Milford native Earleen Fisher shows off one of many objects she has brought back to the U.S. from overseas. During her career as a journalist, she lived and worked in Cairo, Beirut, Tel Aviv and New Delhi. This small sculpture was made for her by a young Iranian woman.

Text and Photos
By Lilli Dwyer
InkFree News

MILFORD — Earleen Fisher has experience with the world that few other Kosciusko County residents can claim. A native of Milford, she started writing for The Mail-Journal as a sophomore in high school, but her journalistic ambitions took her much further than that.

In 1977, Fisher and her husband at the time moved to Cairo. There she worked a freelance writer, often covering Anwar Sadat, a politician who served as the president of Egypt from 1970 until his assassination in 1981.

“We used to doorstep Sadat,” she recalled. Doorstepping involved waiting outside one of Sadat’s many houses or on an airport runway and waiting for him to make an appearance. “I literally ended up nose to mustache with him sometimes. Sometimes he wanted to talk and sometimes no, but for the most part you could shout questions at him and get some words back.”

From 1980 to 1983, Fisher worked in Beirut, covering the Israeli-Lebanese conflict and Israel’s efforts to drive the Palestine Liberation Organization out of Lebanon. From 1985 to 1987, her beat was in Tel Aviv, Israel.

In 1988, when Fisher was working as an AP bureau chief in New Delhi, India, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan began and her city was able to “take over reporting.” At the time, Fisher recalled, coverage on Afghanistan had to come from neighboring Pakistan.

“Once or twice a year, there might be an on-the-bus, off-the-bus tour for the Moscow press who would go down with the Russians and obviously get a really narrow view. New Delhi was one of the very few places you could get a visa into Afghanistan and a direct flight, so we sort of annexed Afghanistan while I was there,” she explained.

Fisher’s motivation for reporting from some of the most politically volatile places in the world was, she said, “Good story, and/or a sense of responsibility that this needs to be told.”

At the time, there were far fewer women working in journalism, but Fisher’s capabilities proved strong. “Afghanistan and Lebanon taught me the most about myself and what I could do,” Fisher said. “Just that I could operate and know what I was seeing.”

According to Fisher, some reporters working in these places didn’t fully grasp the situations they were in. One reporter, she recalled, was sent to Beirut by an editor who said, “I don’t understand what this is all about. Why don’t the Palestinians just go back to where they came from?”

“And gee, that’s sort of what the problem is. They would like to go back to where they came from,” Fisher said.

Conflicts that were ongoing during Fisher’s career have since compounded into the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, the governing body of the Gaza Strip in Palestine.

“There are refugees camps to this day that date from shortly after 1948,” Fisher said, referring to the Palestinians displaced when Israel was formed. “You now have five or in some cases six generations that have lived in these camps.

Fisher remarked on the conflict, saying, “I find no excuse for what Hamas did, but when you think of six generations of refugees, and they still don’t know what to do with the Palestinians, there are no good answers to any of this.”

Fisher went on to say, “What Israel is doing now is hugely disproportionate, death-wise, but again that’s no excuse for what Hamas did. Hamas wants to see Israel gone altogether, which is not going to happen. Where do we go from here? It’s very depressing.”

Fisher also had some thoughts about the reporting being done on this conflict, and other issues of the day. “There’s so much more quote ‘media’ unquote than there was in the past. Anybody can have a platform and express or comment on so many things. … If you really want to know what’s going on you have to make some effort to find out how valid or how true something is. Too many people will look for somebody saying what they want to believe,” she explained.

“I fear enough people aren’t responding one way or the other. It’s just something to them that’s foreign and they don’t care or they’re not interested. They don’t see the world as interconnected. … What happens in Gaza or Ukraine or Beijing or Tokyo can have an effect on us. The days of isolation are over. You can’t not be a member of the planet,” Fisher said.

Earleen Fisher displays “Goha the Wise Fool,” a book of Middle Eastern folktales about the titular Goha, in her front foyer. The tapestry behind her illustrates one of the tales.