Zen and the Art of Peacekeeping

'Bad tea, bad sign': an extract from my WIP

This is an extract from my work in progress, a memoir about my life and work as a human rights officer with the United Nations in Afghanistan. This text may not be reproduced without my permission. For more extracts select WIP extracts from the categories in the sidebar. Let me know what you think!

The next morning our courtesy meeting with the Provincial Governor took place in his office, a simple room that had nonetheless been furnished with a lavish lounge suite, including a two seater, two armchairs and an intricately carved and painted coffee table. As he welcomed us enthusiastically to the province and exhorted us to make ourselves at home a young man entered the office with a tray of glass teacups filled with green tea and a plate of caramels.

Over the course of the two years I spent in Afghanistan I must have eaten a thousand caramels and drunk at least twice as many cups of green tea. No meeting took place without tea and caramels or dried fruit and nuts.

The Governor’s tea tasted off, as though the water with which it had been made had not been clean. I considered for an instant not drinking it but the risk of causing offense was more pressing than the threat of a stomach bug so I began to sip the tea, reaching for a caramel to cover the bad taste.

It wasn’t only his tea that was off, however. Everything about this Governor screamed foul to me. His manners were exaggerated and oily and he spoke about the province with a thinly veiled contempt. It was fairly obvious that this man, an urbanite from Kabul, resented his posting to this remote and ‘backwards’ province.

I had heard rumours that the man was deeply corrupt and that he was too busy lining his own pockets and rushing off to Kabul to seek a transfer to more appealing post to actually get anything done for the province. Now that I had met him I found the rumours easy to believe. For the province’s sake, if not for his, I hoped he got the transfer and that Badghis would get a Governor who actually cared about the place and it’s hard-working people.

In the meantime I asked him a few tough questions that I had been fed by my boss back in Herat, just to see if he would squirm or give anything away. He was far too smooth for my game and I was soon ready to thank him for his fetid hospitality and move on. He had, at least, confirmed the reports of crop shortages and had sent a message to the Department of Agriculture directing them to prepare some data for me to collect the next day.

Our next courtesy stop was at the office of the Provincial Chief of Police who was quite a different sort of a man. He welcomed us into his office with a stern nod and seemed quite unconcerned about whether or not he was charming me. He did, of course, serve us tea and sweets but as the tea was poured he skipped through the preliminary greetings and got down to business.

He was concerned about reports of increasing activity by anti-government groups in the province. Only the previous week there had been a rocket attack on one of the district police stations in the province.

He was also concerned about renewed reports from the northern part of the province of ‘night-letters’ in which anti-government groups, perhaps even Taleban, warned teachers and students against attending school. There had been many night-letters in the Southern provinces of Afghanistan at this time, but they were a new phenomenon in the north and the police chief wasn’t happy about the development.

In the south the letters had sometimes been followed by school-burnings or the execution of local teachers so he had plenty of reason to be concerned. As soon as our meeting was over I asked one of our young assistants, Rahim, to find and talk to as many people he could find who had come into the capital from the districts. They would be able to tell us more about the night-letters.

Before we ended our meeting, though, I asked him about the two Pashtun detainees I had heard about the night before. I told him that I was concerned that the rumours circulating about maltreatment of these two men appeared to be inciting ethnic tension in the town.

I suggested that it could be helpful if the UN were to visit them and then clear up the rumours definitively. He agreed and assured me that I would be welcome at the prison anytime I wanted to visit the detainees. So once we had said our farewells and sent young Rahim off on his investigations I asked Fazel to accompany me directly to the prison.

WIP extract: In which Murphy's Law applies and I end up in the deep end...

23 October 2006

I’d been on the job less than a month. I was barely settled into my room at the guesthouse and was still having problems figuring out how to use my handheld VHF radio. But it was Eid, the holiday that follows the end of the month of Ramadan, and my colleagues were all ready for a break. So I was about to be left in charge of the entire Western Region of the United Nations Assistance mission in Afghanistan.

Our office covered four provinces of Afghanistan and was responsible for ‘promoting peace and stability in Afghanistan by leading efforts of the international community’. Sure, no problem. I can do that. Well, I had some doubts. So I double-checked with my boss. Was he really sure that I was ready for this? I should have known that his interest in getting out of the country on a long overdue break might cloud his judgement on the matter, but I decided to trust him when he looked me in the eye (as he rushed out the door) and said “you’ll be fine Marianne. As long as no-one kills Amanullah Khan, you’ll be fine.” Okay, I’ll be fine. Hang on a minute, what was that last bit? He was kidding about Amanullah Khan, right?

