A GRANDMOTHER from the North-East has been saluted for her courage high in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Mounted tribesmen held a buzkashi tournament - a game of skill and daring where riders chase wildly after a stuffed goat skin.

The contest was held at a dizzy 4,000 metres above sea level in honour of 58-year-old Unicef worker Hermione Youngs, who is supervising the delivery of 200 metric tonnes of food, clothing and medicines into Afghanistan from Pakistan. Hermione's diary entry for Wednesday states: "All the 200 metric tons of materials have been distributed to the people who will take it over the ShahSaleem pass.

Today will be a day of re-packing of those materials that are not yet in double sacks (single sacks not being strong enough to withstand being roped to and hanging from donkey backs).

"Two Afghan colleagues from our partner Norwegian Afghanistan Committee have already left to ensure everything is organised on the other side of the mountain to receive the convoy. The whole team is working very hard."

Hermione, from Guisborough, east Cleveland, had only two boiled potatoes to eat all day and faces another night on a mountainside.

She spent Wednesday night huddled 3,800 metres up alongside several hundred Afghan tribesmen, surrounded by "hundreds of donkeys and horses with feed bags over their noses", on a darkened slope, with the lights of a village a thousand metres below her. She said that the night transport up and down the track, with a thousand metre drop on one side, had been terrifying, though there were no injuries reported.

The Pakistani authorities have proved very helpful. A spokeswoman for Unicef said Hermione's convoy is one of the largest convoys ever to have been run through the Shah Saleem pass - and is the first since the terrorist attacks on America.