Over the years, luckily many people has asked me why I do the work I do, far fewer have rolled their eyes.. So what do I answer?

Well, let me tell you a story. Quite a time-appropriate story actually, as it is related to events that happened exactly ten years ago, in the Balkans.

It is a slightly reworked version of the shortstory “Scene of War”, published in my eBook.

June 1999.

Richard, Alf and I are standing on a mountain pass, at the border crossing between Albania and Kosovo. The view is breathtaking. It is part of a movie, projected in 360 degrees around us. Better than a movie.

A long, slow moving stream starts from far behind us. We can hear it, the random noise. It passes right next to where we stand, and follows bends and curves for as far as we can see. A stream, a steady flow.

A stream not of water, but of people. Tens of thousands. Refugees returning home. Whole families on tractors and donkey pulled carts, with all their belongings stacked as high as they can. Mattresses, cupboards, tables, chairs, cardboard boxes… Mothers holding on to babies, brothers and sisters walking hand in hand. Elderly men with deep grooves in their faces, walking with a stick in their hand, or pushing a wheel barrel.
A massive flow of people. Each with their own horror story to tell, moving steadily back to their homes. Homes they fled a couple of months ago after militia and special forces wrecked their lives, burnt their crops, raped their mothers and daughters, killed their brothers, sons and fathers. As the stream of people tops the mountain pass, they see the same scenery as I do. I wonder what goes on inside them.

In between the mountains tops, capped with tree forests, scarred by cluster bombs which Nato blanketed over them, lay the valleys. Valleys with a fresh green colour of spring grass and young leaves on the trees. For as far as the eye reaches, we can see plumes of smoke coming from the valleys, like candles on a cake, which have just been blown out. Plumes of smoke, going up in the air and dissolving into the clear blue spring sky. Smoke of houses, cars and farm sheds burning, for as far as we can see, dotted over the valleys. The militia and break away paramilitary forces looted and burned everything as they retreated. It looks like the whole country is still burning. People’s lives are burning. And yet the expression on the faces from all who pass us, is not one of desperation, but one of hope. They all smile. Sadly, but they smile. They look at the same scenery as I do, but they think of hope. Hope of starting afresh. They wave at us. They wave at the Nato military trucks and tanks maneuvering in between the stream. “The liberators and the liberated?”.

It is yet another scene of war, another scene of misery and hope, another scene of destruction mixed with hope, of a past and a present. Will it ever end? Will we ever learn from our mistakes?

Two F16 fighter jets blast low over our heads. Instinctively, everyone pulls their heads down. The fighting is not over yet. We hear the remote muffled thunder of a bombing raid. Very far away. The misery is not over yet.

As I get into the WFP car, my eyes cross those of a young girl, sitting on her mum’s lap, on the back of a tractor. She looks at me and I look at her. I smile and she smiles back, hesitantly raising her arm to wave to me. Her mum searches who the girl is waving to. She finds me. She whispers something in the girl’s ears. The girl looks up, kisses her mum on the cheek, and looks back at me. She throws a kiss at me. I throw one back and wave. She laughs. Her dad, driving the tractor looks back and waves at me too.

Would they know I am thinking of my daughters? Would they know she has the same eyes, the same hair. Would they know this is why I do this work? Because she could have been one of my daughters, sitting on my wife’s lap?

This could have been my family, my life. But destiny has put them there and me here. Sheer luck determined those who suffer and those who never realize enough how lucky they are. Sheer destiny determined those who need help and those that can help. I can help.

And that is why I am an aid worker.

Pictures courtesy Arben Celi (Reuters), Getty Images and Tom Haskell (WFP)

Richard, Alf and I are standing on a mountain pass, at the border crossing between Albania and Kosovo. The view is breathtaking. It is part of a movie, projected in 360 degrees around us. Better than a movie.