Amanullah Khan was one of the two biggest political figures in Western Afghanistan. The number one position belonged to Ismail Khan. Ismail Khan first came to attention when he led a local garrison in Herat into an uprising against the Soviet government in 1979. Although the uprising was defeated, and the overwhelming military response of the Soviet regime led to the deaths of an estimate 24,000 people in Herat province, Khan went on to become a powerful Mujahedeen commander during the Soviet War in Afghanistan. He was also a key member of the Northern Alliance, second perhaps only to Ahmad Shah Massoud in both power and popularity.

Once the Soviets had been ousted Khan became the Governor of Herat Province, successfully defending the province against the Taleban in 1995. But he was no liberal himself. Khan strongly opposed participation by women in higher education and the workforce (both of which had been encouraged by the Soviet regime), was known for his repression of journalists and the press and established his own ‘Islamic police’ that patrolled Herat arresting and beating anyone found to be breaking Islamic laws.

Despite his reputation for repressive policies and brutal policing, Ismail Khan had, and still has, many supporters in Herat. After the fall of the Taleban, despite moves to re-establish national governance of Afghanistan, Khan continued to rule Herat as though it was his personal emirate. He collected taxes and customs duties himself and refused to pay them into the central purse in Kabul. Instead he used them, or at least some of them, to rebuild Herat city. While Kabul waited for the slow trickle down of international aid, Herat’s roads, bridges and schools were being rebuilt.

This independent streak may have been tolerated by Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul were it not for two factors. Firstly there was the problem of revenue, Herat province borders with Iran and so the customs duties collected in Herat constituted a massive proportion of national revenue from import duties. The government couldn’t afford to allow Ismail Khan to continue to hold those funds in Herat province.

Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, Khan continued to foster close relations with Iran. President Karzai’s main backers, the Americans, were not happy about that. So in 2004, under the urging of the USA, Karzai agreed to send Afghan National Army units to Herat to remove Ismail Khan from power. In the clashes with Khan’s men that ensued, Khan’s son was killed. As a conciliatory gesture he was offered an especially lucrative ministerial post, that of Minister for Energy, in Karzai’s cabinet.

Although Ismail Khan no longer held any official positions in the government of Herat province, there was no doubt as to his ongoing political power and influence. The first time I saw him in person I was surprised at his modest stature. His reputation was so gigantic that it was hard to reconcile it with the reality of the small, rotund man with a long white beard who I watched descending from a private plane at Herat airport. But the calibre, and political stripes, of the people who had shown up to welcome him home had tipped me off to the importance and the identity of the man on the tarmac. I couldn’t help staring.

Here before me was a character of legendary proportions in Herat and he looked, quite frankly, so ordinary. But appearances can be very deceiving. Even if I hadn’t seen him at the airport I would have known within an hour that Ismail Khan was in town. Our political staff made a point of reporting to me immediately when he came ‘home’ because, they insisted, whenever he was in town something big was going down.

Amanullah Khan (who was affectionately known in our office as AK) was one of the few people in the Western Region who had the balls and the backing to openly challenge Ismail Khan (aka IK, obviously). He was the leader of the branch of the Noorzai tribe based in the Zirkoh valley to the south of Herat city.

The Zirkoh valley-based Noorzai are only one small part of a much larger clan. Araf Khan Noorzai, Deputy speaker of the Afghan parliament at the time, is one of the well-known members of the tribe. Another is Bashir Noorzai, the war/druglord who was lured from Afghanistan to Manhattan by American intelligence agents in 2005 with promises of a cosy chat about the Taleban. Instead of a cosy chat, he was questioned for days to extract as much information as possible and then, as he went to leave, arrested and slapped in jail on drug charges.

The dirty deals made and broken between US agents and the warlords of Afghanistan could fill a book on their own, but for the purpose of this story it is probably enough to know that the Noorzai are Pashtun (like Karzai himself and the majority of Afghans) whereas Ismail Khan is Tajik, the second largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. To oversimplify and generalise wildly, in the interest of getting on with the story, you could say that there are closer links between Pashtun leaders and Pakistan, on the one hand, and between Tajik (who are Persian-speaking) leaders and Iran on the other. As the removal of IK from his position of Governor of Herat had shown, the American backers of Karzai’s government had little tolerance for any friendly relations between the powerful elite of Afghanistan and Iran. I had even heard rumours that AK had received clandestine support from the central government to mount a campaign against IK.

