Security was light at the palace. My aid worker ID pressed to the car window got us past the staggered tanks and coils of concertina wire. At the vehicle and personal search area, the American soldiers were friendly and talkative. National Guard from Florida. They were ready to go home. “There’s nothing we can do here, just being the police. It’s not our job.” As I was frisked, I was told I had a lot of hair and that I should have shaved it like the soldier for the desert. We passed this initial inspection and were allowed to drive through the makeshift entrance.

My mentor and colleague, Doris, and I were in Iraq to conduct a rapid assessment of humanitarian needs in advance of submitting a proposal for funding from the Danish government. As a certified auditor with extensive humanitarian experience across Africa, Doris was in charge of the numbers; my job was to find the words.

From the UN HQ at the Canal Hotel, we had been given an address for the next humanitarian coordination meeting somewhere in Saddam’s sprawling palace grounds. The soldiers at the next gate had no information on our meeting nor did they recognize the address we were given. Our vehicle with a Dane, an American, and an Iraqi driving was allowed to pass without any questions.

We drove up to a grand building where several identical, oversized heads of Saddam stared out across the city. The soldiers on guard outside had no information but we were not allowed to enter to inquire if we were in the right place. If the soldiers were unmotivated to help us, it was probably because this too was “not their job.” That or it was 122°F in the shade if you could find it.

After twenty minutes driving in all directions unchallenged, along largely empty roads, past date palm orchards and artificial lakes, we eventually gave up and returned to the main palace building. After a few phone calls to numbers we were given at the UN office, a Coalition Protection Authority representative said he was coming to collect us. We waited. Doris returned to the car while I remained standing in front of the American soldier who stopped us from entering. He seemed annoyed by our presence, which had taken him out from under a makeshift shelter into the heat. After a few minutes, he called on his radio.

“Zero this is one.”

“Zero this is one.”

“Zero this is one. Nothing heard.”

We stood in silence.

“So, how’s it going so far?”

“I am ready to go home. I don’t even know what we are doing here, but every National Guardsman I know in Florida was mobilized. They are probably going to keep us here longer than the regular army. At a fraction of the cost, too.”

“Do you know how long you will be here?”

“Nope. We are told nothing.”

“Have you seen the 30-foot doors and gold faucets?”

“No.”

“What will happen if I run right past you guys and up to the palace?”

He answered without looking at me. “We’ll shoot you.”

“What? Not even give me a chance and at least tackle me to the ground?”

He grunted, “maybe.” I decided it was time to shut my mouth.

It was a curious time to be in Iraq. It was just over a month since President Bush had declared “the end of major combat operations” from aboard an aircraft carrier off the coast of San Diego. It was after the Iraq Museum had been plundered for thirty-six hours by thieves and before Saddam Hussein was discovered hiding in a hole in Tikrit. Each of the government ministry buildings bore huge, blackened scars from the precision guided missiles that had obliterated their walls. Each building except the Ministry of Oil.

Foreigners were flowing in, the opportunistic, the mercenaries, the do gooders and no good doers. Doris and I stayed clear of the large hotels teeming with journalists and UN staff. In Baghdad, we slept in the basement of a church.

There were palpable tensions as Shia, Sunni, Kurd, Christian, and other minorities adjusted their routines for the long fuel lines and checkpoints. There was also an unmistakable undercurrent of energy, before any hint of insurgency, because no one knew what to expect.

It was the hottest place we had ever been, with temperatures reaching over 140°F and few buildings had functioning electricity or air conditioning. After early morning meetings and assessments, some days were so hot we just lay in our beds, trying to sleep and then worked on the proposal and budget during the night.

In the mornings before the heat forced everyone to lie down, Baghdad bustled with chaotic energy. Thin policemen in ill-fitting uniforms stood in the middle of intersections, attempting to direct the traffic converging from all sides at once. Across the city, every one of Saddam Hussein’s portraits had been defaced, yet a left or right eye could still be seen staring back at you.

Doris and I travelled in unmarked vehicles, always seated in the back behind darkened windows, with a hired driver and another man in the front seats. We didn’t ask if they were armed and they didn’t tell us to put on our seatbelts. We drove in very fast cars over long stretches past donkeys in empty fields along the highway paused in a mid-day trance.

In this window, we could travel “safely” from Erbil to Basra so long as we understood the first principle of safe travel for an unarmed aid worker: speed was our best defense against anyone shooting at us. In some stretches, we traveled well over 100mph.

The night before we traveled from Baghdad to Basra, Doris and I found each other awake and the pent-up tension from the first few days spiraled into cycles of delirious laughter. Independently of each other, we had been going over evasion tactics for our journey the following day. I confessed I couldn’t find my ticket back to Jordan, which I was sure I’d hidden in the folder with notes on the education sector. Doris revealed she had divided up her cash bills and squirrelled them away so carefully that now, in the dark, she could not account for $500! She grumbled that she was getting old and forgetful. I replied that was ridiculous but why had we thought it was a good idea to haul both our laptops when we really only needed one?

One by one, our fears expressed, we began to relax and marveled at how well it all had worked so far. Then Doris started to laugh again. “You know, I’m more afraid of the speed tomorrow than the risk of theft (or worse) from drivers we’ve never met.” She had a point.

We had no way to stop a bullet, and we couldn’t remove the threat that was all around us. What we had was speed, which doesn’t make you safe, it makes you harder to hit. It came with its own danger. A fast car on any road can be just as lethal as a gun. But it was a danger we’d chosen, and that’s not nothing. Most people never have to outrun hostile fire. Most people do, at some point, have to decide whether to keep standing still inside a situation that’s getting worse, or take the risk of making a move that at least has your hand on it. Standing still isn’t neutral and it isn’t necessarily the safe option. The real danger is failing to act once the moment calls for it.

We weren’t reckless and we weren’t always calm, although we didn’t show it to the people helping us. Our decision point was closer to accounting. We priced the dangers against each other and made our choice.

