In 2003, Joann Kingsley shared a $3,200-a-month rental house in Kabul, Afghanistan, with four roommates. That house was ringed by a 10-foot concrete wall and topped with two feet of razor wire. There were armed hired guards inside and out.

Her first job there was as a United Nations refugee protection officer, her second was as a data manager for the U.N. voter registration project and her third—in northern Afghanistan—was to coordinate and monitor the distribution of nonfood items for displaced persons.

She’ll greet 2005 in the Sudanese desert at the center of what aid groups call the “worst current humanitarian crisis” in the world—where tens of thousands of persons already have been killed in a civil war that has divided the country along racial, ethnic, religious, language and other lines.

As a protection officer for the Norwegian Refugee Council, Kingsley is based in Kalma, a large camp in Southern Darfur for internationally displaced persons (IDP). She expects to help make displaced civilians more secure from bands of rapists and looters, as well as develop ways to prevent sex and gender-based violence.

Kingsley, AS ’96/’99M, is a former secretary and computer consultant who went back to school at UD in her mid-30s. The international relations courses she took on campus led her to Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Afghanistan, working variously for the U.N., the International Organization for Migration and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Now she’s contracted to spend the next six months, or maybe more, helping displaced persons in Darfur, where cholera, malaria and meningitis are increasingly common, and where 30 villages were burned to the ground in a single day earlier this year.

Kingsley has earned as much as $7,000 a month and so little that she’s one notch above a volunteer, but she’s not living among displaced populations for money.

“Partly because I’m a single person, my job needed to be meaningful, and computer consulting just didn’t do it,’’ she says. “I do it because I feel that as an accident of birth I’m American, which has entitled me to a vast array of liberties that the rest of the world will never have, maybe not even hear about. I feel a sense of obligation to give back.”

Kingsley says she has been interested in international relations since she went to Argentina as a high school exchange student and stayed seven years. She wasn’t focused about exactly what to do, though, until she had a class with James K. Oliver, Emma Smith Morris Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Relations.

“One class with Dr. Oliver was all it took,’’ she says. “The man is an incredible lecturer. I went up to him after class and said, ‘Now I know what I want to do with my life.’ He’s been my compass.’’

Her work with the U.N. and other international agencies has taken Kingsley to nightmare situations around the world. The places she travels sometimes match the picture Americans carry around in their heads, and sometimes they are far different.
More than a year after the bombing of Afghanistan, she walked into a city shop there and was surprised by what was on the shelf—Orville Redenbacher microwave popcorn.

At the same time, she was shocked by the severity of the bombing in other parts of the city—office buildings reduced to their foundations.

She said she was touched by a school set up for Afghan girls once the Taliban was defeated. Because parents would not allow the girls to study with boys and there was no formal school building for girls, they studied in UNICEF tents in temperatures that varied from freezing cold to more than 100 degrees. Their headmaster worked from an office that consisted of a wooden table and bench stuck in a dirt bank.

When your job description includes escorting displaced persons in dangerous situations, armed with nothing but your wits, Kingsley says you use whatever you have to make things just a little bit better.

When an Afghan warlord insisted on taking a share of supplies meant for homeless Afghans, she said the equivalent of “shame on you,’’ and he backed down. When people commit a crime, she takes a picture or just stands by with the victim.

“Well, we try to prevent the crime from occurring in the first place,” Kingsley says,” but if that fails, we do what we can to document it and try to see that justice is done.

“Sometimes, people won’t do things in front of an international. It’s amazing how simple things sometimes work. We’ve got to use whatever we have. Bad things still happen but, without the U.N., it would be far worse,” she says.

As she left for the Sudan in September, Kingsley said, “I don’t profess any particular religion, but I believe in people and I believe in helping and I believe when you do good, it generates good things.

“For now, I’m happy with just moving my grain of sand.’’