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Like a politician, Mustafa Omar often speaks with his hands. He is doing it now, seated astutely behind his modest office desk. Caught between the duties of his desktop and the allusions to his heritage crowding the four walls of this Oshkosh office, Omar slices slowly through the air with his left hand, softly accentuating his current talking point.
Omar - a tall, handsome and sure but soft-spoken man of 31 - recounts his childhood. His palms move in a different direction entirely. Lost for a moment in telling an extraordinarily brief snippet from his already-extraordinary life, the right hand nuzzles up against his cheek and Omar’s gaze moves out across the expanse of a cartographic collage in his eyesight.
One might marvel at the tasks those hands have accomplished – going to work at a medical school in Kabul, fleeing to Tajikistan as a 22-year-old refugee, reorganizing his dried goods stock following yet another robbery, motioning to explain himself to corrupt law enforcement, or rebuilding communities following disaster and conflict.
Omar begins with the nervous laughter he interjects in so much of his storytelling. It is unclear whether he does it to make the listener feel at ease or to simply heal his own wounds. Perhaps it is a bit of both. Asked why he left Kabul in 1998, the hand is still supporting his face. He vaguely alludes to his departure but jumps quickly into where the exodus led.
“The life of a refugee is not a fun life to live,” he understatedly offers. It is a claim anyone can immediately attest to, while never literally experiencing its truth. And it is at that moment one realizes that no amount of inquiry could ever allow them to understand where Mustafa Omar’s hands have been.
But another question remains. Where are they going?
***
Omar is not actually a politician. Nor is he a celebrity of any sort. His current job title – Program Development Manager at Shelter For Life International – provides a glimpse at the nonprofit work he does in foreign community development. But more broadly speaking, Mustafa Omar is a searcher.
If there has been a problem in Omar’s broad field – which includes both immediate humanitarian response as well as long-term foreign development – it is that the top of the chain is so incredibly far removed from the bottom. Expert economist William Easterly, in his recent book, says that foreign aid belongs to the world of planners, rather than searchers. And the planners – implementing their top-down universal solutions that rarely live up to promises – need searchers to actually find what works from the ground-up.
Of course that would mean bringing the same standards of accountability and professionalism to agencies across the entire pay-grade spectrum. It would mean valuing experience alongside credentials, as well as relationship building alongside idealism. It might even make for a few bruised egos.
“There’s a ‘you tried’ kind of attitude a lot of times,” Omar says. “A lot of times people come volunteer, and if you volunteer it demonstrates how passionate you are. But at the same time you feel like, ‘Well, I’m giving my time, so you have to be thankful for it.’ But you’re not giving your time if you’re getting paid money for it. So why do you expect this world to react differently?
“Basic reward principles [are what we need]. It is challenging, to be honest with you. Because a lot of us within here, we have individuals who are very dedicated, do a wonderful job, but never ever use the business terms. If you say ‘company’ they will get upset with you. ‘We’re not a company' [they say]. Which, I don’t buy it."
At Shelter For Life (SFL), Omar earned the opportunity to witness first-hand how things work in the more corporate office setting. He serves as a liaison between the field and the government donor community, communicating need in proposal form to tackle various projects in post-conflict and post-disaster situations across the globe.
SFL does this by building homes, but also through the construction of schools, clinics, or any number of projects contributing to the infrastructure of a community. Sometimes that may mean building a bridge and other times it may be engineering a permanent water source. By identifying needs on the ground beforehand and using a predominantly local staff, SFL projects aim to best serve a community based on the actual expression of its most pressing needs.
Ideally, these needs are expressed through the voices of refugees themselves. This is what makes Omar such a valuable asset in his field. He knows these people on the ground. He was one.
“It might mean something to you to say ‘alleviate suffering’ because you can’t see someone going through it,” Omar says. “It might mean something else for me because I was there.
“It happens all the time. What we interpret, how we interpret is, I think, heavily influenced by our life experience.”
For Omar, the life experience began in Kabul, where he lived in a compound made up of 24 scientists and their families. His father, who taught physics at the local university, was the only nuclear physicist in Afghanistan at the time. Others had left, drawn by opportunities abroad, but Omar’s father stayed behind out of a sense of loyalty.
Following high school in Kabul, Omar enrolled in medical school after what he described as a “difference in opinion” with his father. Omar felt a passion to go into engineering. Dad said if young Mustafa did not choose medicine, he would not be proud.
“So I got into medicine,” Omar recalls. “I said, ‘I got into it. Can I transfer to engineering?’ he said, ‘No, people will say you couldn’t do it.'”
