How I Met Your Father: a sappy true story of love and war
“It’s not that I really like her that much,” Ole jokes, “but the “how-I-met-your-mother” story was simply too good to be wasted.”

As we fly with our three kids back to Georgia, where we met 10 years ago, I thought to tell this story, my way. It is not quite my genre — there’s very little exposé of human rights violations, and a long, romantic rant, which I hereby devote to a man who made my life so joyful and complete, and to all our friends and colleagues without whom none of that would have happened.
By the summer of 2008 my life was in a bit of turmoil. I separated from my husband, whom I’ve known since we were teenagers, and moved to New York with my 8-year-old son, Danya. I felt sad, and guilty, and unclear about the future. Each new war-zone assignment at the time felt like a welcome escape from reality.
In August, war broke out between Georgia and Russia and the next day, I was on my way to South Ossetia. South Ossetia had been an autonomous region within Soviet Georgia, attempted to gain independence in the early 90s, and since 1992 was under a peacekeeping agreement which involved Georgia and Russia. Low-intensity exchanges of fire between South Ossetian forces, politically supported by Russia, on the one side and Georgian army, on the other, however, continued, and escalated significantly in the summer of 2008. Finally, Georgia attempted to end Russia’s creeping invasion of South Ossetia by bluntly pounding the breakaway republic with hundreds of Grad rockets and moving ground troops into the border villages, killing many. Russian state media hysterically screamed of “genocide” in which “thousands of Ossetians” have been killed within days.
Together with Tanya, my colleague from Human Rights Watch’s Moscow office and a reliable accomplice for some of the most daring missions, we tried to cut through the fog of war and establish what was actually happening. And the fog was thick, especially as the Russian troops quickly moved into Ossetia to push back Georgia’s offensive. We documented the destruction in Tskhinvali and neighbouring villages caused by Georgian artillery attacks and also the looting of ethnic Georgian villages in Ossetia by the local militias. We did what we could to stop both, and in the end enraged the Russian authorities by establishing and exposing the real number of civilian deaths — which was about 10 times lower that what the Russians claimed. We didn’t sleep, we didn’t eat, we drank some seriously hard liquor with people who hosted us, we got detained and questioned, and did some good work in some pretty challenging circumstances. It was perfect.
In the meantime, the Russian army quickly pushed deeper into Georgia, bombed Georgian cities with cluster munitions and ultimately occupied a significant part of Georgian territory beyond South Ossetia.
And so I went to Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. We already had a strong team there. Giorgi, HRW’s Georgia director, and Marc, our weapons expert, worked day and night to document and expose the attacks, highlight the stories of those displaced from South Ossetia, lobby the authorities and run public awareness campaigns to warn the people about mines and cluster bombs. I had a specific task — with my Russian passport I could travel all the way north, into the areas occupied by Russian forces. Ole was the only other person who could go there, as he still had some accreditation papers from his previous job in Russia.

It wasn’t the first time we met. We both had worked for HRW since 2001 but we barely overlapped.
In Georgia, every morning, we would load up the trunk with cigarettes and water and take off, with Ole in the driver’s seat (“which made YOU the navigator!” Ole usually smirks at this point of the story).
“Journalists?” Georgian soldiers inquired as we passed their posts. We smiled and nodded ambiguously. “Where are you from?!” young Russian soldiers demanded at their checkpoints. “Moscow,” I would say in Russian, with my unmistakable Moscow accent, and wave a Russian passport at them, “Are you thirsty? There is some water in the trunk,” I would add, and it sealed the deal.
The suffering Ole and I witnessed in the occupied Georgian villages was overwhelming. Formally under the “protection” of Russian forces, they were left to the mercy of Ossetian militias, who looted, burnt houses and fields, killed, beat, and kidnapped the villagers. We documented, we appealed to the Russian forces to intervene, we gave out our phone numbers so that people could reach us immediately in case of an attack.

