Work/home balance? Try a coup and a birthday party

For decades, Mariana van Zeller (shown here) has reported about scary people in scary places.
“She really is the bravest person I know,” Courteney Monroe, the president of the National Geographic Channel, told the Television Critics Association.
But she still feels fear and regret. “As a working mom who travels all the time, I live with this eternal guilt of not being there at important moments,“ van Zeller said..
That peaked last summer, in an embattled desert country. The story will be on the season-finale of “Trafficked,” at 9 p.m. Wednesday (March 20) on National Geogeraphic; van Zellar gave the TCA a verbal preview.
At 47, she’s had an adventurous life. She grew up in Portugal and started graduate school at Columbia University. A month later, she found herself doing live coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks, for Portuguese TV.
She went on to global reporting for two now-defunct channels (Current TV and Fusion) and then Nat Geo. In five seasons, “Trafficked” has probed hit men, drug cartels, white supremacists and people doing illegal sales of weapons, tigers, organs, babies and more.
Last July, she was probing gold sales in Niger, which she calls “one of the most dangerous places in the world. Iit’s an inland country (80-percent of it is the Sahara Desert) that borders Nigeria
Away from cell-phone reception for a few days, van Zeller didn’t realize the country had started its fifth coup in 13 years. “Our military convoy … abandoned us.”
It was time to get out. “The governments around the world started evacuating their citizens . but not the Americans.”
The U.S. government, with military and drone bases in Niger, condemned the event, but fell short of calling it a coup and evacuating. Van Zeller, now an American citizen, was on her own, trying to get back for her son’s 13th birthday.
She even tried some traffickers, acknowledging “the irony that, after so many years of covering black marketers, my life might actually depend on hiring one.”
That fell through, but people in her office found “two crazy-enough pilots” to try. When they landed, however, soldiers told them not to take off.
That’s when she got a call from her husband, Darren Foster. (The met in grad school; he’s a documentary director, including the acclaimed “Science Fair,” and a producer, including “Trafficked.”) One of the pilots, he said, had a Portuguese name.
She talked to the pilot in their native language. “He trusted us, partly because of the Portuguese connection.”
And yes, she got home for the birthday party.