An Aristocrat’s Mission of Mercy

It’s 10 a.m. on a crisp November day, and Suraya Sadeed bounces around in a highly combustible natural gas-powered van over potholes the size of swimming pools. We are traveling through Tajikistan’s dusty, desolate no man’s land of minefields and barbed-wire fences toward the Afghan border. Russian troops lie in the hills above with orders to shoot on sight anyone attempting to cross over. Sadeed, incongruously, looks like she’s going to a ladies’ lunch. Her makeup is immaculate. Her rich black hair is carefully brushed. Her dark slacks and cashmere shawl look coordinated. What’s more, she’s smiling.

There really isn’t much to smile about. What should have been a six-hour car ride from Tajikistan’s capital, Dushanbe, is going on 17. The van’s broken down a dozen times, the driver got lost, forcing us to spend a cold night on a hard floor in a roadside dump. We’ve cleared umpteen Tajik and Russian army checkpoints and now the van’s beginning to reek of fuel, making every bump we survive seem like a stay of execution. Still, Sadeed is smiling. “There it is,” she says, explaining that broad smile. “There’s my country.” She points at the landscape, scarred by tank treads during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan two decades ago. Just beyond the drabness shimmers the green, fertile valley of the Amu Dar’ya river, which defines the border of her homeland.

Sadeed, 49, the daughter of a former governor of Kabul and naturalized American citizen, is on her 18th humanitarian mission here since 1993. She is single-handedly bringing in more than 200 tons of food to feed the hungry. Her target: an estimated 150,000 displaced civilians living in squalid camps on the barren, drought-stricken plains of northern Afghanistan’s Takhar province. They are mostly women and children, many living “open air”--that is, without so much as a tent--and many are on the brink of starvation. Compounding matters, Afghanistan’s notoriously harsh winter is almost upon them.

Though she has been down this road before, this mission differs in two crucial respects: This is her first trip back to her birth country since her adopted country began bombing the Taliban out of it. It is also the first time she is going in under the constant eye of a reporter as well as a camera crew shooting a documentary about her for the Oprah Winfrey co-founded Oxygen Media. For in a twist, the irony of which is not lost on Sadeed, the events of Sept. 11 that thrust Afghanistan back onto the world’s center stage have also made her a minor celebrity on that stage.

Sadeed’s van clears the final checkpoint before the border crossing. We unload and proceed on foot to the muddy banks of the Amu Dar’ya, where two dozen members of the world’s press--haggard-looking men and women in their 30s and 40s--are already waiting to cross. The vehicle for that crossing is a single battered pontoon raft guided by thick steel cables attached to either side of the river. The reporters, all clad in standard-issue Banana Republic photo vests and safari jackets, look quizzically at Sadeed as she approaches--who is this woman being filmed so relentlessly?

Suddenly on a bluff a short distance away, two gray-black plumes of smoke mushroom up. And then comes the sound--two eardrum-popping KAPOWS. A pair of American B-52s, their four-engine contrails clearly visible against the azure Afghan sky, have just dropped two 1,000-pound bombs on Taliban positions less than three miles away. As the bombers arc around for another strike, the excitement among the reporters is palpable. This is what they came to see. For Sadeed, the bombings elicit a very different emotion. Though she supports America’s war on terrorism, this is her country, and it is being pummeled. As she stands there looking on as the planes drop a dozen more bombs on the nearby landscape, tears run down her cheeks. It’s an exquisite video moment and Sadeed seems to know it, holding perfectly still as the camera catches it all.

In 1927, German physicist Werner Heisenberg theorized that the physical act of looking at particles in motion affects their behavior, rendering their measurement, well, uncertain. Sadeed’s most recent trip--indeed Afghanistan itself--offers proof of the uncertainty principle’s peculiar adaptability. The founder and life force of the Washington, D.C.-based aid organization Help The Afghan Children, Sadeed and her bravery went pretty much unnoticed until the onset of “Operation Enduring Freedom.” For years she ventured alone through Taliban lines, under the threat of death, over mountains on donkey-back in freezing conditions, bringing in millions of dollars worth of food, cash and medical supplies to those in Afghanistan who need it most--doing it all in relative obscurity.

