Bike Riding in Kabul: The Global Adventures of a Foreign Aid Practitioner by Jamie Bowman (2022) is the memoir of a legal advisor in post-conflict and emerging market countries from 2002 to 2011. It covers Kosovo, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Russian Federation, Afghanistan, Southern Sudan, Rwanda, and closes in France.
Full disclosure: I have known the author, an attorney from California, since 2006, working together in Southern Sudan. Many countries mentioned in this book, I have also worked in – and I appear in this book!
The prologue introduces characters that appear throughout most chapters of the book, one of whom the author met in 2002 in Kosovo – her starting point.
Her job – mainly related to updating national laws – was not an easy one. She explains the challenges with an anecdote from her work in Ukraine. An ancient Ukranian artist had drawn a picture of an elephant, and a rather simple, little one, from a description because he had never seen one – in real life or in a photograph. ‘As I stood there [in the museum], it struck me how this sweet but inaccurate rendition of an elephant illustrated the risks of trying to recreate something as complicated as a free market economy or a democracy if you haven’t seen it in action. I just prayed that on future examination, my work in Ukraine on the mortgage law wouldn’t be subject to the same ridicule as this little elephant.’
I like the Afghanistan chapters, one set in 2005 – donkey carting and bike riding in Kabul with her Argentine boyfriend are two funny stories reminding me of my assignments in Afghanistan from 2002. The second chapter on Afghanistan is five years later in 2010. Our paths didn’t cross that year – I was there in 2009 and 2011 – but this is another great chapter in which the author expertly explains the Washington Post’s allegations of the Afghan Central Bank improprieties.
In 2006-2007, we were both working in Juba, Southern Sudan. And that’s a delightful chapter too. It was before the country’s independence from Sudan and the Khartoum government, after which time it changed its name to South Sudan, becoming a ‘brand new’ country. I returned to Juba this year – September 2023 – and began reading Jamie’s book, finding it hard to believe that 17 years had passed.
I also like the way the author weaves her mother and father into the narrative to make this a personal journey and to ground her work in the realities of relationships.
As Jamie Bowman was writing this book, I was fortunate to receive partial chapters to read. Reading the fully-formed novel is a complete joy – reminiscing about the tough and heart-breaking times, and the many times we laughed, relieving the stress of working in post-conflict locations. She brings life as a foreign aid practitioner into perspective, and she takes the complexities of legal aid and explains them simply, with humour and respect.
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| Jamie Bowman's library in Juba 2005 |
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MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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