This is one of those moments in which Omar generates a somewhat nervous and reflective laugh. He smiles and continues with his story. “So when I came to the U.S. [in 2003], I said, ‘Well, I’m independent now. I’m going to do what I want.”
He never did finish medical school. After his fourth year out of seven, Mustafa Omar left Kabul on his own.
***
Fittingly enough, Omar keeps a reminder of the now famous planners versus searchers ideal tacked on the wall of his office.
A searcher embraces the fact that he or she does not already have the answers. A searcher proposes homegrown solutions and concentrates on the specific tasks that can be accounted for. And a searcher never stops asking what is working, why it is working and how it can work better.
“What is it that makes the business world successful, and how can you apply it in the nonprofit world?” Omar asks rhetorically, addressing what he considers to be a search that may drive him for some time.
In order to figure this out, the aspiring engineer turned medical student turned entrepreneurial refugee has now taken up a supplemental education in the evening hours. Omar will graduate with an economics degree from UW-Oshkosh in January, and will then turn his focus toward his new dream of obtaining both an MBA and Ph.D. in finance. It is a schedule that required him to complete 47 credits in the last year, cramming in the end so he could finish in time to prepare for a March wedding.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever had to tell him to do something,” says his fiancée, Jennifer Turner.
Whether debating politics with friends or listening to nonfiction audiobooks in the car, Omar lets few moments go to waste. And with all the ideas floating through his mind combined with the vantage points through which Omar has seen the world, he seems bound to develop some novel opinions.
“The [business] principles, that’s one thing that I’m most interested in,” Omar says.
Foremost amongst those principles, Omar highlights the “culture of accountability” which he finds lacking in nonprofit, international humanitarian work. Often times, he believes that people are not held to the same standards as would be appropriate in a business setting.
“Of course, a performance reward would not be based on how much more money you made for the company, but how well you got the job done,” Omar says.
The comparison he loves to make is one that puts the humanitarian field on par with any local business, despite the difference in goals.
“The problem with [only wonderful intentions] is that this profession, for the most part, is not always looked at as a profession,” Omar says. “It’s looked at, ‘Oh yeah, we’re do-gooders.’ But like any other sphere of work, we have professional accountants, as Oshkosh Truck would, our project manager on the field who will have to deliver what another business expects from their project manager.
“The well-intentioned individuals look at is as, ‘Hey, I can do something.’ But they waste a lot.”
***
The reasons Omar left home lack detail. He says there are “many.” But it would be a challenge to earn the unabridged version.
“There’s a lot about his past I still don’t know,” says Pete Pantzer, a close friend and co-worker who asked Omar to serve as the best man in his wedding earlier this year.
Pantzer and Omar met in Tajikistan in 2002, two months after Pantzer had started renting a two-bedroom apartment. They tried living together and became good friends in the process. Omar had already been in Tajikistan since 1999, whereas Pantzer was laid off at a software company in San Francisco and then decided to move in a different direction.
Omar had left Kabul early in 1998, living in northern Afghanistan until he connected with distant family – his father’s second cousin – on their way north to Tajikistan.
In December 1998 they arrived in Tajikistan, and Omar started a small business buying and selling dried goods. “I was robbed so many times, I thought it was better to join a lower-paid company than continue with the business,” he laughs.
Such an opportunity appeared in the figure of Randall Olson, now the president and CEO of SFL. Omar met Olson in an international church in 1999. Olson had been serving as the country director for Tajikistan, and soon enough, Omar started work for SFL.
“You wake up, and that is the day,” Omar says. “You go to bed, and that’s the end of the day. Literally, 7:30 [a.m.] to 11 p.m., nonstop.”
During these years in Tajikistan, Omar got an even deeper understanding of what his current work means to people on the ground. Perhaps in response to the era of sweeping yet unsuccessful top-down “structural adjustment” strategies formulated by the big global players, now an expanding emphasis focuses on stimulating growth from the bottom-up.
Muhammad Yunus, father of the Grameen Bank and architect of the microcredit principles designed to empower the poor through small savings and access to credit, won a Nobel Prize in October for his work. Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital shed light on the incredible barriers to land rights and small business formation in developing countries.
What Yunus, de Soto and many others have exposed is an alternative to those who stereotype the poor as inferior, rather than burdened by the lack of starting points – like small business loans or the ability to possess a deed as collateral. Disaster relief, sustainability and economic stimulation are all about more than carrying boxes from one world to the next. And Omar knows it.
“In the humanitarian world, shelter and housing have been downplayed to the greatest extent,” he theorizes. “I think maybe it’s expensive. You can build a house for a thousand dollars and you can spend a thousand dollars and feed probably 500 children. The immediate visible impact is probably greater. But does it last longer?