Sept. 11 changed all that. “All of a sudden, people in the press are calling,” she says. Flooded by media requests, she appeared on both the “Today Show” and CNN as well as before Congress to testify on her homeland’s state of affairs. Diane Sawyer and Anne Curry both pleaded to tag along on her mission, requests nixed by Sadeed and the Oxygen crew. The effects of all the attention on Sadeed--and on Afghanistan itself--will subtly yet profoundly change the variables involved in her work. Call it the uncertainty principle as applied to war zones; the upshot will be to make this mission the strangest she will yet undertake.

First there’s the entourage. (Normally she’d go in alone). Joining her at Dulles airport is Dr. James King, dean of a medical college in the Seychelles and experienced disaster relief worker. After seeing Sadeed on the “Today Show,” King looked up her organization on the Web and initiated contact, offering his services. He gave as a reference Rep. Karen Thurman of Florida, providing Sadeed with the congresswoman’s office number on Capital Hill. King, 47, tall, with the air of a 1950s G-man, is bringing a trunk full of medical supplies and plans to perform an evaluation at the refugee camps of what’s needed for his next trip. He chain smokes Marlboro reds and has the ashen demeanor of someone who does so regularly.

Also in the group is Oxygen documentarian Randall Scerbo, a vivacious 36-year-old with long auburn hair. Scerbo has been working on this project for the past three years. In June she accompanied Sadeed to Kabul. The two have grown close. “Mother-daughter” is how Scerbo describes their relationship. “Sisters” is Sadeed’s gentle reprimand. She has told Scerbo that she does not want the documentary to over-emphasize that she is a grandmother.

Bringing up the rear is Doug Hostetter, 57, a member of the Mennonite Central Committee, the relief agency of the church, whose organization has contributed more than $45,000 to her mission, and Scerbo’s cameraman, Bill Gentile, 50, a veteran war photographer and journalism professor at Kent State University.

We change planes in Munich to board Air Tajikistan’s flight into Dushanbe. The plane, packed with reporters, is an ancient Russian Tupolov 154 with frayed carpets and the pungent stench of high-altitude flatulence. The toilets don’t work and the air hostess looks like an aging, bedraggled prostitute. As soon we are airborne, a group of young photog vests stands and pores over a large map of Afghanistan. Sadeed, a few rows back, looks at them: “Last March I was in Herat when more than 570 kids froze to death. I remember looking around for someone to take their picture, to alert the world to what was happening. There was not one journalist to be found.” Sadeed stops in mid-conversation and looks around in a panic. She locates a small black canvas tote bag, which she places firmly between her feet. I ask her what’s in the bag. She smiles mischievously and opens it. Inside is a tan canvas sack marked “U.S. Federal Reserve.” It is full of cash.

“There’s $130,000 in here,” she says. “That can buy a lot of food and blankets in a place like Tajikistan.” I urge her to put the money away before anyone sees it. Sadeed laughs. “During the earthquake in ‘98, I brought over $182,000. I had to strap the money to my stomach. The Taliban [at the border] said, ‘Why does a pregnant woman have to come here?’ I really looked like I was delivering. I then had to change the money into Afghani--I had 14 bags--huge. The first helicopter pilot said he couldn’t take it all, so I had to find another one who would. The helicopter had all these bullet holes in it. But we made it [150 miles to Badakshan, the site of the earthquake].”

Suddenly the smell of jet fuel overwhelms the cabin. “Oh that’s normal,” she says. “I take this flight all the time. If it didn’t smell like jet fuel, then I’d really be worried.”

Sadeed acquired her sense of style the old fashioned way--she was born into it. Her father, Mir Abdul Aziz, served for 10 years as governor of Kabul under the reign of Afghanistan’s once and possibly future king, Zahir Shah, after which he ran the monarchy’s secret service. “He was the king’s right-hand man for 15 years,” she explains, “right up until the coup in 1973.” Part of Afghanistan’s small, privileged elite, she and her 10 siblings grew up in a big house in Kabul and enjoyed a lifestyle few others in her country could. “We had gardeners, cooks, drivers. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was very, very spoiled.”

