On two different occasions my media law professor at USC Annenberg asked our class of aspiring journalists whether we would be willing to go to jail to protect a source. As prosecutors force more reporters to either hand over the names of anonymous sources or risk going to jail, the question takes on greater importance. The group of students, accustomed to modern comforts like fluffy pillows and bottled water, pondered whether they would voluntarily agree to jail time.

But here is a question often overlooked in class: What happens if a foreign, autocratic country arrests you for doing your job, throws you in jail and keeps changing the charges? What if you don’t have warm clothes or a blanket? What if you don’t trust the legal system?

That is what happened to Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter Barry Bearak while covering the Zimbabwe elections last week. He has been in jail since Thursday. That is four days—and counting— “held in a cold cell with no shoes, warm clothes or blankets,” according to New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller.

Sitting in jail in the United States can be scary. The NYPD arrested me for being part of the Critical Mass bike ride during the weekend of the Republican National Convention in 2004. During my 28 hours in jail, I became so terrified, I thought my family would never find me. I can’t imagine what goes through your mind when you are sitting in jail in Zimbabwe.

Bearak was originally arrested on a charge of working as a journalist without accreditation. The charge then changed to falsely presenting himself as a journalist.

Now imagine Bearak was your husband, and you had to report on him. Bearak and his wife, Celia Dugger, are the Times’ bureau chief’s in Johannesburg. After Bearak’s arrest, Dugger wrote an article from South Africa about the progress in Zimbabwe’s election and at the end mentioned her husband: “The government has also cracked down on foreign journalists, who have been covering the election without accreditation. On Thursday, the police arrested Barry Bearak, a correspondent in the Johannesburg bureau of The New York Times, on charges related to covering the election without official permission from the government. He was still being held in a Harare jail on Saturday.”

I know I would go to jail to protect a source. That feels to me like part of the job description. If I didn’t, I could never promise confidentiality. And if reporters can’t promise confidentiality, they will miss the opportunity and obligation to hold others accountable and be a check on power. For the sake of my profession, I have to be willing to sacrifice a few months in jail.

But what about in Zimbabwe? I have never been there. I have never spent time in their jails. Maybe they are very nice. But I doubt it. Reporters Without Borders said in its 2007 report that Zimbabwe “is one of most vicious on the continent in its treatment of journalists. Surveillance, threats, imprisonment, censorship blackmail, abuse of power and denial of justice are all brought to bear to keep firm control over the news.”

Unfortunately, I think the lesson about Bearak is that he too had no choice. In order to do his job – to report on the election in Zimbabwe – he had to be in Harare, and he had to write a fair and accurate story. And now, he has to wait in a cold cell and hope the government releases him.

As for the aspiring journalists, we have to be willing to do the same. If we don’t go to places like Zimbabwe, Sudan or Cuba and accurately report on government suppression, we are not doing our job. That said, it is pretty damn scary. And we should all be doing what we can to pressure the Zimbabwean government to release Bearak. It could be us.