The Sewing Circles of Herat
Page 32
As my travel companion on much of the more recent part of this journey and fellow detainee during two tense days and nights being held by Pakistan’s military intelligence ISI, photographer Justin Sutcliffe deserves a special mention. Were it not for his ingenuity in smuggling his spare phone into captivity, we would not have been able to alert our newspaper to our plight. Many of his wonderful photographs appear in the book.
Paul Marsden, MP for Shrewsbury, helped rescue us from the ISI, being manhandled by Baluchistan police in the process, and kindly rearranged his whole schedule to stay in Pakistan until we were safely out.
Princess Homaira Wali, eldest grandchild of the king of Afghanistan, could not have been more generous with her time and friendship in showing me round Rome and I will always think of her when I hear the song Mack the Knife.
I would like to thank my good friends Professor Akbar Ahmed and John Witherow for taking time from their extremely busy lives to read the manuscript and make invaluable comments.
As always, my wonderful agent David Godwin who perhaps alone knows what this book means to me, and my fantastic editor Arabella Pike for her late night e-mails of encouragement and for commissioning a book on the Amazon and ending up with a memoir of Afghanistan.
Last, but very definitely not least, I would like to thank my Mum and Dad for looking after their grandson whenever his mother had a chapter to finish, my husband Paulo for making the most inspiring cappuccinos every morning, and my son Lourenço for keeping me aware that it is not always necessary to fly to the other side of the world and dodge bullets to have an adventure.
London, July 2002
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHRISTINA LAMB was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year in 2002 for her reporting on Afghanistan in both the British Press Awards and the What the Papers Say Awards, and awarded Foreign Affairs Writer of the year by the Foreign Press Association. Her original despatches from Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation won her Young Journalist of the Year. She is also the author of the best-selling The Africa House and Waiting for Allah. She is married with a young son and is a roving foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times.
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