When you get over there - to Pakistan or Afghanistan - call Dr Sima Samar, they said. She is wonderful, runs some schools and medical clinics in both countries. Good source of information, they said.
But we were heading to Pakistan because the US has declared a war against terrorism. Military deployments have begun and air strikes inside Afghanistan are thought to be imminent. Journalists with flak jackets and satellite phones are filling the hotels. A doctor who operates free schools and affordable clinics sounds moderately noble, but not remarkable.
In Ireland we are accustomed to education and at least basic medical care in our lives. Our children go to school, they learn to read and write and play video games and try our patience. A broken foot or bronchitis leads us to the doctor or hospital and then perhaps a fight with the insurance company over coverage. We are used to this . . .
On this day I am heading across a barren desolate plain to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, a place called Chaman, in the company of two Afghanis, one of whom is educated and speaks English well. The two men are talking to each other in Pashtun, tut-tutting, shaking their heads. After a while I ask about the problem.
"Oh we are talking about our friend. He got sick last week."
"Oh dear," I say, somewhat distracted.
"Yes, he was sick a few days. Then he died." Pause.
"He was 23."
"My God," I say. "What did he die of?"
"He caught a cold. Then he got a fever and died."
Later that day, another Afghan man lights a cigarette up, and asks if I mind that he smokes.
"No," I reply.
"Do you think it is a bad habit," he asks.
"Well it is probably not the best thing for your health," I offer.
He can barely contain his laughter.
"I am an Afghan. My life expectancy is 45 years. Now do you think smoking is bad for me?"
Dr Sima Samar can be found in a medical clinic on a dirt street in Quetta, a city in the southern area of Pakistan. Cows, goats and donkey-drawn carts compete with mopeds and copious numbers of pedestrians. Rows of stalls and shops, most without signage, are interrupted by a distinctive sign that reads "Shuhada" Medical Clinic for Afghan Women and Children.
Women wait on shaded benches inside a courtyard. The clinic itself is really a hospital; there are 17 beds, an operating room, a delivery room, and several examination rooms. There is a chemist, a blood lab, an x-ray room and an ultra sound machine. This may be the cleanest place you can find in Pakistan. (An Irish Times colleague has visited a public hospital elsewhere where there are rats running around freely; I am told this is typical.)
There are five doctors here, three of them women. They deliver about 60 babies a month, conduct 20 surgeries a month, and see 60 patients a day. It is free to those who are completely destitute; others pay 30 rupees for a visit - about 47 cents.
"Welcome!" says Dr Samar. "You were able to come without a guard? Wonderful!"
Dr Samar knows that foreigners in Quetta are now required to travel anywhere in the city with a policeman carrying a Kalishnikov. Ostensibly for the protection of the foreigner, it is not an inconspicuous way to move about. Such restrictions can make a foreigner rather cross. Dr Samar smiles and laughs, which she does often.
"Welcome to Pakistan!" she says.
Dr Samar, is from Afghanistan and studied medicine at Kabul University. There are many ethnicities in Afghanistan - among them the Pashtuns, who comprise much of the ruling Taliban, the Uzbeks, the Tajiks, and the Hazara, which comprise some 17 per cent of the population.
Dr Samar is Hazara. Widowed at 23, the main question in her life became whether she was the property of her father or of her in-laws. With a young son and a medical degree, and an increasing tendency toward both women's rights and participation in anti-Russian activities, it seemed time for her to go. She came to Quetta in 1984. She began this medical clinic in 1989.
With initial funding from Church World Service, she began setting up clinics and girls' schools inside Afghanistan, travelling frequently between the two countries. When the Russians left the country in 1992, and the US Central Intelligence Agency put an end to the $3.3 billion it had poured into the rebels coffers since 1979, Afghanistan ceased to be of strategic interest to the United States. Coincidentally the US-based charities who had funded Dr Samar lost interest.
In 1992, the mujahideen and other Islamic rebels moved in on Kabul and ousted President Najibullah, who had been a Soviet puppet. From the mujahideen emerged the strict Islamic fundamentalists called the Taliban who, mindful that the current state of Afghanistan was founded in 1747 by the Pashtun tribal confederacy in the southern city of Kandahar, soon made that city its spiritual home. By 1996, the Taliban ruled some 90 percent of Afghanistan.
"Under the mujahideen it was not great," Dr Samar says. "They decided that the television news could not be delivered by a woman. So they put a picture of a rose up and the woman's voice presented the news. Then they decided that didn't work. So they covered everything on the woman except her eyes- a chador from the Arabs, which was not our tradition - and she read the news."
That was before the Taliban.
"Those were the good old days!" Dr Samar says.
The Taliban ruled that woman must not work, must not leave their homes alone, must be covered by the burqa, which only has a small grill-like opening for the face. Their edicts were continually forthcoming and often inexplicable; no dancing, no music, no television, long beards . . . and no kite-flying. Girls were prohibited from going to school at all.
Inside Afghanistan, Dr Samar at this stage was running four hospitals, 12 clinics and 46 schools. Another two clinics and two schools for Afghan refugees were run in Quetta.
She began negotiations with tribal and Taliban leaders to keep her facilities open. Dr Samar has short hair, green eyes, smiles often which is unusual here, and conveys a toughness that is unmistakable. One Muslim observer described her as a true mujahideen engaged in a jihad, the true meaning of jihad being "struggle" and not holy war. She believes fervently in health and education and is willing to do whatever is necessary to provide it for her people.
She was adept at compromise. The Taliban, pressured by local leaders, agreed to let her continue the girls' schools, but only up to the sixth grade.
