Futaba Kaiharazuka, an assistant program director with the aid organization CARE International Japan, remembers clearly the first time she visited a refugee camp in Pakistan.
She was 28 years old, working for the nongovernmental group JEN on her first overseas field assignment. Immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, Kaiharazuka was sent to assess the changing needs of a long-established camp for Afghanistan refugees.
"Before I went, I had images of a refugee camp, basically like what you would get from watching TV or reading articles. I had no real idea," she recalled. "First, it did not look like a camp at all, but like a village. In Pakistan, there are many long-term refugees who fled Afghanistan in the early 1980s when the former Soviet Union invaded. Some of the refugees had been there over 20 years, and then there were the newcomers, fleeing the Taliban in the wake of 9/11."