Just About 25
Just About 25 Fatima Triki | Principal Producer, Al Jazeera News Channel
Twenty-five is a relatively significant number when it comes to human life. As Al Jazeera celebrates its silver jubilee, I’d like to write about what that number means to me and share something of my journey. Each of these words carry a part of me in them – a part unknown to an audience only familiar with me as a female journalist’s voice. For the past 20 years that I have worked with Al Jazeera, I have been living the dream. But my journey with journalism began before that - with the press and radio in Lebanon. In a partisan environment loaded with sectarianism, I found myself feeling alienated. So when I saw an advertisement in a newspaper, I applied. I was given a test, followed by an interview and the result came immediately: I was offered the job. In disbelief, I ran home and told my mother that I had found a place where my qualifications and competence were valued. That place was Al Jazeera. With no previous experience in television, I suddenly found myself working for the most prominent news channel in the Arab world. I recall a night shift, early on, when I was tasked with writing a report on developing events in Venezuela and given less than an hour in which
to do it. What a task! I felt a heavy burden on my shoulders. Then my colleague, the late veteran journalist Hamid Abdul Raouf, came to check on me. “Don’t worry, let’s get some coffee,” he told me. After he had bought me a coffee, he brought a pile of tapes, as we used to get footage manually from the archive then. When I began to voice the report, he stopped me. “The tension is clear in your voice,” he said. “Take a step back and relax.” He walked me through the whole process until the report was done. In fact, he helped so much that I told him it ought to bear his name, not mine. “It is your words, your voice,” he replied. “They will be something one day.” Hamid was an exceptional human being: knowledgeable and supportive. More reports followed; some have resonated remarkably. Growing up during the civil war in Lebanon, I learned that homes are not built of stones and bricks but of souls and spirits.
I will never forget the lady who waved to us from afar, as we were preparing to leave the field during the 2006 war in Lebanon. “Tell the world how murderous the Israelis are; how they destroyed my home,” she said. Her face represents every Palestinian, Syrian, Libyan or Yemeni reeling under the strain of war. Before Egypt’s January revolution, I used to visit the country and make field reports on the lives
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