Beatrice Bashibyukyan, Traveling with a Purpose

Q and A reporting by Joss Higgins

Beatrice Bashibyukyan is a 25-year-old journalist finishing up her degree at UNR, specializing in documentary film and photography. The heart of her storytelling is centered around her passion for animal rights, conservation, environmental challenges, and different people and cultures from around the world.

Q: What sparked your interest in journalism?

A: I moved to Reno because I thought that I wanted to be a veterinarian, and UNR actually has a pretty nice pre-veterinary medicine program, so, I moved out here and then really, really early into that degree, I realized that’s not really what I wanted to do.

Before university, I traveled around the world for collectively a few years, and I was doing that to build experience working with animals because I thought — I want to be a vet, and in traveling I realized that I was more interested in people and stories and storytelling. I thought that switching to journalism might be a good way of keeping my interests in animals and conservation and traveling, but also kind of turning that into a career where I’m telling the world what something is like, what a place is like.

[embed]Beatrice Bashibyukyan The Reno News & Review (RN&R) has been the alternative news voice for Reno, Sparks and Northern Nevada since 1995. The…renonr.com

Q: Where was the first place you traveled outside of the US?

A: I went to France when I was sixteen to see my family out there. That was the first time I’d ever left the country.

The first time I’d ever left the country on my own was when I went to Pakistan in 2021, and that was sort of to gain experience working with animals — and incidentally, also, when I realized that I didn’t want to be a doctor and I wanted to be a storyteller.

I was there with a journalist who was doing his own story, but I was there to tag along and work with animals where I could when we were in the cities. Then I just wanted to change my path from there, because I was more inspired by that. It was probably the most transformative and eye-opening trip for me, especially being that I was twenty years old at the time, and kind of discovering myself and what I wanted. It showed me a lot of what I could handle and what I liked.

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Q: Was it scary for you?

A: It was scary. I think that it was the one period of my life where I thought that I was going to die many times. Nothing scary about the people or the culture, which was a misconception that I think a lot of people in the West have about that part of the world. It was scary in the sense that there were some environmental challenges. We were traveling in really desolate desert environments for twelve hours at a time on a very unreliable motorcycle in high desert heat, and you had no cell service, didn’t speak the language. It was remote. Things like that, they got pretty hard at times.

Q: What was most inspiring about your experience?

A: When I was in Pakistan, there was a period of time where I traveled to and lived in a remote village, kind of bordering Afghanistan and Tajikistan. There was a day where I went out on our motorcycle to the closest I could possibly get to the border of Afghanistan, and it was guarded by the Pakistani military. They were these very unfriendly, stone cold men with AK’s slung across their backs, and they were equipped with all this weaponry. They spoke very little English, and they were not pleased to see Americans trying to enter into Afghanistan, so they questioned us as best they could in their broken English. We kind of did mutual charades of, like, we’re not here for malicious reasons, and they were just telling us to leave. My partner at the time, the journalist that was driving us on the motorcycle, was communicating with them, saying, hey, we’re American, but we’re not doing anything weird.

I kind of just disassociated. I was really scared, and I thought I was going to die, or I thought I was going to get in real trouble. I was staring off into the pastures behind the guards, and I saw this little goat, who I think was lame, and he didn’t have fully developed front legs. He was just crawling on his ankles, and it looked like he was in pain. He had a lot of callus built on his arms. It looked like he was hurt. He was definitely the runt, because there was a herd of goats and sheep very far away from him, so he was alone, trying to get his own feed.

I felt really sorry for him. I started to tear up, and I think I was just feeling a lot of adrenaline because of the confrontation, but I was also sad for the animal.

One of the guards saw me starting to cry, and so he was like, what’s wrong with the woman? Pointing to the goat, I said, he’s hurt, and I was mimicking what he was doing. He pointed to the goat and he said, he’s okay.

To get to know why we were approaching the border better, they wanted to sit us down and kind of have a meeting, and so they sat us down, and towards the middle of the meeting, one of the guards ended up seeing that I was just staring at the goat the whole time. He ended up going to get the goat, and he picked him up, brought him to me, and he was like, see, he’s fine.

I don’t know why but I asked to hold the goat. I held the baby in my hands, and I was massaging his horns that were just growing in, because I imagine those feel like when teeth grow in and they’re painful, and he fell asleep in my arms. The guards really softened when they saw that. They were a lot nicer after that. They were gathering around me, pointing and smiling and taking pictures. The lead guard snapped his fingers and said something in Urdu to another guard, and I think he told him to go get fresh bread, because the guard came back and he had fresh bread to feed to the goat, and they were all petting him and feeding him snacks.

It completely changed the energy of the interaction. It was less like an interrogation and more of a friendly understanding. That was really one of the moments that opened my eyes to culture and politics and real life of the world outside of the West, and so even though I was there with veterinary interest towards the entire interaction, it kind of shifted me into more of a journalistic interest. I’ve been thinking back to that interaction for many years now, and it’s really inspired my work in traveling the world, because there’s a lot of those interactions that can happen, and there’s a lot of community building and culture learning that can happen.

