Brian, thank you so much for having us in your lovely home. How are you doing?

Oh, great. Thank you and my pleasure to have you here.

All right. You have covered a lot. Ethiopian famine. You were in El Salvador. You were in Kuwait, Lebanon, covering pretty much the entire Cold War.

I imagine as a journalist, you are pushing through, seeing some of the worst things possible. What kept you going?

Well, I think it was the obligation of the craft, being a journalist, being a foreign correspondent, which is what I dreamt of, and knowing there was a risk reward involved in that work, that it was sometimes risky.

I didn't realise just how much the emotional suffering could be. And I think certainly covering the Ethiopian famine in 1984 and 85 and for often weeks and months on end, it did really cause major strain on all of us who were involved in that coverage.

And we saw things we couldn't really have even prepared for. I thought I could prepare for everything.

When I arrived in Ethiopia in 1984 and northern part of the country hit by famine, it was just beyond imagining. It was like apocalypse, a world after a nuclear holocaust.

The dust clouds across the horizon, the bodies along the streets, as I think I reported.

Famine is along each road and at the gates of every town by the hundreds of thousands. Peasants are fleeing the worst drought in memory.

What kept you going was the feeling that, you know, this was hidden from the world. We were there because we fought our way in with the BBC to get visas. We were the only two crews in the whole famine area, and we needed to alert the world. And that's what kept us going.

And afterwards other things kept us going, like a desire to see the famine ended and the desire to see that society recover from famine.

Tell me about one particular person that is still someone that you keep in touch with, that you met in Ethiopia, that people really connect with in terms of your story and your coverage?

Yeah. Her name is Birhan Woldu, and I saw her first when she was three and a half years old.

I was at a feeding centre right outside, one of the worst famine camps, trying to feed these mothers and fathers with young children who were dying or already dead, or save them in some way or another.

I was going down a line of them, and I saw this girl slumped over and collapse on the pavement.

I don't know, something about her face, or just something about the nearness of that appeared to me dying sequence that I called out to a nurse and said, nurse, can we possibly save this girl? Is there anything we can do?

The nurse runs forward, picks her up, runs inside the one room medical centre we follow with the crew rolling and capture on her face what we thought might be the last gasps of life.

The face, looking outward seemed to me a symbol, really, of Ethiopia itself looking on a unhealthy world, begging for help kind of stuff, calling for help.

And the nurse says to us, I'm afraid there's not anything we can do. She's going to die within 15 minutes.

So it just devastated all of us. And we walked, went outside the room to let her die in peace.

We later were arranged to come back to see her burial. That afternoon we went out and did other famine stories. Come back that afternoon to cover the burial of Birhan Woldu and do a story maybe about that. And we see this group of people holding the girl. She's there in her arms and she's alive.

And I say to a nurse, nurse, we seem to have seen a bit of a miracle today, did we? And she said, yes. We stuck a needle in her, and she she will love now. She will survive.

And I still remember that. So we later did a story on her face and the symbolic of Ethiopia and the story, seeing if she can survive. Maybe Ethiopia itself can survive later.

Live Aid, months later uses an image of her face and the pictures CBC pictures of other desperately ill children in the famine and that caused such a pouring of grief and tears around the world. Before an audience of 1.1 billion people.

I'm imaginable that it was the greatest, according to Bob Geldof, who arranged Live Aid was the biggest moment of giving that the whole show had, and they ran it for four times.

I went back to documentaries around her years later because she'd been lost. We found her, did documentaries on her, and she appeared in the second Live Aid and Dancing with Madonna on stage.

She's very, very Christian girl. And when we first said she was going to appear with Madonna, she said she was really weird. I thought that was a bit weird.

Anyways, we were on Oprah together. Long story short, had her over here for a holiday. I arranged for her and her family, their living and her education and now we zoom back and forth our families. She has set up a a small charity in northern Ethiopia itself for disabled children in the very poorest of all areas. She wants to stay there and help her people.

These are some old pictures I kept through the years. Going back, you know, childhood ones. But these are that's me along the line in Ethiopia of the famine line where I met Birhan.

Will do. Okay. Is she in this?

She is in this. This is her. This is the scene. That's her slumped against the cement, this pavement. That's her father grieving over her. That's the nurse would just rushing in to pick her up this way.

Went back to find her four years later. Four years later, right. There outside there. Hot.

I have to imagine that that story and that relationship is unique in comparison to all of the other places and stories that you've been. You don't get a chance to be able to tell that full circle story. And I imagine that that must weigh on you heavily.

I know that in your book you talk about the moral injury. What what what can you tell us about that?

Well, it was a long time for journalism to really realise the psychological and emotional damage of being this professional witness over and over again and also facing dangers, which is so much a part of that life.

It wasn't really until the '90s that journalism discovered that PTSD was ravaging the ranks. It turned out later there was another thing called moral injury, which is not a psychological mental illness. It's an emotional one.

Leading psychiatrist in Toronto, Anthony Feinstein, as termed that, wound to the soul, a wound of the spirit that when you watch things like that happen over and over again, even though you may be doing wonderful work in terms of a report that does useful stuff and you can tell yourself a hundred times over, look, it did well. It was good that we were there. We helped the aid arrive.

You still feel that as a human being, you didn't quite live up to your highest expectations of yourself because there were refugee families. You didn't stop and load into your van and drive off with for a medical centre. There was something in your pocket you didn't hand out at a given time. There were other people, even though you were not qualified to do anything, as I was not qualified to even give first aid. What was I doing in a famine? You kind of feel I could have done more, I could have done more.

And that begins over the years to build to the point where you have symptoms very like PTSD. And I had, in fact, a nervous breakdown caused by this and was treated for moral injury successfully. So I'm glad to say so. I've lived a very good life since that.

It is no secret, and it's something that you talk about through your time at CBC, NBC and then back. Newsrooms don't have the resources that they once did, and I am curious what happens to democracy when we lose the privilege of someone like you in the field of foreign correspondent reporting for the world to see?

I think it's a serious loss for particularly the media. But also, you know, Canada is a country that doesn't have the same kind of diplomatic corps it used to have. It's a country that chose not to even have an overseas intelligence service of its own. Like most industrial powers of our size, cabinet often seems out to lunch on the rest of the world and journalism. We've just decimated the ranks of our overseas coverage.

So we get stories from other people. We don't have Canadian eyes and ears out there looking for angles that we as a country need to be informed about. And I think the main networks, the private networks have done, I'll be quite frank and horrible job at virtually eliminating foreign news coverage by their own bureaus and reporters. And the CBC has held a held a sort of bridge. So it's still functioning, but with a much lower impact.

And what happens is we have fewer reporters out there doing the job at a time when there's more stories breaking all the time, the vortex of news that goes on 24 over seven, over and over, crisis upon crisis, upon crisis, and the fragmentation of news makes it very much harder to do the job out there. So I'm hoping that this country gets to a part where it realises we have got to start rebuilding our foreign media sources overseas, the same way we have to rebuild our diplomatic sources as well, and our economic sources overseas.

Brian, thank you so much. Really appreciate that.

Thank you very. Much, honour.

My pleasure indeed.