“We don’t look at shelter as four walls and a roof. It’s more foundation for a stable and secure society.”
“There are instances in every setting that you can pick on,” Omar says. “In hotspots, in Afghanistan and Iraq, do the politicians want to have visible results? Not all of those visible results end up in sustainable work.”
SFL espouses some of these very ideals in its mission. Its website says it “understands that sustainable communities are built through the shared involvement of local people” and that “full community participation and ownership is critical.”
In the process, people are provided with an accessible voice in which to express their needs. Omar does concede the need to have people at the top doing great things as well. “What we do here does have a direct effect on what can get accomplished in the field,” Pantzer reinforces.
The top can only function properly, however, when the foundation is in place. It is representative of what Omar has experienced that he might approach things with a heavy emphasis on building relationships on the ground – searching over planning.
That usually leads to places no one’s even talking about yet. Some ideas, like eradicating poverty through profits, are still in their relative infancies. But that specific concept, which calls for the corporate world to rethink the way it approaches and creates markets, is the type of idea Omar is crazy about.
***
According to Omar, 60 percent of his native city Kabul has been burned. You can imagine what that might do to the housing market.
“The structure is that if you pay cash, you can own one,” Omar says. “If not, good luck. If we could develop something like a mortgage system, it would create an incentive for those middle-income or low-income who have no way to own a house otherwise.”
What these challenges need, Omar maintains, are the minds of devoted foot soldiers ready to utilize the “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid” – the title of a book Omar recommends. This fortune can be viewed both in terms of untapped financial markets, but also in terms of original ideas.
Initiating these conversations and unlocking solutions requires enormous amounts of skill and patience. A weekend jaunt to Kabul is not going to inspire a mortgage solution, but embedding people in communities for long periods of time just might.
Omar consistently reiterates what he feels to be a stigma towards nonprofit agencies like his – that they require only the same background and time commitment as volunteering at the neighborhood animal shelter. That maybe a bit pessimistic, but it is likely that much of the public does not comprehend the expertise that is needed to run a successful operation, be it with engineers, accountants, lawyers, journalists, economists and a host of others.
“As for general public understanding of these skill sets, I would think it would be reflective of the larger understanding of foreign aid in general, which is somewhat limited – and a big reason why I and many of my colleagues engage in training and outreach activities on a regular basis,” says Charles Setchell, Shelter, Settlements and Hazard Mitigation Advisor at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Setchell referenced the murders of humanitarian workers, not to mention the more common characteristics of longer hours, worse working conditions, lower pay and long distance from family and friends.
These points are made not to encourage people to be afraid, but to be challenged. Every day in Omar’s field is a challenge. And if it isn’t, someone’s not working hard enough.
But amidst these exotic and trying positions may be opportunities that were not available before because no one had bothered to search for them. Not everyone needs to play the same role. Many people, not just Mustafa Omar, can place a two-hour conference call to that troubled spot in Sudan rather than design a bridge. And they can do this from an office in Oshkosh.
At times if one believes in the potential of eradicating poverty through profit, that person may instead end up working for a Madison firm that is developing a technology that allows rural Malawian farmers to coordinate cassava markets and improve agricultural techniques. As the searching uncovers fresh ideas, the opportunities will evolve accordingly.
SFL set up its Oshkosh headquarters out of a basement in the 1980s. And they didn’t even have Blogger. Whether in Washington or Wisconsin, what happens next could all depend on the searcher.
Most of that future figures to be inspired by people on the ground. It is not only about intellect and skill, but people – working in conjunction with them, communicating and learning from them, and ultimately delivering to them.
Omar is in the unique position of knowing the people that need to be spoken to, and bringing that knowledge into the traditional planning role. His bride-to-be speaks glowingly of Omar’s love for people. He loves to listen, and is the type of guy who just calls up random friends to talk, or hardly lets a day pass when he doesn’t check in on his family, now in Atlanta. His father passed away, so Omar inherited that role in addition to all the other hats he dons.
Or he will be driving through the neighborhood with Turner, recommending they stop the car in a friend’s driveway and just go spend time with them. “Let’s be third-worlders,” he will joke. She balances him out as the more introverted half of the couple, reminding Omar they can’t just show up on people’s doorsteps unannounced. They share a laugh over it. But he is making some headway with her in the shyness department.
“He’s always told me, if you don’t fit in, make yourself fit in,” Turner says. “Make them spend time with you.”
Omar certainly takes his own advice, and it is that attitude that leads to challenging beliefs and seeking solutions.
Because when you boil it all down, what Mustafa Omar is advocating is not holding out his hands in pity. He is doing much more than that.
He is digging. He is searching.
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(c) curb magazine 2006