How did award-winning journalist Jan Goodwin go from editing “Can This Marriage be Saved?” at Ladies’ Home Journal to hiring 50 Kalashnikov-armed mujahideen to ride shotgun on her humanitarian aid trucks in war-torn Afghanistan?

From starting as an editorial assistant in London to becoming executive editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, Goodwin took her journalistic know-how and experience covering war in the Middle East to starting and managing a Save the Children office in Afghanistan. 

She told this story and many others to a packed audience at the Tusten Social club’s bi-monthly meeting, held in the upstairs of the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance in Narrowsburg. 

“When I started the Save the Children office for Afghanistan, I initially had a staff of two,” Goodwin remarked. “One of whom had zero office experience and didn’t know how to address an envelope, simply because he’d never seen one before.”

But Goodwin took that meager staff and grew it to over 100, spending four years building a humanitarian program from the ground up working to build and run hospitals, clinics, schools and roads and transporting food aid.

This is just part of Goodwin’s life’s work in the Middle East, where she was witness to the horrors of everyday life under war, and the many casualties along the way. 

It all started when British-born Goodwin, who had a sense for curiosity since she was a child, began her journalism career at a London weekly newspaper as a cub reporter, writing about weddings, the Women’s Institute, and creating the horoscopes. 

“A few weeks after I was hired, and all the reporters were out covering courts, or on police calls, a big story broke,” Goodwin said. “The Editor-in-Chief came out of his office, looked at me in the empty newsroom, and said: ‘Well, it is either you or me, so it better be you.’ Off I went, and ended up with my first cover story and first byline. After that, my career moved rapidly.”

Next stop was as a reporter at Britain’s largest news agency, where if you didn’t think and move fast, you didn’t survive. She ended up as News Editor and faced sexism in the workplace when a senior male reporter quit because he “wouldn’t work for a woman.” 

She was then offered a job at The New York Times, and so began her move to America, where she has lived for 52 years, ending up in Beach Lake, PA. 

From The New York Times she was headhunted to Ladies’ Home Journal, where she had a “glamour job” covering parties at the Metropolitan Museum with Jackie Onassis and interviewing Elizabeth Taylor, to covering politics, interviewing both American presidents and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. 

Then one day her editor asked her to do a story on what happens to women in war, interviewing Afghan women refugees in Pakistan.

 “While I was there, I decided to go into Afghanistan and see for myself what was going on. I crossed the border for a few days, and was horrified at what I saw,” Goodwin said. “And I was outraged that this war wasn’t being covered in the West.”

This led to Goodwin writing two books, “Caught in the Crossfire: A Woman Journalist’s Breathtaking Experiences in War-torn Afghanistan” and “Price of Honor: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World”. 

“Once I returned to the U.S., I knew I wanted to continue writing about social justice and human rights, both here and abroad,” Goodwin said. “In countries around the world, girls and women are brutalized daily, subject to horrendous treatment simply by virtue of their gender.”

Goodwin remarked that she’s been lucky in her career in covering 17 wars that she has not been injured, or worse. She lost many colleagues to conflict, including American journalist Marie Colvin who is the subject of the movie “A Private War”, now available on Netflix.

In her parting words to the Tusten Social, Goodwin said her role model is Martha Gelhorn, a reporter and the third wife of Ernest Hemingway.

“When asked what message she wanted to leave her readers, she responded in her typically blunt way: ‘I want them to pay attention; We have no right to ignorance,’” Goodwin said. “I believe that, too.”

Goodwin, a longtime Beach Lake, PA resident, is now preparing for a move back across the pond, where she will return to her native England to be near friends and good medical care.