Volunteer Returns Home to Rebuild

By Dee Anne Finken

Ahmad Qayoumi believes in building democracy one city street at a time. A civil engineer for the city of Vancouver in southwest Washington, Qayoumi is volunteering on a $2 million effort to help rebuild war-ravaged Kabul, Afghanistan -- street by street, block by block. For Qayoumi, 36, the project has personal importance, as he called the capital city home until he was 12, when invading Soviets forced him and his brother Mohammad to flee to neighboring Pakistan.

Licensed as a civil engineer, Qayoumi is teaming with a former supervisor who now works with the International City County Management Association. At the request of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the association has assisted in humanitarian and development efforts around the world since 1989. Qayoumi’s project, of course, pales in comparison with other reconstruction efforts undertaken by the U.S. and other countries, including Japan and members of the European Union. The USAID alone has directed $2 billion in aid to rebuild Afghanistan so far.

Yet as small as it is, Qayoumi is confident his effort will have significant impact. "It’s just like here," he points out. "When people ask to have their sidewalk or roads fixed, or something about their water taken care of, they appreciate it." Furthermore, given history, Qayoumi says continued reconstruction efforts will help convince Afghanis that the U.S. and other democracies are sincere about spreading freedom. "During the Cold War, the United States helped the Afghan freedom fighters defeat the Russians, and once the Russians left, from my understanding, we left them, too," says Qayoumi. "That’s when all the terrorists began brewing there, and a lot of the Afghan people we met are concerned that the United States might leave again. Doing this builds our credibility."

Born in Kabul, Qayoumi and Mohammad had to slip over the Pakistan border to flee invading Soviets in 1982. Since then, Qayoumi has watched from afar as his homeland has been pummeled by 25 years of fighting, including the retaliatory strikes the U.S. launched after the Taliban-led terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. After spending a year and a half in refugee camps in Pakistan, Qayoumi made his way to the U.S. with a refugee visa. He joined Mohammad, an electrical engineer and computer scientist, who had already made his home in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Thankful the Taliban has been defeated, Qayoumi says extensive work remains to be done. Two years ago, the United Nations estimated the cost to rebuild Afghanistan at $15 billion over the next 10 years. Right now, bombed-out buildings predominate in the country, notes Qayoumi, who took personal vacation time to travel there this summer with his colleague Jon Bormet, the former supervisor. Few homes have running water, and most have only latrines or pit toilets. "A majority of the drainage system is uncovered, and a lot of time, sewage leaks into the storm drains from the latrines," Qayoumi remarks.

In Kabul, the men met with mayor Ghulam Sahki Noorzad and his staff and came up with a proposal to upgrade a mile-long section of roadway. Kabul consists of 18 districts, and the plan is to complete the $2 million reconstruction and then encourage Kabul officials and workers to replicate that effort themselves in the other 17 districts. "There is no end to what you can put into the country because it is in total need of rebuilding," said Qayoumi. "But just now, we can do some small projects."

Bormet describes the work as demanding. "It’s not glamorous, just hard work, patching streets, helping the sanitation department pick up trash regularly, ditch cleaning so that water will flow away and not flood homes, helping reforest the city, all those basic things that people in the United States take for granted."

Although Kabul is in shambles today, Qayoumi recalls a childhood home where parks were plentiful and tourists came from Pakistan, the Soviet Union, Iran, and even the U.S. during the hippie years of the 1960s. "It was a cultural center," he says. The years of warring and a drought now seven years old have changed all that. "It’s very primitive. Just imagine a dusty area with a lot of the vegetation gone. Most of the houses are made of mud. There are very small houses with lots of people living together. People function, but they’re very much in the honeymoon stage of being free. At some point, they will ask for services, but right now they’re enjoying their new-found freedom."

As the project unfolds, Qayoumi will remain in Vancouver, visiting Kabul on occasion. The grant will pay for two Afghan-American engineers, who will live and work in Kabul for up to two years supervising the project.

Qayoumi said in too many locales in Afghanistan, workers have insufficient tools and equipment. "The trucks are 30 years old. They are from the Russians. In some places, they don’t even have wrenches to work on them with." Equipment is so basic that much of the work must be done manually. "They work on a very primitive level, with just a shovel and a wheelbarrow." In modern countries, public improvement work can take place year round, regardless of the climate. But because so much of the reconstruction will be done without sophisticated equipment, Qayoumi says winter and summer weather extremes could cause problems.

When he first arrived in his homeland this summer -- the first time in 22 years -- Qayoumi says he was upset by the reports of killings and brutalizing by the warlords and others. "It was horrific."
But he said his spirit was lifted by the positive attitude of the Afghans. "That motivated me to help them more."

Qayoumi earned his B.S. degree in civil engineering from the University of Cincinnati in 1992 and an M.S. degree, also in civil engineering, from Portland State University in Oregon in 2000. He had originally planned to study electrical engineering, but he got a taste of the civil variety when he boarded at the home of the dean of the civil engineering school at the University of Cincinnati. He completed an internship in civil engineering and found it more to his liking.

Starting his career, Qayoumi worked for the municipalities of Mason and Montgomery Counties in Ohio as chief subdivision engineer and assistant city engineer respectively. Then he worked for two years in Sherwood, Oregon as director of engineering services. He has worked in Vancouver more than five years and now serves as its manager of a state-mandated program to implement transportation standards. The latter two jobs have involved general civil engineering projects, including overseeing sanitation, public works management, and construction management efforts. Little did Qayoumi know that this experience would set the stage for him to play a meaningful role in rebuilding his homeland, bringing democracy in the process.

Dee Anne Finken is a freelance writer in Vancouver, Washington.