She was also very rebellious. “Not only did I not wear a veil--I was wearing miniskirts and driving around on a motorcycle,” she says. She attended Kabul University, which is where she met Ghulam Sadeed, who would become her husband. They moved to Beirut in 1977, both pursuing master’s degrees in educational psychology at the American University of Beirut. Sadeed learned Arabic, one of the six languages she now speaks fluently, and raised a baby, Mariam, now 27. In 1979 the Russians invaded Afghanistan. Overnight Sadeed and Ghulam became refugees. “We couldn’t go back to Afghanistan because the Communists had taken over; we’d gotten our scholarship from USAID and we would have been labeled CIA,” she explains.

After two years in Germany, they settled in the United States, in Arlington, Va. Sadeed’s husband was hired as a supervisor for social services for Arlington County. Sadeed worked for Georgetown University in administration, then at the World Bank. At the same time she was raising Mariam. In 1988, the Sadeeds became American citizens. She got a real estate license and started her own company. “I hired about 10 agents. We did well. I myself bought six houses, bought some land. One year--the year before I quit--I cleared $179,000 after taxes,” she says proudly.

Then tragedy struck. In 1993, Ghulam had a massive heart attack and died. He was only 47. “In seven minutes my life changed completely. I gave up everything. The pain of losing him was just so overwhelming . . . I just didn’t care much about material things anymore.”

She decided, after a 15-year absence, to return to Afghanistan. Her father, who had stayed there, was now dead. Her mother was living with her in Virginia.

“I went to see how life was for the millions of people who also lost their loved ones, who lost their fathers, mothers, husbands, daughters, sons--how did they cope with this pain? When I got there, it wasn’t the same country anymore. My family home had been destroyed. There was destruction beyond belief, and hundreds of thousands of people in the middle of nowhere.”

She describes the incident that changed her life. It took place during her first trip back, in the border town of Peshawar, Pakistan. Some 2 million Afghan refugees had recently arrived. “All these people were swarming all around me when a woman called my name. She was wearing a burqa and I couldn’t see who she was. She said she had been in my psychology class in college. She started laughing. She said, ‘Remember that motorcycle?’ And I said, ‘Who are you?’ She said, ‘I won’t tell you, but could you please give me 50 rupees because my child has no milk to drink.’ Can you imagine? I gave her the money and she ran off. I tried to run after her but she disappeared into the crowd. This woman was like me, educated, privileged. You can’t imagine the psychological impact. She was too proud to tell me who she was. And I thought, I could be one of these people. It made me angry and that anger changed me.”

Sadeed returned to the U.S. and founded Help The Afghan Children. The organization is small, with only three full-time staff and seven volunteers, but deliberately so to avoid administrative expenses. Virtually every penny Sadeed raises through periodic fund-raisers goes to the people she’s trying to help. She takes a salary of $2,500 a month, she says. “We’ve raised millions, not just in money but also in medical supplies, blankets--whatever we can get.”

Since then she’s founded five medical clinics, one near the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan and four inside the country. Three of her clinics were in Taliban-controlled territory. She closed them after Sept. 11 out of concern for the workers. She’s had problems in the past. In 1998, the Taliban overran her clinic in Bamiyan. “We had a staff of 18, mostly female doctors, and some 45 patients, mostly women and children. They [the Taliban] entered that clinic and burnt it down--nobody got out alive,” she says.

Despite this, she says, the Taliban don’t intimidate her. “I told them, I was here before you and I will be here after you. Now get out of my way.” She founded 17 clandestine home schools in Taliban-controlled areas. Until the recent U.S. bombings, she was directly involved in funding the education of more than 400 girls.

It’s 4:30 a.m. and still dark when we touch down in Tajikistan. Dushanbe is actually a pleasant city with wide, tree-lined streets encircled by tall, snow-capped mountains. We pull up to our destination, Hotel Tajikistan, which, alas, is not so pleasant. It is a gigantic concrete bunker, a prime example of the kind of say-it-with-cement Soviet architecture that mars much of the erstwhile Communist bloc. Inside the hotel, it becomes apparent why Dushanbe, once called Stalinabad, merits its former name. Like some sort of Monty Python parody, six people sit behind the front desk, each meticulously filling out small pieces of paper, everybody far too busy to help you check in. We wait another two hours before we are finally each given small pieces of paper that we must present to the floor lady, who will, at last, give us our room keys.

