When Ben Granby ran for Dane County coroner a decade ago, he pledged to "demystify the office" and wanted to market key chains, T-shirts and caps with the coroner's logo.

He lost that election to former coroner Ray Wosepka and after thinking about making another what he described as a "joke-candidacy" run for sheriff in 2000, Granby, who had founded the political student group Ten Fat Tigers on the UW-Madison campus, gave up local politics for an international perspective.

For the past year, he's worked in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for Relief International, a humanitarian aid organization based in Los Angeles.

"After losing a lowly office job in early 2001, I decided that I would do whatever it takes to make an attempt at my dream career -- international journalism," said Granby, who received a bachelor's degree in history and political science in 1999. "I began making almost random trips to various hot spots at the time. I was incredibly nave, with no training in the field, but I backed up my explorations with plenty of historical research as my foundation."

He visited Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories during the summer of 2001, followed by trips to Macedonia, where he was embedded with Albanian guerrillas, and Colombia. After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, he traveled to Iraq.

Over a three-year period, Granby wrote a series of guest columns from Iraq that were published in the Wisconsin State Journal. A book based on his Middle East experiences was published in 2005 with the title "Welcome To The Bethlehem Star Hotel: An Account of Life in Palestine with Descriptions of People, Places and Incidents."

"I never had much success in connecting my writing to outlets that paid and mainly wound up writing for online citizen journalist Web sites that were just then emerging," he said.

He moved to Washington, D.C., and earned a master's degree last year in international development from George Washington University before returning to the Middle East.

"Since journalism failed me, I figured that the best alternative to help open the world to Americans would be to work for humanitarian nonprofits," Granby said.

-- Marv Balousek

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