I volunteered to work for the polio programme in Afghanistan in 2008, fresh from my first international assignment in Nigeria. It was only in 2010 that this materialised. I spent half a year with UNICEF working on eradicating polio, a job that came quite naturally to me since I wrote my book, but nothing had prepared me for the complexities that came with working in a country that had only known conflict. At the end of six months, I was weary and weatherbeaten. But Afghanistan was a drug that was hard to shake. So I returned. This time, I transitioned from polio (and public health) to regional integration and from…