The next morning Sadeed arrives for breakfast wearing particularly thick makeup. Dressed in her uniform of pantsuit and silk scarf around her shoulders, she’s also blow-dried her hair. I ask her why. “For a woman, makeup and looking good give you self-confidence. I learned that in the real estate business. Today I need confidence because today I have to negotiate,” she explains. Sadeed is meeting a group of suppliers--all male--to purchase the food she plans to bring in.

The meeting takes place in the apartment of Qadir Bakhshi, a supplier. It is up two flights of stairs of a shabby cement building. Sadeed, King and the camera crew take off their shoes before entering a small four-room flat. Tea, raisins, pistachios and dried chickpeas have already been laid out. The chairs are red velvet with gold trim, the wallpaper shiny silver with a floral design. On a TV in a corner, the American soap “One Life To Live” plays in Farsi.

Bakhshi and his associate, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Sylvester Stallone circa “Rambo III,” rise to greet us. They look like heavies in a Bollywood movie. They speak in Dari, but the body language of negotiation is clear enough. Sadeed uses her femininity to its maximum advantage. She smiles, flirts, laughs at Bakhshi’s jokes. She lowers her head and looks at him coquettishly. He smiles back.

In a quiet voice, she makes her pitch. She pleads for help with the refugees. Her eyes well with tears. I look at Bakhshi, who is Afghan-born, and can see that it’s working: the man is moved. He sighs, says a few words to Rambo. They leave the room to discuss the deal. As soon as they’re out of earshot, Sadeed leans over: ‘His bottom line for wheat is $400 a ton; I’m going to get it for $330. He wants $750 a ton for sugar, I’ll bring him down to $650. And I’ve already got him to ship it and package it,” she says, crossing her fingers.

Bakhshi returns. They have a deal. Sadeed jumps up, ecstatic. She agrees to purchase 239 tons of food--175 tons of wheat, 36 tons of sugar and 28 tons of cooking oil. All for $116,000. Bakhshi agrees not only to truck the food to the border, but also to prepackage it in 3,600 individual family packets. “We’ll be able to feed over 25,000 people for more than a month,” Sadeed exults. Also included are 1,000 blankets. They will sign the contracts tomorrow, when Sadeed will hand over half the money, the rest payable in Afghanistan upon receipt of the goods.

We make plans to leave for Afghanistan the following day, when Sadeed hopes to intercept her convoy of 25 trucks at the border. But a problem arises, precipitated by the sudden appearance in the hotel lobby of Bakhshi and his three young children, each of whom suffers from a minor illness. Bakhshi wants Dr. King to examine them. He has even brought along a stethoscope, since King had said his disappeared from the side pocket of his suitcase.

Here’s the rub. I have just made some calls on my satellite phone to a private investigator in New York to check King’s medical credentials as there are things about him that don’t seem to add up. King has recounted doing emergency medicine in Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico and heading medical relief operations in Florida in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. He has said he headed the main medical unit away from ground zero in New York after the World Trade Center bombings. And he talked of being the official flight surgeon for TWA and of actually having saved two passengers’ lives in flight on two different airlines.

Then one day at lunch he recalled an incident in which a Delta employee refused to hold open the gate while he finished his cigarette, causing him to miss his flight. To take revenge, he got hold of a pilot’s cap and, already wearing a blue suit, started walking back and forth in front of the Delta check-in counter with a cane, pretending he was a blind pilot. “Haven’t you ever heard of flying blind?” he claims to have told a little old lady, scaring her witless. He then got on the next flight, still dressed as a pilot, and began playing with rosary beads and praying. He thinks his tale is hilarious.

I think his tale is disturbing; Scerbo thinks he may be a wacko. Suddenly this humanitarian mission is turning into an episode of “The Real World.”

