Zen and the Art of Peacekeeping

Global food and financial crisis - what can we do?

We've all been watching the global financial crisis with various degrees of interest. Some of us might be wondering what it all means for us. But maybe you've also wondered what this means for people who already live in poverty and insecurity? Further down this post you'll find a joint statement by Oxfam, Amnesty, World Vision, Greenpeace and Plan International that explains exactly what it means.

The key message is that there is a massive disparity between the scramble to rescue the wealthiest institutions in the world from the current crisis and the continued failure to keep international promises on aid, poverty reduction, human rights and climate change. The prognosis for much of the world is dire. But don't read it and weep. Do something about it.

People often ask me what they can do to make a difference in the face of these massive injustices. So here are my suggestions for you to take action.

1. Vote

If you are American or Kiwi you get to vote in the coming weeks, so make a vote for social justice at home and abroad. On the websites of various NGOs (including Oxfam) you can find out more about the policies of candidates and parties on issues that could make a difference to global inequalities.

The survey I did for Oxfam on NZ political parties is here

But if you are in the States then you can check out Oxfam America's campaign to tell your representative about your concerns about the food crisis.

2. Support/ donate

You can also financially support one of these organisations. One effect of the financial crisis is that a lot of people stop giving to organisations like Oxfam. The terrible irony is that at times like this communities in vulnerable and fragile states can least afford to lose our support. So now is a great time to make a donation.

Here is a YouTube clip about Oxfam's approach to poverty alleviation, if it appeals to you then please think about supporting Oxfam NZ. 

You can find more information about supporting Oxfam here

Here is the joint statement: Billions in bailouts for the wealthy

Last week the US government provided another bailout of $37.8 billion to the giant insurance company, AIG, bringing the total of rescue loans to that one company in the last two weeks to nearly $123 billion. This is $18 billion more than the annual amount of aid to poor countries and twice that needed to achieve the internationally agreed Millennium Development Goals. In Europe the bailouts have continued. The UK government has thrown in a further £50 billion to recapitalise the UK banking sector - which is roughly what's needed for poor countries to adapt to climate change each year.

The urgency shown by rich countries to tackle the financial meltdown stands in stark contrast to their foot-dragging and broken promises over aid and poverty alleviation, human rights and climate change.

It is too soon yet to predict exactly how badly the poorest countries will fare in the financial crisis and resultant economic downturn. But it is clear that reduced demands for exports to developed countries and lower foreign investment will mean less growth and government revenue for already-fragile social protection and services.

For millions of the world's poorest citizens, it is literally a matter of life and death. In many countries social safety nets were dismantled under pressure from international financial institutions, leaving the vulnerable unprotected. In late September, while Wall Street was reeling from its financial failures in the glare of publicity, a meeting organized by the United Nations in another part of Manhattan revealed that very few governments will meet the targets set by the Millennium Development Goals to reduce poverty by 2015, and that rising food and energy prices have wiped away much of the progress made so far.

The human rights prognosis is not good. Not only are economic and social rights - including the right to housing, health and education - coming under increased pressure, there is a risk of more human rights violations. As the economy shrinks and countries tighten their belts, migrants and refugees could be pushed back to untenable situations. Social tensions could increase, leading nervous governments to clamp down on dissent and impose tough public security policies, curbing civil liberties. Already fragile states could be further weakened by the current crisis and slide back into instability and violence.

Worse could follow if rich countries decide to use the financial crisis as an excuse to cut aid and trade. History gives us cause for concern. During the 1972/3 recession, global aid spending fell by 15 per cent to just $28.8 billion. In 1990/3, aid donors slashed their spending by 25 per cent over a five-year period to $46 billion, and aid did not return to 1992 levels until 2003. Humanitarian aid - what we spend to help people hit by natural disasters and conflict - also fell sharply and over a similar time as a direct result of the 1990-3 recession (only the years of the Rwanda and Kosovo conflicts bucked that trend). In terms of trade, for instance, countries reacted to the 1929 Wall Street crash and global depression by erecting tariff barriers and world trade fell by two-thirds.