At the time, I kind of lived under a rock, and I was still kind of a kid. I didn’t really realize that there was a lot of political tension with the United States and Pakistan. I didn’t realize that being there was not welcomed in every part of the country, so, I didn’t understand why that interaction was so tense. But, in hindsight I do, and I think that seeing both sides have a mutual understanding of, you know, that’s just another human being with interest and love and softness, and that animals really brought us together, it changed my life.

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Q: What was your first trip as a working journalist?

A: I went to Costa Rica in the spring of 2025, spring of this year, and I went with the Hitchcock Project. It was my first time leaving the country for a job, essentially, so I really wanted to incorporate my interests into the story. I was really trying to find something that in some way connected to animals, because it’s always been my passion. I came up with this idea to do a documentary about pesticides, because pesticides affect everybody.

There is a small segment in the film that’s about how it affects wildlife, but that was less about animals and more so an introduction to science reporting, which has really shown me that there’s a lot of international opportunity when it comes to science reporting.

That trip really encouraged me to start working with scientists because they are constantly doing research all around the world. As a journalist, wanting to travel and wanting to report on things that are timely and relevant, I think that science reporting is definitely where it is.

Q: What have you been involved in since that trip?

A: When I was in Costa Rica, I met two researchers who do research also in the Amazon rainforest. A few months after that, I stayed in touch with them and found out they were going to Ecuador to do a story with indigenous communities in the rainforest, and they let me join them. I went with them to Ecuador in the summertime and did a story, which I’m still working on, on solar powered canoes along the Amazon rivers.

That was a very happenstance story. I went for a completely different idea that didn’t pan out, and coincidentally, in the region that I was staying in, there was a researcher who was doing a trial run of solar powered canoes. I met him and I kind of asked to follow him around for a week, and I did a story on him.

It’s been really fun. There’s a lot of work all around the world if you just ask for it. Look for it.

Q: Where do you see your career going in the future?

A: I hope that I can end up on something like National Geographic. That’s always been my dream. I’m really working for something more international in scope, and preferably, if I can keep that passion for animals alive through being a journalist who does stories on conservation or environmentalism. Anything that falls under the umbrella of protection of animals, because that mirrors the goal of being a veterinarian, so, I’m kind of keeping that desire alive, just with a different career.

Q: Did you ever have trouble with communication or language barriers?

A: I think that with international trips, it’s really important to have an “in” in that country, a connection to that country, to the people that you’re going to be working with, so that you have an interpreter.

Unfortunately, when I was in Pakistan, even though it wasn’t my story, the journalist that I was traveling with did not have an interpreter. So, there was a lot of difficulty getting good information for a story because we couldn’t speak to a lot of the sources. He was primarily a photographer, so I guess it wasn’t really his main concern, but for me, if I can’t study the language in a feasible amount of time, I always try to find someone who either lives in that region or bring someone who speaks the language of that region.

I’d say that’s probably the biggest difficulty, the language barrier, and then any cultural differences that might make communication hard.

When I was in the Amazon, I was working with an indigenous community for a story that I was doing about insects in the region, and it was really hard to communicate with them because they are in a remote corner of Ecuador. Ecuadorians speak Spanish and I can speak Spanish, but I didn’t speak their native language, and I didn’t know anybody who did. A lot of it was a game of charades, at least for the photo aspect and video aspect of the story. It wasn’t until I was able to finally form a connection with someone who could be an interpreter that I really got the bulk of the story. So, that really amplifies how important it is to do the planning for the language aspect before you actually get there. I could translate enough to get consent for photo and video, but I couldn’t ask detailed questions about the science that was going on until I was able to, luckily, find a person that could work with me on it. That was definitely the most challenging, because that was the most inaccessible language for me to possibly have even studied.

It was Waorani language, which is only spoken within certain communities in the jungle.

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Q: What do you think is unique about your specific work and your passion?

A: I think that having a background in other career fields has helped me kind of develop more of a unique perspective when it comes to journalism, just because I’ve lived in a lot of places, I’ve had a lot of different jobs, I pursued different degrees, so I have a well-rounded approach to how I want to tell stories. I’m grateful for all of the pivots I’ve had to make, even though at the time it felt unfortunate and like I was going to be really set back. I mean, I came to UNR being basically a super senior because I switched my path so many times, but I’m grateful now, in hindsight, because it really led me to refining my interests and my scope.

Q: Do you have a message that you’d most like to spread out into the world?

A: This is specifically towards people in journalism. No matter what your interest is as a journalist, I would say, just find people who have the job you want and message them. Just cold call, cold email, approach them, introduce yourself. It’s kind of like a game of numbers. The more people you talk to and the more people you introduce yourself to and tell that you want a certain thing, the more likely it’ll be that they think about you when there’s an opportunity and message you to pursue that job. I would advise people to find who inspires them, and just email them, message them. Say, hey, I’m really inspired by this work you did and I want to know what it took to get to that place.

Q and A by Joss Higgins