Iran, on the other hand, was very keen to make friends in Afghanistan and was happy to spend money to do so. Iran had spent vast amounts of money on reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. Most of these efforts had been focused in Herat province, where Iranian money had paid not only for the construction or repair of madrasas (religious schools) and mosques but also of orphanages, roads and hospitals. In my own office there were tensions evident between Pashtun staff (who tended to be more suspicious of Iran its influence) and Tajik or Hazara staff, many of whom had themselves lived in Iran, often as refugees.

My own assistant, an extraordinarily bright and hard-working young woman, was subjected to open discrimination and harassment from her Afghan colleagues because she was born Iranian. She had acquired her Afghan nationality only after her family fled Iran into Afghanistan to escape political persecution. She was still a child when they arrived in Afghanistan but her colleagues mistrusted her, some even accusing her of being an Iranian spy.

I knew that many Afghans had been treated very badly when they were themselves refugees in Iran, and had often had a lot of trouble getting work. So I could understand why they might have resented the fact that an Iranian refugee in Afghanistan could get a plum job with the UN. I could understand their resentment, but I couldn’t tolerate the viciousness with which these grown men ganged up on a young woman. They attacked her in underhand ways, first alienating her from the few other women in the office by telling those women that she was a spy, then spreading rumours alleging she had a boyfriend or that she was having an affair with a married man. In Afghanistan allegations that a woman had a lover were as damaging to her as allegations that she was a spy. In fact they could even be more damaging, because they are harder to disprove and easier to believe.

The week before my boss was due to go on leave I was still struggling to make sense of my role. For years I had been working in jobs where we identified the big, structural and systemic human rights problems and then addressed them through projects aimed at changing policy and practice at a national or international level.

In New Zealand, for example, I had worked to convince the Department of Corrections to change their rules and practices so that women in prison could breastfeed their babies longer. In Timor-Leste I had helped to develop a consultative, community-centred process for the Government to develop its long-term plan to better protect human rights in Timor. In Kabul I had worked on a project to ensure that, when they made plans about Afghanistan’s future, the Government and international donor governments heard the voices and views of Afghan citizens.  

My experience was in identifying the widespread, systemic human rights issues in a country. I could draft a good project plan and manage a complex, multi-disciplinary, project team to get the project implemented. Suddenly all those planning and research skills seemed to be relatively useless. My new job required quick assessments and reactions to rapidly changing political and security situations and the ability to carefully document individual human rights cases. I had moved to the other end of the spectrum. I was as far away from strategic, long-term, systematic work as it is possible to get. I was on the coalface of responsive fieldwork and it was difficult to stick to a daily to-do list let alone an annual work plan.

This job had thrust me well out of my comfort zone, which is saying something since in the past I had quite happily transitioned from corporate litigation to story-telling at children’s birthday parties. But that was a long time ago and in the intervening years, it seemed, I had learned to prefer structure, planning and control in my work. Since this job allowed for very little of any of those, the transition was proving to be uncomfortable.

Our daily work, which involved responding to individual cases of human rights violations, often seemed futile to me in the face of the gross structural injustices that kept vulnerable Afghan people from getting out from under their poverty and fear. Of course I had known when I took the job that I would be dealing with individual cases, and I believed that it was important work. I believed it was worth doing anything we could for each individual complainant that came to us. But in practice it was proving harder than I expected to maintain a sense of hope and usefulness. It was also turning out to be harder than I expected to feel competent or at all confident that I was doing a good job. Without a project plan to tick off it was easy to get lost in the endless parade of human suffering and never feel any closer to making a difference. 

My boss made his quip about Amanullah Khan at 9.00am on 23 October 2006. It was the Sunday before Eid and he was heading out the door to get on a flight for a much-deserved break with his family. I was hoping, and expecting, that things would be fairly quiet while he was way. Our office was scheduled to be closed for two days for the Eid holiday and all our Afghan staff were ready to go on leave on Monday morning.

By midday on Sunday, Amanullah Khan was dead.

Book extract: Gaza

Tahir wasn’t a stereotypical angry young Palestinian man. He was gentle and intellectual and very sensitive. He had travelled on a scholarship to Norway to do his masters degree in political science and now worked at PCHR as a political researcher and analyst. Having spent those years living in a Western country, staying in a dorm and having the anonymity and freedom to go out and do what he pleased, returning to Gaza and moving back into his shared bedroom in the family home had been tough on Tahir. He sought me out, the only foreigner in the office, as someone who would understand that part of him, the part that had developed a taste for privacy and solitude, of independence and freedom. I understood this and was happy to sit with him the office library listening to him talk about his life in Norway, about the people he knew and the places he went.

