Why One Tech-Savvy Aid Worker Had to Flee Afghanistan

Jennifer Gold had never felt afraid during her two years in Afghanistan. Not out in Jalalabad, where she helped get natal-care information to the cellphones of pregnant women. But as she waited in the Herat airport for the flight that would take her home from Afghanistan abruptly, the humanitarian aid worker and Army reservist nervously eyed her fellow passengers, fearing that one of them would try to kill her and her colleagues...

Gold decamped to California. Like an increasing number of her fellow Western aid workers who came to Afghanistan in the hope of helping Afghans enjoy a better life, she doesn’t know when she’ll come back. Whatever the NATO command says about security improving in the country after a decade of American-led war, aid workers fear violent deaths, particularly after the violent protests of U.S. soldiers who accidentally burnt the Koran last month...

Gold, a lieutenant in the North Carolina National Guard who deployed to Iraq in 2009, didn’t think it would turn out this way. She and her friends had started a tech-heavy aid company, the International Synergy Group, that brought Gold to Afghanistan in May 2010. With some contract cash from the blue-sky researchers at Darpa, Gold sought to use mobile applications to get agriculture and health data into the hands of Afghans, particularly for pregnant women in need of natal-care facts, through the use of open-source software favored by aid workers like Ushahidi or FrontlineSMS...