TIME correspondents move around as often as diplomats; the average tour of duty in any one bureau is about three years. The reason: to bring a fresh eye and newly tuned ear to their reporting. In the past few months a full dozen of them have switched locale and sometimes climate, language and hemisphere as well. David Aikman probably faces the stiffest challenge at the moment --establishing a new Eastern European bureau in a 100-year-old farmhouse in West Berlin. He calls it "a forced learning process in the simultaneous skills of driver, messenger, clerk, telex operator and office manager." Aikman went to Berlin after four years in Hong Kong. Both cities, he notes, "are outposts of Western enterprise and freedom within the orbit of Communist states."

After four years in South America, Atlanta Bureau Chief Rudolph Rauch is glad to be back in the U.S. Says he: "It is refreshing to know that no matter what I say, I can't be expelled from the country or barred from getting back in." David Beckwith was glad to get back too. During six months in the Middle East he had been under machine-gun and mortar fire in Lebanon and Morocco. He had never been shot, however, until last week when he was mugged on Capitol Hill in Washington. He is now recovering from a stomach wound and pondering the ironies of chance. Barrett Seaman, moving from Chicago to Bonn, is aghast at the German bureaucracy. "The number of official forms to be filled out --in order to move in, get a phone, or do anything beyond buying a beer--is staggering." In London the directory of civil servants is classified information under the Official Secrets Act, so Lawrence Malkin was surprised to find that in New Delhi senior government officials' telephones are not only publicly listed, but also that the officials answer the phone.

Reporters are often caught up at first in the language or locutions of their new country. German-born Gisela Bolte, assigned to the New York bureau after working in Bonn, has discovered that "a word like hokey, which wasn't in use when I was here from 1968 to 1970, is popular now and others, such as dropout, are no longer common usage." Senior Correspondent James Bell, who joined TIME in 1942 and has served in 14 different bureaus, is also busy getting used to a linguistic shift although he has only moved from Atlanta to Boston. "Retuning the ear from Billy Carter to Ted Kennedy is not easy. As George Wallace says, they speak funny up here."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.