Louise Plante in Afghanistan

Louise Plante is a retired journalist who worked at Le Nouvelliste. Paule Vermot Desroches is currently a reporter at the same newspaper. In this clip, they discuss Plante’s career.

Louise Plante: I was lucky, if that’s the right word, because I was the only reporter at Le Nouvelliste who had the opportunity to cover a war zone…

Paule Vermot-Desroches: That’s true.

Louise Plante: …in Afghanistan. And we really were in a war zone. We weren’t staying at some quaint little hotel, you know? And we moved around in armoured vehicles. We… We didn’t stay on the American or Canadian military base. We moved around. It was really dangerous. I mean, we wore bulletproof vests and the whole shebang. All suited up, like the soldiers. It really was something else. You’d ask yourself what the hell you were doing there. [Laughter] Like, “What am I doing here?” But I was very proud to have done it, because we wanted to meet up with people from the region who were in Afghanistan. That… that was the aim.

Paule Vermot-Desroches: Well, it produced a lot of good articles.

Louise Plante: Ah, well.

Paule Vermot-Desroches: It made for some good reporting.

Louise Plante: In any case, people read it. It’s incredible. The impact that, that it…

Paule Vermot-Desroches: Because people really wanted news about their neighbours, about their friends and family.

Louise Plante: That’s it.

Paule Vermot-Desroches: You know, that’s sort of what we do. We’re a mirror of our region.

Louise Plante: Exactly.

Paule Vermot-Desroches: And people from the region had been deployed to Afghanistan. We had to talk about it.

Louise Plante: Yeah, yeah.

Paule Vermot-Desroches: It’s like we didn’t have a choice. Yeah, we didn’t… It really made for some good reporting.

Louise Plante: An adventure.

Paule Vermot-Desroches: Yes, it proved to be quite an adventure.

Other person: Is that something that happens a lot, having to report from other countries like that?

Louise Plante: Well, we’d have small assignments from time to time, you know, like for the beatification of Father Frédéric. But that didn’t put me under the same level of stress as Afghanistan. [Laughter] You know what I mean?

Paule Vermot-Desroches: It’s different.

**Images of articles by Louise Plante**