by Len Lear

You might think that no one in his/her right mind would want to spend a year in war-torn Afghanistan unless that person was in the military, a defense contractor or at least a journalist on assignment to write a book or articles for a major newspaper or magazine.

But then again, you are not Jeffrey Stern, who dances to the beat of a different drummer. Stern, 34, who grew up in Mt. Airy until age eight and then in Chestnut Hill, had a fine education at Germantown Friends School and Duke University, graduating in 2003 and 2007, respectively, but he had too much wanderlust to sit at a desk in a corporate office.

As a child, Jeffrey had hopes of becoming a major league baseball player or rock star, but those dreams collapsed, as they almost always do. “I always liked telling stories, though,” he said. “I did not write for my college newspaper, but I did do some writing for the alumni magazine and an alternative newspaper, so I knew that I wanted to write.”

So Jeffrey applied for a job as a reporter at a cornucopia of newspapers and tried to get assignments and grants, which is the journalistic equivalent of hammering nails into your head. “Almost everyone ignored me,” he said.

However, a couple of magazine editors did indicate that they could use some original, short content on their websites, and one suggested that Jeffrey could probably find some compelling stories in a war zone like Afghanistan.

“So I decided I had to go for broke,” said Jeffrey, “but I did not know anyone in Afghanistan. It was hard to even get a visa. It never felt real. I had to go to India to get a connecting flight to Kabul (the capital of Afghanistan). And Kabul had a strange economy. Security contractors were throwing lots of money around, so some things like rent were really expensive, and I only had a little money saved.”

Fortunately, Stern’s temperament is as well balanced as a circus high-wire act, and he is clockwork-reliable. “A friend of a friend let me stay at a foundation for two weeks,” he said. “Then I got a room in a place called the Mustafa Hotel, whose owner had just been murdered a few weeks before. I asked if they had a gym, and they said yes. The ‘gym’ turned out to be one stationary bicycle on the roof. There were more employees than guests.”

These young ladies were students at the Marefat School, which the Taliban would like to destroy because it provides an outstanding education to both boys and girls. Jeffrey Stern wrote a widely acclaimed book, “The Last Thousand: One School's Promise in a Nation at War” (Macmillan, 2015), about the school. (More about the book in next week’s issue)[/caption]

Stern learned about a company that had English-speaking taxi drivers who would just charge a flat $7 fee to go anywhere in the city, and he came to rely on these drivers. “One in particular became like a brother to me. A bomb would go off, and he’d call me. He would drive me to the bomb site; I would interview people in the area, and the driver would translate for me.

“I’d take photos and put together a story and send it to editors in the U.S. Some would put it right on their website. It was impossible to make a living that way, and there was an epidemic of freelance journalists getting kidnapped and killed, but this got my foot in the door.”

Money was getting so scarce that Jeffrey considered coming home, but his heart melted like a setting sun when he was able to get a full-time job at the Professional Development Institute at the American University in Kabul. This provided a regular paycheck and housing. Stern and his cohorts trained the male and female students for jobs in both the public and private sectors. They were protected by armed guards (almost like the U.S.). After work Jeffrey would still go out looking for stories that he wound up getting onto the websites of Esquire and Newsweek magazines. It helped that his writing is a gumbo of efficiency, completely lacking in pretension.

“But I got tired of how hard it was to get a beer,” he said. “I fantasized about going to a Happy Hour without a gun being stuck in your face. So after one year in Afghanistan I came home.”

After Stern came back to Philly, he was able to get a job at the National Constitution Center at 5th and Arch Streets for two years. He then enrolled at Stanford University and earned a graduate degree in international policy studies because he “wanted to do something with international relations and conflict resolution.” The sword's tip of the war zone zeitgeist began scratching him again, though, so despite the ubiquitous danger, Jeffrey returned to Afghanistan.

NEXT WEEK: How Stern wound up writing books, including one that was turned into a major motion picture by Clint Eastwood!