CNN —

Gary Strieker had every reason to be a pessimist. People dying of starvation, brutal murders and many other horrific events that he covered as an international reporter unfolded right before his eyes.

However, Strieker never lost his optimistic spirit or his passion for shedding light on critically important but often underreported stories about the environment and global health.

Strieker – who died in July this year at the age of 78 – was the first chief of CNN’s Nairobi bureau and helped the network open its reporting center in the Kenyan capital in 1985. Colleagues say he covered the entire African continent — sometimes as a one-man band — in the network’s early years, when newsgathering budgets were tight.

“He had a passion for (Africa) and he wanted to share that love for the continent, with all of its madness and violence, but also its beauty and fun,” said Kim Norgaard, CNN’s senior director of operations for international news gathering.

Strieker won an Emmy Award in 1992 for his role in CNN’s coverage of the civil war in Somalia, and is credited with being one of the first TV journalists to come to Rwanda when the genocide was unfolding in the spring of 1994.

He spent the latter part of his career focusing on global environmental issues – most recently producing This American Land, which airs on PBS stations across the US.

This career change came in the mid-1990s after meeting CNN founder Ted Turner, who shared Strieker’s passion for conservation and the environment.

“[Gary]had this idea that he wanted to be an environmental reporter for CNN,” Norgaard said. “About every year we had (a) conference in Atlanta and I would go there with Gary and I would hear Ted yell, ‘Gary! Come sit here!’ and he announces to everyone: ‘Gary is our man in Africa!’

“They sat down and started talking and then Gary just brought up this idea about the environment (reporting) to him and I remember Ted turning around and looking at Tom Johnson (then President of CNN) and he was like, ‘Tom, that is brilliant! I love it, let’s make it happen!”

Other colleagues who recalled the story said Johnson later vowed, half-jokingly, never to seat a correspondent next to Turner again.

In 1997, Strieker and his second wife, Christine, moved to Atlanta, where he worked as CNN’s global environmental correspondent. His coverage of the bushmeat crisis in Central Africa and deforestation in Indonesia, Peru and Papua New Guinea earned him the National Press Club’s top environmental reporting award in 2000.

“Gary was ahead of his time in many ways – he pushed for environmental reporting years before any other network,” Norgaard recalls.

Norgaard, a former head of CNN’s Johannesburg bureau, was a junior editor at the station’s international desk in Atlanta when he began working with Strieker.

“I was born and raised in Africa, so we had a special understanding,” he said.

Strieker was unlike many international correspondents at the time, who, as Norgaard said, could be “really upset” and rude when calling the international bureau.

“He never was,” Norgaard said. “He was always calm, polite… I’ll never forget that about Gary. I didn’t know him that well, but he’s someone you consider a friend.”

Strieker was born on July 7, 1944 in the small town of Breese, Illinois and grew up in San Diego, California – eventually earning a law degree from UC-Hastings in San Francisco. Strieker and his first wife Phyllis joined one of the first US Peace Corps teams to undertake a mission to the newly independent African Kingdom of Swaziland – now Eswatini – in 1968.

Strieker spent five years in Swaziland, serving as legal advisor to the new sovereign government and helping draft a bill to protect Swaziland’s land rights. During this time his eldest daughter Lindsay was born. Strieker accepted a position with Citibank in Beirut in 1975 in the early days of the Lebanese Civil War before returning to Africa as Citibank’s Resident Vice President for their regional office in Nairobi, Kenya.

Strieker’s twin daughters, Rachel and Alison, were born in Nairobi and some health complications put Alison’s life at risk.

Courtesy of the Sturmer family

“The doctor at the hospital who looked after me was just very casual and said, ‘Well…we’ll see if she makes it through the night,'” Alison Strieker recalled of her father’s story. “And my father said, ‘Can we do something?’ and the doctor said, ‘She needs blood for a transfusion.’”

Gary Strieker said he asked the nurses to test his blood type and he was a match. Years later, Alison said her father saved her life a second time when he donated his kidney to her.

“He’s my favorite person on earth,” Alison Strieker said. “I still have his kidney to this day.”