Next week: A connection between de-mining and rugby, and the second principle for travelling unarmed.

~~~

Holly Hughson spent nearly two decades as a humanitarian aid worker and military advisor. She is writing her first book about operating unarmed on the frontlines of 21st century conflict. This is her newsletter.

There are times, apparently, when hurtling your body towards earth in a tight coil is your best chance at seeing another day.

Twelve of us sat sweating in the narrow fuselage of the United Nations’ Cessna Caravan parked at Jordan’s Queen Alia International Airport. The first officer turned to face us through the open door to the cockpit and greeted us warmly. He gave the usual short, calm message about clear skies and a smooth ride to our destination today, pilot speak to signal the flight was entirely routine. Then he paused and grinned,

“For our arrival into Baghdad we are going to use an approach known as a ‘spiral descent’, which is pretty much as it sounds.” His South African accent oozed the easy confidence of years spent flying in remote and unsupported skies.

“Your stomachs may not like it but believe you me, it’s a whole lot better than taking a missile up the tailpipe!”

We laughed apprehensively and with a wink, the first officer turned back from his announcement to finalize preparations for departure. Doris, my mentor, colleague, and the bravest woman I had ever met, sat across the narrow aisle. Her large blue eyes gave me a look that said exactly what I was thinking: What had we got ourselves into this time? How did I get here? How did the little girl who grew up without guns or television find herself on a UN flight into an active warzone?

Neither the pilot nor the first officer bothered to close the door to the cockpit, which seemed over-confident. It was 2003 and still early days since 9/11. I took a picture of the open door because I was curious and also an idiot.

A couple hours into the flight, the hum of the engine changed. I felt the body of the plane start to slow down and my chest clenched tight, a shiver climbing the skin of my neck. The plane slowed and we heard what sounded like an engine about to stall as the body of the plane began to tip over the left wing until I was dangling from my seatbelt over the window frame. I hung in a one-arm handstand, my arm braced to hold me steady. The aircraft paused, and just when it felt like we would drop, the nose lowered and began to turn in a circle. Through the window directly below me, I saw geometrical shapes of buildings next to tiny, white planes appearing like toys in a sandbox. I watched as the tip of the wing circled the airport, like water curling around a drain.

As the toy planes grew to life size, our tight spiral intensified, the force pushing my body downward and outward, away from my anchor arm. At the point I could make out the weathered cracks in the tarmac, without instruction, my body instinctively braced for impact. Transfixed, I couldn’t shut my eyes until the last minute, when the plane swung upright and our bodies dropped back into our seats as we leveled off. Seconds later the wheels caught traction, steadied, rolled along the runway.

Sweet Mother Earth. I was holding my breath.

In my work with people navigating high-stakes situations, my favorite question to ask is: “How did you make it out of childhood alive?” They usually stare back blankly, waiting to see if this is the setup for a joke.

Nope, it’s not a joke or trick question. I really want to know: How did you make it out of childhood alive?

Ok, I’ll go first.

California

Growing up in a rural California valley in a dry, rocky landscape, my brothers and I learned early on that we were in rattlesnake country. Living some 20 miles from the nearest hospital, my parents drilled a message into us: Never, ever step where you can’t see the ground.

Daily, we roamed wild over dry creek beds, through orange groves and into hills covered in sagebrush and tumbleweeds. One summer afternoon, on a day too hot for outdoor adventures, we lazed at home with the doors open to encourage a breeze. I was walking down the hallway when I nearly stepped on a small brown stick on the green carpet. Except, this stick had a triangular shaped head.

Every muscle in my body went stiff.

“Ah, Marme? Help?” I called out slowly.

In what seemed less than a minute, I heard my mother’s footsteps behind me. Perhaps deciding the hallway was getting crowded, the snake slithered away into my parents’ bedroom. My mother shut the door and stuffed a towel at the bottom.

My father was out of town that day. We phoned a neighbor, who soon arrived at our house. We listened from the hall as he opened doors and drawers until he finally found it, coiled around a nail at the bottom of my parents’ wardrobe.

With his hand wrapped in a pair of my father’s underwear, he called out, “I’ve got it!” As he left with the snake’s limp body shrouded in white Y-fronts, he turned to me.

“You were brave,” he said. “This was a baby rattlesnake. If you had panicked, it would have startled and likely attacked you. Staying calm probably saved your life.”

Time Now

What does any of this have to do with the ground that may be shifting under you right now?

It might not be obvious how events from decades ago help me navigate, for example, the levels of uncertainty I’m facing today. Yet the relationship between these two experiences continues to prove instructive.

When I look back at that day with the rattlesnake, I see hints of how I first learned to operate intuitively in a frightening situation. I never forgot being told I was brave. It contributed to my sense of self when I was tested, traveling unarmed into warzones. No matter how helpless or confused I felt in the moment - such as the one where, strapped into my seatbelt, I heard the words spiral and descent used in the same sentence - I discovered I could reach back to this memory as well as others and connect with a sense that allowed me to stay calm until the danger passed.

Wherever you find yourself, I’ve learned a powerful truth:

In any given moment, we have the power to reconnect to our personal stories of courage and survival. We have the power to stay grounded and remember who we are, the threats and bullies we’ve survived, the instant life could have gone a very different way.

Yet thanks to our instincts, guts, protection of another, we are still here. This knowledge can help us keep calm, refocus to evaluate our options, and step forward confident the force that shielded us once will do so again.

How did you make it out of childhood alive? The way you answer this question can help you understand what your very own basic instincts have been trying to tell you.

And once you and I can figure that out, we can start the real work: learning to harness our intuitive knowledge of how to handle difficult situations and applying that more effectively to our current challenges.

Next Post...
…will actually hit your inbox this Friday! Because today’s piece was delayed, you’re getting a double-dose of Do It Afraid this week. See you in three days!

Part II: We drive for miles unchallenged across the grounds of Saddam Hussein’s palace and the National Guard threatens to shoot me.

Holly Hughson spent nearly two decades as a humanitarian aid worker and military advisor. She is writing her first book about operating unarmed on the frontlines of 21st century conflict. This is her newsletter.

The answer to the only question that mattered was sitting in my inbox waiting for me, behind the bold font of an unopened email. I wasn’t ready to know our fate and looked around the office, studying the team at work instead.

Abdullah sat at his desk, set apart from the others, silent and concentrated on a spreadsheet. Handsome with fair, carefully groomed features, his natural stoicism served him well as project accountant. Abdullah was the last to join the team in year three and he remained an outsider to the easy, often raucous laughter in the office. Whether this was a professional distance or personal dislike or discomfort with our playful banter, we didn’t know. He was responsible for asking tough questions of the program team to ensure compliance with our donor, the Danish government.

Gazmend was short, like Abdullah, but his polar opposite in terms of appearance and personality. With dark hair and eyes, a mouth in a constant smile or smirk, he was on permanent lookout for how the mundane might be an opportunity for mischief. On paper, Gazmend’s role was “Driver” but in reality, he was a master problem solver who thrived at tracking down ‘a guy’ and sourcing the most obscure items in the black market that was the mainstay of Kosovo’s economy.

Antigona was my prettier sister from another mother, complete with naturally curly hair and a tendency to take the work too seriously. She was implementation to my vision. Starting out as a team of just two, over the past three years, we had punched above our weight and taken an education project that started with teacher training in two districts to building and resourcing a regional skills development center, conducting a large-scale qualitative research project on the role of education following ethnic conflict, and hosting an international conference in the capital Pristina. The currency of our bond was an intuition that spooked us both. Without words, just looking into each other’s eyes, we could guess not only what the other was thinking but what needed to be done next.

Last and opposite of least, Veton loomed large as he did in any room. His tall frame was made taller by at least two inches of thick hair over large green, permanently smiling eyes. Seated in the office, he looked out of place, like he wasn’t meant to be contained by chairs or the indoors. Most importantly, Veton possessed an indispensable quality which should be mandatory recruitment for any crisis response team: deadlines, pressure, stress, even threats, all bounced off him like water on a duck’s back. He could diffuse any situation with the logic of his plain speaking and the easy charm of his grin.

Three and half years before, when I first arrived in the country the office was located in a four-story building with the logistics department taking up the whole ground floor. In those days, logistics was a beehive of activity - supply planning, procurement, transportation and storage - all supporting a large portfolio of operations from temporary shelter for hundreds of displaced families along with “shelter toolkits” (consisting of blankets, clothes and basic kitchenware), providing psychosocial support, to rebuilding houses and schools that had been targeted and burned in a mutual ‘scorched earth’ tactic by both sides of the conflict.

These days, we were a skeleton crew by contrast and there simply wasn’t enough work to keep up with the combined energy of Veton and Gazmend. All that could change if my most recent proposal for a project extension was accepted. There was only one way to find out. I opened the email and my eyes jumped to the only word that mattered: “Unfortunately…”

Instantly, I felt the inside walls of my nose start to sting and moisture appear at the corners of my eyes. With each blink, the moisture grew into fluid pools the way a gentle creek begins to rise after a thunderstorm. I finished the email’s contents by forcing my eyes wide open as if I could stop the tears by not blinking.

The end was now in sight. There would be no extension to our project. I’d let the team down.

I wanted to smother my emotions before anyone noticed, but my body had other plans. When I tried to draw even a thin breath nothing came - just a suction behind my sternum with nowhere to go. Finally, my tightened chest gave way and released not a breath but a gasp – an involuntary sob and graceless snort.

Everyone was staring at me. The battle for composure lost.

