The Foreign Service Journal, March 2022

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2022 41 inspiring all at once. I’m forever part of it. I’m proud of that. I’m not erasing those phone numbers. Marjon Kamrani is a U.S. Foreign Service political officer serving in Qatar. She has served in Ho Chi Minh City, Dubai andThe Hague. Her family evacuated from Iran during the Iranian Revolution. The Sheer Humanity of It All AL UDEID AIR BASE, QATAR David Lawler When I first stepped into the WRM, the reality of what we were trying to accomplish hit me hard. This is what evacuating tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan feels like, and it’s oppressive. The WRM, or War Ready Materials, is a warehouse on the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar where evacuees were held pending an onward flight. The key term is “warehouse.”The WRMwas never designed to hold people; it was designed to shieldmilitary equip- ment from the punishing Qatari sun. That means it’s just a hollow shell of a building with no overhead fans, no running water and, most importantly for Qatar in August, no air conditioning. I wasn’t there from the beginning, though, when extreme conditions in the warehouse were making headlines around the world. By the time I arrived, the military had already begun cut- ting holes in the walls to connect industrial-sized A/C units. But still, the building is so massive that if you stood 30 feet away from one of the new vents, you felt no cooling breeze. You only felt the hot, stagnant air and ubiquitous dust. Now take those life-sapping conditions and add a few thou- sand people. It was physically uncomfortable. It was mentally exhausting. It was overwhelming in so many ways. But on the other side of that discomfort was the pure humanity of it all. Hundreds of U.S. military personnel were volunteering on their days off to work in the WRM handing out food, water and clothing to the evacuees, or just kicking a ball around with a group of kids. Colleagues from State and USAID worked to solve problems where we could, whether it was the old man who simply wanted a clean shirt, or the worried husband wanting to know if his wife had given birth yet and if the baby was healthy. There weren’t many other ways we could help, but we tried. Then there were the evacuees themselves. They had risked their lives to flee Afghanistan and were facing an uncertain future. They had just lost everything, literally everything. And yet a short man in his mid-30s approached me one day to ask if I needed help. Me?! I was the one who got to slink back to a five-star hotel in Doha every night and stand under the shower for 20 minutes. How could he possibly be so selfless? But that’s who they were. The equanimity they showed in the face of such a hopeless situation was humbling. There was the bodybuilder who was an absolute beast of a man. He made jewelry back home and cried when he told me about his children. There was the young woman whose family lives in Woodbridge, Virginia, so close to me. I still regret not giv- ing her my number so she could let me know they made it home. And then there was the famous Afghan singer who was now an evacuee like everyone else. One evening he co-opted our ad hoc PA system to sing songs and raise spirits, and in a small piece of magic, there was dancing. I could not begin to understand what had just happened to all these people. But the patience and grace shown by the Afghans who made it through the WRMwill forever make them, at least in my mind, the best ambassadors of the Afghan people. David Lawler is a Foreign Service officer currently serving as a watch officer in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. His prior postings were to Ciudad Juarez, Hong Kong and FSI, where he taught consular policy. In August 2021, he went to Qatar on temporary duty as a con- sular officer to help identify U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents and U.S. visa holders for priority evacuation to the United States. MARJONKAMRANI An Afghan evacuee (far left) and the author (to his immediate left) celebrate Thanksgiving with her family in Nashville, Tennessee.