June 1, 2004 In late November of 2003, I traveled to Quetta, the capital of the southern Pakistani province of Balochistan. In the evening, while I was having dinner at a restaurant, I heard an earth-shaking sound of explosion. People told me that the explosion was "harassment fire," a tactic used by the local resistance movement that doesn't involve killing or injuring people. Balochistan borders Afghanistan on the north and Iran on the west. Afghan refugees account for 10 percent of the province's population of some 2.5 million. Conflicts have been part of life in this region, home to a great diversity of religious and ethnic groups. Over the years, organizations supporting Afghan refugees have been withdrawing from this city in great turmoil one by one. There are still 27 refugee camps in the province, but only five international NGOs continue operations (as of November 2003). The only Japanese NGO operating in the province is AMDA (the Association of Medical Doctors of Asia), which provides emergency medical relief. I visited the Latifabad refugee camp, the main base of AMDA's activities in the country. "My parents were Uzbeks living in Uzbekistan, but they were forced to flee the country by the conflict that gripped the country some 80 years ago and started living in Afghanistan as refugees," said a housewife in her fifties. "I am an Afghan national, but I've been living here in Pakistan since I fled from Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan during the era of the Taliban regime." Many of the Afghan refugees in Balochistan don't go home because they think their country, still plagued by ethnic and political confrontation, offers virtually no chance for an economically independent life. Tsukasa Konishi, an AMDA member working at the camp, describes the situation. "About half of the Afghan refugees who came to the camp have gone home, but there are still some 5,000 staying here. We hope to keep our eyes on each one of them through continued aid activities. If the international community turns its eyes away from Afghanistan, the country could be engulfed in conflict again." Konishi's words reflected AMDA's agenda, which is focused on contributing to stability in the region through efforts for fundamental solutions to the refugee problem. (Published in EMERGENCY NURSING, June 2004 issue)