A replay of that in 2009 would be a disaster for poor exporting countries. Reduced aid and trade flows could mean that the people in the poorest countries pay the highest price for the profligacy of the credit bubble in North America and Europe.

Human rights are not a luxury for good times. Inaction in the face of climate change is not a viable option. Global poverty does nothing for global stability. Rich countries will be following a myopic and self-defeating strategy if they ignore the most pressing challenges of our times and focus solely on narrow financial interests.

This is not just about money. It is about sustained attention, international collaboration and clear political will to tackle big issues. The signs of concerted action by the G7 finance ministers and the Eurozone finance ministers to address the financial crisis are welcome but they are not enough. Governments must reduce the volatility in energy prices, food prices and the financial markets by ensuring sensible regulation, adequate protection for the rights of poor and vulnerable people, and long-term environmental sustainability. Governments must show decisive leadership to build a global economy that is green and where better lives and livelihoods for all is more important than a system that rewards a privileged few.

Joint statement from:

Dr. Dean Hirsch, Chief Executive Officer, World Vision International

Irene Khan, Secretary General, Amnesty International

Jeremy Hobbs, Executive Director, Oxfam International

Tom Miller, Chief Executive Officer, Plan International

Gerd Leipold, International Executive Director, Greenpeace

In the lead up to Christmas this year I'll be posting more ideas about what we could all do these holidays given the global situation. Maybe you, like me, feel uncomfortable with the idea of lavish Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners when most of the world are suffering from the food crisis? Well I don't think that means we have to lose the spirit of the holidays. On the contrary I think it gives us even more chance to explore what the holidays really mean to us and to find creative ways to make a difference using these events as a springboard. 

I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Gandhi: "Be the change you want to see in the world" 

New lessons in peacekeeping

 

Stop the Violence Against Women, Goroka, Papua New Guinea Highlands

I recently got back from a work trip to Papua New Guinea, which has interrupted my writing here. I met a group of three women from three different warring tribes. Eight years ago they each in their own way came to the decision that the fighting, which had cost them husbands, brothers, sons, had to end. They each decided that they would do something to end it. 

Speaking with them now, eight years later, I understand that in that moment there was no miraculous flash of inspiration providing them with the perfect answer to solve all their communities problems. Nor did they experience a surge of courage that overwhelmed the fear they had to feel in the face of the very real dangers that came with their decision to begin to do something different in response to the anger and violence. 

They first began to meet, in secret, in a second-hand clothing store where they could disguise the fact that they were talking to the enemy behind the ruse of shopping for their family. They had to make an amazing leap of faith in each other. If any one of them had betrayed the others to their respective tribes at this early stage of the process they could very well have been killed. 

Their first public act of peace was a peace march. They had each been quietly talking to other women in their own tribes. Gathering in unseen places in the long grasses near their villages they had passed their vision of a peaceful future to other women and little by little the power of that vision must have become stronger than the fear of their present. 

So the women marched. One day they marched right into the space where the men were fighting and they stood, holding the space for the notion of "not-fighting" to begin to take root. When I imagine them standing there it is easy to think of them as super-women. Fearless warriors for peace. So it is sobering to be told that on that day one of these incredible women literally wet her pants in fear. They were not fearless. They faced their fear and acted anyway.

So these were my lessons in peace-making from my new friends in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea:

They decided that the violence would end.

They started by changing how they themselves responded to the "enemy".

They trusted each other. 

They trusted themselves.

They felt the fear and acted anyway.

They persevered. 

Eight years later it is easy to see the impact of their work, but in the early years it must have felt like the changes were very slow. But they held on to their vision, they kept learning as they went and developing their work accordingly and they stuck together. 

Finally, they kept a sense of humour through it all. I worked with them for a week and along with their incredible intelligence and the insightfulness of their analysis what stays with me most is our laughter. That and the image of these brave women from the remote PNG bush dressed in t-shirts with staunch feminist slogans. 

