Nothing Pretty About It

By Alex Newman

Jane Houser receiving a medal.For the last half of 2008, Jane Houser, a parliamentary assistant, found herself plucked out of her comfortable Ottawa existence and deposited into the middle of Afghanistan’s Kandahar military base.

Living in a large tent euphemistically called a “weather haven” until more permanent digs of stacked-up shipping containers were ready, Houser shared this part of the desolate Registan desert with about 15,000 military personnel.

“It’s like a little town,” she explains, “with tons of cars and four-way stops, a boardwalk area with a Tim Horton’s, a convenience store, local Afghan carpet and pashmina stalls, an ice cream shop, Pizza Hut and an American-run big box store.”

The heat is unbearable – summer temperatures between 40 and 50C that can occasionally rise to a killing 60C – but thanks to air conditioning, the petite 25-year-old says she lived quite comfortably. “I really felt for the troops, though, out in the sweltering heat, carrying heavy gear on their backs.”

What brings an educated young woman – with an honours political science degree and a plum job in the Ministry of National Defence -- to Kandahar to serve Timbits and double-doubles is the same thing that brings so many young soldiers to this poverty and violence-stricken place.

“I needed to do my part as a Canadian in support of the mission,” she explains. Since the Afghanistan issue was something her office in the Ministry was dealing with on an almost daily basis, and with her interest in current affairs and politics, Houser wanted to do something concrete. She also wanted to “understand a segment of society, the military,” that she knew nothing about, and to grasp what “life is like for them on deployment.”

So she took a six-month leave of absence to join the Canadian Forces Personnel Support Team, a program that brings a touch of home – like Tim Horton’s -- to the troops. It also brings support staff, like Houser, whose main role is to listen.

“Serving coffee at Tim’s is the task, but the real job is caring and listening to people,” she says. “Some of these guys haven’t had a kind word in six months, haven’t seen their families.”

Though she occasionally had “bigger picture” conversations -- about the Afghan mission, about whether Canada was “making a difference” and about the spiritual life – most of the time it was small talk about “the little things, and keeping things lighter.”

Even so, Houser gleaned a “sense of the magnitude.” While a thorough briefing ahead of time apprised her of the situation, it was only through talking to soldiers and seeing local Afghans on the base that she started to understand “the scale of it, and how long it will take. You see the lack of what’s around, and that can be discouraging if you let it get to you.”

One reason why morale remains good, says Houser, is the high calibre of the military: young people with lots of potential who “feel they’re doing something of value” by participating in Canada’s efforts to keep peace, rebuild the nation and protect civilians against violence.

The Canadian strategy is a “whole-of-government approach” with military training an Afghan army; security forces doing the actual fighting and clearing to push the Taliban back and make sure areas are safe and controlled; the RCMP training national police; and CIDA building schools and medical clinics, and bringing vaccinations, food and supplies to the villages.

In the process, though, people get exposed to things “most of us couldn’t begin to imagine” -- abject poverty, suicide bombers, landmines planted where children walk to school.

It could easily lead to a feeling of defeat. To Houser, it was a place where people “felt lost and really needed God. But I was not always sure how to help. You have a conversation about faith and the person stops you by saying, ‘You can’t understand what I’ve seen.’ How do you communicate God’s love to someone who sees no evidence of it around them?”

She arrived in Kandahar immersed in her own spiritual struggle following some personal disappointments which had led to anger and a cessation of Bible reading and prayer. But after being in Kandahar a while, she also experienced acedia – that spiritual slump most Christians have experienced at one time or another. “Even through the slump, I was aware of God trying to communicate with me.”

She recalls it as God saying, “I’ve brought you to the desert for a reason, and now I’ve got your attention, we might as well get some work done.”

In the middle of the process, she took a short leave to see friends in Australia, one of whom is a strong Christian.

“God’s really persistent. Good thing! There I was angry and pushing God away, and he insists in engaging...putting godly people in my path regardless of whether I wanted to listen or not. I’m in this relationship with God, and I wanted to leave and didn’t know how, and couldn’t because of the reality of who Jesus is.”

She returned from Australia more rested and more willing to “listen, submit a little more, and be honest with people about what was going on with me.”

A Christian roommate and an American chapel on the base taught her some of “God’s kindness – it’s a beautiful thing that in Afghanistan I could go to this church service, amidst a setting that seemed so devoid of God. But he does say he will take us places and he will provide.”

As with many others who go through a dark period, she eventually deepened her commitment to God: “When you say you are God’s, then you have to accept, obey and move on in that.”

Whether or not Afghanistan precipitated her own spiritual crisis, the way forward for Houser seems clearer now. She wants to work with the Canadian government, possibly in foreign affairs. She’s “more than willing” to return to Afghanistan or some other similar place in order to have a more concrete understanding of what’s at stake and experience first-hand what people feel.

“If I ever ran for office,” she explains, “I want to be able to have an emotional connection with the people I’m making decisions about and for. I want to understand more fully the impact a political decision made from an office in Ottawa has on actual people, and I would want to have the weight of that understanding in making a decision.”

Houser challenges other Canadians to walk in the military’s shoes for a while before making judgments. What she would like Canadians to know is how well aware the military is “of negative public opinion about being in Afghanistan and how it affects them, gets them down. While it’s fair to question a mission, these are real people, trying to do their best, being asked to serve, and even to give up their lives. We can’t possibly imagine what they see out there in the villages and the desert. And at the very least, they deserve respect.”

Houser’s prayer life has returned in full force and these days she prays a lot for Afghanistan: “I pray for peace definitely. But I also pray for people working there to be effective, and for Afghan people of integrity to succeed and be given positions of leadership. I pray for the safety and health of friends still there. I pray for people who’ve returned home, that they won’t push God to the back of their minds, and that God will be in their face about who he is.”

And lastly she prays that Christians serving in Afghanistan – or anywhere for that matter – “will be obvious lights and be able to show God’s love.”