday to hear daring stories of overseas adventures from war correspondent and author Anjan Sundaram as he discussed his newest book, “Break up: A Marriage in Wartime,” a tell-all about the personal costs many journalists make to deliver the news.

But how exactly did Sundaram make his way from Mexico City to Charlotte? Turns out, the book is also a first-hand account of selectboard member Lewis Mudge’s work with Human Rights Watch, an international non-governmental organization that investigates and reports on war crimes in dozens of countries across the globe, centered around the Central African Republic.

Sundaram came to journalism out of curiosity and happenstance, which has turned into a life’s work of fighting some of the world’s greatest injustices and re-telling stories about parts of the world most people will never see.

A Yale graduate with a mathematics degree, Sundaram was working as a mathematician for Goldman Sachs when he opened up the New York Times one day in the dining hall.

“I saw, middle of the newspaper, bottom of the page a story that four million people had died in this war in Congo, and it blew my mind,” he said. “I didn’t understand why this was in the middle of the newspaper and not the front page.”

One thing led to the next and as he was paying his final school loan bill for school, he started talking with the cashier who happened to be from Africa.

“I asked her where she was from and she said she was from Congo, and I told her that I wanted to go there. She said, ‘Oh, you stupid Yale kids,’” he laughed as he let out a grinning smile. “I became friends with her and finally she accepted for me to stay with her in-laws in the Congo. I bought a one-way ticket after I graduated and showed up with no journalism experience. I had never even written a story.”

At this time, he booked his first gig and became a freelance reporter for the Associated Press and began writing his first book, “Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo,” the first of three books recounting his life from age 20 until 33.

From there, he moved to Rwanda where he coincidentally met Mudge and wrote his second book, “Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship.”

“I went there to teach a class of about 12 journalists,” he said. “Rwanda to a lot of people is known as a beacon of progress, but Lewis and I happened to see a very different side of the country.”

He described unimaginable horror stories of journalists being killed, imprisoned or suddenly disappearing for talking critically about their government.

“The book really is about the demise of the free press, what a country feels and sounds like when the free press is shut down,” he said. “It can actually seem very peaceful, but the peace is not harmony, it is from people too afraid to speak up.”

The pages pay homage to nearly 17 journalists whose names cannot even be spoken in Rwanda to this day.

As fate would have it, Rwanda was only just the beginning of the adventure for Mudge and Sundaram. Mudge had been working in the Central African Republic since 2008 and, in 2013, Human Rights Watch flew him in just as the city was being overtaken by a rebel coup.

“I was shocked at the amount of death and destruction I was witnessing,” Mudge said. “I was really trying to get people to come embed with me and Anjan was the one I trusted the most to get the story out.”

“Lewis just kept saying to me, ‘You should come!’” Sundaram added.

The pair traveled through some of the most dangerous parts of the country for nearly three weeks, oftentimes the first people to show up after a massacre just happened.

“There was a moment where Doctors Without Borders called us and asked, ‘Where should we go?’” Sundaram remembered. “They are usually the ones who know where to go. We were just so far beyond the frontline.”

The book retells story after story of heroic people he met along the way, but also turns the camera inward and dissects the personal cost of such high-stakes work, which in the end, ultimately dissolved his marriage.

“People don’t talk about the personal cost, it’s not seen as something relevant,” he said. “We are supposed to talk to the people and the places we are reporting on, but we never turn the camera on ourselves. It’s only now in journalism circles we are beginning to talk about these things.”

Aside from his personal experiences while embarking in the Central African Republic, the trip shaped his friendship with Mudge in ways that most people will never be able to understand, and the two have remained close friends for nearly 15 years.

“There are very few people in the world in whose hands I put my life and I did that on this trip with Lewis,” Sundaram said.

Although most Charlotters know Mudge as a selectboard member tending to municipal issues like budgets and zoning matters, Sundaram’s latest book tells a whole different side to Mudge’s story.

“I have my work life and then I come back to my Charlotte life,” Mudge said. “But I am still (in Africa) almost every month. It’s really hard work to abandon.”