Top ten tips for Zen Peacekeepers No 1: How to learn a new language

1. Ask your colleagues to speak to you in their own language as much as possible.   
2. Slowly and sadly come to accept that you are not going to learn by osmosis.
3. Find a language teacher and arrange for him to come to your guesthouse for lessons.
4. Find a chaperone to join your lessons in order to protect your reputation (I asked a male colleague to join me in the lessons, he ended up becoming my boyfriend, I'm pretty sure that is not how chaperones are supposed to work).
5. Pay attention in your lessons and do your homework. But be careful not to pay too much attention or your teacher may think you fancy him and start getting you to repeatedly practice sentences like “I love my teacher”.
6. Listen to your colleagues as you all eat lunch together and pay attention to words and sounds that you hear often. Ask them what those words mean, or guess and ask them if you are right. You probably won’t be, but you might make them laugh.
7. Practice every chance you get, speak Dari to the cook (even if means only being able to ever ask for the same meal over and over again) and speak Dari to guards (but not too much, see tip 5).
8. Practice by running through verb tables with your driver in the morning (notice that he knows enough about verb tables to be considered well-educated in Afghanistan and wonder why this is the best job he can get).
9. Practice by talking to yourself (seriously, I do it all the time. See also “Top Tips for How to Survive Living Alone in the Middle of Nowhere”)
10. If in doubt, use an Arabic word. This might not work so well with French but there are plenty of them scattered through out Dari and even if it was not right, I found people thought it was pretty cool that a non-Muslim foreigner knew a little bit of the language of the Quran.  

[I'm planning to scatter these lists of "Top Tips for Zen Peacekeepers" through the book - as a way of talking about some themes in a more light-hearted style and in keeping with the idea of the book as a "manual" about the "art of peacekeeping"] 

Arriving in Kabul

As we drove from the airport into Kabul city Horia started to tell me about the work we would be doing together. She had been waiting for a long time for me to arrive, since long before I even applied for the job, and was excited to finally have me there. But I struggled to concentrate on what she was telling me because I wanted to spend the whole trip looking out the window, getting my first real look at Kabul, my new home.

The airport is to the north east of Kabul city centre and as we drove south towards the city I saw a large collection of rundown apartment buildings. Horia told me they were called the “Macrorayan” building, one of a set of similar apartment complexes throughout the city. Built by the Soviet regime to house civil servants they looked to me like they might have become home to squatters. Their walls were pocked with bullet holes and they were surrounded by bare dirt and mud. But Horia told me that she lived with her family in one of the other Macrorayan neighbourhoods. These apartments, although they didn’t always have electricity or running water, were affordable only to Afghan’s with decent jobs and at least a government salary. Rental costs for houses in Kabul had apparently gone sky-high since the arrival of thousands of foreigners like me, and ordinary Afghans were struggling more and more to afford housing for their families.

As we continued to drive I saw where some of the millions of other Afghans in Kabul lived, the ones without regular jobs or income. In the dirty cold mud along both sides of the road there were men, women and children making their way in and out of mud and tin shacks, . In 2001, at the time of the fall of the Taleban, the population of Kabul was estimated at 500,000. Today the population of Kabul is estimated to be around three million. This extraordinarily rapid growth has happened alongside the slow process of developing a constitution and then electing a president and then a parliament. This has been a period during which the civil and criminal justice system has had to be rebuilt across the country, and during which the entire education system has needed revision and massive expansion.

So while the machinery of government in Afghanistan was slowly being rebuilt, the city of Kabul was being flooded with new arrivals. People came from all over Afghanistan in the hope of work and opportunities. Instead they found a city totally unequipped to accommodate them and they began the struggle to survive that makes up the day-to-day existence of people living in extreme poverty all over the world. In Kabul they were doing this in a setting of political instability, potential insecurity and, when I arrived that day, harsh winter conditions.

As we entered Kabul city itself the streets looked really familiar to me. Although I was thousands of miles from Gaza city, here in Kabul I saw the same signs of heavy weapons. Kabul is littered with the corpses of buildings long dead. Some of these buildings destroyed many years ago during the Soviet invasion in 1979, more were destroyed during the uprising against the Soviet-controlled government a little over a decade later. Some of the buildings met their fate more recently. According to one UN report ninety percent of the building in Kabul were damaged from 1992 to 1996 as the mujahideen militia groups that had overthrown the Soviets fractured and fought for control of the city. Still more were destroyed during the US-led invasion to oust the Taleban government in October 2001.

