Working the home front fund-raising effort is another of Ms. Rea's colleagues — Richard Joselson, senior supervising attorney in the Criminal Appeals Bureau of Queens Legal Aid and a member of the ILF board of directors.

If all goes well over the next few months with funding efforts to sustain Legal Aid Afghanistan for the two to three years Ms. Rea believes is needed to meet the project goals, then she and Mr. Joselson will be looking for more and more volunteer attorneys from both the public and private bars.

"It's a fascinating opportunity far outside the day-to-day range of defense work," said Mr. Joselson. In past ILF initiatives, he said, volunteer lawyers have worked in Sierra Leone and Rwanda. "You learn a tremendous amount about the place you're going, and about the world."

Ms. Ross described the lessons she is soon to learn in Afghanistan a bit more bluntly.

"You deal with the mighty and the lowly," she said. "I think [the ILF board] picked me to go over there because they were impressed with my experience at Providence House. That was where you had basically a bunch of white nuns dealing with black and Hispanic ex-offenders.

"I'd go off to get these fancy awards, but also I'd scrub the floors." In Afghanistan, said Ms. Ross, "I expect some parallel experience."

To be sure, there is culture shock in store for Ms. Ross. For instance, in all Afghanistan there is only one female criminal lawyer, Najiba Taj, a one-time juvenile court judge who is part of the Legal Aid team in Kabul.

Ms. Rea is also careful to remind volunteers that Afghans and others view American lawyers and the American legal practice with a fair amount of skepticism.

"We should remember that the U.S., the richest and most developed country in the world, has the death penalty," said Ms. Rea, "and has not signed the [United Nations] conventions on the rights of women or children and, at this moment, is not providing counsel to prisoners deemed 'enemy combatants.' "

This is not to say that encounters with skeptical Afghans are entirely without humor.

In a patchy telephone interview from Kabul, Ms. Rea spoke of discussing the crime of sodomy with an elderly Afghan judge who spoke neither English nor French, in which Ms. Rea is fluent.

"Imagine the sign language we used — "

The phone went temporarily dead.

Then Ms. Rea's voice returned to say, "I have to go now. They're walking around in bullet-proof vests."