A long, slow moving stream starts from far behind us. We can hear it, the random noise. It passes right next to where we stand, and follows bends and curves for as far as we can see. A stream, a steady flow. Not of water, but of people. Tens of thousands. Refugees returning home. Whole families on tractors and donkey pulled carts, with all their belongings stacked as high as they can. Mattresses, cupboards, tables, chairs, cardboard boxes… Mothers holding on to babies, brothers and sisters walking hand in hand. Elderly men with deep grooves in their faces, walking with a stick in their hand, or pushing a wheel barrel. A massive flow of people. Each with their own horror story to tell, moving steadily back to their homes. Homes they fled a couple of months ago after Serb militia and special forces wrecked their lives, burnt their crops, raped their mothers and daughters, killed their brothers, sons and fathers. As the stream of people comes the mountain pass, they see the same scenery as I do. I wonder what goes on inside them.

In between the mountains tops, capped tree forests, scarred by cluster bombs which Nato blanketed over them, lay the valleys. Valleys with a fresh green colour of spring grass and young leaves on the trees. For as far as the eye reaches, we can see plumes of smoke coming from the valleys, like candles on a cake, which have just been blown out. Plumes of smoke, going up in the air and dissolving into the clear blue spring sky. Smoke of houses, cars and farm sheds burning, for as far as we can see, dotted over the valleys. The militia and break away paramilitary forces looted and burned everything as they retreated. It looks like the whole country is still burning. People lives are burning. And yet the expression on the faces from all who pass us, is not one of desperation, but one of hope. They all smile. They look at the same scenery as I do, but they think of hope. Hope of starting afresh. They wave at us. They wave at the Nato military trucks and tanks maneuvering in between the stream. The liberators and the liberated.

It is yet another scene of war, another scene of misery and hope, another scene of destruction mixed with hope, of a past and a present. Will it ever end? Will we ever learn from our mistakes?

Two F16 fighter jets blast low over our heads. Instinctively, everyone pulls their heads down. The fighting is not over yet. We hear the remote muffled thunder of a bombing raid. Very far away. The misery is not over yet. As I get into the car, my eyes cross those of a young girl, sitting on her mum’s lap, on the back of a tractor. She looks at me and I look at her. I smile and she smiles back, hesitantly raising her arm to wave to me. Her mum searches who the girl is waving to. She finds me. She whispers something in the girl’s ears. The girl looks up, kisses her mum on the cheek, and looks back at me. She throws a kiss at me. I throw one back and wave. She laughs. Her dad, driving the tractor looks back and waves at me too. Would they know I am thinking of my daughter? Would they know she has the same eyes, the same hair. Would they know this is why I do this work? Because she could have been my daughter, sitting on my wife’s lap. This could have been my family, my life. But destiny has put them there and me here. Sheer luck determined those who suffer and those who never realize enough how lucky they are.

‘Let’s go’, I smile at our driver, ‘let’s go, work to be done’. I can see in his eyes he is thinking the same as I do. We all do.

Pictures courtesy WFP/Tom Haskell

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It has been ten days since we arrived in Kosovo, and for 10 days, we have been eating what we could find. The only thing available was minced lamb, in all forms and shapes. Hamburgers, cevapcici sausages, small meatballs, large meatballs. Minced meat and bread. No vegetables, no fruits. Bread and minced meat. To drink, we could only find sparkling water and vodka. I don’t drink either.
Last night, out of sheer desperation, Alf, Richard and I dug into the survival kits we received at the warehouse. We found a camping cooker and bags of dried food in it. We pulled out the curry-rice combination, and cooked it in sparkling water. The pack had ‘Best used before 10-1989’ on it. That was ten years ago. But we did not mind. It took hours before the rice was cooked through. Richard, a Ugandan, is very picky with his food. He refused to eat it. Alf and I savoured it. At last something other than minced meat and bread. Even after hours of cooking, the rice was still pretty hard, but the spices gave it some flavour.
During the night, I thought ‘if I lit a match now, the room will ignite’. I had never farted that much in my whole life. I was rolled up in my sleeping bag, in an underground room, full of mould and dead insects, cold from the humidity. But still I had to pull away the sleeping bag, as I could not take my own smell anymore. These were not the occasional farts, but long blasts of gas. My stomach did not take the rice lightly. I could not stop laughing at myself, I giggled like an idiot, in between the farts.. Man, this was not normal anymore…

But now we had Coke.. At last, something with taste. The Real Thing. I am the happiest person on earth. Nothing can go wrong anymore.

