APPROACHING HAVANA — The blast of insecticide jolted me awake. A Mexicana flight attendant had just doused me with a chemical cloud while her colleague explained over the intercom that the Cuban Health Ministry requires arriving aircraft to be fumigated.
"The substance isn't harmful to humans," we were assured, amid a chorus of coughing.
Ah, the glamorous life of a foreign correspondent.
Nights spent in war-zone villages without heat or indoor plumbing. Days of driving through blistering heat to hell-and-back outposts with no chance to bathe before bedding down with bugs, dust and strangers. Scary rides on dubious aircraft and lost-luggage nightmares so prolonged you burn the clothes on your back once you can take them off.
The Mexicana debugging, presumably part of the Cuban government's campaign against mosquito-borne dengue fever, set me to reminiscing about 25 years of reporting abroad as the plane descended in mid-June for what would be my last trip as a foreign correspondent.
Bad smells, unsafe transportation, fear and humiliation exponentially overwhelm the breathtaking moments of history and excitement. More "Perils of Pauline" than "The Year of Living Dangerously," my journal, if I'd kept one, would be titled "The GLC Factor" (Glamorous Life of a Correspondent), or perhaps "The Indignity Index," and allot points for each assignment's discomforts and impositions.
From my first foreign posting to Moscow in 1984 through pro-democracy revolutions and rebuilding in Eastern Europe and wars, rebellions and natural disasters from Pakistan to Haiti, the experiences have been dramatic; the comfort and elegance, well, not so much.
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I've contracted giardiasis, caused by a microbial parasite, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and amoebic dysentery in the Balkans. A mold-spewing air conditioner in the Dominican Republic left me with bronchitis for six months. I've had food poisoning on four continents and rashes, gouges and bruises all over my body.
I've been bitten by bed bugs at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and spent sleepless nights clutching a can of Chinese-made bug spray in a rented house in Kabul, poised to ward off cockroaches as big as my hand.
That was The Times' second house in the Afghan capital, secured at war-profiteering rates in the aftermath of the October 2001 invasion. The first house, in a slightly more upscale neighborhood, didn't have roaches but came with a cook with a tubercular cough, dirty hands and more than a touch of body odor.