"Education has always been important in Afghanistan," says Dr Samar. "Only to the sixth grade? What is the goal, making a literate shepherd?"
Nonetheless she agreed to the edict. So the classes continue and seventh to 12th grade subjects are still taught.
"But we call it the sixth grade," she says. Her girls' schools, with 20,000 students, are now the only ones in existence in Afghanistan. At one, the local mullah has protected it. His daughter attends.
The Taliban wanted to close her hospitals, and have in fact succeeded in closing two. But the others are still running. In 1998 her hospital treated wounded Taliban soldiers. But another hospital was bombed and looted. The place was stripped, plumbing fixtures, toilets and electrical equipment stolen.
No amateur at intelligence-gathering, Dr Samar soon learned the name of the Taliban commander who ordered the bombing.
Not long after the same commander had a problem. His mother was ill. He brought her to the best clinic in Quetta. Dr Samar treated her.
"I told him, 'We have a deal here. I have your mother. You bombed my hospital and looted. You want your mother back? I want my toilets, my plumbing fixtures.' He said, 'Oh I didn't know it was your hospital we bombed!' I said 'Well now you know. What about my stuff?' "
Dr Samar got half her supplies returned. The rest had been sold.
"We lost three staff members in that bombing. It is very difficult," she says.
There are three people on staff in Quetta who do nothing but travel back and forth bringing teachers' salaries, medical and school supplies and vaccines. They travelled by truck until May 2000, when the Taliban arrested the driver, seized the vehicle, and stole the polio vaccine. The driver was released in December 2000, but the vehicle was not returned. Now Dr Samar's staff travel by bus, lugging oxygen and nitrous oxide cylinders for surgeries.
Since September 11th, the Taliban has closed all foreign aid offices such as UNHCR, Oxfam, Concern and the Red Cross and seized supplies. They have shut down most telephone communications.
The Afghan staff now communicates with Dr Samar by satellite phone and the reports of what is happening come in daily.
"Things are difficult but they are functioning. This is so sad. We have been fighting there for 23 years. We have lost a whole generation. And what is going on now, how did it happen?" Dr Samar asks.
"Did Kalishnikovs fall from the sky? The madrassahs (fundamentalist religious schools from which the Taliban sprung) were funded by Pakistan. The US funded the mujahideen. The World Food Program gave food to the madrassahs. Everyone knew that. So who is surprised that we are now in this situation?" she asks.
It is busy in the medical clinic here in Quetta today. Raihan (most Afghans only used one name) is 25-years-old and has come from Jaghori. She has two girls, ages three and nine months, and she wants some kind of birth control, though she does not want a tuballigation.
She is worried about having more children in her current state of poverty - the Taliban arrested her husband and they had to pay all they had to get him back. Besides, she says as she considers the infant, "I have no milk. The children are too small." Raihan is being treated by a woman doctor named Nasireen.
"I graduated from Kabul University medical school in 1987. There were 180 students in my class, 100 of them women." She shakes her head.
"My sister is an electrical engineer in Kabul," adds Dr Samar. "Now she sits at home in her burqa. She cannot work. She cannot even go the bazaar."
Later in the day we go to the two girls' school for Afghan refugees, a five minute drive from the medical clinic in Quetta. There are two shifts a day, 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.
At the upper school, there is what would be for most of us an unusual educational display behind glass. Under a sign "Mine Awareness Program" are selections - not photographs, real examples - of several mortars and landmines, including so-called "Bouncing Bettys," the mines that activate when stepped on but do not explode until you withdraw your foot, allowing the walker a few moments of awareness that they are about to lose their legs or be killed.
Roya and Wida are two sisters who have arrived here just a month ago from Bamiyan, the province that featured the famed Buddhist statutes until recently. They are willing to talk, but there is something wrong. Their fear is palpable as they look at the floor.
Roya has not been to school since 1997. She was in the 9th grade when the Taliban closed her school. Now she in the seventh grade here. She does not like that she has fallen behind. She took some secret English classes organised at a friend's home in Afghanistan but eventually gave up when the class of 20 dwindled to three because of fear. She will not say why she came here a month ago, offering only "because of my brother" and refusing to say more. She says her father is "missing." All she wants in life is to be in peace and walk freely.
Her sister Wida, head covered like all the women in Quetta, is 19 and she looks like she is about to cry. Her mouth is tight and she looks down. It feels unkind to press her further with questions.
But her anger, contained and explosive is also there. It cuts the airs like a current, like the weather before a storm. After a while of fairly innocuous chat - she used to enjoy MTV and the BBC before the family's illegal satellite dish was seized - the cloud parts.
"I hate them!" she says of the Taliban. "They killed my father. He was a doctor. My mother is still there. My brothers are students and the Taliban want them to join the jihad. My mother is afraid."
One must consider the sheer bravery of the outburst, considering that her family remains inside Afghanistan. A US attack against her country may be months away . . . or hours.
Why is she speaking? What does she want us to know? There are three things, she says.
"I want to see my country free. The campaign against terrorism is in our favour. But we do not want innocent people to be killed."
Whatever happens in the coming weeks and months, however George Bush seeks to shut down Osama bin Laden and his network, Wida and her sister will continue in school in Quetta.
Dr Samar will continue to run her schools and clinics, undoubtedly finding new negotiating tactics as necessary. All of them would someday like to return to their homeland. But as the days and years pass, will determination and hope prevail? Or as the poet Elizabeth Bishops put it:
Continent, city, country, society:
The choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No.
Should we have stayed at home,
Wherever that may be?