Although the bombing in Kabul had clearly been more sustained and much heavier than in Gaza, I recognised the state of the buildings. I also recognised the script on all the signs hanging above storefronts closed up with the same heavy metal doors that I also knew from Gaza.  

Later, when I started to learn Dari I would use my familiarity with Arabic to impress my teacher. He didn’t know that I had taken three lessons a week for two years with my patient and gracious Arabic teacher Ibrahim in Gaza. So when I learned to recognise the Dari letters quickly and could even sight-read simple children’s books in Dari he thought I was some kind of linguistic genius. For about a week. Then I started accidentally using Arabic words in my fledgling Dari sentences and the truth came out.

Dubai to Kabul

Flying to Afghanistan from Dubai is an extraordinary experience. Firstly there is the contrast between Dubai, the Disneyland of the Arab world, and Kabul. The Dubai skyline is dominated by outrageous, shiny skyscrapers and construction cranes building ever bigger, brighter, better buildings. One often-quoted statistic asserts that about 30,000, or 24 per cent of the world's 125,000 construction cranes, are currently operating in Dubai. Whether or not this figure is accurate, there is no denying that Dubai is a city building itself with gusto and big dreams. Whether you are driving along the waterfront past the replica French chateaus or flying over the extraordinary man-made islands in the shape of a palm tree, you can’t miss the dollar signs. This is a city rolling in money, and if you are one of the people who have all that money then Dubai is a city where you can get all the material things you want.

Even in my short time in Dubai, however, it was apparent that there is another side to Dubai’ story. Staying in a cheap hotel in the Deira neighbourhood, I met Filipino women who worked in the local beauty salon and lived ten to a room in order to be able to save enough money to send home to their families.

But on its face Dubai tells a story of money and what people who have lots of money can do with that money in order to get more money. It is a city that attracts people who hope to get their own share of that money, whether wealthy professionals from the West or indentured construction labourers from the East. People come to Dubai for the money.

When you fly in over Kabul, having passed over the extraordinary beauty of the snow-covered mountains in the Hindu Kush, what you notice first is the lack of colour. Where as Dubai is a dazzling cacophony of neon and shiny surfaces, Kabul from the air is all brown. The surrounding landscape is brown and the city itself appears to be built out of the very land on which it sits, and to a large extent this proves later to be true. Brown mud-brick fences surround brown mud-brick buildings in compounds of brown earth. In mid-winter there is no green to brighten this mud-hued landscape and it was refreshing to the eyes (if not comforting to the rest of the body) when the snow came to cover the relentless brown-ness of Kabul with its fresh coat of white.

Once you are on the ground in Kabul the contrast with Dubai becomes even more apparent. Whereas even Terminal Two of Dubai International Airport had the trappings of airports everywhere, the duty-free store and the departure lounge café, Kabul International Airport in 2005 was bare. Arriving into Kabul we were taken from the UNHAS plane by bus to the arrivals hall. This was an empty room with two booths where the arrivals officials were checking passports and visas. Penny had put on her headscarf before we left the plane, so I had done the same, but I noticed than most of the foreign women in the queue had not. It was mid-winter in Kabul and I was dressed in brown pants covered by a long brown jacket, topped off with a dark olive brown woollen headscarf. Without realising it when I was packing in New Zealand I had colour-coordinated myself perfectly with my new home city.

As we passed through the passport check Afghan men with luggage trolleys came rushing up to me offering to help me with my luggage. I couldn’t see any trolleys apart from the ones they were pushing and realised that this was how they made a living. So, with Penny’s advice, I agreed a price to carry my luggage to the car. As soon as we got out of the airport building I was very glad I’d accepted this help. Cars, except those of the most important VIPs, are not allowed to approach Kabul Airport. When you exit the building you walk across the empty space, which in any other airport would be bustling with taxis and people collecting or depositing their friends and family. You walk across this area and into the first car park. Access to this car park is limited to the next level of VIPs, and the park is filled with white 4x4s belonging to government departments and international agencies of the United Nations. We kept walking.

