A Piece of My Heart I Leave Behind

by Diana Janse

The year before Diana Janse went to Kabul, she was a desk officer at the European Security Department in Stockholm. It was an unglamorous and stressful job that entailed working
long hours at her desk, writing instructions for the government’s negotiators at the European Union delegation in Brussels. For the first time since her dream of becoming a diplomat was born, in a shabby student dorm on the outskirts of Moscow in the early 1990s, she doubted her choice of career. This was not what she had had in mind. But then what did she have in mind?
When a new position at the embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, with placement in Kabul, Afghanistan, was posted for the third time, it caught her eye. An escape route had opened up... She applied and left shortly thereafter.

I Leave A Piece of My Heart Behind is part personal diary, part travelogue, and part an account of working as a diplomat in a war-torn and staggeringly poor country. It is a proclamation of love and fascination, but also of frustration, from a Westerner struggling to understand the world of politics and diplomacy in a culture entirely different from her own – while at the same time defending her choices to her family and friends back home.

188 pages, Paperback

Published June 20, 2019

About the author

Ambassador Diana Janse joined the Swedish Foreign Service in 1999. Since then, she has served in Belgrade, Moscow, New York, Kabul, at the EU Council Secretariat in Brussels and in the office of the Swedish Foreign Minister, serving as Minister Bildt’s special assistant, travel coordinator and advisor. In September 2010 she took up a position as the Swedish Ambassador to Georgia, resident in Tbilisi, Georgia. From March 2011 she was also the accredited to Armenia. In August 2014 she left the Caucasus to take up her new position; to head the Swedish Embassy in Damascus, Syria, temporary relocated to Beirut, Lebanon, where she was also accredited. Already in mid-September 2015, she left the region, to take up her current position as Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to Moderaterna, the main opposition party in Sweden, and its party leader, Ms. Anna Kinberg Batra.

Before joining the MFA, Ms. Janse worked in the Ministry of Defence and in the Swedish Military Intelligence. She also spent one year as an interpreter for the UN forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1994.

Ms. Janse holds two degrees from Uppsala University, a Master in Political Science and a Bachelor in Russian Language and Literature.

In 2010, Ms. Janse published a book about her two years in Afghanistan between 2004-2006 - "En del av mitt hjärta lämnar jag kvar", which was well received by critics and readers alike.