Veton stood up. ‘Come with me,’ he said and headed for the door. I followed him out of the office and up the cement staircase in the hallway leading to the rooftop. Veton stood at the far edge looking out at the surrounding blocks of hastily constructed flats forming a hexagon around the haphazard, dirt clearing below that served as a spontaneous car park. I stood still and waited. The other three arrived a moment later, drawn by an unspoken summons. Veton turned as he said,

‘Why are you crying?’

‘We didn’t get the extension. The project will close at the end of the year.’

‘What’s wrong with you? So it’s the end. Everything has to end.’

‘But…it’s the end of…all our hard work. Your jobs. It’s over,’ I squeaked, looking at Antigona’s serious expression. Again I burst into tears.

‘Why are you crying?’ Veton demanded. He swept an arm in a wide arc in the direction of the surrounding buildings. ‘These people are not worth it. Stop crying!’

Of course he was right. The emergency was well over, witnessed by the pace of construction across the city. It was time for the expatriates to move on and Kosovars to take responsibility for their own fate. In truth, I was ready for a new challenge. The Danes had just asked me to go out to Sierra Leone next month, and honestly, I couldn’t wait to get on a plane. So why was I crying?

In a word, it was Antigona. We were a perfectly matched team, buoyed through each and every challenge on the strength of the quiet, knowing smiles we would exchange that seemed to transmit wordlessly, a thousand years of wisdom. Yet, in this moment on the rooftop, it was right to begin to imagine this team in the past tense. Over the past year as I had been sent into Iraq and Sudan on short assignments, it had been a seamless transition for Antigona to step into my role as project director while I was away. It was time to step aside and free her to take the leadership role, albeit with a new project and organization.

What had surprised me most about Veton’s reaction was his detachment. He didn’t share my concern for their jobs or the lives we touched with our project were it to close. After all his people had suffered, they weren’t worth even my tears? How was it, that I was taking myself and the value of the project more seriously than the locals? Veton was a survivor, they all were.

Losing a job was nothing like their experiences from years of systemic persecution from the Serbian government in Belgrade or fleeing in terror at the outbreak of open, armed conflict. In the 1999 mass exodus, ethnic Albanians fled in battered cars and horse driven carts through the treacherous mountain passes of the Prokletije range (the Accursed Mountains) to the Morina border crossing and refuge in Albania. On the way, Abdullah had been beaten, and Antigona nearly froze in the back of a cart trying to keep her frail mother warmly wrapped in blankets. The end of our project was nothing like the loss of life each family had suffered. My tears stopped. I smiled and nodded. Local wisdom well received. We stood together. Gazmend said something to Abdullah and they laughed. Veton lit a cigarette and I moved to stand with my arm around Antigona.

The sun dipped below the exposed red clay brick outline of an unfinished building, and the sounds of construction stopped for the night - tools set down until morning. I was putting my tools down too - not because the work was finished, but because Veton had just helped me let it go. It would not be the last time a rooftop would bring me back down to earth.

Two weeks ago, a reader responded to my post, Security is in the Eye of the Beholder, with a question about the line I shared from the first rule of wilderness survival and one of the key themes of the book I am writing: Your most valuable asset in any life-threatening situation is a positive mental attitude. She wanted to know two things — how do you actually get there, and do you manage to keep it?

The short answer to the second question is no. I don’t manage to hold a positive frame of mind at all hours, because I’m human. I have a tendency to internalize other people’s suffering, and, as this story from Kosovo just demonstrated, I can take the work and my role too seriously.

My answer to the first question is that there isn’t one thing I do that allows me to flip a switch in my head, back to a positive frame of mind. Rather, it’s a collection of tools and tactics I learned in real time.

For all the fascinating, thrilling, and emotional heights of my time in the field, there were as many moments, hours and days of tedium, waiting on decisions from headquarters, sick of living with my colleagues, feeling helpless for budgets that fell short of the desperate needs, and frustrated at how long it had been since I had access to a gym. In these trying moments, there wasn’t much I could do to change the conditions or situation I was in. But did I want to walk away? Demand to be extracted and sent home? That didn’t feel right either. What was left? My attitude. I couldn’t control the giant forces, but I could control how I perceived them.

One tool I can offer directly, because it’s tangible. In the moments I felt stuck yet unwilling to walk away, I learned to ask myself one question:

What is possible only because I am here? Right here, right now.

Asking this question would set aside, however briefly, what was dragging my energy or focus downward and shift my attention to what I valued that was present only in the place and time where I found myself. For example: Who am I living, working, sharing space with that bring joy, learning, laughter, wisdom….and who I will miss when this ends? What am I learning from this experience that will lead to the next opportunity; or the opposite: What am I learning that demonstrates I no longer want to do this work/role/responsibility? What do I get to see, taste, smell, hear that is unique to this landscape?

There’s also a useful, balancing question to ask yourself: What will I absolutely NOT miss from this place and time? It lets you register the negatives on a list that reminds you they’re temporary - a chance to elevate a complaint into something you can laugh at when it occurs: “Now that goes on the list of things I’m not going to miss!”

Back to Kosovo. When Veton saw that I was crying, he didn’t come over and sit down by my desk. He got me away from the computer screen and its disappointing news, out of the office and led me up to the roof. What I discovered that day in Kosovo, was not only the truth I needed to hear but the function of putting yourself intentionally in a physical space to shift your perspective.

In most of the countries where I worked, it was common for the roofs of buildings to be open and accessible. Over the years, I found something transformative and essential in the function of this space. Going up on a rooftop, the air was different, sound waves arrived in echoes, suffocating heat was softened by a breeze and most importantly of all, I was presented with a panorama view.

What happens next? The brain stops locking into a single point and broadens our visual field. The muscles in our eyes loosen, adjust, relax focus, shifting our attention to peripheral cells in the retina, and we start to uncouple from a narrow stress-response.

The question and the rooftop: two different routes to the same destination: bringing me back down to earth, terra firma, where I can put one foot in front of the other. Veton got me there by force of reproach, from outside my head. Over time, the question would get me there by force of habit, from inside, something I built because no one was always going to be there to march me up a staircase.

Presently, I don’t have access to a rooftop but there’s a low hill overlooking a river that I can reach by foot in fifteen minutes. When I need something quicker right where I am? With just a few clicks there’s a song that offers a close second place escape and reminds me it doesn’t have to be a physical rooftop. With my thanks to The Drifters for this gift. Try it for yourself.

When this old world starts getting me down
And people are just too much for me to face
I climb way up to the top of the stairs
And all my cares just drift right into space
On the roof, it’s peaceful as can be

Holly Hughson spent nearly two decades as a humanitarian aid worker and military advisor. She is writing her first book about operating unarmed on the frontlines of 21st century conflict. This is her newsletter.

“It’s a peculiar trait of the privileged: Immediate, incautious intimacy.”

– Notes on a Scandal

If you missed Part 1, I spent time working as part of the humanitarian response in the North Caucasus a few years after the Second Chechen War. As a condition of our work, we were regularly interviewed by the FSB — Russia’s Federal Security Service, successor to the KGB. My response to the oddity of the experience and the discomfort of the locations was...playful. I was provocative. And if I’m honest, some part of me quietly enjoyed being the American who couldn’t be rattled.

It had started innocently enough. When my father wrote to ask if he could visit, I was delighted - he was one of my greatest cheerleaders for my life choices and this was a chance to see where I actually lived and worked. I asked my leadership for permission for him to visit and received a green light without much discussion. He could stay with me where I was based in the team house near the office in Nazran, Ingushetia. My expatriate colleagues chose to live in Vladikavkaz, across the border in North Ossetia where the mostly Christian population meant there was a lot more freedom of movement, though this meant they had a twice daily commute of about 45 minutes. In exchange for my proximity to the office, I lived on lockdown whereas my colleagues could walk to restaurants and bars outside work hours.

In a conversation before he arrived, my father said he wanted to see Grozny. Chechnya wasn’t open to tourists, and our movements as foreigners were carefully tracked by the authorities, including the FSB - every trip required advance permission from local authorities. At an NGO coordination meeting, I happened to mention my father’s upcoming visit and his hope to see Grozny. A German aid worker, notorious for his cowboy style and spirit - who would disappear for days on a solo ride on his Harley-Davidson - casually offered to take him on one of his assessment trips. Without giving it much thought, I just said thanks, and the meeting continued. No one cautioned me, and I did not think to mention it to any of my colleagues.

The day after my father arrived on a flight from Moscow to Magas Airport, the security team hosted a shashlik - skewered meat grilled over an open fire, the centerpiece of hospitality in the region. The team and local staff wanted to meet and honor the father who had traveled all the way from California. It was a move they respected, a father expressing his duty of care for his daughter. It was as important for my father to meet the team as it was for me to keep building trust with them. Sharing meat, which wasn’t cheap for them, was one of the few currencies of gratitude available to people with very little else to offer an aid worker and her father. The grill was set up in the back garden of the team house in Nazran. The men took charge of the grill, proudly, and my father charmed the whole yard without a shared language between them.

A few days later, the German aid worker collected my father for the assessment trip to Grozny — the offer he’d made weeks earlier, almost in passing, at an NGO coordination meeting. I thought nothing more of it. Then Adam called me to his office. This time, it wasn’t a security briefing.

The courtyard between the three-story office building and the entrance to the security office and canteen where lunch was served, was large enough to turn a car around once inside the tall, reinforced metal gate as well as park 3-4 cars. The office staircase had clear glass walls and as I descended the steps, I could see some of the drivers standing in a circle, smoking and laughing. They fell silent as I made my way around fresh puddles and up the short wooden steps of the building opposite. I had been summoned.

