The Foreign Service Journal, February 2004

76 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 4 N ot in Bangladesh, not in the Congo, nor in any other of the most desperate parts of this tumultuous world where I have been assigned during my Foreign Service career, have I ever felt any- thing like it. It was my first attempt to give away something of continuing value in northern Afghanistan. Not candy or Big Red chewing gum. I decid- ed to pass out a dozen bright blue ballpoint pens — emblazoned with “U.S. GOVERNMENT” and made by the handicapped back home. Strike a blow for education, for lit- eracy, for the little girls that the horrific Taliban wanted to leave behind forever. I was headed to the provincial capital of Mazar-e-Sharif for a meet- ing with the president of Balkh University. U.S. taxpayers had just spent $50,000 to furnish the impov- erished school with desks, beds and other basic equipment. I was travel- ing with my personal security detail from the British Forces — a young driver and a shooter, both heavily armed, dressed in desert camouflage and speaking in a Cockney accent largely beyond my comprehension. At first, there were only a few children around the two vehicles. But when I started to pass out the pens, something happened — a mob of bigger kids came out of nowhere to engulf me as I tried to hand the pens to the smallest chil- dren. I am a large man at 6’5” but my size did little to prevent the chil- dren from literally climbing my frame to grope for the box of pens, which I strained to hold aloft. Then a couple of bigger children (or maybe they were undernourished adults) got a hold on my right arm. Their grip sent a wave of despera- tion from their pathetic lives into my body and down to the depths of my soul, forcing me to drop the box — with the spoils falling into the dirt and into the hands of the biggest and most aggressive. So much for charity to small children. I called to mind the chilling accounts of children gone wild in Animal Farm or Lord of the Flies . Some days later, we stopped our armed convoy to remove our body armor near a village on the highway from Mazar-e-Sharif to Sheberghan in the neighboring province of Jawzjan. Again, our vehicles were approached by a crowd of villagers, large and small. The villagers scur- ried haphazardly from the patchy wheat fields they had been thresh- ing by hand. When I offered them my sack lunch, courtesy of our British Forces chef, my previous experi- ence recurred. In trying to ensure that a small girl got an orange or an apple, my right arm holding the fruit was so desperately gripped by a grown man that I thought he would never let go. And the out- come was the same — my arm was brought violently down by the des- perate grip of two more large chil- dren who got the orange and apple, leaving the little girl’s tears to fall into the dusty roadside. Now comes a new dimension to the question of survival of the fittest: whether it is better to try to give to the weakest when in the grip of the strongest — struggling so desperately to survive until the next meal? Or, does humanitarian aid simply allow the least fit to suffer longer — before they succumb to the vagaries of life in the real world? I have no answer.  Their grip sent a wave of desperation from their pathetic lives into my body and down to the depths of my soul. w Thomas R. Hutson is a retired Foreign Service officer who was recently re- employed as the U.S. representative on the U.K. Provincial Reconstruction Team in Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan. The stamp is courtesy of the AAFSW Bookfair “Stamp Corner.” R EFLECTIONS The Grip of Desperation B Y T HOMAS R. H UTSON