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, and 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 Programs Network -- a Pakistani nongovernmental organization (NGO) working with earthquake victims in this remote Pashtun area. She is talking quickly, and nervously, with an older bearded man with a red and white headdress resting on his shoulders. She gestures in my direction and I look into his stern face, registering my presence for the first time. I have never been so afraid in my life.

This man is introduced as Dastali Shah, a local leader whom I am to interview.

I don't scare that easily. At least not these days, as my recently established non-profit media collective, the Common Language Project (CLP), has found me tiptoeing through Cambodian minefields, and poking around crime-riddled red-light districts in Calcutta over the past few months, in search of unwritten and ignored stories.

The 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-owned media that typically reports only violence, if it covers foreign affairs at all.

CLP reporters like to consider themselves an intrepid bunch, and like most young, liberal-minded, journalists we think that we are immune to the frightening stereotypes perpetuated by our government and the evening news. Pakistan has family 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 in the usual proportions.

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 eyes turned on me.

Suddenly 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-Qaida. The Taliban, Terrorists. The Enemy. The loose white pants, the taupe vests, the felt 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 blind-folded 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 as I sit on the cracked plastic chair they have brought especially for me, a glass of 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 last fall, early in the morning of Oct. 8, a huge 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 toward foreigners, and Americans particularly, in response to the international organizations that have been aiding their reconstruction.

Most specifically, I'm here because Tanya has suggested that if some used tents and plastic backpacks from the U.S. Agency for International Development 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 that 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, typically, I launch into a series of 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 graduated from Hunter College, in New York City, last January, and then founded The Common Language Project, a nonprofit media collective committed to covering positive and under-reported stories from around the world. This article originally appeared in Glimpse, an international news, travel and feature magazine available online at www.Glimpsedbroad.org.