Adam explained that my father had been detained by the Russian security forces and questioned. He was on his way back to the office and expected any minute. I started to apologize and was told it was best to hear from my father first.

A few minutes later, we heard the gate open and a vehicle drove past the office. As the outer gate clanged shut, my father entered with a sheepish smile, shaking his head and laughing, as if he could deflect from the obvious: he had some explaining to do. I was relieved to see him look physically unchanged from when we parted that morning but that only made me realize I too, had an explanation to make.

My father explained that they’d made it through the checkpoint at the Chechen border and proceeded without incident on the highway to Grozny. At a later checkpoint, they were stopped, asked to get out of the car, and taken inside a makeshift office. A burly Russian officer began asking questions: Who was my father? What was he doing in Chechnya? Where were his authorization papers? He replied that he was an American pastor, visiting his daughter, and wanted to see Grozny. The officer was interested in the fact that he was clergy and drilled down on that point.

This line of query was not random; it was institutionally directed by design. From the 1980s, Gorbachev’s glasnost policy cracked open religious freedom after decades of Soviet suppression. In the 1990s, this fissure widened into a breach that unleashed a time where mutual curiosity flourished, a population eager for Western jeans, music and freedom of expression, including Christianity. An equal and opposite force arrived in the form of American evangelicals pouring into the former Soviet Union by the planeload, certain they’d found an unclaimed mission field. The fervor and arrogance of their conviction betrayed their superficial inquiry about the people they were seeking to convert.

Meanwhile, the historically Christian - proudly Orthodox - society was reclaiming its own relationship to faith as a part of the broader identity crisis. While the waves of missionaries ultimately subsided with limited lasting or quantifiable impact, their presence hardened into a lasting post-Soviet suspicion of the West. The deep and enduring suspicion of foreign or foreign-funded organizations was precisely why it was a condition of our presence that we had to work with 24/7 armed guards provided by the local police.

My father wasn’t remotely political, and he certainly wasn’t there to convert anyone. But he’d walked, without knowing it, straight into a category the state had already built.

It was evident to me, hearing it secondhand, that my father had been entirely unfazed by the whole process - he’d simply answered honestly. Eventually the officer must have decided my father held no subversive interest in spreading Christianity or Western democracy to the people of Chechnya. My father asked if it was still possible to see Grozny, and for reasons no doubt to give the surveillance team more time, the answer was yes, though with a time limit.

Then my father started laughing again, in a way I recognized all too well.

My whole life, my father had shown two peculiar traits that had not, until this trip, gotten him into real trouble: an uninterrupted delight in his ability to amuse himself and the confidence to confront law enforcement. Growing up, it wasn’t unusual for him to get pulled over for speeding - not recklessly, but a steady 10 to 20 miles over the limit - back when police still used radar instead of lasers. He’d get out of the car to argue with the officer every time. He rarely talked his way out of a ticket, but it never stopped him trying. And with equal consistency, once he was back in the car, he’d mutter the same two words: “Dirty Commie.”

I glanced at my colleagues. Their faces were impassive. I braced for what was coming.

“As we got up to leave,” my father continued, “I asked the officer if I could have a Russian bear hug.”

When the request was translated, the officer just shook his head. No.

Then he and his soldiers came around to shake each of our hands. When the officer reached my father -

“I threw my arms around him! Guess what? He hugged me back!”

My colleagues looked at each other and just nodded. I steered my father out of the room. There was no way to impress upon him how serious a breach of security protocol this was, for a state suspicious enough to use the incident as leverage against our work if it wanted to.

The next day, I was called to the office of the deputy country director. I was profuse in my apology for letting my father’s unsanctioned trip put our work at risk. The matter was resolved, he told me. The authorities had been told a reprimand would go in my employee file, and that would be the end of it. His expression, and the slight shake of his head that went with it, told me there would be no lasting record. I took the message implicit in his warning. More importantly, for my safety going forward, I took a strategic lesson learned for navigating foreign, unpredictable, culturally complex locations.

Two generations, two encounters with the FSB. Two examples of confidence and the limits of intimidation tactics when your subjects were not raised in a climate of fear.

My father’s most valuable asset was a positive frame of mind uninterrupted by self-examination. That was the luxury of his life up to that point. It works, right up until it doesn’t. On the day, he was fortunate to be judged correctly for what he was: harmless. But he still got lucky.

The FSB never asked me why I was there. Their questions were all who - biography, verifiable facts, things that could be checked against a file or caught out in a contradiction over time. Where did you grow up. Who was your first teacher. What was your first job.

They couldn’t ask why, because it would have been too overt, too transparent, it would have tipped their hand - it would have admitted the interrogation was about motive, not just identity.

Yet, in the combination of the two questions - asked and implied - I discovered a technique I needed to keep asking myself. From Chechnya, back to Sudan and on to Afghanistan, I needed a way to question whether the decisions I was making were still worth the risk. If the juice was still worth the squeeze.

Who am I wasn’t a demographic question for me. Rather, it was to ask, “am I still the person who chooses this?” Why am I here was the question I couldn’t afford to dodge with myself.

The FSB apparatus policed the story, mine tested the stakes.

Holly Hughson spent nearly two decades as a humanitarian aid worker and military advisor. She is writing her first book about operating unarmed on the frontlines of 21st century conflict. This is her newsletter.

D,

Promise to cheat death with me. Please.

Truly, he — the Grim Reaper — is quite open to charm. I know this for a fact. I have been interviewed on multiple occasions by the FSB, in dark, dank holes with my feet standing in pools of water. Sometimes you just need to keep talking.

H

Your most valuable asset in any life-threatening situation is a positive mental attitude. My record of work lacked that instruction. It lacked formal instruction altogether.

Operating unarmed, as a humanitarian aid worker on the frontlines of 21st century conflict, I was tested constantly by high-stakes conditions for which I had no recognized training or preparation. Over and over, I had to adapt — new locations, new rules, new cultures — and quickly grasp what I needed to do to stay safe. As the operational environment got progressively more dangerous, I faced the question: Was the work worth my life?

At some point, I realised there's only so much a civilian organization could do to protect me. Over time, I honed skills, tactics, and a mindset to keep myself safe. I knew there were no guarantees. But I sensed there were means by which I could stack the odds in my favour. I called this my Personal Security Strategy.

“Don't say too much. When you are asked questions, answer exactly, only what is required, nothing more.” With that, my security briefing was over. I thanked Adam, the security manager, and returned to my small office on the third floor. It was my first day of work for a Danish NGO as Head of Assessment, Monitoring and Evaluation. Our primary project was funded by the World Food Programme delivering basic food commodities (flour, cooking oil, sugar, salt) to a still vulnerable population in the North Caucasus. Our logistical set up reflected the complicated security picture of the region. Our office was based in Nazran, Ingushetia. Most expatriate colleagues lived in Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia, more than an hour's drive away. The majority of our operations were in Chechnya.

In 2005, Putin's tolerance of foreign NGOs operating in the North Caucasus was wearing thin. It was the first time I worked with armed guards. This was non-negotiable — a government requirement for any international humanitarian organisation working there. Local police and military were assigned to us as guards, twenty-four hours a day. The regular police salary was woeful given the cost of living. It was as if the central government expected police to supplement their income with bribes as a natural part of local law enforcement. Foreign aid organisations were charged for the service and the jobs were coveted as both safer and better paid.

Day to day, it was probably safer to be the police stationed in little guardrooms outside the blocks of flats where most expatriates lived, but police providing armed escort faced a different threat. Both during and since the Second Chechen War, which had been brutally put down by Russian forces five years before, aid workers had been targeted and killed. At my arrival in 2005, there were still over 80,000 Russian soldiers in the region fighting a guerrilla insurgency based in the mountains under command of Shamil Basayev. Hostage taking of civilians was a well-established tactic of the insurgents whose goal was the removal of Russian forces. The police in Chechnya and Ingushetia were themselves targets of the insurgency, even though they were ethnic Chechen and Ingush. With so few jobs, working as police was the only option for legal income for thousands of men yet this labelled them as collaborators with the Russian state.

As part of our permission to work as foreigners, we were interviewed by the FSB — Russia's Federal Security Service, successor to the KGB — before and after we traveled in and out the region, after important meetings, and whenever they felt like it. These meetings took place in different locations and while not interrogations per se, the settings pushed an edge of intimidation. Usually, they were held in abandoned buildings, down a darkened hallway, in a freezing cold or suffocatingly hot room with a man seated at a desk and other men standing around. I could be left facing an empty desk for half an hour — a man standing in the shadows, watching, saying nothing — before anyone finally sat down across from me, others posted around the room.

Years later, working alongside the American military in Afghanistan, I would understand that intelligence gathering on an individual includes looking for inconsistencies of message. Finding myself facing a stone-faced FSB agent asking questions about my childhood, there was really nothing from those formative years to prepare me for the moment. Unless of course, my childhood was precisely the explanation for what happened next. The questions would start with a variation on the following: Where did you grow up? Who was your first teacher? What was your first job? My response was both instinctive and calculated. It was the opposite of Adam’s instruction in my security briefing. I overanswered their questions.

