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Not like other girls: meet the Asian women who have enlisted as United Nations peacekeepers
- In 2000, not a single woman from the Asia-Pacific countries served in UN peacekeeping forces. Today, women from across the region pursue careers thousands of kilometres from home and family
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When Vu Nhat Huong, a 31-year-old army captain from Vietnam, told her parents she was going to be deployed on a foreign mission as a United Nations peacekeeper, her mother burst into tears. “You are a very strong woman,” she said, “but why do you want to do something so different from other women?”
Although such questions were not easy for her to hear, let alone answer, Huong went on to serve as a UN communications officer in the Central African Republic, one of the world’s poorest countries and one which has struggled with decades of instability and violence.
From her outpost in the capital, Bangui, she counted off 379 days on a paper calendar that she spent away from her loved ones, before returning to Vietnam last December.
Living in the Central African Republic felt like being in “an old film”, she says. The volatile security situation, together with extreme heat – temperatures can rise as high as 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) – a lack of water and electricity and an alien culture made it all the more challenging.
Often homesick, she would go days without being able to speak to her family because of the poor internet connections.
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