Exactly one year after he proposed to me, my fiance and I were due to sign our papers at the register office in Cairo, the city where we had been living together for four years. We were both journalists, there to cover the dramatic events that unfolded after the revolution that ousted the president. Our plan was to move to New York afterwards, where my fiance had a job lined up. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I had just quit my job as Sky News’s Middle East correspondent, exasperated with journalism and its limitations.
It was clear that I was burning out, despite the awards and accolades my team and I were receiving. I felt I was doing nothing to change the lives of the people I reported on. My interest was no longer in explaining the bad things going on in the world. Rather, it was in trying to stop these injustices from happening.