“My first teacher? Mrs. Bowman was my first grade teacher but also my third grade teacher in my second year! How was that possible? Well, I grew up at a boarding high school which had a small elementary school of just two classrooms. One classroom was for grades 1-4, the other was grades 5- 8. Mrs. Bowman taught grades 1-4. Mrs. Bowman saw that I was working ahead of my class in the mathematics workbook and she did not stop me. When I finished the book, she gave me the second grade mathematics workbook which I also completed. She gave me an alternative third grade workbook to finish the school year. Meanwhile, she started allowing me to work ahead in other subjects and by the end of the year, announced to my parents I could skip to the third grade the following year. Mrs. Bowman was a wonderful woman. She always wore dresses and ate her sandwich at lunch, leaning against a pole outside the classroom while we played kickball.”

At some point, the officer would stop taking notes and wave his hand saying, “Ok, ok, that's enough. Next question.” I would start in again, “My first job? Well, it was actually at fourteen years old when my father saw notice for student assistants to work in the accounting office of my school. I got the job and would help take inventory of school supplies, manage requests from teachers, deliver orders of paper and pencils. I earned $2.85 an hour....” I would go on and on until I was stopped and asked another question. Finally they would get annoyed or tired and end the interview.

Because I was genuinely narrating from the facts of my life on each occasion, my answers were consistent without effort. Injected into their climate, I chose to make a game of it. I played by their rules. They asked questions, I answered.

It wasn't just personality. It was geography. I grew up in a country where questioning authority might cost you an argument, but not your freedom or your life. It might not get you out of a speeding ticket, but you weren't expected to pay the officer in cash to avoid one. Sitting alone in the room, I felt the intimidation — at the extreme end, these were people who could disappear me and make it look like an accident. But geography and upbringing gave me enough to stay calm and simply answer their questions, and maybe push the limits a bit.

The people I worked alongside had no such luxury. They lived under the threat of intimidation and torture the Russian state could inflict on its own people with impunity, and they lived the quieter version too: the way a government keeps a population manageable not by watching everyone itself, but by making sure no one's entirely sure their neighbor isn't being paid to watch for them. Same street, same religion, same ethnicity — and still, you didn't fully know. I was being handed a mildly uncomfortable afternoon. They were navigating a permanent, generational calculation I'd never have to make. I want to be honest about that gap, because it's easy to tell the version where I'm just plucky.

Then there was the work itself. I believed in its integrity — we were helping people in genuine, desperate need — and I had a kind of faith that the work would speak for itself.

Your most valuable asset in any life-threatening situation is a positive mental attitude. Sometimes that attitude is fuelled less by fearlessness than by where you're from, who raised you, and what you believe you're doing there. Within a couple of months, this truth would hit close to home. Literally.

The afternoon of the day my father travelled into Chechnya, I got a call from Adam, asking me to come to his office. When I arrived, I found him sitting with the deputy country director. They both looked serious. “We have a problem.”

Next week, Part II: A mad German on a Harley, my father thinks he’s funny, and the FSB is not happy.

Holly Hughson spent nearly two decades as a humanitarian aid worker and military advisor. She is writing her first book about operating unarmed on the frontlines of 21st century conflict. This is her newsletter.

I stood witness to a tactic as old as human conflict. As long as man has sought dominion over his fellow man, it has been the visceral knowledge of the warrior left standing that to conquer land militarily does not equate to victory over its people. To break a people, you go past the piles of weapons discarded in defeat, you destroy the rallying points of their spirit, their monuments, places of worship and spaces for social reconnection. To add lasting insult to injury, scorch the earth, but leave the destruction untouched — a reminder of their defeat. Mounds of rubble fallen at the feet of what remained of the blocks of flats that once held whole lives together, a mortared skeleton of concrete standing precariously until its residual joists are cautiously surveyed for the makeshift dwellings of the desperate and the defiant.

It was nearly six years since the Russian army invaded Chechnya and pummelled its capital Grozny into the ground for the second time. With overwhelming advantage and force disproportionate to the threat of the Chechen paramilitary uprising, Prime Minister and acting President Vladimir Putin had lost the patience of his predecessors. He unleashed the Russian military whose artillery, rocket launchers and aircraft blew apart the city once home to 400,000 people. Even now, it looked like pictures of Dresden after the Second World War.

Of course, life had moved on in the years since. We drove past a lake that looked recently constructed. Four plastic chairs sat near an umbrella and a single ice-cream cart. Even the ruins were being reclaimed. Gutted buildings still stood with only a partial, street-facing wall, hollowed-out screens of holes hinting at what they’d once been — office, mosque, block of flats — but here and there, someone had filled a hole with the glass of a new window, walling off what might be a single room over whatever was left of a salvageable floor. People weren’t waiting for permission to live again.

A man walking with his hands clasped behind his back stepped over a pile of rubble and kept going. From above, one of the ubiquitous witnesses of war, an old woman in a headscarf, watching the mundane business of getting by, below. I wondered what alchemy makes a precarious balcony or staircase stand or fall? Is it the random type, precision and trajectory of the munition that landed? Or does it go back to the negotiation between architect and engineer?

At one point, we stopped so I could get out to take a closer look. What must this scene do to the soul? I looked back at the drivers and guards, grouped together smoking cigarettes. It’s still early days in country, yet already my sense of their stoic eyes and expressions suggested that in the case of Chechen people, living amongst the destruction only made them stronger for being alive. Certainly they showed no sentiment in the face of destruction. One thing they have kept intact: the authority of their dignity. Show nothing in defeat and it will never be complete.

My affection for the drivers and guards was growing. I took such delight in observing their individual personalities, though they only spoke a few words of English, and the same was true of my Russian. I don’t have a good ear for picking up foreign languages, but I like to think it frees my mind from the arithmetic of calculating the technicalities of translation. Instead, I read cues from body language, tone and eye contact. That day, my driver was a big guy who straight out of Hollywood central casting for a mafia boss. When he first introduced himself to me a few weeks earlier, he had pointed to his chest and said, “Sultan.” Immediately he turned to the translator with some emphasis he wished to add. As the translation came through, I smiled and nodded. I had guessed right from his tone: It’s not just a name. It’s a title!

Sultan asked if I was ready to go back to the office and I said yes. Before I got into the car, I turned to the translator and said, “Tell Sultan, he reminds me of the character Tony in The Sopranos.” When we communicate, Sultan doesn’t look directly at me and never into my eyes. As he listened to my comment translated, he shrugged his shoulders and got in the car to drive. I was disappointed. Surely I had found a point of universal, macho connection — a compliment, I thought, that he resembled the famous tough guy. True, I was trying to connect with these new colleagues and perhaps mischievously hoping for a reaction. Apparently, I guessed wrong. The drivers set out in formation with our car in front of the two-car escort. After a couple of minutes, the radio crackled and we could hear raucous laughing from one of the other cars. A masculine voice, pushed to falsetto and possibly tears, was saying something in Chechen. A string of foreign words punctuated by “Tony Soprano!” in English.

The teasing had begun.

Over the next few minutes, I peeked around the flak jackets hung protectively across the rear passenger windows, to watch as the two cars began taking turns overtaking us. Uniformed police officers laughing like young boys were calling on the radio and leaning out of their windows to make hand gestures trying to get a response out of Sultan. For a moment, I feared the attention might backfire — that Sultan would be annoyed with me, or at a minimum, that the antics would cause an accident. Then I saw the expression on his face. He was smiling. At one point, “Tony” let out a slow, deep-belly chuckle, shaking his head while concentrating on the road ahead. Occasionally he indulged his tormentors by turning to wave a cautioning, parental finger as they passed, in a game that played out through the intersections of Grozny.

I was in love. In love with the scene which perfectly captured everything I was seeking in this life. It felt like we had achieved something universal, an improbable cast, brought together for a moment in time, irrespective of how different we were. Here for a moment, we were united in a universal human value: mockery. This once-sheltered California girl, newly arrived, without the bonds of a common language, religion, education or history, was able to get through to her big, tough driver and the team at the level of humour. I believed that for this brief window with the wind in our hair, we were perfectly content to be alive and laughing. For just that moment, the incredible sadness lingering in a landscape still waiting to be rebuilt was suspended. Surely it was the same need for the people who lived there – finding small moments of connection and levity in order to endure.

A short while later, out of the city and on the fast stretch of tree-lined road with fields on both sides and only the checkpoints to slow our speed, I slipped into one of my internal, eternal moments. I was fully present, aware that I would not change places with another life for anything. The past and future were beyond my control, and I was grateful to rest in this knowledge. I knew my purpose and reason for being right here, right now.

I was free. Well, technically, I was pinned down by a heavy flak jacket we had to wear for travel in Chechnya, but this was no inhibition on my spirit which soared above us. We were flying along the road fast enough to make me nervous on an American highway, but here, it felt perfectly safe. Even the most unassuming, slow-talking, slow-walking of our drivers impressed me with the dexterity of his reflexes — his ability to negotiate our way around pedestrians and traffic cops standing in the road, to judge the proximity of oncoming vehicles when he pulled out to overtake a slower car.

Their music from the car stereo always caught me off guard — hours of high-energy, percussive syncopation, played loud, by men who otherwise gave nothing away. It sat strangely against their macho, unsmiling world: guns, guards, checkpoints, silence. But what had I expected instead? A funeral dirge? If music is an escape, let it be this.