We continue driving towards Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. It is the first time we would go to Pristina, after installing the office in Prizren for over a week. We are joining the rest of the team who had entered Kosovo out of Macedonia. Alf, Richard and I entered from Albania. There had been a healthy competition between the two teams, trying to complete the first office installation as soon as possible. We won –of course-.. Kind of. As we drove into town the first day, we saw a house with a WFP flag. No-one was there, so we took it for the WFP office. It was just days after Nato entered Kosovo, and there was chaos everywhere. We did not wait for the WFP field coordinator to come back from town, and started installing the computers, generator and the radios. We were the first ones to send an Email to all our colleagues: ‘We are online! Team Albania is online! We win!’. It did not matter that in the evening, the WFP coordinator came back with a puzzled smile on his face ‘Ah.. Here you are, guys. I have been looking for you the whole afternoon. But eh.. this installation is all nice, but eh.. this is not our office. Our office is on the other side of town..’ We never told the other team.. We won, we were the first on the air!! No matter we installed it in the wrong house. The next day, we took everything down, and moved it to the ‘real’ office. We never told anyone. Shht, let it remain a secret!

When we told the other team over the radio we would join them in Pristina, Mats had told me they had pizza there. The first restaurant in Pristina to open up after the crisis, and they made pizza! Now I have Coke, and in the evening, we would have pizza… This is a good day!
After driving for an hour over a road filled with potholes from the bombing, with Nato checkpoints every few miles, we can finally see Pristina laying in the valley.. It is getting dark, but splashes of light come from the valley. At first I thought it was fireworks, but soon we realize these are tracer bullets. We can hear the machine gun fire coming from town. From afar, we can see cars racing around, and masses of agitated people shouting and shooting in the air. Dozens of Nato helicopters hover low above the buildings with strong searchlights pointing down. Flares leave traces in the sky before floating down slowly, lighting up parts of town as if it were daylight. ‘No it is safe, they are just celebrating the end of the war’, Mats says over the radio, ‘Come on over, we’re waiting for you at the pizza place, on the corner of the main road, just past the second traffic light’.
We maneuver ever so carefully in between the shouting and cheering crowd. Many of them with AK47s in their hands, firing at will. I am a bit wary. What goes up, must come down also.. It is not the first time people get killed from stray bullets which were fired in the air. They bang on the side of the car. Not because they are angry at us. Just because the banging creates noise I guess. The Kosovars have, after all, been kept quiet for many years.
We join the team at the pizza place. ‘Pizzeria Napoli’, the painting says on the makeshift corrugated sheets, which surround an outside area filled with plastic tables and chairs. Everyone is there.. The whole WFP Pristina office. We are happy to see each other. It has been three weeks or so since we parted in Rome, not knowing how this emergency operation would work. Everyone was anxious to get going, and tonight we will celebrate a successful deployment with Pizza and Coke.. Life can be good. No matter that next to the thin corrugated sheets, crowds run by, shouting as if they were insane. From where we are sitting, we cannot see them. The corrugated sheets shelter our pizza-fest from the sight of the outside world’s craziness. We hear continuous blasts of AK47s, one meter from where we are sitting, at the other side of the fence. The gunmen are shooting and yelling as if they lost their mind. The helicopters hovering low overhead don’t matter. The flares don’t matter. The deafening sound of all the explosions don’t matter. The pizza has arrived and all we can think of is how simple life can be. Pizza, Coke and friends. A happy scene, lit by candles and tracer flares. For just a while, the outside world is outside. Outside the corrugated rusted fence. We are not part of it anymore.

