Trippping Down the Kabul Stones

By: Mark Fitzgerald As freelance arts and entertainment columnist for the 4,500-circulation Duxbury (Mass.) Clipper, Bruce Barrett never travels anywhere on the paper's dime. He doesn't even expense show tickets. "If there's something going on, like I'm covering a high school play, I just talk my way in, you know, 'I'm with the Clipper,'" says Barrett, whose full-time job is supermarket cashier.

But in April, Barrett talked his way into a place few journalists have ever been: Afghanistan. "Initially, to be honest, I kind of dismissed it," says Editor/Publisher Josh Cutler, but he soon saw that Barrett was proposing a local story.

For months, the paper had been reporting on the efforts of Duxbury businesswoman Razia Jan, an Afghan native, to build a school for girls in Deh'Subz, a village outside Kabul. Members of the Duxbury Rotary Club donated virtually the entire cost.

Barrett's six-page package of stories, the biggest in the Clipper's 58-year history, published on April 16, mixed the constant threat of the Taliban with the hope of girls' education. "There's a wildness to the place," he says of Kabul. "Everybody's got Kalashnikovs." But back home, "It really is clearly a Duxbury story," he adds.