It’s just after this lunch that Bakhshi and his sick children arrive. Sadeed panics: She feels she cannot share with Bakhshi her concerns about King’s medical credentials because it would cause her to lose face, an event with consequences in these parts. But she is prepared to let King proceed with the examination. I feel that allowing King to examine the children would be criminal. We are about to have a spat when Scerbo happens to spot Dr. John Peters, a member of a different relief mission. Peters, 67, a hefty former Special Ops officer who broke his back twice in Central America while jumping from planes with parachutes too small for his size, agrees to oversee the examination of Bakhshi’s children.

That afternoon I receive an e-mail back from New York that neither the Florida nor New York boards of health--the two states where King claims to be licensed as a doctor--has any record of a James Henry King in the last 40 years. The State University of New York, from which King claims to have graduated medical school in New Rochelle, does not have a medical school in New Rochelle. He is not registered with the AMA, and according to the AMA database of licensed physicians in the United States, there is no James King with our Dr. King’s birth date.

I decide to confront King directly in the hotel’s coffee shop. King goes very still. He is unable to explain why I cannot find any record of his being a doctor. I ask him if there is anyone in the United States who could vouch for him and clear this up. He becomes indignant, vexed that he was not confronted sooner, when the group’s suspicions first arose. He gets up and leaves

. “I feel so stupid,” says Sadeed later. She chooses not to confront King. “If he gave an interview to someone, he could damage me, who knows,” she explains. She concocts a story that the Afghan authorities are demanding valid accreditation from everyone: without a copy of his medical license, she tells him, he will not be granted a visa to Afghanistan. She suggests he go home. He agrees to do so without argument. “The Real World” has become “Survivor.” Exit James King.

The 17-hour ride to the Afghan border in the aforementioned highly combustible natural gas-powered van provides plenty of time to admire Tajikistan’s endless fields of cotton. It also brings out the growing tension between Sadeed and Scerbo. The immediate source of the friction appears to be that Sadeed has yet to sign a release granting Scerbo the rights to her story. During the trip, Sadeed often teased Scerbo about this, clearly enjoying the power it gave her. When Scerbo countered that she probably didn’t need the release anymore since her multiple interviews with Sadeed were proof enough of Sadeed’s cooperation in the project, Sadeed goes completely still. She seems petrified of not being in control. Now the two women, who have been so close for the past 18 months, are barely speaking. Sadeed starts to turn away from Scerbo’s cameraman and refuses to wear the mike.

We pass through the final Tajik army checkpoint into Russian army territory. There are still more than 20,000 Russian troops in Tajikistan and they control the country’s borders. At the penultimate Russian checkpoint, there’s a long line of trucks waiting their turn to cross the Amu Dar’ya river on the raft, one at a time, into Afghanistan. Sadeed checks to see if any of the trucks are hers. Alas, her convoy has yet to arrive. I can’t help wondering if Bakhshi and Rambo aren’t right now in some Odessa nightclub with a bunch of plug-necked friends, living it up on Sadeed’s money. Sadeed says she is sure the trucks will arrive tomorrow. But she looks worried.

We board the pontoon raft to make the crossing as Sadeed pulls her shawl over her head to cover her hair. She will not be seen without it again. She does this, she says, “out of respect for the culture.” Just then another pair of B-52s drops its ordnance on Taliban positions nearby. Kaboom kaboom-- welcome to Afghanistan.

We arrive on the Afghan side of the river, haul our luggage and 120 bottles of water off the raft and wait. The half-dozen battered Russian jeeps there have already been spoken for. Suddenly a shiny new Toyato Landcruiser materializes for us, provided by an elegant Afghan who says he recognizes Sadeed’s voice from her frequent radio broadcasts. We pile in and take off across the brown, desiccated plateau of northern Takhar. “I remember when, not too long ago, all this was green and beautiful,” Sadeed says, looking out the window. “Look what the drought has left us with.”

We eventually pull into Khoja Bahaudin, a dusty, one-story frontier town that could be straight out of a Sergio Leone spaghetti Western, were it not for all the turbans and camels. Khoja Bahaudin serves as the Northern Alliance’s regional headquarters. It also serves as the Western media’s headquarters, with all the major television networks commandeering houses from which to coordinate their Afghan coverage. According to Mohammed Gull, the Northern Alliance’s visa and NGO (nongovernmental organization) coordinator in Dushanbe, some 1,300 journalists have been accredited with Afghanistan press credentials. It becomes quickly evident that the influx of all the Western media--and media money--has had startling effects on this subsistence economy.