As we came to know each other better Tahir told me more about his family. His elder brother had been killed by a shot from an Israeli soldier during the first intifada. He was at high school when he was shot and Tahir, a young boy at the time, heard about his brother being shot before he got home. When he got home his father and other brothers were already gone, rushing to the border in a frantic effort to get his gravely wounded brother out of the Gaza Strip to one of the better hospitals in the West Bank. They were blocked because another brother had been involved in a resistance group in Gaza. This collective punishment of families for the activities or associations of one member wasn’t uncommon but when Tahir told me his story I began to understand just how cruel it could be. Unable to get him the emergency surgery that may have saved him, he died.

Book extract: Gaza

It has been a while since I published a book extract. I developed some concerns about the privacy of people who appear in the book and haven't yet decided how best to handle them. But here is an extract I wrote this week where I've chosen for the moment just to use random names. Although most of the book will be about my time in Afghanistan, these past two weeks I've been working on a couple of chapters about my life in Gaza. Obviously events in Gaza over the past month have brought these memories to the top of my mind, but I also decided that the experiences I had and the people I met in Gaza had such a strong impact in shaping the person I was when I arrived in Afghanistan that I needed to tell some of that story to set the scene for what came after.

Enjoy, feel free to comment, but please do not reproduce anywhere without my permission. Thanks!

"My first friend in Gaza was a 36 year old Palestinian man. He worked with me at the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and I had met him there once or twice in my first days. My first impression of him was of a face that was a little too worn by life to be handsome but that, when he smiled, which was often, burst radiantly into life. Khalid also had the first pair of literally twinkling eyes that I had ever come across and in time I learned to trust the goodness in that twinkle to get me through whatever hellish dark thing we were dealing with in our work.

Khalid had introduced himself to me, warmly, on my first day in the office and I had seen him coming and going from the office. He was a field officer, which meant he spent most of his time out in the streets and camps of Gaza gathering information about human rights developments. I didn’t know much about the detail of our work yet, but I knew enough to realise that he spent a lot of his time talking to very unhappy people about very sad events. Despite this, when I saw him in the office he was usually laughing and there was a warmth and ease about him that I found both comforting and mysterious, under the circumstances.

When I had been in the office for only a couple of days I was invited to the leaving party for Sylvie, the young French woman who had been volunteering with PCHR up until my arrival. I go along with a Spanish woman who has also been invited and who works for the same British NGO as me. The party is at Sylvie’s apartment, which is in a typical apartment building in central Gaza city. Most of the other inhabitants of the building are middle class Palestinian families and as we arrive I wonder what they think of this party, with men and women mingling together, music playing and alcohol being consumed. As I spend more time in Gaza I’ll come to understand how tolerant most of the residents are, and how inappropriate the Western stereotype of the intolerant, fundamentalist Muslim is for this place.

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. 

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.

Terminal Two, Dubai International Airport

There are two terminals at Dubai International Airport. Terminal One has fancy restaurants and bars, first-class lounges, duty-free stores selling Gucci, Chanel and champagne, and hourly flights to Paris, New York and London. Terminal Two has a small mosque, a coffee shop, a duty free shop selling tampons, teabags and toothpaste, and hourly flights to Bagdad, Kandahar and Kabul.

If you are willing to overlook a few subtleties then the travellers at Terminal Two can quite easily be sorted into three categories. Firstly there are Afghans and Iraqis coming or going from their homelands. On the way home, in particular, they are often loaded up with excess luggage. Once I shared a flight to Kabul with hundreds of pilgrims returning from the Haj. On arrival, the luggage carousel was crowded with large plastic containers of water from the spring in Mecca.

Secondly there are private sector contractors and consultants, including ex-military personnel now working as private security contractors or engineers on projects in some of the most dangerous spots on the planet. This group includes the Chinese construction crew I saw at Terminal Two on their way into the heart of Afghanistan to build military bases funded by the US. Later I would come across these men building new barracks on the ISAF base in a remote province. The local US Department of State representative complained to me that it was security risk to have Chinese labourers getting such a good look inside a US military installation.

Then there are people like me, the humanitarian and aid workers. Although some remnants of our missionary and Peace Corps forebears survive we are an increasingly professionalised bunch whose careers are progressed by moving from one conflict-zone to the next. Many, like me, are strongly committed to our work and to the people for and with whom we work. Some of us object, for various important reasons, to the privatisation of security forces and think of ourselves as being quite distinct in our mission and ethics from the private sector contractors. But I wonder whether the Afghans and Iraqis sitting in the airport waiting room with us can tell any difference between us.