Goodbye, Comfort; Hello, Service

Omar Samad left behind an $80,000-a-year computer job in Washington, charged $3,000 worth of air fare for his wife and himself, and headed back to his homeland to help forge a new Afghanistan.

As recently named spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, he has no idea what his salary will be, when he’ll get paid or if he’ll be reimbursed for the airline tickets. The pay for most senior government jobs is about $50 a month.

His childhood home is a pile of rubble, as is most of this once-vibrant capital he fled two decades ago. Instead of the luxury Northern Virginia high-rise condo the couple is paying off, Samad and his wife make do with a borrowed bedroom.

Samad, 40, who dedicated his time in the United States to bringing Afghanistan’s plight to the world’s attention via a radio station he founded and speeches across the country, is getting the chance to turn his crusade from afar into reality from within.

“I wanted to do something I was good at and be effective,” Samad said.

In his feisty wife, Hassina Sherjan Samad, he has found a ready compatriot for this odyssey. They met three years ago at a Hollywood benefit for Afghans, where the two refugees got into an argument about whether the event truly helped their nation’s cause.

Like the Samads, droves of educated Afghan exiles are giving up the comfortable lives they built in the U.S. and Europe, and often leaving their families behind, to help rebuild their homeland. Many plan to stay indefinitely.

Deputy Foreign Minister Rahim Sherzoy, formerly of Stockton, now resides at the Intercontinental. Kabul’s best hotel is an oppressively drab, hulking, Soviet-style building where some rooms sport bullet holes and others bird nests. The closest thing to a shower comes when a bellboy delivers a bucket of hot water in response to a shout down the hall. Outside, soldiers sport Kalashnikov rifles.

Then there are the constant cold and lack of central heat, the power outages, the dusty air choked with diesel fumes and the curfew that forces everyone off the streets at 10 p.m.

Phone calls to the U.S. cost at least $1 a minute and sometimes as much as $3. Internet access is just as expensive. The only safe commercial route into and out of the city is via a $600-each-way United Nations charter flight to Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, which seems like paradise compared with Kabul.

“My wife didn’t want this,” said Sherzoy, 68. She remained behind with their children and grandchildren in Northern California, where they have lived for 18 years.

“But I want to serve for the rest of my life here,” said the former career diplomat, who served as ambassador to Czechoslovakia and Pakistan but retired when he fled to the U.S. “They [the Afghans] are poor and needy.”

Raheen Makhdoom, 54, the interim government’s information and culture minister, returned in December, leaving his wife and two grown children in Annandale, Va., where he had formed the nonprofit Assn. for Peace and Democracy for Afghanistan. Makhdoom did not even wait to get a temporary filling replaced after a root canal. He has nowhere to have the painful tooth fixed now that the filling has fallen out.

He asked his daughter to reduce her college course load and work more to support the family. His wife, who is employed at a bank, is working more as well.

One Returnee Wants a ‘Meaningful’ Life

Makhdoom left Kabul a decade ago and had been active in the Afghan resistance movement in Pakistan and the United States. This is his second term as the information and culture minister. He held the post first in 1978, before being put under house arrest by the then-Communist government for 14 months.

Now his job is to help rebuild the country’s arts, theater, national museums and media, most of which were destroyed by the Taliban.

“Life in the U.S. is comfortable and full of fun and happiness,” he said. “But for me, the life in Kabul is meaningful.”

There are others with similar stories. Central Bank Gov. Abdul Q. Fitrat, 38, is another expatriate who returned, leaving behind his wife and 19-month-old son in northern Virginia. Sharif Faez, 56, of Ashburn, Va., gave up a translation business to become minister of higher education.

Some expatriates have come seeking to make a buck, start businesses or work with humanitarian groups. For the most part, they’ve been warmly received by Afghans who remained during more than two decades of war. Some locals gripe privately, however, that exiles often are favored over locals for civil service positions. For instance, some exiles will serve on a panel that is outlining how the all-important loya jirga, or grand council, will choose the next leader of the country.

“We lived through the Taliban and civil war,” said one Afghan woman who works for a humanitarian group. “We know best what has happened in Afghanistan.”

For all of his crusading from afar on behalf of Afghanistan, Samad returned to Kabul somewhat of a stranger. Most of his family and friends had followed him to the United States long ago. The ruins left by 23 years of warfare shocked and frustrated him. “The whole system has been destroyed,” he said.

