Sarah Chayes ’80 discussed her experiences in Aghanistan and her recently published book, The Punishment of Virtue: Afghanistan After the Taliban last Sunday morning. Ms. Chayes is the most recent recipient of the Claude Moore Fuess Award, given to the Andover graduate who contributes the most to public service efforts, which she received last February. Also a guest speaker at an All-School meeting, Ms. Chayes spoke about her time in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban researching for her book. In her introduction of Ms. Chayes, Assistant Head Of School Rebecca Sykes began with a comparison of journalism great Peter Jennings and Chayes. She said, “If Peter Jennings was in search of the soul of America, Sarah Chayes is in search of the soul of Afghanistan.” In her talk, Ms. Chayes emphasized her apparent lack of fear in her line of work. She told an anecdote about a boy from Denver, Colorado who told his mother about Ms. Chayes, “This lady came to our school, and she’s not afraid of bombs.” However, Ms. Chayes said, “It would not be very intelligent to not be afraid of bombs.” She went on to discuss her fears of failure, humiliation, and not living up to people’s expectations about her work. Ms. Chayes said that there are those in Afghanistan and around the world who allow fear to govern their actions, and attributed the U.S. decision to invade Iraq to the government’s fear of Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. “The U.S. is now less safe than before,” she said. In Ms. Chayes’ view, Iraq is the perfect example of her theory that actions based on fear are not effective. Ms. Chayes also talked about her encounters with fear in the media during her experience as a war correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR). She said that many editors have “a concern not …of death, but a fear of clashing with powerful people… and because of this, they pass along lies. Rather than uncover [them], they enforce [them].” Ms. Chayes emphasized the dividing power of fear, and said, “Fear isolates ‘us’ from ‘them’ – whoever we define ‘us’ and ‘them’ to be…which leads to ignorance, which leads to mistakes.” Ms. Chayes’s book, The Punishment of Virtue, expands on these and other theories. Copies were on sale in Cochran Chapel, and the book is being sold widely elsewhere. Ms. Chayes graduated from Harvard in 1984 with a B.A. in history and earned the Radcliffe History Prize, awarded for the best senior thesis written by a woman. She then served in the Peace Corps in Morocco and began working as a radio reporter in 1991. She joined NPR as a Paris correspondent in 1996 and has since worked in Algeria, Lebanon, and Palestine. In 2002, she left NPR to contribute to the restoration of Kandahar, the former Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan. Since then, she has also traveled across America, giving firsthand accounts of her experiences in post-war Afghanistan.
