It is perhaps only when they become a part of the story they are reporting that journalists realise just what a narrow segment of reality they depict in the coverage of a crisis.
This is especially true when foreign correspondents report on a disaster like the earthquake that hit Nepal a month ago this week.
For the first seven days, as videos and photographs of a devastated city were broadcast around the world on TV and the internet, my family got frantic calls from friends and relatives. They seemed surprised that we were still alive, that our house was intact, we had food and water, or that they could even make that phone call.