The orchards in August groaned with ripe fruits, which the villagers could not sell because the roads and markets have been closed for weeks. They brought them to us instead — our car was saturated with the luscious scent of fresh peaches and plums.
We ate them and chatted, during the endless hours on the road together. Ole talked about growing up on a little farm in Norway, a childhood that seemed as different from my Soviet Moscow childhood as one can imagine. He bragged about his expertise in building snow caves — one of the skills he acquired in the military, along with Russian language. It sounded bizarre but very refreshing as we were melting under the Georgian sun. I tried to explain what it was like growing up in the Soviet Union during the years of Perestroika and how I ended up going into journalism and then human rights work.
It was easy to work and make decisions together, and we never ran out of topics for conversation, and, let’s admit it, I started pausing in front of the mirror a bit longer every morning. But throughout the week, the only chemistry in the car was the mixing aromas of sweat, my cigarettes, and, ultimately, of peaches going slightly off in the trunk… We were colleagues, Ole knew I had a husband and a son, I knew he had just moved to New York to be with his long-term girlfriend.
Each day we tried to move further and further north, to reach the villages closest to the South Ossetian border where most of the violations occurred as they were within easy reach for the militias. The border, however, was nothing but notional. As South Ossetia is part of Georgia, there was nothing that looked like a border demarcation. Inevitably, one day, we made a wrong turn as we were looking for the next village on our list, and drove straight into a South Ossetian police station which presumably doubled as the border post. We immediately stopped. I quickly got out of the car, walked to the soldiers, and asked for help, saying that we’d gotten lost. They just about bought it, but a few other servicemen came out and yelled at us to stop, raising their Kalashnikovs towards us.
The rest unfolded within minutes: they took our cameras, passports, and phones (well, those we handed over), accused us of being Georgian spies, and, before we could explain much, informed their headquarters in Tskhinvali about their successful operation. We were definitely in trouble.
Luckily, we managed to keep some of our multiple cell phones with us, and, once they briefly left us alone, we made a quick call to Giorgi who sprang into action, alerting both the Georgian authorities and our colleagues in Moscow and New York.
They took us to Tshinvali and handed us over to the Ministry of Interior. For many hours, different soldiers and policemen kept interrogating us, asking the same questions, and making the same ridiculous accusations against us. Finally, we ended up in the office of an investigator who was apparently assigned to handle our case. We got seriously lucky. He was sober, smart, polite, and funny, and he knew very well who we were, and didn’t seem to mind. He shared his dinner with us, and helped us write our statements, and protected us from his drunken and stoned colleagues who would every once in a while storm into the room to look at the “spies” and yell another question or a threat at us. But — he didn’t have the power to let us go. By that time, the Minister of Interior himself has been informed of our capture and until his arrival no one would dare to decide our fate.
Meanwhile, in Tbilisi, Moscow, and New York our colleagues and bosses were seriously worried. In New York, it was Rachel, who back in 2001 hired both Ole and myself and was Ole’s supervisor, and Iain, my boss. A few years later, when they jointly officiated our wedding in New York, they cracked a few jokes about those days, but at that moment, I know, they were not amused.
Well after midnight, the Minister showed up, accompanied by a Russian general. Unlike the others, the General was no novice to interrogations, and the next 30 minutes of his rapid-fire questioning seemed quite intense, especially given how tired and hungry we were.
Fortunately, just as he moved to grilling Ole about the details of his “special training” in Norway, the Minister’s phone rang. It was a top international human rights official, whom my colleagues had alerted and implored to intervene on our behalf. We were going to be fine.
Sometime later, a local official came to get us and took us to his home. We got food, tea, a couch for me and a mattress on the floor for Ole. It was hard to fall asleep after what we’ve just been through, so we talked, and, I seem to remember, got into a pillow fight. Nothing else.
Next morning, the Russian military took us back across the border to our car and we got clear instructions from our supervisors to go straight back to Tbilisi — to rest, reflect and account for all of the security protocol breaches we might have committed.
We started driving back to Tbilisi. But after just a few kilometres, we suddenly saw a car driving toward us. It was unusual — all the cars in this area had stolen by looters. Within split seconds, as the car got closer, I saw that the four men inside were Ossetian, and Ole noticed the license plate. They waved us to stop.
We couldn’t afford to get detained again — even if the Ossetians would not have killed us, New York surely would have, as they’ve clearly had enough of our adventures the night before.
Instead of stopping, Ole floored the gas pedal.
At that moment, it all came together. His blue eyes, his luminous smile. His sincere concern for the people we were trying to help, without playing the hero. His ability to make complex logistical and substantive decisions without claiming credit. The stories of his unusual life which he told simply, without pretension. The way he made me feel safe, admired, and appreciated. The way he made me laugh.
As the Ossetian car turned around and gave chase, and Ole fixated on the road — his hands squeezing the steering wheel as he started making multiple turns to smaller and smaller side roads, kicking up dust clouds to confuse our pursuers — I fell hopelessly in love.
The time lapsed, and then stopped abruptly as we realised there were no more roads to turn to and slammed into someone’s courtyard. An old Georgian man ran out of the house, his hands in the air, convinced that we were Ossetian looters and begging us not to shoot. We got out to reassure him and signalled to him to keep quiet. We sat in the car, and waited. We didn’t have a plan, there was nothing else we could do. The old man went back to the house and brought us a peach. Just one, but it was huge. We halved it with a pair of scissors from the first-aid kit, and ate, juice streaming down our hands and faces. I wouldn’t have chosen to be anywhere else in the world at that moment. In fact, if a therapist asks me one day to describe my happy place, this would be it. And I suspect any responsible therapist would promptly prescribe many more hours of therapy…
After some time, we realised the pursuers must have lost us.
We stayed a bit longer, and suddenly my phone rang — people from a nearby village sad that a car with four armed militias had come and the looters took some tractors from them at gunpoint. Before heading to Tbilisi, we stopped in that village to document the case and then reported the incident to the Russian forces at the nearest checkpoint, who, to our surprise, took it seriously and sent an armoured carrier to chase the looters. We heard afterwards that they had eventually captured them.
Back in Tbilisi, we went through hours of talks and debriefs with our colleagues, so we had plenty of time to process the security incident — but not much to reflect on what was going on between the two of us.
The next day, my last in Georgia, was no better. We travelled all day with the CNN crew filming our work, taking them to the villages, showing the cameraman unexploded cluster munitions, explaining the context, and doing stand-ups in the ruins of burnt-down house.
On the way back, one of the journalists suddenly asked, “Anya, who takes care of your son when you are on mission?” “He sometimes stays with my ex-husband,” I said, not wanting to expand on the subject. Ole, who was still driving, gave me a brief and strange look. Until that moment he didn’t realise the husband was “ex” as we haven’t really spoken much of our private lives.
In the evening we were sitting in my hotel room, with Ole and Giorgi, drafting a press-release about the new incidents of looting in Russian-occupied region, and sipping some Cognac to mark the last day of my trip. At one point, Giorgi, who was not only a colleague and a friend, but a host, which in this part of the world presumes multiple additional responsibilities, stepped out — to send off the presser and get some more booze. Our eyes met, and then hands, and Ole reached over and stole a kiss. He was terrified, he told me later. And I am terrified, to this day, every time I think he might not have.
And then I got into a car and went to the airport, all the way getting his ridiculous love texts which made all the “butterflies in my stomach” (one of the first Norwegian expressions I learnt) go crazy.
In Moscow, my mother, who works for HRW Moscow office and thus helped with logistics for both of our trips and heard about our night in detention together, somehow knew it all already. “You and Ole are such a beautiful couple,” she said matter-of-factly, almost the moment I walked into my Moscow flat. “Three kids would be a good number.” “We are not a couple!”, I laughed nervously in response. “And three kids– counting Danya or not?!” I’ve always wondered what kind of dark witchcraft my mother practiced under the disguise of her life-long career as a professor in chemistry and physics of polymers…
I felt wonderful… and sad. I was old enough to not believe in love from the first sight. I’ve seen too many colleagues mistaking mission romance for real feelings. I barely knew Ole — and what I knew made me feel like we came from different planets. I was getting ready to land back in reality.
Ole, in the meantime, didn’t seem to be agonising much. He simply changed his flight, came to Moscow the day after me, and invited me for our first date. It took place in a BBC studio café over plates of pasta. The pasta was quickly getting cold and the conversation hard to follow as every fifteen minutes I would run into the studio to get miked, check the connection, and then do the interview.
A few days after we both returned to New York, he ended his relationship, came over for dinner and, basically, never left.
He quickly and effortlessly became friends with my son, and after a few months it was hard to believe that there was ever a time when we weren’t together. The feeling that we come from different planets didn’t immediately go away. The third date was an epic fail. He took me to see the ventriloquist Jeff Dunham. Raised in the sophisticated tradition of Russian stand-up comedy, I smiled politely and couldn’t believe anybody would laugh at that (full disclosure, I warmed up to Jeff Dunham eventually). I almost ended it when Ole fell asleep watching my favourite movie, Claude Lelouch’s “A man and a woman.”
Ole found my taste in music horrendous and I gave up trying to explain the point of poetry to him.
And then, none of this mattered.

