I Was a Stranger and You...

And then there is a heart-felt commentary by Kate Clark about the still extant practice of hospitality to strangers in Afghanistan.

The taxi driver was calling me back. It was late at night in Irbil, and there was a problem with the fare.

Sometimes it is the taxi driver who wants to keep down the fare. We had spent the half hour journey chatting. He told me he was struggling to bring up a young family on a low income and with soaring inflation.

"Rent," he said, "had gone up five-fold and petrol prices 20-fold since 2003."

So I paid him a bit extra. He called me back to argue over the money because he thought I had paid him too much.

Read all of Hospitality in a suspicious world.