Kathy Kastilahn thanks the press.

“There would be no Lutheran church if it weren’t for the printing press,” she said. “Lutherans have always been wordy and into printing and valuing words.”

But it’s those same words that landed Kastilahn under house arrest for almost a week in Zimbabwe.

The Evanston resident and Medill ’68 graduate returned home last week after serving time for an unusual accusation — being a journalist.

She was on assignment for The Lutheran, a Chicago-based magazine, when she was detained. Her arrest prevented her from writing about her subject: the Lutheran church’s missionary work in Zimbabwe. But Kastilahn said her experience changed the way she sees democracy, activism, journalism and her faith.

The trip was supposed to be an adventure. Kastilahn has traveled and written about missionary work for The Lutheran all over the world — including Tanzania, India, Thailand and Peru, among others.

She has devoted her life to the press while serving her faith.

“She’s a real pro,” said the magazine’s managing editor, Sonia Solomonson.

A rough journey

When she arrived Jan. 23 at the airport in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, Kastilahn didn’t expect danger — though she knew the political climate in the region was unstable.

“That’s one of the reasons we were going,” she said.

To keep watch over critics, President Robert Mugabe’s government passed a press law in May 2002 that requires all journalists to register with the government. Yves Sorokovi, the African program coordinator for the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, said Zimbabwe is unsafe for both foreign and local journalists.

Despite the antagonistic climate, Kastilahn and her companions — two Germans, a Finn and a Swiss citizen who is Kenyan by birth — felt sheltered coming into Zimbabwe. They wanted to report on Lutheran missionaries, who have a strong presence there, Kastilahn said.

After a five-hour drive in a rickety pick-up truck to the small mining town of Zvishavane, Kastilahn’s group arrived late at night at the Hotel Nilton. The elegant colonial building had only one phone line.

‘They didn’t want to protect us’

Twenty minutes after the group arrived, the local coordinator for Lutheran Development Services greeted them — along with a cadre of local police.

Jet-lagged and hungry, Kastilahn said she wondered why the government thought they needed protection.

“(But) they didn’t want to protect us,” she said. “They wanted to investigate what we had with us.”

The officers searched their rooms, and from Kastilahn they confiscated three blank reporter’s notebooks, printouts from the BBC’s Web site, a passport and contact information for the U.S. embassy.

The officers escorted the group to the police station, which was surrounded by chicken-wire fencing. Kastilahn sat in the station’s only room, lit by a single bulb, before being returned to her hotel for the night.

The next evening, the officers came back. They confiscated Kastilahn’s camera and reading light and placed her group under house arrest. The police would not release the five journalists for four more days.

The story had already broken in the state-run newspaper: “Five Foreigners Nabbed.”

Clear country sky

Three days after the house arrest began, Kastilahn and the others were charged with instigating a “mass media operation.” That night Kastilahn watched a state-run television station and saw a story about herself. The station reported that five foreigners pretending to be Lutheran aid workers would be deported.

The next day, police escorted the group to Gweru, the regional capital, where they met with the bishop of the national church, a grizzled old man with white hair.

Kastilahn apologized to the man. She regretted that the group couldn’t report on the relief projects they had hoped to observe, she said.

“You must take this positively,” he told her, and then he repeated it two more times. “You will need to think why you were stopped here.”

Later that day, a new set of officers brought Kastilahn’s group back to Harare.

At dusk an officer pointed out a tree full of big white-spotted black birds.

“Their nickname is pastors,” he said. “You’d understand those — church birds. Those are the kind of birds that fed Elijah.”

Another night they stopped by the road to look at the amazing, clear country sky.

They reached Harare early Jan. 29, and an official gave them a choice of where to sleep: his jail cells or the airport.

‘The real Zimbabwe’

Kastilahn said that when she was a student at Medill, one professor, Peter Jacobi, told her all great journalists love other people.

“Journalism is about getting the middle initial right first,” she said. “Then you’ve got to tell the rest of the story. You really have to care that individual people live good lives.”

Kastilahn said she was reminded of that by the officers who arrested her. They were frightening at first, she said, adding they even beat the group’s driver.

“He should not have had to bear that because of us,” she said.

But over time, her companions grew sympathetic to their captors, she said, and forgave them.

The officers had families to support, and Kastilahn said she understood that they were unable to defy their orders.

“I think they were told we were the absolutely most dangerous, most anti-Zimbabwean folk that had ever been around,” she said.

The men probably realized the Lutheran group wasn’t a threat, she said. She realized that when one officer read back Kastilahn’s denial of the charges against her.

“He’s not mocking me or reading it with no intonation,” she remembered. “He’s reading it like he believes it.”

Before they left the station, one of the officers took Kastilahn aside and asked what she thought of his country.

“I love it,” she told him. “The countryside is fabulous, and everybody we’ve met has been thoughtful.”

“Would you ever come back?” he asked.

“Absolutely.”

“Please do,” he said. “This isn’t the real Zimbabwe.”

‘Day by day’

The group flew to Malawi, a neighboring country, in the morning. Before returning to Evanston last Tuesday, Kastilahn visited humanitarian sites in Malawi. It was a relief, she said.

But there were riots in Malawi’s capital, and church officials had been beaten by police.

The rioters were fighting over whether Malawi’s president should be allowed to seek a third term, which would require a constitutional amendment.

Before she left Malawi, Kastilahn spoke with the leader of a congregation who had been beaten in the protests. She asked him how he put up with the poverty, the turmoil and the AIDS epidemic.

He responded by paraphrasing the religion’s founder Martin Luther: “We do it day by day, by faith.”

Kastilahn said her brush with African politics makes her want to learn more about the unstable region.

“We in the States just don’t pay enough attention to Africa,” she said. “I sure wish … we would use our defense money to build up democracies and to support people who really do want open societies and freedom.”