We became a dream work partners as HRW started sending us on missions together — first reluctantly and then as a matter of course. Sri Lanka, Kyrgyzstan, Syria… We got through frontlines posing as a vacationing couple; wrote reports in record time because we could literally finish each other’s sentences and thus work, when necessary, through days and nights without a break; we drove through checkpoints, sought shelter from the bombs, and confronted hostile authorities and rebels. We fought fiercely over paragraphs in the report, security plans, or advocacy strategies — but never about anything else.

In between, we danced salsa, travelled all over the world with Danya and friends, moved houses and countries, got married in three different ceremonies, and, one by one, produced the three additional kids my mom had predicted.
At times, I feel like we’ve been together forever, not just in this, but in all of our previous lives. And then there are moments I am struggling to believe it’s been ten years. I look at our kids, our “grown-up” house, his greying hair and my emerging wrinkles and wonder: wasn’t it just yesterday that we were sitting in the car on a deserted road in the middle of Georgia, savouring the peaches?

We don’t work together anymore, having left Human Rights Watch to join other organisations, and if there is one thing that I miss most in my current life, it’s that — heading into the unknown together, and together fighting against all odds for the abused and the forgotten.
For now, we have to take turns. While one goes into the field, the other changes diapers, fixes playdates, runs to after-school activities and attends parent-teacher conferences.
We’ve missed or forgotten most of our anniversaries, but this time we couldn’t be anywhere else. We sit in Tbilisi, around a table which, as always, has enough food to feed an army, all of it delicious. Giorgi, who by now also has three gorgeous children, and is our daughter’s godfather, raises a glass, and the toasts begin. Rachel is here, and my parents, and I look at them all, counting my countless blessings. Cheers to this beautiful place, may it be peaceful forever. Cheers to our wonderful friends and loved ones, who have been with us through everything. Cheers to our three sons and daughter who will one day read this story and roll their eyes, or maybe smile. Cheers to you, Ole Solvang, the love of my life. One day, you’ll be driving again and I’ll navigate, and we’ll inevitably get in trouble again. Cheers to that.

