BUCKiT® #52-Amandine Roche: Peace Keeper Faces Suicide Bomber

It’s 2014 at a voting station in Kabul, Afghanistan, a female UN peacekeeper is waiting in the rain alongside 250 Afghan women with their babies as they line up to cast their vote for the very first time. From the corner of her eye Amandine Roche notices something suspicious - the person beside her looks like a man disguised as a woman and under his jacket, he’s hiding something. The sickening realization she is face-to-face with a suicide bomber sets in – with only moments to spare before she can escape. French born Amandine Roche is a human rights lawyer and peacekeeper for the United Nations. Her work has taken her all over the world, but her primary focus has been on a country she’s been evacuated from 4 times. It’s here in war torn Afghanistan that Amandine has faced a suicide bomber, the pain of her colleagues being kidnapped and murdered, and years of turmoil, terror, and trauma that have engulfed a country and people she loves so much. Yet, despite witnessing the horrors of the conflict first hand and being personally affected, her resolve to find peaceful solutions is stronger than ever. Realizing that not just her co-workers, but also Afghans suffer from depression and anxiety, Amandine now teaches meditation to both sides, and surprisingly directly to some members of the Taliban. She has also created the inner peace keeping program for humanitarians on the frontlines to help prevent PTSD, burn out and depression and is currently building the Inner Peace Corp organization to heal the invisible wounds of war and restore human dignity to female refugees. This is the incredible story of how one person’s deep personal pain turned her life around and led her down a new path to building peace and conflict resolution.