Scottish Father’s Kashmir Campaign

For 37 years, a Scottish father crossed borders, lobbied officials, and held on to hope that never faded.

- Fiza Masoodi

Ona late summer day in 1981, in the meadows of Sonamarg, a young Scottish woman walked out alone and never came back.

Nineteen-year-old Alison MacDonald, a student from Aberdeen, had been traveling through Kashmir with a friend. The two agreed to part for a few days: one left on a pony trek into the hills, Alison stayed behind.

She was last seen buying apples near a bridge. Her rucksack and clothes were later found neatly folded in her guesthouse room.

For six days, her family knew nothing. Then the cable reached Scotland: Alison was missing.

Her father, Kenny MacDonald, was in Edinburgh, only months into his training for the ministry. He had grown up on the Isle of Skye, one of eight children in a Free Church family, and was by then a husband and the father of four. He had only recently left behind a career in Customs and Excise and stepped into the calling he believed God had kept for him.

The cable struck like a hammer. Within days, Kenny was on a plane to India.

The valley he entered was beautiful and confounding. Sonamarg lay beneath peaks that turned gold in late afternoon light. Streams cut through meadows where families picnicked and shepherds led their flocks. Yet when Kenny asked what had happened to his daughter, the answers shifted.

Kashmir police suggested she had fallen into the river. Others said she had wandered into the mountains. Nothing was certain, and everything sounded evasive.

Kenny did not believe the stories. He became convinced that Alison had been taken, forced into a life she had not chosen.

That conviction, born in those first days in Kashmir, shaped the rest of his life.