Take the price of translators and drivers. One Voice of America reporter says: “During the first week I got here, the going rate for a translator was $30 a day. It went to $40, then $50, then $60--then we finally all got together and set a ceiling at $100 a day.” The fight for translators can get nasty, according to Hannah Beech of Time magazine. “I was with my translator, who I’d been working with for a while, when Dexter Filkins of the New York Times--that’s F-I-L-K-I-N-S--comes up and offers my guy $150 dollars, $50 more, to come work for him. Right in front of me!” she says. “Of course, I had to match him.”

The scramble for translators also has seriously affected the various aid organizations working in the area. “The NGOs lost all their English speaking staff--every one of them,” says Frederic Roussel, the co-founder and program coordinator for ACTED, the aid agency that has spearheaded relief efforts in the area. “The reporters were paying per day what my guys were making in over a month.”

The largest recipient of all the media’s munificence, though, has been the Northern Alliance itself. Aside from the 20% the Alliance skims off the top from translators’ fees and 10% from drivers’ fees, the Alliance charges $200 for reporters’ entry visa fees, exit visa fees and various fees for day passes to go anywhere. And since the Northern Alliance at the time operated the only helicopters in the region, they were able to set the prices on air transportation as well. “Chopper ride from here to the Panjir Valley? [a 45-minute journey]. Try $3,000,” says Martin Seemungal of ABC News. “It’s an extortion racquet. It’s incredible,” adds Refet Kaplan of Fox News.

Mahmoud, a young Northern Alliance driver who holds a degree in international law from Kabul University, says: “The Northern Alliance is completely corrupt. They know they’re not going to be in power for long, so they’re trying to make as much money off the journalists as they can. That way they can leave with something when a real government comes in.”

We settle in the compound of ACTED, which has offered to help Sadeed locate those in the camps most in need. We are six on the floor in the small, bare room. The courtyard is filled with journalists sleeping under tents. That night, I notice several of them eating their dinner from the yellow plastic U.S. food drop packets. “Most locals won’t eat it because they don’t know what it is, so they sell them in the markets, mostly to the journalists,” says Mahir Yaqobi, ACTED’s deputy coordinator. “Each packet goes for around 50 cents.”

And then, out of the blue, the deteriorating relationship between Sadeed and Scerbo crumbles completely. Sadeed announces that she will no longer participate in Scerbo’s documentary, which Scerbo has spent three years preparing. Sadeed tells her she is hiring another cameraman--she will find one from the ranks milling around--the next day to document the rest of her mission. Her reason: that Scerbo failed to properly incorporate her company (a charge later shown to be groundless). “How can I sign an agreement with a company that doesn’t exist,” screams Sadeed, who bemoans having turned down Diane Sawyer. They are standing in the makeshift press room. Other reporters, amused, start to take notes. Sadeed is on a rant; she does not care. Scerbo is mortified. This fight is not rational. It’s personal. We are back in an episode of “The Real World--Afghanistan.”

Bill Gentile, Scerbo’s cameraman, my photographer Chris Anderson and I attempt to mediate, all singing in unison the Rodney King single, “Why can’t we all just get along?” Finally, two hours later, a deal is brokered whereby Sadeed will allow Scerbo to complete her work if Scerbo agrees to provide Sadeed with 45 minutes of her documentary (likely to be 90 minutes in total) to use as Sadeed sees fit.

Onlookers are not impressed. “We’re in the field, we’re in a war zone--and we’re in a cat fight,” notes Anderson.

The next day, recriminations between Sadeed and Scerbo evaporate with a visit to Qum Qishlat, a tent city of close to 8,000 people staggered on the banks of the Amu Dar’ya. Many of the tents are no more than blankets flung over a piece of string. Some are actually quilts sewn from the yellow plastic pouches of the U.S. food packets. Dysentery and malaria are rampant here. Sadeed steps from the car and starts walking toward the camp. She’s immediately surrounded by women and children. The people here are bone thin and many of the children have a clear blind eye, the result of vitamin A deficiency. Sadeed talks to them and, most importantly, listens to their stories.