The next car park is where ordinary Afghans, and people like me who are working with them, have to park and wait. As we walked into the car-park a man stepped out of the crowd and greeted Penny, he was her driver and was obviously really happy to see her. Just as I wondered how I would find Horia, another man stepped out and also greeted Penny. He was the driver for the organization I would be working with and he led us through the crowd to where Horia was waiting. As I approached her she stepped towards me and embraced me. As Penny turned to leave with her driver I knew that I was in safe hands. 

Sacred Activism

In keeping with the memory of Sister Paula, and the overall theme of "Zen and the Art of Peacekeeping" I found this quote in an email from my yoga teacher this morning:

"The one hope for the future lies, I believe, in Sacred Activism - the fusion of the deepest spiritual knowledge and passion with clear, wise, radical action in all the arenas of the world, inner and outer. We have very little time in which to awaken and transform ourselves, to be able to preserve the planet, and to heal the divisions between the powerful and the powerless. Let us go forward now with firm resolve and profound dedication."  -Andrew Harvey

Finding time to write: A lesson from Paula

Last week I had a magical writing day. I actually managed to shut out all the other things clamouring for my attention and simply write. I wrote 2300 words and I enjoyed it. 

But two days later I was paying the price. Having taken that day out of my week, I got to Friday with a to do list that was growing faster than I could cross things off. I had several unpleasant arguments with colleagues about what I could or could not realistically do in the coming week and ended up walking home on Friday night in tears. 

The tears were triggered by a beautiful memorial service for my friend and former colleague, Sister Paula Brettkelly.  I worked with Paula over the course of five years at the Human Rights Commission and she showed me what compassion and a heart for justice looks like in action. Her obituary reads: 

Diminutive and well mannered, she had abundant courage. She needed it. She did not quail when confronted by Aids sufferers, nor when faced with hostile gay bashers and Christian fundamentalists.

Paula was, as they say in the obituary, "a fearless activist in arenas that many New Zealanders would be inclined to avoid" and she offered me an example of a deeply spiritual woman who respected no higher authority on earth than her own "informed conscience". Although always committed to her church and most especially to her sisters, the Sisters of St Joseph, Paula refused to accept religious dogma and held herself to the more difficult but ultimately much more liberating standard of reaching her own conclusions on critical issues. To Paula an informed conscience required both communion with God and deep engagement in the world. 

Paula is the fifth friend of mine to die in recent months and their deaths have all reminded me that our lives are short and precious. Yesterday I was talking with my Mum and she suggested that if I was feeling overwhelmed with the combined load of study, work and writing then I should feel free to drop something. What Paula's life reminds me is that I can listen to my heart and my informed conscience to decide which of these commitments should stay and which should go. 

In the past I've been advised to "follow my heart" but there have been times when that simply wasn't enough to guide me through ethically complicated issues. Paula's example, the combination of an open heart and an informed conscience, is something that I find very helpful.

When I left Afghanistan what I craved most was time and space to think. I knew that I had plunged headlong into my life, and had no regrets about that. But I was learning the incredible value of taking the time to sit quietly with myself and with the wisdom of others. The first half of this year I valued that time above all else and in the space it afforded me I learned and grew. Now I am busy again, and it doesn't feel right anymore. 

So I'll take some time to decide what goes and what stays, but I'll follow the guide of my informed conscience and my heart and I feel pretty sure that the writing will stay. 

But first, a trip to Papua New Guinea, where I spent the first few years of my life. This will be my first time back since we came back to New Zealand when I was about to start primary school and I wonder whether anything will be familiar to me. 

Before I leave on Friday I'll finish an essay (a 'critical review' of the research evidence for the effectiveness of yoga in the treatment of depression and anxiety disorders), get through the organisation of some election related events for work, and post at least one more extract of Zen and the Art of Peacekeeping here.  

