09 August 2009

Northern Afghanistan: “I am still moved to see people travelling for miles to queue for a registration card and participate in elections,” confesses Jetiti, a UNV volunteer in a region of Afghanistan where security concerns have recently increased significantly. 

Encouraging people to register and vote is more than just a job to the veteran post-conflict election organizer. A Public Outreach and Training Adviser with the UNDP-supported ‘Enhancing Legal and Electoral Capacity for Tomorrow (ELECT)’ project, Jetiti is helping plan for Afghanistan’s upcoming presidential and provincial council elections on 20 August.

Part of his assignment involves coordinating the activities of fellow UNV volunteer Electoral Advisers in the north-east of Afghanistan. But mainly, he works directly with a team of Afghan nationals, offering guidance and training on how best to prepare local communities to take part in the elections. 

This is a role he particularly enjoys. By sharing his knowledge and experience with Afghanis, he feels he is doing his part to ensure that Afghanistan’s future self-reliance is built through democracy. “We prepare the community to own the future”, explains Jetiti, who is originally from East Africa,

He is also motivated by the challenge of reaching every person in this conservative society.  In a region where women can often only freely interact with other women or young children, Jetiti and his team are turning to schoolchildren to educate and inform their mothers on the election process.

The ELECT team provides advice as the Afghan Independent Election Commission (IEC) distributes leaflets and gives talks in schools throughout the region, encouraging the children to share the information with their parents. “Please take it to mommy” is one phrase Jetiti has learned well in Dari, one of two official languages in Afghanistan (the other is Pashto).

The former social worker acknowledges this assignment is one of the hardest he’s worked in. Jetiti previously served as a UNV volunteer Electoral Adviser in Timor-Leste and Nepal. There, he says, he lived amongst the communities. “When you live with them, eat their food and speak their language, you surely become part of the community,” he notes, “and that makes a world of difference.”

In today’s Afghanistan, however, an increasingly volatile security situation makes these daily interactions nearly impossible.

Jetiti is more conscious than most of the danger he is in: in 2004, on his first assignment to Afghanistan during the country’s inaugural post-war elections, insurgents bombed the UN facilities where UNV volunteers were working and residing. He not only survived the bombing, but also insisted on returning to facilitate the election.

“We were three UNV volunteers deployed in the province,” he continues. “Amidst all the security concerns, we felt it imperative to return and complete the work we had begun.  Even with the bombing we never gave the insurgents any sign of victory; we had come a long way right from registration, and there was no way we were going to abandon the community at the last hour.”

Asked why he chooses to put himself in harm’s way, he responds: “If money were my main motivation, I would have left Afghanistan running a long time ago... What keeps me going is what brought me here in the first place: the spirit of volunteerism.”

For security reasons, the full names and locations of the people mentioned are not disclosed.