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The problem with small planes is that you can see and hear everything going on in a cockpit. You’re sitting just a few inches away from reality. In a big commercial jetliner, it looks like all goes automatic. You can ‘Sit back, relax and enjoy your flight’. Our reality is a bit different at this moment. I don’t know why, but pilots that go off cursing and act all agitated don’t inspire a lot of confidence in me. I have no fear of flying, but I do not like to be reminded of the fact that flying an airplane is only part science. The rest is luck, skill, art, habit and experience. All very grey things if you ask me. A thin line between ‘to be or not to be’.. Looking at the co-pilot who is all sweating, I am sure that Shakespeare is not the first thing on his mind.

Reminds me of a flight in a small twin engine Beechcraft we once took from Mpulungu in Zambia to Entebbe Uganda. I was sitting just behind the pilot. And all of a sudden, in the middle of the flight, he goes ‘Oooooh shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,…’, while banking sharply to the left.. The co-pilot had just dozed off, his head bouncing slowly on his chest, with his headset sliding off his ears, woke up with a shock: ‘What, what?’ ‘Thunderclouds ahead. I don’t like to flying through thunder clouds in this small plane..’. I thought: ‘And how do you think this makes me feel, eh’.

There is no science in flying.. Ok, ok, ok, let me rephrase that. The basis is science, all the rest is nothing.. Luck. Thin air. A combination of random features. Sometimes I think ‘If someone up there decided this is my day to die, then there is nothing I can do.’ Especially with the flights we are taking. Bush flights. Control towers manned by amateurs, hardly paid, hardly interested, hardly equipped. We often use old Russian planes. A Russian pilot once told me that IATA rules stipulate pilots can not drink liquor less than 24 hours before getting onto the plane, and how that the rule was translated into Russian as ‘pilots can not drink liquor less than 24 paces before getting onto the plane’.

Meanwhile, we are still sitting with a bunch of relief workers cramped behind the Italian pilot who is getting more and more agitated. Cramped in a Learjet, one of those small fancy jets you see in the movies flying business people around. Or movie stars. When they told us yesterday, we would fly to Albania using a Learjet, we thought ‘Well, if we go, we might just as well go in style!’. Unfortunately, they had not told us this was the only plane available on charter. Every man and his dog apparently were flying into Albania and Macedonia since Milosovic had signed a treaty with NATO and pulled out of Kosovo.

A Learjet, hey?!.. Hmm.. We were cramped with too many people, sitting with our luggage in between us, on our knees, looking at the lights in the plane that dimmed each time the pilot pushed the big green button. A Learjet with dead batteries.

To kill time, and to make each other obviously more comfy, we exchanged horror stories of planes with the other relief workers in the plane. Stories of the Russian crew that shuttled between Kisangani-then Zaire and Kigali-Tanzania. Flying cargo in and refugees out. The Kisangani runway was a bit too short for the Ilutshin76 plane, so the pilot had to pull the brakes real hard. As soon as the plane stopped, a crew member would jump out of the plane and throw buckets of water on the tires to cool them off. On the same airport, an IL76 got stuck, because someone had forgotten to pull away the big wooden wedges blocking the wheels. So the pilot gave full throttle trying to get the plane to move. The massive jet wash this created, blew away the corrugated roof of the only hanger at the airport, and flattened all stalls of the local market just behind the plane.

Once approaching Kabul airport, our plane was forced to do a flyby. The pilot pulled up the plane as much as possible to avoid the mountain ahead. The plane then banked that sharp, people thought it was going to roll.. The pilot announced a few minutes later: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize for this aborted landing. There was a guy with a bicycle riding on the runway. We’ll try again now’. Try? Try? How about giving some confidence, eh?