Penny and Horia

I sat waiting for my flight to Kabul with Penny. Penny was the Deputy Country Director for Mercy Corps, Afghanistan and was one of the two co-chairs of the board of the consortium for which I would be working. Two months earlier she had been one of a panel of three people who interviewed me by phone for this role. My first taste of life in Kabul had been the difficulties we had getting together at a suitable time for the interview. I suggested a time, Penny emailed back explaining that that they were under curfew and couldn’t be in the office after 7pm. They suggested another time, but on the day the phone lines were down and they couldn’t get through to me.

Eventually we got it together and I was interviewed by Penny together with Horia, the Director of the Consortium, and Kanishka, the co-chair with Penny of the Board. I was impressed that I was being interviewed by two Afghans for a role in Afghanistan. This happens much less often than you might expect. 

My first international job was with Raji Sourani, a Palestinian human rights lawyer, in the Gaza Strip. For two years I worked in a Palestinian office, with a Palestinian director and an entirely Palestinian board. In Timor-Leste, although the project was funded by New Zealand, I worked with and was primarily answerable to a Timorese woman.  So my experience of international human rights work had been as an employee of local organizations or as an advisor to local experts. But this is not typical. Most foreigners, or “internationals” working in countries like Afghanistan, Palestine or Timor-Leste are working for international organizations and their bosses are foreigners like them.

What most attracted me to Afghanistan was the chance to work with Horia. Horia Mosadiq is my age, which means that when I arrived in Afghanistan she was 34 years old. She was the first ever Afghan director of an organization that had initially been managed by foreigners. She was well known in Kabul for her intelligence and her courage. Starting out as a journalist Horia was known for her willingness to speak out on women’s rights and human rights generally. 

As an activist in post-Taleban Kabul Horia was deeply committed to seeking justice for the many victims of past human rights violations in Afghanistan and their families. When many others were willing to switch their agenda to suit the preferences and priorities of international funders, Horia never stopped talking about victims and the need, for the sake of the entire country’s future, to address their needs.

When I arrived in Kabul I was single and had no children. Horia had been married for over a decade and had two daughters, 10 and five years old. I grew up on a stereotypically idyllic farm in central New Zealand and heard about the suffering of the rest of the world mostly during our family’s morning prayers for missionaries around the world. Horia and her family had fled Afghanistan into Iran after their home was bombed and her brother killed. I studied law at university in New Zealand, specialising in international human rights law, and met and married the pastor’s son three days after I turned twenty. Horia studied journalism and met and married her husband in Iran, moving together to Pakistan to continue their studies and work.

In a refugee camp in Pakistan far from her family, Horia had her first child. At about that time my own early marriage was breaking apart and I was setting out to explore the world, backpacking for 10 months through East Africa, Middle East and Eastern Europe. Horia raised her daughter in the refugee camp and began her work as an activist. At about the same time I was trying to make sense of the suffering, conflict, poverty and injustice I had seen during those 10 months of travel and decided to look for work using my international human rights training. As Horia juggled motherhood and working as a journalist to speak out about problems faced by women under the Taleban regime, I moved to the Gaza Strip and began to work with Raji to bring the world’s attention to the oppression of the Gazan people under the occupation.

As the call came over the intercom to announce that boarding was beginning for the UNHAS flight to Kabul I was thinking about Horia, who would be meeting me at the airport when I arrived, and hoping that she would like me. 

Sacrificing the Unbook

"The only way [the book can be written] is to set the unbook - the gilt-framed portrait of the book - right there on the altar and sacrifice it, truly sacrifice it. Only then may the book, the real life flawed finite book, slowly, sentence by carnal sentence, appear." 

Bonnie Friedman

Last night I went to hear Robert Fisk talk about his work as a journalist, about human rights in the Middle East, about the occupation of Palestine, about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and about how he "copes" with the traumas of his work. He was promoting his new book. 

It was a great feeling for me, to sit in the large theatre filled with my fellow Wellingtonians and realise that they all care about what Fisk was saying. But in the midst of that pleasure I was struck by a sense of doom. How could I ever write a book about my work and life in Afghanistan and the Middle East given that it was clearly never going to be as good as what Robert Fisk would write. 

