This is a photograph of the Himalayas, taken from my vantage point in Ghorka, Nepal, some years ago. I was working on a television story about civilian killings in the country’s long-running conflict with Maoist guerillas. My guide, Guna Raj, stopped me and told me to take a picture as we were heading to an interview.

I love this photo, not only because of the grandeur of the scene I captured in my lens, but also because of what it says, subliminally, about the work I do. The lens is my eye. If I use it discerningly, it captures wonderful things and dreadful things, blue skies and skulls, sometimes from the same spot, and it asks me to understand these things, how they co-exist, how they connect to us, why they matter.  It tells me that I have to look hard and deep: this Himalayan snapshot is seductively beautiful. It almost made me forget that in the shadow of this mountain, bad things were happening to people, and my job was to find them and tell their stories. Stories like that of Niru Pokharel (left) whose sister Rudra was murdered by police because she was a Communist. Or stories like that of Pelagia (to his right) who is being asked to forgive the Hutu killers who terrorized her village in another beautiful country, Rwanda.

I’ve had the good fortune to travel to Rwanda and Nepal and dozens of other places over 40 years  as a journalist and teacher. I’ve worked as a print reporter in London and Washington, a network television correspondent in Europe and Canada, and a freelance videographer and documentary filmmaker on five continents. I’ve written a best-selling non-fiction book, The Canadian Caper, and I’ve been published in most of Canada’s leading newspapers and magazines.

I’ve also taught broadcast journalism at the University of British Columbia, and for a brief time at the National University of Rwanda.

You can find my blog at

http://claudeadams.blogspot.com/

On Twitter, I’m Clawman1