'A once-in-a-lifetime challenge.' (Diane and Jim Lubin, assigned to United Nations Transition Assistance Group in Namibia)

This year, UN statters Diane and Jim Lubin will not hear the mating calls of frogs in the stream outside their log cabin overlooking New York State's Hudson Valley. Instead, they are in a remote corner of Namibia, helping in the birth of the new southern African nation. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime challenge", Jim said before his departure in mid-April.

He and his wife, Diane, are among the hundreds of UN employees heading for Namibia as members of the civilian component of the United Nations Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) The Lubins have been assigned to the Otjiwarongo district, in the central plateau region some 200 miles north of Windhoek. There they will help in the four-month electoral process and elections that are the centrepiece of Namibia's transition to independence.

Jim Lubin, 53, is from Burtonupon-Trent in the United Kingdom, where more beer is brewed than anywhere else in England. Diane, 43, was born in the quiet college town of Onconta, New York, in the United States. Theirs was a UN romance-he is Chief Editor of the UN Yearbook, she a copy preparer and proof-reader. They married in 1981, just after Jim returned from a stint in southern Lebanon as Chief Personnel Officer for the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).

"When you're in the field, you can see that everything you do has an immediate impact on the life of the people around you", he said. "The everyday acts of kindness make such a difference."

He recalled: the Fijian soldier in UNIFIL who "adopted" a small boy orphaned in southern Lebanon; the staff and troops collecting $1,000 for a holiday party for the children of the area, with gifts distributed to Muslim and Christian alike by a soldierly Father Christmas"; and consoling the farmer whose house had been destroyed during some fighting, with...