The late afternoon sun beats down on the high, rocky landscape. Sweat runs down my face and the back of my neck and tickles my scalp underneath a long, gray burka swaddled tightly around my head and shoulders, hanging to just below my knees. My feet slip on loose pebbles as I scramble up a steep slope in the rugged foothills of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province.

Squinting against the light and heat above me, I see Tanya Khan, my guide and head of The Rural Support Programmes Network—a Pakistani non-governmental organization (NGO) working with earthquake victims in this remote Pashtun area—talking quickly, and nervously, with an older bearded man, a red and white keffyeh resting on his shoulders. She gestures in my direction, and as I look into his stern face registering my presence for the first time, my stomach rolls over itself and a stinging cold suddenly runs up my spine and down my arms, sending a series of tremors through my hands as they flutter and grasp at the dusty earth to steady me on the uneven slope. I have never been so afraid in my life.

I don’t scare that easily. At least not these days, as my recently established nonprofit media collective the Common Language Project (CLP) has found me over the past four months tiptoeing through Cambodian minefields and poking around crime-riddled red light districts in Calcutta in search of the world’s unwritten and ignored stories. The entire point of the CLP, from its very inception, has been to travel to the places that inspire fear in an American audience fed on a corporate media that typically reports only violence, if it covers foreign affairs at all.

We CLP reporters like to consider ourselves an intrepid bunch, and like most young, liberal-minded journalists, we think we are immune to the frightening stereotypes perpetuated by our government and the evening news. Pakistan has our families and friends worried, and we’ve been sending reassuring e-mails for the past few weeks, promising that like everywhere we’ve visited, like America itself, the good, the bad, and the in-between are represented in the usual proportions. We toasted to our mothers’ nerves over non-alcoholic margaritas at a Pizzeria Uno in Lahore just three days ago.

But suddenly, as I climb to meet this man introduced as Dastali Shah, as Tanya hisses in my ear, “this is a very conservative place, they have not met Americans before, please be very careful,” as I walk into the center of the Pashtun village of Kakray and see 50 sets of stoic eyes turned on me, I am silently screaming, this is different!

Now images from the War on Terror march in front of me as though they were always cued and ready to go. These men are Al Qaeda, The Taliban, Terrorists, The Enemy. The loose white pants, the taupe vests, the wool fezzes, the huge bushy beards. I see them crouched in anonymous foreign cities and mountains, rocket launchers hoisted on their shoulders. I see them looking down the sights of Kalashnikovs. I hear them shouting out hysterically to Allah in grainy Web videos as they tower over blindfolded and terrified Westerners. God help me, I see them huddled in caves plotting a global end to freedom and security. Then they bring me a plate of stale wafer cookies and a pitcher of syrupy pink rose water, and ask me, “please to sit.”

And as I sit on the cracked plastic chair they have brought especially for me, tepid rose water clutched in hand, and look out over the stone rubble of their homes and the tattered tent that makes up their school to the jagged mountain peaks that encircle them, I remember why I’m here. I’m here because, early in the morning on Oct. 8, less than a year ago, a 7.6-scale earthquake shook apart what little they had. It took 20 of their friends’ and families’ lives, injured hundreds more, and toppled almost every structure in their village.

I’m also here because rumor among local NGOs has it that many people in this traditionally anti-Western region are softening their attitude towards foreigners, and Americans particularly, in response to the international organizations that have been aiding their reconstruction efforts.

Most specifically, I’m here because Tanya has suggested that if some used tents and plastic backpacks from USAID can work to challenge deeply rooted animosity towards the West in these remote, traditional areas, then perhaps a full-fledged commitment of aid from the U.S., especially before the coming winter, could do more for the war on terror than any military campaign or CIA presence can. And that’s the kind of story the CLP climbs mountains for.

Usually in an interview I am first to speak, I have a little rehearsed introduction that I run through and then I launch into a series of pre-written questions. But this time I’m too disoriented, and there is a long two minutes of silent staring before Dastali Shah speaks through our translator and says, “Thank them for coming to see us to talk of our tragedy, and tell them thank you for coming in Burka, we would never have thought that Americans would respect us in this way. These Americans may visit us anytime.”

Sarah Stuteville has written for The Indypendent, The Gotham Gazette, and $pread Magazine in New York City, as well as CIMAC and Milenio in Mexico City. She was the 2005 student winner of the Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, and has won two Independent Press Awards.

Photograph by Alex Stonehıll.

This article originally appeared on Glimpse Abroad, an international news, culture and travel site that features stories written by students and volunteers living abroad.