As his daughters grew up they were the focus of his life and he captured many moments of their young life with a film camera and an old Kodak “Brownie” camera.

His passion for photography sparked his switch to journalism.

“What interested him most about photography was not just being interested in the images, but telling a story… about people and places and animals that have no voice – and that seemed to be his true passion,” recalls Alison Strieker.

After a brief stint at ABC News, he joined CNN in the early 1980s, setting up the new station’s Nairobi office and becoming its only correspondent on the African continent at the time.

“Gary entered the world of reporting in African countries at a time in the 1980s when long-standing conflicts in Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia coincided with drought and famine (and) led to major refugee crises,” recalled the former editor-in-chief by CNN, Eli Flournoy.

“Gary has been on the ground year after year reporting, documenting and illustrating these endemic conflicts.”

Strieker had many close calls during his reporting career.

“He’s been in plane crashes, he’s been in car accidents where other people have died — he’s just been very dedicated,” said his eldest daughter, Lindsay Strieker.

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After a car accident in Rwanda, he was pronounced dead and taken to the morgue.

“He woke up in the morgue to a toe tag being placed and said it almost killed the medical worker as he sat up,” recalled Jim Clancy, a former CNN anchor and international correspondent.

He touched on death again when he covered the 1995 Ebola outbreak in Kikwit, Democratic Republic of the Congo, which claimed hundreds of lives.

“Gary … fearlessly went in and reported on the Ebola patients and the operations of the (Kikwit) hospital, which was one of the first of its kind to treat a contagious outbreak like Ebola,” Flournoy recalled. “It was a very, very dangerous environment.”

At one point, local authorities began implementing a quarantine and reached out to Strieker, who they believed had been exposed to Ebola.

“They wanted to take him to the hospital’s Ebola ward,” Flournoy said.

Armed with a satellite phone, Strieker frantically called the international office.

“He[said]’We have to do something to prevent this because I’m almost certainly going to die if I’m quarantined in this hospital,'” Flournoy said.

After a “insane mess” that included many phone calls and intervention by United Nations officials, Strieker was allowed to leave the country instead.

“Gary remained steadfast, determined to get to the facts of history while always finding the human story within the larger conflict,” Flournoy said. “He was a remarkable storyteller.”

Strieker has never lost his curiosity or energy to illuminate critical stories about people impacted by global health and environmental crises.

“It was never about getting your face on TV or getting a higher Nielsen rating,” said Dave Timko, who worked with Strieker on This American Land.

Strieker only cared about using its platforms to tell the stories of people around the world who were in need.

“Sometimes he would say, ‘If I don’t go to these places, no one will write these stories,'” said his widow, Christine Nkini Strieker.

He was a devoted father to the couple’s two children, Reid, 20, and Nandi, 16, telling them stories of his adventures over dinner and spending every moment he could with his family when he was not on duty.

Even when he fell ill, Christine said that Strieker was determined to get well so he could get back to work.

“He refused saying I’m too ill to do anything,” she said.

After Strieker’s death in July, friends and former colleagues flooded a shared Facebook page with memories — all telling Strieker’s incredible stories, his quiet bravery in the midst of impossibly dangerous reporting assignments, his wit and genuine dedication to the craft of journalism.

“His message to us was, ‘Life, with its ups and downs, is an adventure — and it’s important to stay curious and compassionate,'” said his daughter Rachel.

It is a comfort to the loved ones he leaves behind, including his five children and three surviving grandchildren who are picking up the pieces after his death.

“The more we don’t look at the sadness, but the more at the positive in the life he gave us – that’s what my children should carry on,” said Christine Strieker.

by Arianna Ravelli, sent to Doha

Travel to the Labor City, also known as the Asian City: the city within the city, far from glittering Doha, home to foreign workers. Housing, wages, conditions. But we’re not talking about the dead

DOHA Kuame is already in the stands two hours before the game, but doesn’t know which of the two games will be projected onto the big screen. He comes from Ghana and is a driver here. He has a valid hope: I think they will take on Ghana and Uruguay, which is more important, right? Portugal has already qualified. And if not? I’m watching Ghana on my phone. OK.

