BIOGRAPHY

Osman spends holiday with refugees

Joseph Osman went back to a place where his father was jailed for nothing and ultimately deprived of everything but his life, his wife and his kids.

To a place that is in some ways even harsher than the Soviet-occupied city his parents fled in 1982.

To a place where families by the thousands live in mud-brick buildings with no heat, no electricity and no running water.

Osman, spent the holidays in this place, Uruzgan province, Afghanistan. Osman lived in Tarin Kowt, the capital
of Uruzgan – a place that time forgot and modernity never knew; a place that war and poverty have never failed to remember.
Shortly after arriving, he e-mailed his mother a photograph of his new home.

"I was crying, trust me, not because of the lifestyle because I know that everybody lives that way there," Fauzia Osman said. "But because I had had the great privilege of seeing my child grow up in different conditions."

Louisville, Ky., and Tarin Kowt, Afghanistan , are worlds apart in a way average Americans can scarcely imagine. Osman heard stories from his parents, but like anyone raised on basketball, Big Macs and MTV, he was shocked to discover that, in 2006, any place on earth could be so broken and backward.

"I was like, 'What the heck have I gotten myself into?' " Osman said. "You know how some people can get sick from stress? It was sort of like that. I almost made myself sick because I just couldn't believe the conditions."
There are no streetlights, no stores, almost no cars and no paved roads in Tarin Kowt. Conditions are so primitive, Osman said, "It's like Tyrannosaurus rex could walk right by you and you wouldn't even be surprised."

Even when Kabul was besieged by the Soviets, it wasn't as bereft as Tarin Kowt. But Osman's father, a U.S.-educated civil engineer, knew his homeland was headed in that direction.

Ghafar Osmanzai took his wife and four children (Joseph was in the womb), hiked three days through the mountains into Pakistan and made a new home in Hawaii.

The Osmans, as the family is now known, came to America seeking peace, plentitude and opportunity. They found all three in abundance.

By last spring, Joseph Osman had parlayed a master's degree in business administration into a good job, a nice SUV and a comfortable home– the American dream his parents were looking for.

But their youngest son was looking for something else, something he didn't find until he arrived in Uruzgan, one of the bleakest, poorest, most dangerous places on earth.

There Osman found only one thing in abundance, something quite unexpected in a city shattered by decades of ceaseless war and deprivation.

"I had more peace of mind there than maybe I've ever had in my life," Osman said. "I don't know quite how to explain it except with this quote from Gandhi: 'The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.' ."
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He was conceived in a war zone and born in paradise, half a world away from the besieged city his family escaped after his father spent an undeserved week in prison. His crime: telling his wife to change out of her nightclothes when dozens of rifle-bearing soldiers made a house call after dark.

The soldiers thought Ghafar Osman was trying to hide something. They tore the house apart and found nothing, but threw Ghafar in Pul-i-Charki prison nonetheless.

Ghafar Osman was an important man in Kabul, a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Kansas who built, among other things, Kabul's first movie cinema.

The elder Osman owned three houses and a construction firm in Kabul. Fearing that he'd be killed, not imprisoned, the next time the invaders knocked, he left everything to move to Honolulu, where he washed dishes for $4 an hour while earning a master's degree at the University of Hawaii.

Ghafar Osman died in 1999 of hepatitis C that he contracted from a tainted blood transfusion he received in Kabul. Before he died, in 1991, he moved his family to Louisville so he could work on the airport expansion project. His youngest son was 8 at the time.

Joseph David Osman was a varsity basketball player at Seneca High School and one of 10 valedictorians in the Class of 2000. He went on to earn a finance degree and an MBA.

He considers himself a philanthropist through and through.

"I love helping people. Nobody is going to remember what you keep, but they will always remember how you helped, gave, and made them feel." he said.

But he is Afghan-American too. Friends were surprised to hear Osman, a practicing Muslim, talking to his mother in fluent Pashto, one of Afghanistan's official languages.

His friends were all set to attend the New Year's celebration in Paris, France, and they were even more surprised when he decided to spend his holidays in Afghanistan, which most people know only as the place from which Osama bin Laden launched the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

"When you say 'Afghanistan,' people automatically think, 'Terrorists, craziness, bad people,’." Osman said. "But the Afghans are human being's just like everyone else. The average Afghan is peaceful and kind and very, very thankful for help."

