I had the privilege to speak with Boo before her reading from Behind the Beautiful Forevers. The piece runs today in the Sunday Oregonian. A clip:
“I had been working in the United States, and my husband would see me agonizing over facts with fact checkers; he knew how crazy I got trying to get documents. He said, ‘You could do the same in India, and maybe that’s worthwhile.” I said, I don’t have the right to do this. He felt there were a lot of people making policy, and not everybody would be against you in these elite circles; that some people really do want more information. He said, ‘Don’t be afraid to do this.’
“For the first seven months, I was working in three different places. I didn’t have a translator who wanted to work in the same way I wanted to work, which is really slowly. A lot of the time it seems pointless to them: why are you sitting in a garbage shed watching this kid work? It’s boring. They often want to jump-start it.”
They want to show you something exciting, something shiny...
"Right. This one translator wanted to show me the rat squad--they go around killing rats. Every newspaper in the world has done the rat squad story. It took me from November 2007 to April 2008 to find a coll translator who understood what I was doing, Then I could really start reporting."