I sat thinking this for a few moments. Then I thought about all the books I've read and how impoverished my reading would be if every novelist gave up because they wouldn't be as good as Tolstoy, or how dull the theatre would be if every playwright gave up because they wouldn't be as good as Shakespeare. I do wish that a lot more journalists would worry about whether they were as good as Fisk - but that's a different story. 

So I pulled out my ticket stub and found an orange felt pen in my handbag and started scribbling notes to myself about stories of my own that Fisk had reminded me about. That ticket stub is now sitting on the kitchen table beside me and I'm about to write at least one of those stories.

The quote above leaped out at me today when I decided quite randomly to visit Laini's series of essays on writing at Not for Robots. It is time to place the gilt-framed portrait of the perfect book (one that Robert Fisk could write) on the altar and let it burn so that my book in all its flawed, finite reality can emerge. 

What I left behind

On 27 December 2005 I was sitting in Terminal Two, Dubai International Airport, waiting for the plane that would take me to Kabul, Afghanistan. To get to this moment, I had left behind the best job of my life. It had been a job in which I’d been challenged professionally beyond any thing I’d attempted in the past. I’d been forced to face up to my personal and professional weaknesses and had slowly come to appreciate my real strengths. I’d worked with people who shared my passion for human rights and for justice and who had become true friends. For five years I’d looked forward to getting into the office. Near the end, though, I had become exhausted. I felt I was running out of new ideas for the work and, even worse, running out of excitement about what we were trying to achieve. It was time for a new job. 

I had also left behind a spectacular group of friends - intelligent, loyal, and compassionate women and men. Each of them not only had a fantastic sense of humour and of occasion but they were also each incredibly talented in their own way and a source of constant inspiration to me. I’d left behind the Matterhorn Ladies’ Book Club, where I’d spent many deliciously languorous Sunday afternoons with good books, great friends and some excellent sherry. I’d left behind my running club and the running buddy with whom, during our many training runs, I had talked through every challenge life had thrown me over the past five years. I’d even left behind my wee cottage, the first home I’ve ever owned and a place of sun, happiness, refuge and great creativity.

In the midst of all that goodness, however, there was a big hole in the middle of my life in Wellington. Two of my closest friends had recently left New Zealand to work with the UN in Liberia. I’d met these two women while we were all living and working in the Gaza Strip. Among my friends, they were the only ones who understood the things I had seen and experienced there and the ways that they had permanently changed me.

Every time I got an email from one of them describing the challenges and struggles of the people they were working with in Liberia, I wondered whether what I was doing in New Zealand was enough. I remembered what it felt like to live and work in Gaza. I remembered what it meant to be pushed so far out of my comfort zone every day that I was forced to grow braver, stronger, more compassionate and more resilient. I missed that growth and wondered what the easy life in New Zealand was teaching me, apart from comfort and security and ease.  Every time I spoke to one of them I started to feel that it was time to get out there again.

To get to Terminal Two, though, I’d also left behind my family. I’d left behind my grandmother, her pain still fresh as she mourned the loss of her beloved husband of sixty years, my grandfather. I’d left behind my beloved cousin who had just had a malignant cancerous tumour removed from his brain and was about to embark on the fight of his life to rid his body of cancer forever. I’d left behind my parents, sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews, aunts, uncles and cousins. I’d left behind my whole big fat Scottish-Irish-Scandinavian family who remind me that even when I don’t quite fit in, I will always belong to my people.

More than anything else, however, my family were the reason why I was on my way to Kabul. My great-grandparents were missionaries in Papua New Guinea. My grandparents were missionaries in Nigeria, where my father and uncle went to school by plane. My parents had been on mission in Papua New Guinea when I was a child. When I was in high school my sisters and I were taken out of school for several months to go and visit our aunt, uncle and cousins who live in Guatemala as missionaries. As I grew into my own life I realised slowly that whilst you could take the theology out of the sense of mission, it was much harder to get the sense of mission out of the girl.

Because of that sense of mission, here I was sitting in the waiting room of Terminal Two. I’d left behind everyone I loved and everything I knew and I was waiting for the UNHAS (United Nations Humanitarian Air Services) flight to Kabul, Afghanistan.