The culture shock was dramatic. We had some really
elementary information on the culture, not just the Muslim
culture but the way of life in Pakistan and how business
is done, extreme levels of poverty which none of us could
of imagined until we get there and saw. That is one
of the things that I think Canada certainly could have
done better even at the time. It was not like it was
the first mission Canada ever participated in.
I mean we had been up to our eyeballs in, you know,
in the UN up to that point. So getting somebody ready
for a mission in that part of the world, I get the feeling
it was hastily put together, but to actually get off
the plane and show up there and realize that you are in
a different world, an entirely different world.
So not just armed police, but armed soldiers through the
airport literally by the hundreds. They surrounded our
plane as a security measure when we got off the plane
and we flew in British Air. That was a little bit unexpected.
To say that they have a road network is a gross
overstatement. It’s about a 3 ½ - 4 hour drive from
Peshawar, or from Islamabad where we landed to the
city of Peshawar where we were living and working and
the roads were dreadful to say the least. A main bridge over
the Indus River had a warning sign on it that this bridge is
unsafe but it was the only bridge across the Indus River
and the road we were on was called the Grand Trunk
which was their equivalent to the Trans Canada.
So when you see things, road kill there wasn’t a coyote or a
rabbit. Road kill that we saw was a big old water buffalo
and it took up the centre of the road so everybody had to
drive around it and when we left months later it was still
there rotting away. So, there’s no such thing as well,
we’ll get that off the road and we’ll fix the potholes,
nothing, it just simply didn’t exist. So little things like
that, totally aside from the mission, is what has a
tendency to fill the guys’ heads. They’re seeing
things for the first time that they couldn’t have imagined.