A new day: Heidi Kühn and Shamin Jawad, wife of Afghanistan's ambassador to the US, look over an Afghan vineyard that was once a minefield. Kuhn won a CAA Excellence in Achievement Award in 2002.
Courtesy of Roots of Peace

Ana Paula gingerly crosses a field in southern Angola near her home in the central province of Huambo. She is starving, and across the field drapes a thick curtain of branches on a grove of mango trees, their swollen fruit hanging just within reach. Swollen herself at nine months pregnant, she carefully picks her footsteps, trying to feel for the small metal canisters that keep most of the hungry villagers away from these trees. She reaches toward the dangling fruit under the wide leaves. Seconds later, after as long as 30 years in concealment, the landmine she missed as she looked upward detonates.

Nine thousand miles away in Marin County, Heidi Kühn closes her eyes momentarily, as she often does for full effect, as she finishes telling the story. The 48-year-old is the founder of a nonprofit called Roots of Peace, which funds mine-removal efforts and runs education and development programs across Asia, Africa, and the Balkans. In her San Rafael office, Kühn exudes manicured "let's do lunch" suburban elegance, wearing a sassy pink low-cut blouse with frilly trim, dangly earrings, and stylish shoes. On the office walls, numerous photos show her in more formal attire with international political dignitaries. Though she is a fifth-generation Californian with Irish roots, her dark hair and strong features lead many to assume she is Eastern European or Middle Eastern.

Ana Paula survived the explosion, Kühn says, but gave birth to her child at the same time that doctors amputated her leg. She is one of an estimated 20,000 people every year maimed or killed by landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO). Although definite numbers are hard to find, some landmine experts have estimated that there are 60 million mines or 71,000 square miles of minefields around the world—enough to cover the entire state of Washington or to allow one explosive for every citizen of the United Kingdom. "When a seed is planted, with sunlight, water, and the human hand, it will grow. That's economic viability," Kühn says. "When a landmine is planted, it only creates a lethal harvest for generations to come."

This is the inspiration for Roots of Peace, she says, which came during a formal dinner she hosted in her San Rafael home for visiting dignitaries the same year that Princess Diana, a landmine removal champion, died.

"It was really an epiphany of sorts. Of turning blood to wine, of turning killing fields into vineyards. I raised my glass in the living room of our home with a toast that ‘the world might go from mines to vines.'"

That toast led to a ten-year mission that began with years of working alone in her basement and has since enveloped her family. Her husband Gary, also a Berkeley graduate, has retired from the tech industry and is now a full-time employee of Roots of Peace. All four of her children have worked in some fashion with the nonprofit, the most visible being Kyleigh, who started at Berkeley last fall.

In conversation, Kühn shows little interest in discussing the details of her organization, preferring to talk instead in broad, emotive strokes about the issue of landmines, which she calls "seeds of hatred." For her, there is an almost poetic, intrinsic connection between sowing seeds and removing landmines. After a conflict in rural Third World countries, she says, people need their farms for economic stability. But if the very soil they need to sow is riddled with hidden explosives, the country is left paralyzed.

"The African farmer cannot stand on his own two feet when he has the fear of a landmine beneath the sole of his foot," she says. "The war is ended, but the hatred goes on until every mine is gotten out of the field."

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