Not a single windowpane or desk remains at the elite French school he attended. Its once state-of-the-art theater is now “open air”--thanks to the huge bomb hole in the wall behind the stage.

“The country, the city, are not the same,” he said. “And the people aren’t the same either after two decades of fighting.”

Samad had spent some of his childhood living in London and Paris while his father served as a diplomat. But when he returned to Afghanistan as a teenager in 1978, it was to a reign of “red terror” that followed the country’s takeover by a leftist regime.

Those who were educated, religious, Westernized--anyone deemed a threat by the Communists--were targeted. The disappearance and presumed death of his best friend changed him forever, Samad said, pushing him “toward a commitment to do something.”

Samad’s family, afraid that he would be drafted into the military, arranged to get him out of the country when he was 17, just months before Soviet forces moved in and began a 10-year occupation that killed about 1 million people and caused 6 million to flee the country.

Eventually Samad arrived in Virginia to live with an uncle and was joined several months later by the rest of his family. But he never stopped thinking, talking, dreaming and campaigning about Afghanistan. While attending community college in Virginia, where he studied computer programming, he formed an Afghan students association to help refugees in Pakistan.

Previous U.S. Help Allegedly Misdirected

Over the next few years, while he worked full time and earned a bachelor’s degree at night, he devoted his few free hours to the cause. He lectured at colleges. He was happy to see the U.S. involved in helping to rid his country of the Soviets during the 1980s but argued that the aid was going to the wrong groups in Pakistan.

Over the years, he did commentaries on Afghan issues for the major U.S. television networks and wrote for a weekly publication aimed at Afghan Americans. In 1996, he started an Afghan radio station in Washington, and he later launched an affiliate in San Francisco.

But his attempts to bring what the Taliban was doing in Afghanistan to the world’s attention were mostly for naught, he said.

“It was frustrating and nerve-racking to see the society implode and then to see Taliban fanatics, extremists who have nothing to do with Afghanistan and someone named Osama bin Laden take over my country in the name of religion,” Samad said.

Even the Afghan community was fractured, he said, “with educated Afghan people in the West supporting the Taliban while sitting warmly in London, Paris, Washington and San Francisco, not worrying that their daughters can’t go to school or that their wives were being lashed because their ankle was showing.”

The Hollywood benefit where he met his future wife was put on by female celebrities on behalf of Afghan women, with tickets going for between $5,000 and $25,000. Hassina Samad thought at the time that the benefit was a farce, “a Hollywood sham,” as she called it. She was especially upset when actresses talked about the importance of mother-daughter relationships, when Afghanistan’s problems went well beyond that.

She and Samad debated on the air for 90 minutes when he later interviewed her for his show, saw each other once after that--she lived in Walnut Creek, Calif., and he in Virginia--then married four months later. Marriage “is always a gamble anyway,” she said.

Hassina Samad thinks that the world has wrongly focused on the controversy over the burka, the head-to-toe garment that many women in Afghanistan wore in public even before the Taliban made it mandatory. “They’re ignoring the real problem: education,” she said.

Her family fled Kabul about the same time as Samad and ultimately ended up in Seattle. Her father, who had attended UCLA on a scholarship as a young man and had been president of an Afghan textile company, could find a job only as a furniture salesman.

She worked as a beautician and later started a business making and exporting children’s clothes from Bali. But after her father’s death seven years ago, she began visiting Pakistan to help Afghan refugees, forming a nonprofit organization to provide school supplies for children. She was particularly struck when an Afghan woman with twin babies asked which one to give away because she didn’t have enough milk to feed both.

In Kabul, Hassina is helping to provide money and supplies for a girls school and other civic projects while keeping her hand in her clothing business.

Inauguration Was Trial Return for Couple

Before the Samads returned in December to do a radio show at the inauguration of interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, there had been hints that Omar might be drafted for the new administration. But nothing was certain till he arrived. The couple also wanted to see if they really wanted to stay.

Samad, who is on unpaid leave from his job as an operations manager at the Washington Transit Authority, attended a Tokyo conference on aid to Afghanistan last month as spokesman for the Foreign Ministry.

He worries about paying his debts and realizes that “everything, his friends, family are in the U.S.,” where both he and his wife are citizens.

But then, as he looks into the faces of Afghans and sees the agony they suffer, he senses a glimmer of hope.

“You realize that the country can’t be rebuilt unless thousands of Afghans return,” Samad said. “There’s nothing here for me but the desire to be of service. So, for as long as I can, physically and mentally, I’ll stay.”