A veteran international correspondent, Christina is currently in Jerusalem with the New York Times Bureau covering the West Bank.
From the New York Times announcement of her assuming their Afghanistan/Pakistan bureau chief. position:
“During her first stint in Afghanistan as a new international correspondent for The Times, Christina Goldbaum was in Kabul the day it fell to the Taliban in August 2021. Ever since, she has written some of the most riveting portraits of the historic changes in Afghanistan, and in neighboring Pakistan. Now, we are excited to announce that she will officially take the title of the challenging role she has filled so well over the past year, as
She has ridden along with smugglers, embedded with rebels, traveled with migrants fleeing Afghanistan, trekked into coal mines, traveled to the frequently shelled borderlands with Pakistan and written a rich, firsthand account of the profound changes in the former government “green zone” in Kabul. Over the fall, she wrote unforgettable dispatches from Qatar during the World Cup. In Pakistan, she authoritatively covered that country’s political crisis and wrote wrenching accounts of life from the hardest-hit flood zones there last year, including the evocative piece about how villages had turned into islands overnight, and how families were haunted by the task of trying to bury their dead after cemeteries had flooded.
In addition to her own top-notch correspondent work, she has been a rock-solid advocate for the safety and well-being both of our former Afghan employees and their families through their relocation to the United States, and for our new journalists in Afghanistan who are working under difficult circumstances.
Christina, who grew up in Bethesda, Md., will also lead The Times’s efforts to open a new bureau in Islamabad, Pakistan, in the coming months.
Before joining The Times on the Metro desk in 2018, Christina reported from sub-Saharan Africa for four years as a freelance correspondent. She also lived in Mogadishu, Somalia, for over a year and received the Livingston Award for International Reporting, the National Press Club’s Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence and the Frontline Club’s Print Journalism Award for her investigative series that found evidence that a U.S. military operation had resulted in the deaths of Somali civilians.
Her interest in that region dates from her first trip to East Africa as a 17-year-old, moving her to start studying Swahili as an undergraduate at Tufts. She returned several times during her college years and moved there to start work as a freelance correspondent right after graduating.
I had the pleasure of benefitting from Christina’s intelligence and insights as my superb student at the Institute. She completed her undergraduate degree in Political Science and Entrepreneurial Leadership studies at Tufts. She worked in East Africa and Latin America on various development and human rights-focused projects ranging from holistic education programs in Tanzania to the protection of indigenous populations' rights in Bolivia. She has served as the co-director of BUILD, the IGL’s student-led, collaborative rural development organization working with resettled combatants in Guatemala and with a community in Tamil, Nadu India, and was my Undergraduate Coordinator for the Empower Program for Social Entrepreneurship in 2012-13. She also conducted research internationally on public health programs in Rwanda and local perspectives on US military involvement in Uganda and was a member of the EPIIC Colloquium on Conflict in the 21st Century. Her interests include social entrepreneurship, non-fiction story-telling, and the intersection of entrepreneurial and political culture. A quintessential Synaptic Scholar, we had the privilege to fund the to explore the unusual and difficult compelling global issues she chose. She was passionate about her work, and always dignified and sensitive in her pursuits. It came as little surprise to me that she pursued journalism, She was a stellar member of the Institute’s Program for Narrative and Documentary Practice (2010-2018) which I created with VII’s Gary Knight to provide students the skills to explain the world around them to the people around them. The program taught students to shape global issues into multimedia stories that are narrative and compelling.
Already as an undergraduate, her demeanor was always professional and dignified her
She is a picture here awarding one of the Institute’s Dr. Jean Mayer Awards to Mary Kawar.