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Archive for the WIP extract category

‘Bad tea, bad sign’: an extract from my WIP

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

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 [...]

Posted in Afghanistan, Story-telling, WIP extract | 1 Comment »

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

Monday, September 28th, 2009

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 [...]

Posted in Afghanistan, Story-telling, WIP extract, Writing | 5 Comments »

Book extract: Gaza

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

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 [...]

Posted in Gaza, WIP extract | 6 Comments »

Book extract: Gaza

Saturday, January 24th, 2009

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 [...]

Posted in Gaza, WIP extract | 5 Comments »

Arriving in Kabul

Saturday, September 20th, 2008

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 [...]

Posted in WIP extract | 1 Comment »

Dubai to Kabul

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

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 [...]

Posted in WIP extract | 3 Comments »

What I left behind

Saturday, September 6th, 2008

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 [...]

Posted in WIP extract | 4 Comments »

Terminal Two, Dubai International Airport

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

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 [...]

Posted in WIP extract | 10 Comments »