I once shared offices with Nigel, our UN flight coordinator. He had the best stories ever. Of the pilot who mistook the lights of the Corniche along the banks of the Nile in Khartoum, for the runway. And had landed neatly. Onto the Nile. Of the first approach at Kigali airport after the genocide. How the UN troops had said all was safe to land, and the pilot responded ‘and what are all those tracer bullets then, I can see flying towards my windscreen?’. Of the sign at Mwanza airport that said: ‘Beware of the potholes in the runway’. Of the loadmaster on the Russian cargo plane who was not briefed his IL76 was an ex-military plane, and had heavy armor plating on the bottom. He had loaded the plane full, like he normally did, making the plane too heavy. Nigel said they flew forever at just a few meters above the ground, leaving behind them a trace of huts and houses with caved in roofs. Guess the armor plating did work well after all…

Lacking a door between the passenger seats and the cockpit, we are witnessing a story which we will add to those string of anecdotes, I am sure. A cheap Italian comedy play. The pilot tries to call the control tower, asking for a start-generator, but the radio does not work either. Of course. Flat batteries, remember.. Even I knew that! He slides open the side window and shouts at a guy walking on the tarmac, past the plane. I seem to understand that with the flat battery, and some mechanical problem, he can not open the main door anymore. So we are all locked up. Stuck in a fancy Learjet, cramped with stuff under, next and on us, hot, stuffed air.
We, the passengers, the audience, are just sitting there, laughing our heads off. The pilot tries to ignore the laughter behind him, getting more agitated every minute. One of the passengers hands him a mobile phone. First he calls a friend to get the number of the airport. Then calls the airport, is put on hold, gets agitated, and in the end, speaks to the control tower. ‘Yeah, euh, this is flight UN23-4, can you find me a start-generator please? We are the white Learjet on the left from hanger number two.’ ‘No, my left, not yours’.. ‘No, no, the white one, not the silver one’. ‘Ok, look at hanger number two, I will wave through the window. You see me now? Yeah, a start generator. How much? Just a second’. And finally he turns to us. Asks if someone has some money. They ask him to pay for the use of the start generator in cash. He does not have enough on him.

Half an hour later, we are airborne.

Italians….

Postscriptum.
Three months later, I was still in Kosovo. I thought of this story and the jokes we made in the plane, when we got a radio call from our flight coordinator at Pristina airport. The sound of hesitation and trembling in his voice, his words will remain in my head for ever. ‘Please call the security officer. The control tower just informed me they lost our incoming flight on the radar.’

BBC World Wednesday, November 19 1999
Kosovo plane crash leaves 24 dead
Nato has confirmed that all 24 people on board an aid flight died when it crashed in northern Kosovo on Friday. The plane, chartered by the United Nations World Food Programme, came down 15km northeast of the town of Mitrovica.
A spokesman for the Nato-led peacekeeping force K-For said it was too early to speculate about the cause of the crash. He said it was extremely unlikely that the aircraft had been shot down by the Yugoslav military, despite the fact it had strayed into Serbian airspace.
The wreckage was found on a steep mountainside close to the Serbian border. The K-For spokesman said Nato troops had recovered the first bodies, and that the plane’s black box flight recorder had been taken intact from the wreckage.
The plane was located late on Friday after a search involving helicopters fitted with searchlights and infra-red equipment. The hunt had been hampered by the fear of mines and the difficult terrain.
The plane disappeared from radar screens at 1213 local time (1113 GMT). The WFP said that the ATR-42 plane had left Rome at 0900 (0800 GMT) on a daily shuttle flight to Pristina. The aircraft was reported to be carrying staff from the WFP, the UN Mission in Kosovo, various non-governmental organisations and a Canadian official.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has expressed his shock and sadness at the plane crash. “Once again men and women of many nationalities have had their lives cut short in the service of the United Nations, on a mission to bring relief to the suffering and peace to a war-torn community,” he said.

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