Handing in my bullet-proof vest yesterday was a good feeling.

I won't need it now my new posting's so far from the conflict zone.

Packing up and setting off today with Henry my cat.

3 years of memories - a bitter sweet feeling.

The soldiers I'd persuaded to catch Henry the check-point kitten I'd seen all winter long scavenge among the mine fields.

The sunny Saturday a retired woman showed us her kitchen garden with 21 delicious crops in a 2 acre plot.

The soldier smiling, showing me the pin, I'd just watched him pull, from the grenade in his hand. Negotiating with him to replace the pin. “I bet your children think you’re a hero here holding this bridge?” They called him “Papa Hero,” he told me proudly. Then replaced the pin.

Leaving behind the residents of the 42 villages I'd been visiting daily for 3 years. The networks I'd built.

The solutions I'd found.

The failures.

The suffering.

The tens-of-thousands of explosions.

"How are things?" I'd ask of villagers I'd meet after a night of violence. "Normal. [Pause]... Well..." "A tank just flattened 3 farms by accident..." or "I was too scared to sleep last night..." or "We wrote this soldier this love poem - see, the paper published it." "They built us that church from wood. A week it took. I never dreamed we'd have one in our village." "Her husband just died and now her 10 yo son's lost his hand on a grenade he'd found playing..." "Can you help us?"

The time back on the bridge between the two conflicting sides 76 hours after a week spent at posters sessions at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Long Beach (https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/politics-diplomacy-seem-rather-less-important-than-what-douglas/).

Another moment negotiating with soldiers and armed militants for safe passage to bring an injured woman on a stretcher through no-mans land reflecting - 48 hours ago I was in Palo Alto (https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/palo-alto-bringing-us-closer-our-unknown-liquid-futures-douglas-1/) where I had spoken with Reid Hoffman about Mark Granovetter’s work on weak ties, and Brook Byers about term sheets.

An unusual job to be sure.

A version of this piece was first posted on LinkedIn on December 29th 2017.