Despite the speed, I felt safe as we bounced over potholes minimised by the Volga’s shock absorbers. The rumble of the engine and the heavy weight of the jacket lulled me toward sleep. I lay down in the back seat, content — asleep in a car full of men I’d known only a few weeks, trusting them completely with my life.

Holly Hughson spent nearly two decades as a humanitarian aid worker and military advisor. She is writing her first book about operating unarmed on the frontlines of 21st century conflict. This is her newsletter.

I lay awake listening to the compound settle into silence after the UN vehicles had gone. Cindy’s voice was still in my head. She was right. The fragile formula I had negotiated for my housing wasn’t sustainable and I knew it. Whatever came next, I couldn’t stay where I was.

I needed a local solution. Something that would let me finish the job — the office built, the team hired, the project back on track.

I put in my earphones and found the King’s College Choir. The men and boys of Cambridge, voices from another world that could transport my mind to a place of peace. In the dark of the tukal, with the sounds of the night coming through the walls, I let the music come.

The next track was the Nunc Dimittis. Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace. The canticle sung at Compline — the last prayer of the day, the prayer before sleep. And somewhere between that line and the silence that followed, a thought arrived, quiet as the music: the Comboni Mission.

Might they take me in?

With just that thought, and something close to hope, I drifted to sleep.

The Comboni Missionaries had been in Kajo Keji since 1966 — half a century of presence through civil war, displacement, occupation, and return. They ran a mission school from elementary through secondary, and a vocational workshop teaching carpentry, masonry, mechanics, weaving, and baking. Like the furniture the workshop produced and sold, the priests and nuns were woven into the fabric of the community across generations, loved and trusted in a way that no foreign aid worker, however well-intentioned, could manufacture or accelerate.

When I knocked on their door the following morning and explained my situation, they said yes without hesitation.

Travelling light, I moved in the next day.

For my first night’s meal, Sr. Catterina prepared what she called casually un piatto di pasta – ‘a plate of pasta’. After weeks eating alone, I looked forward to helping prepare the meal. I stood watching as she measured water into a large pan set to boil, collected pasta, olive oil and dried red pepper flakes from the cupboard, and pointed to a cutting board in front of a single bulb of garlic. She broke it in half and set six cloves in a small pile before the board, asking me to cut them into thin slices.

Meanwhile, Sr. Abrehet set the table while Sr. Adela prepared a simple salad of ripe tomatoes, onions and lettuce. During the six or seven minutes it took to cook the pasta, Sr. Hundetu arrived from the school with some bit of news about a student that made them laugh and nod to each other with insider satisfaction. When the pasta was ready, Sr. Catterina drained the water into a second pan and tossed the spaghetti with the garlic, pepper, salt and a generous amount of olive oil. In less than fifteen minutes, I had been called from the guest room and we were ready to eat. As a special treat, we would have some shavings of precious parmesan cheese Sr. Catterina had brought from Italy on her last visit home.

From the first mouthful, I was transported. So delicious were the flavours of the pasta that, if I had been blindfolded and fed, I would have sworn on my life it could not have been so simply prepared.

Afterwards, as we prepared to wash the dishes, I started to empty the pan of pasta water. Sr. Catterina swiftly intervened. We use that water to wash the dishes, she said. We can’t afford to waste it.

Back in the guest room, on the wall above the desk hung a postcard of St. Daniel Comboni — the Italian missionary who first reached Sudan in 1858 and died in Khartoum twenty-three years later, still at his work. Below his patient smile sat my project folders next to cassette tapes, a portable radio, a box of floppy disks, pencils, and a near-empty packet of paracetamolo teva. Everything sounds better in Italian. I felt completely at home.

From the common room, I heard the sisters singing at evening prayer.

I stood slightly apart from their silhouettes as they sang together and felt a competing pull of connection and contrast between these women with my own life. I had spent so many evenings of the past seven years alone. Living in rooms above the office, guesthouses, shipping containers and tents. The expeditionary life extracts a particular price from women that it doesn’t ask of men. A man can leave a family in the care of a partner and return a hero. A woman who chooses the field chooses it instead of something. Usually someone.

I had made that choice years before, in a life that felt like someone else’s now — teaching high school history in Miami, walking down to the harbour with the man I loved to talk to the couples who had walked away from the rat race to live aboard their boats. We imagined our version of their choice for the simplified life, sailing on blue water where the wind and fish are free — why wait until middle age? Why not now? But I wasn’t ready for a small life, even a beautiful one. We had different questions to answer.

He went to wooden sailboat building school. I went to Kosovo. Before my departure, a care package arrived: warm mittens and thermal socks for the winter, and the nicest jump rope I had ever seen — leather cord with weighted handles, from someone who knew I would miss the daily gym.

Three months of volunteering became a job offer. The job offer became this work.

The sisters — four women from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Spain, and Italy, living in community at the edge of southwestern Sudan — had chosen and been sent here as I had chosen and sent myself, except that their vocation came with a structure mine never would. They had each other. They had this Mission community. They had the singing.

I understood that what they had was something my version of this life would never quite provide. I envied them that. And I loved them immediately.

After a few nights of the best sleep I had experienced in months, I felt a release that seemed to flow through my bloodstream, letting vessel walls relax one by one, until the moment I realised I was sitting — still. The sisters’ accommodation was a simple construction, consciously placed doors and windows welcoming the early morning sunshine, shielding the heat of midday, encouraging air flow between rooms.

The quietude was undisturbed by the predictability of the sisters’ set routines. Their rituals, met with joyful obedience, allowed me to give over the controls of my own survival. I was in their capable hands — the first reprieve in months from serving as sentinel watch over every detail that could derail the project. Procurement, payments, quality checks, the landlord’s mood. For the first time since I’d arrived in Wudu, someone else was holding the perimeter.

Each morning and evening I felt the unpressured warmth of their greeting, their constancy of spirit, their serenity.

One evening, Sr. Abrehet picked up my jump rope and began to jump — slowly at first, then faster, the rope just clearing her long tunic – laughing like a schoolgirl. The other sisters watched and began clapping. The sound of it rose above the mission compound into the sunset air.

The journey from the Comboni Mission to the centre of Wudu was seven to fifteen kilometres depending on the route, navigating the Land Cruiser over roads that could shift from difficult to impassable overnight in the heavy rainfall. Travel time to the construction site ranged from thirty to forty-five minutes. I found myself giving over to the pace like a meditation, which could slow to a crawl in first gear, smiling at the pedestrians who made quicker time.

The office was nearly finished. My newly hired project manager Samuel sat opposite me one afternoon giving his daily report, his voice entirely swallowed by the torrential rain hammering the corrugated metal roof. We looked at each other and laughed. He indicated he’d come back after the rain passed. I watched him step into the office next door, smiled and thought: he is going to be an excellent lead for this project.

In the next instant, I felt water under my feet. The eaves were falling short, raindrops the size of small fruit bouncing through the window, flowing across the bare cement floor — helpfully sloped — and out the door on the left.

I had got the office built ahead of schedule. With one design flaw mitigated by another one.

When it was time to leave, I gave Sr. Abrehet my jump rope.

From Kosovo to Iraq, Sierra Leone, Chechnya, it had travelled with me. I knew then it had found its home. Some things you carry until you find the place they belong.

With deepest gratitude for a time of hospitality that guides and blesses me to this day —

Sr. Hundetu Degheta

Sr. Adela Gonzalez

Sr. Abrehet Petros

Sr. Catterina Crimelli — five ingredients that in her hands produced something I have spent two decades unsuccessfully attempting to replicate. I have however remembered to reuse the pasta water ever since that first shared meal.

Holly Hughson spent nearly two decades as a humanitarian aid worker and military advisor. She is writing her first book about operating unarmed on the frontlines of 21st century conflict. This is her newsletter.

In military shorthand, your 6 o’clock is the blind spot directly behind you. Who’s watching it?

I thought I was.

I was wrong.

The path back to the compound was pitch black. No moon. The white soil of the path contrasted against the dark green cassava fields to guide me moving forward.

I had lingered a bit too long in the village market, walking along the rows of stoic women sat on sheet-like squares of fabric with identical piles of groundnuts, onions and avocados in front of them. The duplication of produce and presentation felt like a test for me. Which of the women would the khawaja choose to buy from today?

I heard footsteps behind me. Male voices. Loose. Definitely drunk. Running was not an option in that darkness. So I did what I’d learned to do: keep a confident posture, stride purposefully. And then, around a corner of the bush, the light of the UN compound gate.

Safe. Or so I thought.

I’d been sent into Southern Sudan to fix a stalled project — get an office built in the small town of Wudu, hire and train local staff, and have everything ready for the return and reintegration of Sudanese refugees from Uganda who had fled the civil war.

I had three months. A male colleague had been trying for over a year and hadn’t cracked it. I’m not going to pretend the ego piece wasn’t real. I wanted to prove I could get done what hadn’t been done. And I was under genuine pressure — if the office wasn’t built, we’d lose the funding. So I went in hard.

Starting with the landlord who had agreed to lease property for the project office. He’d taken project money and spent a year making promises and excuses while nothing got built. Unacceptable. Somewhere between the pressure and moral indignation, I skipped over an unshakable truth and basic premise of collaboration as a foreign outsider: it starts with listening and builds to relationship. Instead, I wrote a new contract with milestones and penalties and presented it in our first meeting. Miss a deadline, lose a percentage of the final payment.