They come in small groups on Fridays, cheerful like those who have the day off and finally have something to do. They take a seat on the esplanade in front of the first giant screen or enter the cricket stadium, a sport that many of them would have preferred where there is the second (and where, unfortunately for Kuame, Ghana, they don’t exist). . Cristiano Ronaldo in the city of workers: Labor City, or, unsurprisingly, Asian City, 70,000 people living in these rows of white houses, in the industrial area (where 600,000 people live), 25 km from glittering Doha, the desert looms, construction sites, truck promenades.

This fan zone was created for the workers and it cannot be said that it was unsuccessful: in the end there will be at least 4,000, maybe more, from Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Ghana, the Philippines and Togo. Electricians, mechanics, truck drivers, bricklayers. They cheer both when Portugal scores and when Korea scores, as long as something happens. They are all men. The only women are the host who opens the pre-game conversation and two dancers on stage. Hours later, when the game was 1-1, a woman in a burqa arrives with her husband, who is holding a baby and looks concerned.

There was no such thing before the World Cup: frankly, there wasn’t even this part of the city built to paint the still existing conditions of semi-slavery and a modicum of dignity to the foreign workers who built the World Cup , as well as to all of Qatar. Let’s stay with the skin: Two days ago, the regime officially recognized for the first time that there had been 500 deaths on construction sites. Independent research says 6,500, but here’s the tab. No, I don’t know about deaths – Sukram, from Nepal, an electrician closes immediately – but I’m not that lucky, I work 10 hours a day, I get 1,000 riyals (260 Euro). Stay here for a year and then I’ll see.

Before the World Cup, the only attraction of the Grand Mall Hypermarket, a stone’s throw from here, was the circular mall (like a stadium), which on Fridays is a mess of taxi drivers trying to lure customers. This is where wages are collected at the beginning of the month (when they arrive), many vans leave this parking lot to take workers to the construction sites. But even before that, there wasn’t even the Grand Mall, explains Rabeeh, who works in the phone business and has traveled from India long enough (10 years) to remember it. Rabeeh, who supports Brazil, belongs to the party that sees long-term improvements. I just hope that everything doesn’t stop after the World Cup and that they will host other events. But he is privileged. The most desperate are not here not to see the game, relegated to barracks with more urgent needs, where they say there are fleas, mice, devastating sanitary conditions and in desperation some have to drink denatured alcohol to clean their floors in desperation, given the the difficulty of obtaining alcohol. Not here, this is a kind of middle class that comes to the games, of course by Qatari standards, which are very different from Western ones, as a lawyer who handles the prosecution of the workers realizes, giving us a Pakistani boy on the phone who doesn’t speak english but still wants to help us.

Kafala, the law giving employers almost unlimited powers (over residence permits, the ability to change jobs and even return home), has been abolished in theory. In practice not really. Andrew came from the Philippines in 2012, operates the cranes: change company? No you can’t. Every two years I have a holiday and can go home and he doesn’t say it while he’s complaining.

I’m sorry you can’t enter here, the security guard stops (politely) as you approach the accommodation town. Anyway, Anthony awake, he lives here, he comes in, takes it with him and comes back with the photos: Here is the canteen, the bathrooms – he shows – here the rooms where the four of us sleep are not very nice , you can see the cots hidden by curtains, an acceptable level of cleaning, it didn’t all remind of a prison.

West Bay hotels are a long way off, but we’re not even at the end of the desperate chain. Anthony is 21 years old, he says he is a singer in Ghana, who arrived half a year ago, his friend who had been here with him two years ago, then returned home, did not feel well. Now they’ve come especially for the World Cup, Anthony in stadium security, his friend is Marshall in another fan zone.

The salaries are too low: 1800 rials (470 euros), it’s not worth it. Nicolas, also Ghanaian, works in the airport laundry: I’m going back to my country. I sleep and work here. I want my freedom back. In some time Cristiano Ronaldo will also leave and only the Grand Mall will remain on Friday night.

December 3, 2022 (change December 3, 2022 | 09:06)

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