In the Field

Four Decades, Six Continents

From Arabic immersion in Cairo and Bedouin traditions in Saudi Arabia, to living with coal mining and traditional shepherd families in Romania’s Transylvanian Alps, a Navajo family and clan on the reservation in New Mexico, and ethnic families in New Zealand — to recently working alongside victims of violence and displaced communities in Nigeria — across six continents and four decades.

In 1992, a rockslide high in the Karakoram Mountains left me with a shattered leg in one of the world’s most remote border zones. Local Pakistani villagers carried me by hand and transported me across 17 kilometers of rubble. The Aga Khan Foundation defied military flight restrictions to reach me, sending their chief orthopedic surgeon and medical director on the rescue helicopter itself. They covered all medical expenses — including follow-on surgery at their teaching hospital in Karachi. The chief pilot, Ajaz Akram, later became a friend and visited me in Washington. Four years of recovery followed — and then mountaineering again.

That experience taught me something no classroom could: our most important problems are solved not by systems alone, but by the character of the people inside them. Kindness, solidarity, and our common humanity are not soft variables. They are the architecture.

It also set the course of a life. The generosity of strangers in the Karakoram is in part why I later worked alongside men recovering from addiction in Washington DC, why I’ve sat with displaced communities in Nigeria and tribal councils in the Navajo Nation, why I’ve spent years in the places where the stakes are highest and the systems are most broken — not as an expert dispensing solutions, but as someone who knows what it means to be carried.