Meanwhile, I needed a place to live. The UN had a compound in Wudu, just near the location of our future office. However, due to outbreaks of violence in the area, it had been evacuated — UN personnel were on Day-Only Mission status, no overnight stay allowed. They slept across the border in Moyo, Uganda, and commuted in each day — a three-hour round trip on challenging roads. I had permission to do the same. I refused. Instead I negotiated informally with UN colleagues to let me sleep in the compound alone. It would save time. It would keep me close to the construction site. It made sense.

The formula was working. Within a couple of weeks, the foundation was laid and the walls went up. At the end of each day, after UN personnel loaded up and headed back to Uganda, I entered the compound to stay in my designated tukal — a mud hut with a thatched roof.

And every night, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army soldiers stationed in town got drunk on cheap Ugandan vodka — sold from roadside kiosks in small, sealed plastic packets, layered like candy bars in cardboard boxes. They had reason to celebrate. For the first time in over two decades, they had received their first salary payment as part of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement which had ended Africa’s longest civil war.

After the footsteps on the path, I made it to the gate, to safety. No one followed me into the light of the compound. Yet I was shaken. I needed to talk to someone and called my friend Cindy in the United States.

I needed to hear a familiar voice. I needed to process. I wasn’t expecting what I got.

She listened to everything. Then she went quiet for a moment. And then she said:

Let me get this straight.

You are the only foreigner in the village.

You’re staying in a UN compound that has been evacuated.

You’ve fired one driver for dereliction of duty.

You threatened the local power broker to get the office built.

You carry cash on your person because you have a project to manage.

And the SPLA are drunk every night.

What is it about this situation that has you thinking it’s acceptable?

She was right.

I hadn’t lost my instincts. I hadn’t forgotten the fundamentals. I’d just stopped checking. I’d gotten so focused on the deliverable — on proving that I could do what hadn’t been done — that I’d quietly, incrementally stopped applying to myself what I knew about operating safely.

That phone call was the external calibration I’d stopped being able to do for myself.

I had been in the field for seven years by this point. Each posting since Kosovo more dangerous than the last. I didn’t have a death wish — quite the opposite. I considered my work a privilege, a union of my twinned motivation to serve and to see the world in all its complexity with my own eyes.

And yet, blind spots had crept in. Every morning I woke up alive, the needle moved a fraction closer to: I’m safe.

That’s the drift. That’s how it happens. Not in one bad decision, but in the daily accumulation of mornings where the worst had not happened.

Cindy wasn’t there. She was eight thousand miles away. She couldn’t see the conditions, feel the temperature, or hear the conversations. But she could see me — more clearly than I could see myself.

That’s what someone who’s got your 6 actually does. They don’t just have your back in the moment. They have the standoff distance to hold a clearer, broader view. And the courage to speak truth to your power.

The phrase originated with WWI pilots — a recognition that however skilled and experienced you are, blind spots are unavoidable. Your 6 is always there. The question is who’s watching it.

Next week — Part 2: What I did about it. (Hint: it involved nuns and a jump rope.)

Holly Hughson spent nearly two decades as a humanitarian aid worker and military advisor. She is writing her first book about operating unarmed on the frontlines of 21st century conflict. This is her newsletter.

My father called last week with a proposal. I should come home, get a proper job — one with a pension attached. He’s 81. He’s allowed to worry. He’s not wrong that I don’t have one.

“Maybe a bank,” he said. He wasn’t joking.

I told him it was a little late for that. He’s the one who created this monster.

I mean that literally. Not the conflict zones, not the years in places most people only see on the news — that came later, that was mine to choose. But the willingness to choose it? The belief that a life could be lived as a challenge to the status quo you inherited, that started decades before I ever boarded a flight anywhere dangerous.

I was raised by wolves, in the best sense. My earliest years were spent on the campus of a rural boarding school in Southern California, where my father was the chaplain and my mother was the nurse. My brothers and I ran free across golden hills covered in dry brush. We had no television, no sense of threat other than rattlesnakes, no reason to think the world was anything other than safe. It was a sheltered childhood yet throughout our house, there were hints of foreign connection: a Chinese abacus hung on the wall above the armchair where I liked to read. In the library, a fat, dancing Buddha with a protruding belly joyfully laughed from a shelf.

At family gatherings, for evening entertainment sometimes we sat together with popped corn to watch home movies or slides projected onto a large screen. My favorite stories were told with images from my father’s adventures during a gap year from university when he and a friend travelled to teach English in Hong Kong. At the end of the year, the two young men travelled back to California the ‘long way’ on an “Around the World Flight Ticket.” To capture the experience, my father purchased his first serious camera in Hong Kong, a Pentax Spotmatic.

One evening, as my father set up the slide projector, I slid under the coffee table until I could just peek out the other side. Lying prone, head propped on my hands, I wanted to be as close as possible to the screen so I wouldn’t miss any details. Holding a slide up to the light, my father found his starting place. He explained what inspired him to dream of seeing the great wonders of the world.

“During the year we taught high school students in Hong Kong, I used to eat lunch from tins of baked beans and crackers in my room to save money for our travels at the end of the school year. On repeat, I listened to Andy Williams singing my favorite song, ‘Moon River’ on long play record. The lines seemed written for me.”

Two drifters, off to see the world

There’s such a lot of world to see

My father gave the signal he was all set and in the next instant the room went dark. My father flipped a switch on the projector that released a tunnel of white light onto the screen. I held my breath. The moment felt charmed, as if the tube of dust particles sparkling in the light was sprinkled by fairies. Where in the world will we journey tonight?

The carousel clicked and the first slide fell into place. A maze of boats intersected by wood-plank pathways filled the screen. Tonight we started in Hong Kong.

“This area was called Aberdeen and while it’s also on the back side of the main island, you can see it’s the complete opposite of Repulse Bay. The population was made up of poor refugees from Mainland China living on those boats which were called Junks. The water was stagnant and stunk in our noses. I don’t think this area exists anymore as the boats were cleared out and the people rehoused in buildings so it could be developed for business. There were famous floating restaurants not far from here.” Click.

The images progressed through rural scenes with trees and animals next to thin farmers, Buddhist monasteries and temples tucked into green hills. People living on boats? Barefoot men with shaved heads wrapped in orange cloth? The tallest buildings and most vibrant feathered birds I had ever seen and my father, seated right here, had been there? My father’s stories were more than exotic images, they were action adventures that he narrated. I asked questions and sometimes it was as if just the two of us were in the room.

His favorite slides were always of Venice. “You won’t believe your eyes, Holly. A city that looks as if it’s floating on water. Promise me you’ll get there someday.” I promised. He meant it as a gift, not an assignment — the world was out there, wondrous and full of people who didn’t look or sound like us, and it was waiting for me specifically. By the time I was old enough to understand what he was actually handing me across that darkened living room, exploration was already in my blood. Wanting to leave was never rebellion. It was my inheritance.

Born into a lineage of three generations of clergy and three generations of nurses, I had a deep sense of being born to people set apart for service. In the early 1900s, one great-grandfather took his young family to Brazil as missionaries so that my grandfather grew up speaking Portuguese and getting teased in the streets for being Protestante. A black and white framed photo showed my great-grandmother in an early nursing uniform preparing a patient for surgery. As keenly as I felt these stories as markers pointing the way for my own life, yet, from a young age I had questions, a lot of them.

There’s a conversation I still carry word for word. I was perhaps 12, starting to question the faith I’d inherited. My father listened and said it was important that I examined the sources for myself and make up my own mind.

Don’t believe anything because I do. It has to be your own faith, Holly. You must study for yourself to find what you believe.

I didn’t understand yet what he’d handed me. He wasn’t loosening his grip on the family’s faith — he was loosening his grip on me. Telling me, in effect, that the line of service running through this family was only worth continuing if I found my own way into it.

Over the years of international travel, a ritual developed. On departure, my mother drove me to the airport. On return, my father picked me up.

On his way to meet me, he’d often stop for one of his favorite meals, a New York style slice, served on a flimsy paper plate. On one return, he met me holding up a paper plate with “Holly my hero” written across it in marker. We laughed, hugged, and I asked how the pizza had tasted. “Actually,” he said, “I didn’t stop for pizza today. I got this plate out of the trash right here!” That my father’s humor is geared first to amuse himself will have to wait for another day...

More importantly, with that simple phrase of tribute and affection, my father captured hundreds of moments where he has been the first to encourage me on what became a highly non-traditional life of choices, motivated by the twinned virtues of service and exploration.

Happy Father’s Day, Daddy. You created this monster. I have no regrets, and neither, I suspect, do you. After all, we’ve both lived lives in the spirit of yet another favorite song of Andy Williams, To Dream the Impossible Dream:

This is my quest, to follow that star

No matter how hopeless, no matter how far

To fight for the right without question or pause

To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause

Holly Hughson spent nearly two decades as a humanitarian aid worker and military advisor. She is writing her first book about operating unarmed on the frontlines of 21st century conflict. This is her newsletter.

“Hey, can you cover a meeting for me with some local staff? They’re upset about something. Go meet with them and tell me what they’re complaining about.”

Less than twenty-four hours since I landed in Kosovo and Ryan, the country director, was already handing off a problem to me. I was a volunteer. I said yes.

A few minutes later I was sat in the centre chair, dwarfed by a shiny conference table in a room packed with local staff — ninety percent male. I looked into eyes that registered on a scale from suspicious to downright hostile.

A slight man with a greying beard and the gravitas of being the spokesperson stepped forward and didn’t wait for introductions.

“We asked for a meeting with the country director.”