Jemagul, a beautiful 10-year-old girl, comes up to her and, at first hesitantly, begins to speak. She also starts to cry. Both her parents were killed by the Taliban, she says. She has six siblings, who are now orphans. By the end, she is unable to see for tears. Sadeed takes her in her arms and is also crying.

She takes Jemagul’s hand and they walk on. A man beckons Sadeed to sit in his tent for a moment. Inside, his wife, Khair Nsa, 24, an Uzbek from Takhar, is sick. The woman tells Sadeed she gave birth seven days ago and now her child is dead. She doesn’t know where her parents are, if they’re even still alive--during the Taliban’s onslaught, they were separated. She’s been living in the camp for almost a year. Sadeed takes off her black winter coat and gives it to the woman. “She was terribly sick, sitting on the dirt, pale and shivering,” says Sadeed. “She needed warmth.”

On and on, Sadeed walks through the camp and listens to tales of loss and grief. All complain of the bitter cold at night and their lack of food. One man tells Sadeed that eight people have frozen to death in the last two weeks. Women hand Sadeed their babies for her to hold, bring her gifts of dried fruit, necklaces made from pistachios--whatever they have. “Why do I do this? This is why I do this,” says Sadeed. “It’s so important to listen to their stories. It’s a release for them. They need to tell their stories to another woman.”

It’s 8:45 a.m. outside the mud village of Lalaguzar, and ACTED staff have begun cordoning off three sides of a large, rectangular space on the flat dusty plain before it. A desk and two chairs are placed in the center of the rectangle and plastic sheeting is laid on the ground. As the first of Sadeed’s trucks arrives, backing into the rectangle, people from the village and nearby camp begin to gather. Inside the rectangle, local workers unload the cargo from the trucks, dumping out the refined sugar in a huge pile on the plastic sheeting. Boxes of cooking oil are stacked next to the sugar and 50 kilo bags of wheat stacked next to the cooking oil. By 11 a.m., a huge crowd has formed all around the cordoned space. Women in burqas of gold, emerald, blue, white, green and yellow sit huddled together on the ground like cooing tropical birds. Children wait excitedly with school bags made from the plastic pouches of the U.S. food packets. And the men of the village, old and young, stand patiently. Distribution is ready to begin. Names are read off a long list compiled by ACTED in monthly surveys of need. In the most orderly manner imaginable, old men, young men, women and children step up to the table. One by one, they get their names checked off and proceed to collect their 5 kilos of cooking oil, 8 kilos of sugar and 50 kilos of wheat, the bare minimum that one family of six can survive on for a month.

Sadeed watches from the side and smiles as the procession continues. For five days in five different locations, she bears witness to the distribution of her food. With ACTED’s supplements to the wheat she brought in, she will have fed more than 45,000 people for a month. That, indeed, is something Sadeed can smile about. And Scerbo will have filmed it all. But the women’s relationship has cooled to the purely professional.

With the subsequent fall of the Taliban, aid organizations have begun to pour back into Afghanistan, with the U.S. military vowing to play a part in relief operations. It is less a case of a sudden conscientiousness than part of the American strategy to win the hearts and minds of Afghanistan and the rest of the world’s wavering Muslim population.

For Sadeed, it is the light at the end of the long tunnel she has been praying for. With ACTED, she makes plans to open a women’s primary care clinic in northern Takhar. She hopes to reopen her clinic in Bamiyan province, which the Taliban sacked. And if the right situation arose, she says she would not be averse to playing a role in the country’s political reconstruction.

“What I would most like to do is rebuild the Red Crescent of Afghanistan. My ultimate goal is to see one hospital, one school, one self-sufficient warehouse for humanitarian emergencies in every village of my country,” she says. As one of the few multiethnic Afghan women equally at ease among all of her country’s various tribes and ethnic groups--and a woman with a certain newfound notoriety--she seems well poised for the job.