The World Food Programme sends food convoys to Afghanistan during the drought in 2001.
photo | WFP/Michael Huggins |
Stephanie Bunker
interviewer: stephanie kinnunen
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“I had a very ‘useful’ course of study for my present work,” quips Stephanie Bunker, the spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in New York. “I [have an] undergraduate major in comparative literature and classics.” Before she could finish her doctorate in comparative literature, specializing in Latin and Greek, she married a Pakistani and moved to Pakistan. Her husband was sponsored by the Ford Foundation to study for his masters and doctorate in the US, and in return he signed a bond that stated he would come back to Pakistan to work once he finished his PhD. While there, Bunker worked as a journalist for a Pakistani English-language newspaper, and she taught in the International School of Islamabad.
Bunker moved back to the US for seven years to stay at home with their small children. She returned to Pakistan in 1993, where among other things she worked as an editor for the Population Council. She says, “I really liked working with this group of Pakistani demographers. It was a great place to work because it was unusual. It was an office with a lot of professional women, and I liked editing their work.”
Then she was hired by the World Food Programme for Afghanistan, which led to her being the spokesperson for Afghanistan from 1999-2002. After nine years overseas, she took the position with OCHA in New York. After 26 years of marriage and 26 different residences, Bunker and her husband have finally settled down in the US and bought their first house this past July. |
I started out with the World Food Programme for Afghanistan in Pakistan because almost all UN staff were in Pakistan — or Iran — at the time. I was brought in because they figured that with my background I could probably manage to write their reports [even though] I didn’t know the World Food Programme, Afghanistan or the UN, very much. So it was really like jumping off a high diving board into cold water.
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In 2001 millions of people inside Afghanistan were struggling to survive the devastating effects of drought. photo | WFP/Michael Huggins |
We had a good team of people in the office that were united behind the country director at that time. He was such a good person and a good human being. He had worked with the World Food Programme his entire life, but even though he was the senior officer, he treated everybody in the office the same – from the highest person to the lowest person on the hierarchy.
Even as a reports officer, being involved in food aid and helping feed people, there was something visceral about it. When [I] went to see the projects that [we] were supporting inside the country, [I] could see how needed they were. [The need could be seen in the] hospitals, when [I] would go to see therapeutic feeding centers for children and when [I] would see the bakeries that we were running in Kabul, which at the time were feeding 50,000, but by the time they ended, they were feeding 300,000 people a day with bread. Food aid is so tangible. The whole package of aid is important, but I really enjoyed [working with the World Food Programme] because of the tangilbility of the aid.
There was one project that the World Food Programme supported called Afghan Amputee Bicyclists for Rehabilitation and Recreation (AABRAR). It is a small NGO [that] works with amputees and disabled people [due to] mines and unexploded ordnance or in some cases because of polio. This small organization gave them some basic literacy training [along with] recreation and rehabilitation and also tried to teach [the disabled] to ride bicycles. These are big solid Chinese-made bicycles that are [ridden] in the sub-continent. They can be fitted with a pedal power knife sharpener (which means [the trainees] can sharpen knives to make money), a cotton candy machine, juicer or smoothie maker. [The participants] could actually become mobile and start to earn money.
One of the most inspiring stories I heard was from a young man that I met in that program. [He] was a scrap metal dealer who had a shop of some kind in eastern Afghanistan. He had a piece of scrap metal, which was [actually] a piece of unexploded ordnance. It exploded while he was handling it, and he lost, I think it was, both hands and part of one leg. He was extremely depressed and felt like his life was over – like he could never do anything again. He could not support his family. He was admitted into this program with the bicycles. This is a man with hooks for hands and one artificial leg. They taught him how to ride a bicycle, and once he learned how to ride, he became an itinerant popcorn vendor. When he was talking to me, I remember he was sweating and was nervous, probably still traumatized. [He was] close to crying when he told me this whole story. I asked him, “Why popcorn?” and he looked at me and said, “Because its very light weight and I can carry a lot of it.” I was so moved [when I heard] how this man had been helped and how he actually had regained his dignity by being able to provide for himself and his family. |
AABRAR has helped more than 6,000 Afghani amputees with skills and literacy training. AABRAR runs a bicycle messenger service in Kabul, Afghanistan. photo | courtesy of Lukas Einsele |
The humanitarian situation in Afghanistan from 1999 on deteriorated due to the ongoing war and all kinds of other problems. One of the main contributing factors [to the deterioration] was a serious drought. It was late 1999 or early 2000 that it became evident there was a drought in the west and south. In the north there was conflict and drought. In still other parts of the country there were also people displaced, some displaced by the conflict, some by drought, and some that had been displaced long before. It was a very broad phenomenon. People in the office became more and more worried about the situation in the country. [It came] to the point where people [in the office] were having insomnia. One would get over insomnia and then the next person would start having insomnia because people were really concerned about the situation in Afghanistan. Pretty soon, there were hundreds of thousands of people displaced. The numbers grew and as an institution, [we] have to think very carefully before [we] start constructing camps for internally displaced people because if [we] build [them], people will come. Camps can act as a pull factor. But in the west the people came in such numbers that the aid community had to build a camp.
Winter came and we were struggling to provide shelter, getting in as many tents as possible. The aid community was also starting to build hard shelters, but it was so difficult to provide enough shelter that we were putting three families in a tent. [Early in] 2000 the temperature fell to 25 below zero in Herat, Afghanistan. It was so cold that my colleagues from the UN couldn’t start their cars. Once they finally got them started [so they could] see what had become of the people in the camp, many people had died because of the cold. The [children, youth and elderly] were worst affected. [However,] we were fortunate that there was so much overcrowding because [there could have been] more deaths. |
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