“Hello. My name is Holly. I arrived last night and this is my first day in Kosovo — clearly not the person you were expecting. Ryan had something added to his schedule and asked me to meet with you in his place.”

“I am Skender. I am the boss of the logistics team.” He remained standing, with the certainty of a man who knew the weight of his influence on the people in the room, and wasted no time. “Why do you foreigners call yourselves experts? You are not the experts here. We are from Kosovo. We are the experts.”

The room was heavy with their frustration and I felt completely out of my depth. The fact that I was new didn’t diminish the force of their anger. I had no concept of the scope of operations, nor understanding of what it meant to call yourself an “expert.” I searched through jet lag to find something to say.

“I hear there’s a problem for you with this word. Could you help me understand by telling me a little more?”

What followed was a list of grievances that had been building for months. Foreigners paid ten times the locals’ rate. Foreign staff were provided with housing but not local staff, even if their houses had been burned to the ground in the recently ended conflict. And perhaps the insult which added most injury — out of office hours, foreign staff could use the NGO vehicles for their own use, to go out to dinner or even drive to Greece for a weekend by the sea. Keeping the vehicles serviced and fuelled was the responsibility of the logistics team. Every time a vehicle was used, it had to be signed out by the driver from — a member of the logistics team.

The differentiator woven throughout this two-tier system of benefits was perceived as the term “expert.” A word used by the foreign staff to describe themselves, to Skender and his team it landed as an insult.

My first instinct was defensive. I nearly said: “Actually, I’m here as an unpaid volunteer so each of you earns more than me.” Better sense prevailed. I was the newest arrival with the sharpest learning curve. My job was to listen.

A woman with smiling and sympathetic eyes leaned forward and introduced herself as the HR Manager. She turned to the rest of the room and explained that there were two versions of every HR policy — one for local staff, one for international staff — and this was standard practice.

Listening to her, something shifted. Another word in English came into mind. It was worth a try.

There was a flipchart on a stand in the corner of the room. With a marker I wrote “Expatriate.” Beneath it, I listed the Latin roots of the word: Ex and Patria. Next to each root word I wrote the meaning: ex = “out of” and patria = “native country or fatherland.”

“Is it possible the word you are hearing is not expert but expat — a shortened version of expatriate? The word simply means a person who has travelled out of his homeland.” I gestured to the room. “If any of you left Kosovo and went to work in Switzerland or Greece, you too would become expatriates. Expats.”

I paused. No one spoke. I continued.

“I know I’m new and don’t know very much yet. But between you and me, for sure you’re the experts on Kosovo. I’m sure every international, expatriate worker here relies on that fact.”

Skender stared at me for a minute. Then, with a short downward jut of his chin, the conversation was over. He nodded to the others and they filed out, a few offering shy smiles. I sat back in my chair and felt a bit light-headed.

The underlying grievances hadn’t been resolved. But the anger of hearing foreign staff with better conditions refer to themselves as experts had been named and, for now, dissipated.

Kosovo in 2000 was a soft landing. Foreign military, foreign governments, international organisations — we were welcomed by the majority population. The stakes of getting things wrong were real but not yet life and death.

That would come later, in harder postings. But the lessons from day one in Kosovo travelled with me to the first day of every location that followed.

What’s at risk if you don’t bother? Fail to pay attention to the way you arrive as an outsider in a new location and you undermine your authority, the effectiveness of your work, and lose your best people. Make the effort to listen first and you gain colleagues who feel respected — people who will go the extra mile, work late, deliver the mission. They will have your back and if you’re lucky, invite you home for Flija and Speca t’mushun.

It starts with a question: Could you help me understand?

Holly Hughson spent nearly two decades as a humanitarian aid worker and military advisor. She is writing her first book about operating unarmed on the frontlines of 21st century conflict.

Ten days into my first posting in the North Caucasus, I was living on full lockdown. Armed guards around the clock. From my bedroom window, I looked out across a small man-made lake toward the Rashid Aushev Central Stadium — where men and boys played football at the weekends. I had arrived in Ingushetia, a small republic wedged between Chechnya and North Ossetia, as part of a team distributing food aid to a population still absorbing the aftershocks of two Chechen wars. Four years since the ceasefire. Eighty thousand Russian troops still based amongst an apprehensive population searching out the last of the separatist fighters concealed deep in the mountains.

It was my first posting living with armed guards, local police assigned to any foreign NGOs officially for our safety but also keeping a close eye and ear on our movements and conversations. Within a week, the psychological tedium of lockdown was already pressing. Long evenings alone in suffocating heat, I would open my bedroom window hoping for a breeze and see the empty stadium.

I asked the security manager if the guards could drive me to the stadium to run in the mornings before work. He said yes.

I had followed protocol.

The track was empty when we arrived. Two guards, still sleepy, took position at the far end of the track, AK-47s slung over their shoulders, cigarettes lit.

I put my earphones in, cued up the first song on my MP3 player, and set out on my solitary routine of running in front of empty bleachers. The first few laps followed the same pattern as the days before until I saw a Lada Niva approach the track at the opposite end to the guards.

I was perhaps two hundred metres when I saw him. A man at the edge of the track. Holding a shotgun.

He raised it. He took aim.

At me.

There was nowhere to take cover on a running track. To turn back would only give him a slower target. I could think of no choices, no options.

Is he going to kill me?

I looked down. My legs were still running.

I looked up. I could see the barrel now.

And somewhere between one stride and the next, a voice delivered its verdict with complete calm:

If he’s going to shoot me, there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I’m helpless.

Something shifted the instant I heard those words. Not resignation — release. My brain stopped screaming and discovered what was left.

I was terrified — but I didn’t have to show it.

This bastard gets nothing out of me.

I forced my chin up. Eyes straight ahead. I kept running. Past him. I rounded the corner of the track and discovered that the only thing more frightening than running toward a man with a weapon is turning and giving him your back.

My legs felt like pieces of a wooden push button animal toy with the tension about to give way. Ahead, I saw one of the guards walking across the centre of track towards the man behind me. Both guards looked calm but what do I know of them? I hadn’t had time to build their loyalty.

By the next lap, the guard stood next to the man, talking, weapons at their sides. As I approached, they stopped talking and just stared. Anger replaced terror. I refused to acknowledge their presence without so much as a sideways glance. My legs wanted to collapse but I’d be damned if I looked weak in this moment. By the next lap, I saw the car driving away.

In hindsight, I don’t believe he intended to shoot me. In the North Caucasus in 2005, a foreign aid worker on a running track was a provocation to be tested — not a target to be eliminated. Putin’s government had no trust in foreign NGOs as neutral actors. I was being sent a message.

He wanted panic. He wanted me to scream, or beg, or bolt. He got nothing.

You don’t need a man with a shotgun to know what it feels like to have no control over what threatens you. The job that disappears. The diagnosis. The relationship that ends without warning. The volatile world arriving at your door.

I know because I’ve used it myself, far from any warzone.

Years after Ingushetia, I was let go from a job I had worked months to get — a role alongside former elite military operators, people who understood exactly the world I came from. No explanation. No warning. Just: your probationary period is over.

The first night I alternated between tears and cursing. But somewhere in that miserable cycle, a question surfaced:

What am I now freed to do?

It didn’t last long the first time. My thoughts spun straight back to what I’d lost. But the next day the question came back and stayed a little longer. And the day after that, longer still. It was like a door opening onto a room I hadn’t known was there — each day I could go in and stay a little longer.

The circumstances were nothing alike. But the move was the same one I’d found on a running track in Nazran: own what you can’t control, and your brain starts looking for what you can.

That same week I flew to Scotland for the memorial of a dear friend and mentor — something that wouldn’t have been possible if I’d been at my desk. While I was there, I climbed. I’m working my way through all 282 Scottish Munros.

Holly Hughson spent nearly two decades as a humanitarian aid worker and military advisor. She is writing her first book about operating unarmed on the frontlines of 21st century conflict.

When I tell that story, people assume Robert was in the military.

Robert is a humanitarian aid worker — a first responder who works in warzones to alleviate human suffering where life-saving assistance is required.

I know because I was there too.

Like the military, our job is to go into harm’s way. Unlike the military, we do not wear protective armour or carry weapons to enforce and secure our presence. Operating unarmed in highly insecure locations is only possible through consent by the local population. The dynamic of operating unarmed elevates the importance of relationships and trust.

For nearly two decades, I walked unarmed onto the frontlines of 21st century conflict — Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq, Sudan — as a humanitarian aid worker. No weapons. No extraction force on standby. No formal training in how to stay alive.

Today, the United States honors its military dead and all who carry their loss forward. That debt is real and their sacrifice is genuine.

But I am also thinking today about everyone else who walked onto those same battlefields without a uniform — starting with my fellow humanitarian aid workers. The doctors and nurses. The journalists. The logisticians who kept supply lines open in places no sane person would choose to be. The fixers who find a way to the conversations we need to have. The translators who help us build a bridge between competing agendas to find what is shared. And crucially, the local staff who stayed when the foreigners flew out.

I am thinking about what it means to serve without ceremony. To go anyway. To do it afraid.

That is what this newsletter is for.

Stories from the field and the lessons I wrested from them — what I call Tactical Pearls. Not theory. Not research. Only what was tested where the stakes were real, and that I believe translates to the uncertainty most of us are navigating right now.

Because you don’t have to leave home to be in a war zone.

Not every veteran wore a uniform. Welcome to Do It Afraid.

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