When the Afghan communists took power in 1977, two years before the Soviet invasion, Suraya Sadeed – daughter of the governor of Kabul – was in Beirut with her husband. Fearful of "pogroms" at home, they emigrated to the US, where Sadeed made a fortune in property. Her husband's sudden death in 1993 plunged her into depression and self-doubt – until she happened to see a CNN clip about the horrors of civil-war Kabul and felt compelled to act. Thus began an epic and escalating series of interventions: blankets, clinics, secret schools, earthquake relief, you name it. Somewhat haphazardly, whenever she noticed a need, back she went to the generous Afghan-American community that financed her charity, Help the Afghan Children, and off on another expedition.
It was also a road to personal redemption. Casting off the materialism that now seemed hollow, overcoming grief to alleviate the plight of thousands, she found new love and received the ultimate accolade: a spot on Oprah in 2002; Oprah Winfrey also gave her $1m for HTAC. Nothing can detract from real achievements, yet this memoir is disconcertingly shaped by the tropes of popular fiction and confessionalism.
Sadeed seems unconcerned with research, the better to play the role of the impulsive ingénue, entranced by a poppy field until told what it's for. Evil confounded by sassy innocence is a frequent scenario; all that seems left of her Afghan upbringing – aside from nostalgia for more gracious times – is a knowledge of the Dari language. She defines herself as an American, "born and raised in Afghanistan". No doubt her childhood nonconformism (the influence of a nanny from the untamed north) made it easy to adapt to a culture where women are allowed to be brash, and spirited mavericks trump team players. "'You men in front!' I yelled out. 'I swear to God if you don't stop smoking I'll unveil in front of the Talibs, and they'll beat the crap out of every last one of you!'" The men at the front of the bus obey. At the next stop, she takes a forbidden pee in the bushes: "In spite of the dangers of getting beaten or worse, the rebel within me just couldn't stomach the Taliban's mindless rules."
This defining scene, as our heroine makes for Kabul with $35,000 under her burqa for the people camped out in the old Soviet embassy, comes at the start of the book; she is never quite so obnoxious after that, although she remains conspicuous. As if reuniting in herself the legendary independence of the Afghan people with the individualism of US culture, she operates in an eerie void. By this account, whether during the civil war or under the Taliban, nobody else lifts a finger.
On reaching Kabul in 1997, Sadeed discovers that girls are forbidden to attend school. She has the daring idea of starting a basement project. Was she unaware, even by the time of writing her book, of the many similar schools run by Afghans throughout the Taliban period? Back home in 1998, she sees another TV clip, of the earthquake that devastated many isolated mountain hamlets. Grabbing a doctor and wads of cash, she helicopters into Rostaq to the cheers of the Northern Alliance: "There wasn't a single aid organisation in the area." In fact, the UN and the International Red Cross had begun working in and around Rostaq almost at once.
Sadeed describes cynical, pampered aid giants not venturing out of Pakistan in 1994; at the next sighting, they're fleeing into Tajikistan ahead of the retaliation for 9/11. Hers is naturally the only outfit pushing the other way, to assist people trapped between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban. As her adopted country starts bombing her birth country, the agony of divided allegiances prompts the most affecting passages in the book. But then she writes: "For the cost of one of those bombing runs, I doubtless could have fed and clothed and cared for those 100,000 displaced people." There's a typical lack of self-awareness in that "I".
Sadeed is at her most credible dealing with individuals. She mothers a drugged-out militiaman, and manages the do-gooder's common tension between concern for mass suffering and alienation in the face of its impersonal scale by sneaking special care to odd figures in the crowd, for private reasons, such as a resemblance to her daughter. Such frailties are the endearing face of the self-absorption that envelops these adventures in charityland.
