USD Magazine, Summer 2003

In Kabul,Afghanistan, Heidler was present as young women attended school for the first time in their lives.

freelance as a producer for CNN. Ir was surreal being in a gorgeous val– ley along the river Jhelum in the dusty capital of Muzaffarabad, while Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf and India's Prime Minister Aral Bihari Vajpayee exchanged verbal jabs with nuclear undertones. After Kashmir, ocher freelance jobs rook me to Kabul, Kandahar and the northern territories of Pakistan. The experiences were enrap– turing. I saw girls in Kabul going to school for the first rime, traveled with an American doctor to his village in the remote area of Helmand, and joined a pagan festival in northern Pakistan. I began to have the same feelings for this region of the world char someone would have for their home. Bur almost a year without seeing family brought me back to my roots. When I returned to New York, I paid Sayed a visit at his Khyber Kebab shop in New York. I was spinning from culture shock, and he helped me deal with it. Sirring in his dingy shop, earing greasy Pakistani food on Styrofoam places and drinking milky sweet tea, brought me back to what had been my home for a year. We talked about South Asia politics, what it was like for him when he returned from Pakistan the previous winter, and what ir was like for me to be back. He made me feel at home ... in New York, my home. My friendship with Sayed helped me enter my life in Pakistan and helped me re-enter my life back in New York. All this happened because I switched sears with an elderly woman on a plane.

On my flight, I switched sears and ended up sirring next to Sayed Yunis Badshah, a very sharp and engaged Pakistani-American who has lived in New York for 22 years. We talked for almost the entire trip from JFK airport to Islamabad. He was headed to his home vil– lage for a wedding, bur also was intent on educating the vi llage about the American perspectives on 9/11. He was very interested in my thoughts about the situation, and why I was traveling to Pakistan. In return, he helped me adjust to Pakistan before I even landed, with a rundown on the culture, rhe political climate and impressions of how Pakistanis feel they have been treated by America. I spent a year in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and my work with Mercy Corps opened doors to many cultures. These two countries are a complex mix of ethnicities: Pakistan, partially because of how the British divided up irs India colony, and Afghanistan, because of the many tribes that rule slices of the country. Pakistan was created in the late 1940s as the British pulled our and created a home for Muslims living in the subcontinent. Drawing bor– ders and shifting families, however, proved to be a difficult and vio– lent task. Thar violence is still very present in the disputed territory of Kashmir, which drew world attention last year as Pakistan and India, which both claim the region, tossed threats back and forth. This story enabled me to put my journalist hat back on. After I finished with my Mercy Corps assignment, I went to Kashmir to

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USD MAGA Z INE