The Locals Attitude Towards Women

It was unnerving the whole time I was there, because you couldn’t trust the locals that they would, the situations could turn sour literally in seconds. We had three female officers on the contingent whose sole responsibility was to teach women and children in the refugee camps just general mine awareness. They would be spit on regularly and pushed to the ground, that sort of thing. They could never go anywhere without escort. One of the women that I had, a young female captain, I was offered a million dollars by a Pak army officer to buy her, and he was upset when I said, “I can’t do that.” And he was insulted and then he came back a couple days later and said, “Well, it was my fault. I insulted you because I didn’t offer you enough for her,” and it was something him and his father had talked about. She was very attractive, blonde, blue-eyed, university education. She was a civil engineer and he wanted to buy her. So that sort of thing stays with you cause that is, there’s nowhere in our Canadian mentality, nobody would think that that’s appropriate but to them it was more than appropriate, it was the thing to do.