By Tammy Lechner
Sadiq Tawfiq describes a vision – the same one I found him busily working toward one recent January afternoon when I walked into the dimly lit room containing his office on the second floor of the Khyber Pass Gallery in Laguna Beach. The room displays beautiful hand-woven rugs hanging on every wall, and hundreds more rugs, folded and stacked into colorful piles four to five feet high, lining each side of the floor. He is in the midst of liquidating the inventory from his rug gallery to enable a shift of focus into his nonprofit organization – Afghan Amity Society.
In the vision he is standing on his native Afghan soil, squinting into a throbbing sun and turning to face the wind sweeping forcefully across a dry, barren plot of land in Herat, Afghanistan, his boyhood home. What he sees in the distance is familiar: desert steppes and mountains standing unaltered to match an image etched into his mind from long ago. Around him a city – populated in the 1950s with less than 100,000 people clustered in villages where his memory can follow the wind through every ancient pathway – has evolved into an urban center pulsing with the energy of nearly 400,000 inhabitants. In front of him is the rubble of war, cloaked in a shadow that returns him to the darkness of his father’s illness and death. Yet, through the darkness he also sees a reality: 25 acres of open space, approved for municipal development by the Afghan government, where a 200-bed teaching hospital will stand one day, accessible by way of the ancient Silk Road. It is a multiyear, multimillion-dollar project – a dream that sprouts from the core of his heart.
He knows that if something even remotely like this medical facility had existed 45 years ago, his life would have taken a different path; his father would have lived. “He died a victim of not having good medicine available in Herat,” says Sadiq heavily. “He had a bad cold that turned into pneumonia. We had the money to send him to a doctor, but it was a harsh winter and we could not transport him to a health facility.”
His father’s death at just 43 years old lies deeply beneath Sadiq’s passion to construct a medical center in Herat – a desire fueled further by the enormous need to bring better health and education to this war-torn nation, along with his enduring love for its people and culture.
“I remember being a six-year-old boy growing up among the ancient ruins of Herat and feeling very attracted to the presence of life flowing through these historical places. I loved where I lived, and I loved the organic way of life… simple things, like watching the villagers gather at the open markets to sell their yogurt, milk, cheese and fruits. It felt wealthy to me, and charming – it was a reality against which I had nothing to compare. To me Herat seemed a remarkable, fascinating place at the very center of the world.”
He tells of a pleasant garden near his home that brought a lot of international visitors, mostly Europeans and Americans, to the city. He was curious about their clothes, their language, even the way they drank tea. In exchange for learning more about the visitors and their culture he offered himself as a tour guide of the city. “I would take them through the narrow passageways of the villages to the old bazaar, and to buildings dating back thousands of years, to show them Afghan art and literature – mosaics, paintings, poetry and scholarly works.”
Believing that Herat was an amazing place, especially with its signature as part of the Silk Road, Sadiq’s pleasure became to share it. Refusing money for his efforts, he instead asked the foreigners to share magazines, photographs and books – anything that would teach him more about the world beyond. In this way he learned English. “My teachers were impressed that I could speak English at 13 years old,” he says, “before we began to learn it in school.”
As Sadiq entered high school he was rapidly excelling to become the top student in his class. It was right at this time that his life changed dramatically with his father’s death. The oldest boy of five siblings, he now became the head of his family. “My father was a successful dry goods merchant and rug trader. He always took very good care of our family. Now I wondered who would take care of me? It was a dark cloud, a troubling time of my life – and it would change my life. Also, I know that in the back of my mind this experience of losing my father to a very simple symptom (a bad cold) strengthens my desire to see this hospital in Herat. It would be meaningful for my heart to know that other fathers will not die this way.”
To be continued….