Sounds fancy. It was anything but.

Osman oversaw the clearing of roads and canals, and lived in a small mud-brick house with no toilet and no roof.

"It was freezing cold every night," he said, "and you wake up every morning with snot running out of your nose."

He was nearly always cold and dirty.

In Tarin Kowt, the only thing Osman was dying for was a Big Mac – or anything but another plate of goat meat and rice.

"That's all they eat, three times a day," Osman said. "It's all freshly slaughtered, right in their backyards. The food almost smells like the animal is still alive.

"It's the most disgusting thing ever. But to them, they love it."

Osman loves them. He must.
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Uruzgan is a notoriously lawless province. "We live in the wild, wild west," Army Maj. Erik Sevingny told Stars and Stripes last year.

But the people Osman serves aren't wild at all. Though the potential for danger is palpable, the greatest threat Osman has faced is being rushed by children seeking candy.

"These people don't want to kill me or anyone else," Osman said. "They just want to have a family and raise their kids.

"They wear the same clothes every day. They are dirty. There are no showers. But they are trying so hard. They've just been forgotten, just left behind."

Uruzgan is a land that progress, if not time, forgot.

Afghans have long regarded the province as an address of exile. Even Tarin Kowt, a city of some 700,000, is regarded as impossibly remote.

Until the American-led Provisional Reconstruction Team completed a 72-mile road connecting Tarin Kowt to Kandahar last fall, Tarin Kowt was accessible only by helicopter, SUV or military tactical vehicles.

"The people are pitifully destitute because everything is in shambles," Marine chaplain Charles J. Anderson said recently. "The (health clinic) has no electrical power or running water — all infrastructure large and small has crumbled."

That description fits almost the entire country, Osman said: "Third world? Afghanistan could possibly qualify for fourth world."

According to the CIA's World Factbook, Afghanistan is a place where life is nasty, brutish and short. Only Angola has a higher infant mortality rate. Only 10 countries have a higher death rate overall, and only eight have less purchasing power ($800 per person annually).

"Despite the progress of the past few years," the World Factbook reports, "Afghanistan remains extremely poor, landlocked and highly dependent on foreign aid. It will probably take the remainder of the decade and continuing donor aid and attention to significantly raise Afghanistan's living standards."

Osman is doing his part, directing and modestly paying villagers to execute such chores as clearing a canal that can deliver reasonably clean water.

He is just about the perfect man for the job – young, kind-hearted, educated and thoroughly Afghan in his religion, appearance and speech. Still, people were skeptical at first.

"The village elders finally said, 'Look at this guy. He was brave enough to come back to his home and help out,’." Osman said. "People were more loyal and respectful to me after that."

Even so, Osman is careful to avoid any slight. If he is invited to dinner, he is all but obliged to accept.
"They would think I was scared or rude if I didn't," Osman said. "So here I am, walking through pitch-black darkness with somebody I don't really know, hoping he's not leading me to somewhere I definitely don't want to be."

So far, so good. Osman has been led nowhere except to another mud home and another gathering of men eating goat and rice cooked over a small open fire in the dwelling.

"Kipling said Afghanistan is the most hospitable place in the world," Osman said. "They treat guests better than they treat their own family. They cried and sang songs when I left."

After playing basketball and doing his ambassador work overseas. Osman would like to start a business, and reacquaint himself with the taste of Big Macs, and continue helping people around the world.

Like father, like son.

"On track to earn his doctorate in engineering, my father abruptly ended his studies to return to Afghanistan," Osman writes in the personal statement portion of his graduate school applications. "He was needed at home. His mother and three sisters, uneducated and unemployable in a harshly patriarchal society, were helpless without him.

"The classmates he left behind went on to garner academic and professional accolades. But my father, at 23 years of age, understood where his priorities lay."

Joseph Osman was 23 when his father's priorities beckoned him to Afghanistan, as well.

"I know it seems crazy to graduate from school and go play basketball and live overseas for a while," Osman said. "But my father always told me, 'Having a big heart and mind is more important than having material things'. I'm not going to take anything from this world with me, but I have seen in my own life the more you give, the more you get back."