Image of the Nutritional Centre in Kabul

Over the past months, I’ve been immersed in writing my memoir — a journey through the many places, people, and moments that have shaped my life. Today, I found myself working on a chapter that takes me back to the very start of my humanitarian career, in Afghanistan in 1999–2000, under Taliban rule.

With World Humanitarian Day approaching, I want to share this passage with you. Though written as part of a fictionalised narrative, it is not far from the truth. The people, the challenges, and the choices reflect realities I have witnessed — impossible situations, extraordinary courage, and suffering that often defies words.

I hope it will spark reflection on what some people must endure simply to survive.


Over the next days, Kacper was taken, step by step, into the quiet heart of GNI’s work in Kabul. There was the ward in the Indira Gandhi Hospital — crowded, hot, and heavy with the sharp, medicinal scent that clung to the air — the smell of a place where life was held together by thin threads — and then the scattered nutritional centres in neighbourhoods further out, where the dust was thicker, the streets narrower, and the war seemed to press closer against the walls. Some were on the edge of the city, almost touching the mountains; others were tucked into quiet courtyards where children’s voices carried through cracked wooden doors.

He was never alone. Amélie, calm and precise, would speak in the measured rhythm of someone used to explaining difficult things. She unfolded the technical side of the work — the weighing, the measuring, the careful re-feeding — until he could almost recite the process himself. Jawed was the other constant. He was the translator not only of language but of the unspoken rules that kept them safe: how to greet an elder, when to lower your gaze, what to say and what never to say under Taliban rule.

It was Jawed who explained the boundaries — that once inside the safety of a GNI compound, the walls gave more than shelter; they gave space for women to be seen. Nurses, doctors, cleaners — their faces uncovered, their voices strong, their laughter carrying in from the courtyards — would welcome him into their world. Under the folds of their burqas were women with fierce intelligence, quick humour, and the quiet defiance of those who refused to stop saving lives.

Kacper listened to them, and slowly began to understand that malnutrition was not simply hunger. Hunger could be satisfied with a meal. Malnutrition was a slow, invisible thief that began its work long before a child’s first cry.

It began in the body of a mother already weakened by years of scarcity, her bones light from not enough food, her blood thin from lack of iron. Poverty was the soil it grew in, but there were other roots: the weight of cultural rules that placed women last at the table, the absence of healthcare that could catch a problem early, the exhaustion of carrying and birthing children too close together. A malnourished mother gives birth to a child already fragile, sometimes too small, sometimes without the strength to suckle.

Without enough food or the right food, she cannot produce enough milk. Without clean water, illness comes quickly. Diarrhoea drains what little strength the child has, fever burns through reserves, a cough lingers and eats away at the body’s defences. Slowly, weight slips away until skin hangs loose over bone, or swelling from oedema gives the false impression of health while the body is collapsing inside.

Malnutrition was not one thing, Kacper realised. It was an entire chain of events — a web of hunger, illness, and neglect, tangled further by tradition and inequality. And in the worst cases, it became a sentence.

There was a line between life and death, and GNI’s work stood on it. Amélie explained that when a child arrived in the worst stage — severely malnourished and unable to digest normal food — giving them a plate of rice or bread could kill them. “Their bodies cannot handle it,” she said softly. “The machinery has shut down. You must wake it slowly.”

That was where F75 and F100 came in — powders mixed with clean water to make a liquid that was not milk in the ordinary sense, but a carefully balanced formula of sugars, oils, proteins, vitamins, and minerals. F75 was the starting point, a gentle reintroduction of fuel to a body on the brink. It gave just enough energy for the organs to begin working again without overloading them. When the child’s body had stabilised, they moved to F100 — richer, more calorific, building weight and strength day by day.

“This is not milk,” Jawed told him, holding up a silver packet in the warehouse days later. “This is a key. Without it, the lock stays closed. If the supply fails — if it is delayed, lost, or runs out — you close the door on them.

Kacper could see it now — how every link mattered. A mother’s decision to bring her child. A nurse’s skill with the feeding cup. A cleaner’s care in keeping disease away. A driver’s ability to get supplies through a checkpoint. His own responsibility to keep the warehouse stocked. If one link broke, the child did not make it.

And then there was the cruelty of culture. Fathers, sometimes without malice but bound by old beliefs, would refuse treatment — especially for girls. Girls ate last, and least. To survive to the age of five was almost a miracle for them. Even then, survival came with scars: stunted growth, damaged minds, and bodies less able to fight the next illness that came along.

Yet in these centres, miracles were made daily. The women of GNI — nurses who fought for each tiny patient, doctors who argued with fathers until they relented, cleaners who brought comfort to grieving mothers — held the line. They treated infections. They buried the children they could not save. They stood in the gap between death and survival, teaching families not only how to pull a child back from the edge but how to keep them from returning to it. They taught with whatever the context allowed: how to make nourishing food from the smallest gardens, how to store clean water, how to use seeds and scraps to keep hunger at bay. And, quietly, how to find strength if the danger in the home could not be escaped.

It was only later, after walking out of one of the centres, that Kacper found his thoughts drifting to Zakopane. To the smell of disinfectant in the wards, the creak of the wooden floors, the way his mother’s face lit up when she was allowed to visit. He had thought, as a child, that he understood what it meant to fight for life — and in his own way, he had. His condition had been complex, the treatments painful, the path uncertain. He had survived because others had fought for him: his family, his doctors, even strangers far away.

But here, the fight was different. Stripped bare. This was not about intricate surgery or rare medicines. It was about whether a child could eat enough to live. Whether the water they drank would keep them alive or kill them. Whether a mother could keep her baby nourished long enough to see another season.

His battle had been hard, but it had never been this. He had never had to wonder if there would be food on the plate or clean water in the cup. And he knew now that the difference was not a measure of whose suffering weighed more, but of how survival could depend on the most basic things — and how, without them, the margin between life and death could be as thin as a spoonful of F75.

And as he walked back through Kabul’s dust, past walls pitted with years of war and markets alive with the stubborn hum of life, he felt something shifting inside him — a quiet tether being tied, thread by thread, to this wounded, unyielding city.

Yes, you guessed it — Kacper is me.