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This week, Video Journalist Yalda Hakim returns to her birthplace, Kabul. In 1983 her father risked death by smuggling his young family out of Afghanistan on horseback to Pakistan, to escape the Russian invasion. Yalda was six months old. While Yalda's parents embark on an emotional family reunion, she takes her camera to an opium den, a drug rehab center, a refugee camp and a hospital, keen to understand why the city of her birth is so vastly different to what she'd expected.

She often travels hidden in the boot of a relative's car - they know she stands out as a foreigner and they fear she'll be targeted by kidnappers. Yalda even comes across Oliver Percovich, an Australian ex-pat, who's desperately trying to make a difference by teaching Afghan children how to skate. He donates skateboards to local kids, in an attempt to inject some fun into their lives.

When she's not filming, Yalda stays with various relatives, all of whom she's never met before. She shares their lives, which includes no electricity and intermittent running water. But the most confronting moment comes when Yalda meets her paternal grandparents for the first time.
When she walks into the room she feels nothing towards these strangers. They can't stop looking at her, touching her, yet she feels distinctly uncomfortable. Yalda also meets aunts, cousins and nieces for the first time, but sees little of herself in them. Her overwhelming emotion is guilt: why does she live with so much, when they survive on so little?

Also in this episode, Video Journalist Aaron Lewis enters the warped and murderous world of Guatemala’s gangs. It’s a world where orphaned street kids are adopted into a “family”, but only after their initiation: killing someone (often a friend) and then surviving a beating by adults.

About International Dateline 

SBS Dateline, which began in 1984, is Australia's longest-running international current affairs program. It has a well-earned reputation for authoritative and incisive reporting. Dateline has taken the traditional way of producing TV current affairs and turned it on its head. Reporters who used to travel with a cameraperson and sound recordist now travel alone and have the responsibility of both filming and reporting their stories. The reporters became video-journalists, gaining access to people and places that the conventional camera crews cannot.