Men on a Mission from Boston

The Boston Globe
Men on a mission
Their Boston-based nonprofit funds life-changing projects in Pakistan
By Omar Sacirbey, Globe Correspondent | December 26, 2005

For Justin Stone, it's the image of a car running a one-legged beggar off a street in Karachi that sticks in his mind. For Omar Biabani, ''it's a collage of images" -- of malnourished children, illiteracy, and lack of plumbing -- that haunts memories of his native land.

Biabani, 29, and Stone, 32, grew up thousands of miles apart. But spurred by the images of Pakistan's overwhelming poverty and a desire to help humanity, they are leading a Boston-based nonprofit in developing, little by little, one of the poorest countries in the world, which also happens to be a pivot point in the war on terror. Biabani cofounded the Association for the Development of Pakistan in 2003 with a handful of other young Pakistani-Americans, while Stone, a native New Yorker and New England transplant, is its president. Although lacking in philanthropy experience, the young professionals who make up ADP have turned the fledgling organization into a model of efficiency that has come to represent a new sophistication in social activism among South Asians.

''It's so easy to spend your life in a comfort zone without worrying about anything," said Biabani, who left Pakistan for Montreal's McGill University in 1996 and moved to Boston four years later to work as a software engineer. ''If we don't invest in human lives there, there'll be no one to blame but us. If we neglect it, it'll come back to us."

Poverty is a serious problem in Pakistan, a nation of 162 million people. In a report last year, the International Monetary Fund estimated that 32 percent of Pakistan's people lived in poverty in 2001, up from 26 percent in 1991. More than 51 percent of its people are illiterate, a figure that jumps to almost 65 percent for women. Life expectancy is 63 years, compared to 77.6 in the United States.

In the short time ADP has been around, it has funded six life-changing projects in Pakistan's poorest regions, including eyesight restoration for 50 rural women and the establishment of an eye clinic in their district, a computer lab with Internet access at a school for underprivileged children, and vaccinations against hepatitis B for 200 nomadic children. Total cost: $8,314 (ADP purchased products at a discount and got health care workers to volunteer their services). Its workers are all volunteers, and more than 96 percent of its funds goes to projects.

Despite these accomplishments, it was the devastating South Asian earthquake on Oct. 8 that tested the group's mettle. Biabani had just finished suhoor, the pre-dawn breakfast that Muslims eat during Ramadan, and went to check the news online. What he saw terrified him: a headline that a 7.6 earthquake had struck Pakistan and an accompanying photo of two buildings, one collapsed and one standing. He instantly recognized the neighborhood in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, where the once-identical buildings were, and knew his mother and younger sister and brother lived in one of them. ''Just by looking at the picture, I couldn't tell which one fell. So what was going through my mind was that there's a 50-50 chance that my mom is . . . dead."

A phone call to his father in nearby Faisalabad confirmed that his mother and siblings had survived, but Biabani would later learn that more than 80 people had died in the collapse and more than 80,000 in the region were hurt. Although emergency response was not what ADP had set out to do, Biabani and Stone started working the phones and encouraging people to donate to Pakistani relief organizations through the nonprofit's website. Within 48 hours the group had raised $50,000, a figure that had grown to almost $364,000, including a $25,000 grant from the Levi Strauss Co., by mid-December.

''The earthquake spawned literally hundreds of organizations, but ADP was already well organized," said Adil Najam, an international relations professor at Boston University and Tufts University whose book ''Portrait of a Giving Community: Philanthropy by the Pakistani-American Diaspora" is due out next spring. ''The earthquake allowed ADP to rise to their potential."

Biabani hardly imagined such potential, let alone such a disaster, when ADP launched in 2003. Back then, the group had to find projects to fund. The first was providing six computers with Internet access, classroom furniture, and a teacher to a school for first- through fifth-graders in Nilore, a village about 17 miles east of Islamabad but light years away socially. The school was founded in 1999 by Ibtida (''Beginning" in Urdu), a volunteer organization that runs literacy programs for women and three secular schools in Pakistan's rural north, where the educational alternative for poor kids is madrassahs, the religious schools often under scrutiny for fostering extremism.

''It was amazing seeing the kids' reactions, because they'd never seen a computer before," said Nuzhat Ahmad, a 36-year-old gastroenterologist in Philadelphia who helped set up the school and returns there for a few weeks every year to teach. She noted that about 50 percent of Pakistani children drop out of school before reaching fifth grade. But in Pakistan, computer skills are almost a guarantee of a job, and thus an incentive for parents to keep their kids in school.

Nongovernmental organizations in Pakistan now come to ADP. The nonprofit's members scrutinize each project based on criteria such as social impact, cost, scalability, and the reliability of the group making the proposal.

Besides doing its own due diligence, what distinguishes ADP from other nonprofits is its emphasis on ''holistic development," Stone said, explaining that funding a school does a community no good if there are no job opportunities later or if parents are likely to take their kids out of the school. He hopes ADP is now at the stage where it can begin complementing existing projects. ''We want to go back to these projects that we've already funded and build upon them," he said.

Humility is also important, Biabani said, stressing that familiarity with Pakistan's problems and having money to help solve them are not a license for ADP to force projects they think sound good on others. Rather, it's important to listen to the people on the ground. ''I can say, 'Hey, I'll educate you.' But you say, 'I have an empty stomach.' What good is an education? Who am I to force help on someone? How do I know what it's like to have an empty stomach?" he said. ''We have to be willing to learn, to say, 'No, we don't know.' "

While it might seem extraordinary that an all-volunteer group has built a successful philanthropy in less than three years, Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, a charity watchdog in Chicago, said such beginnings are not unusual. ''Groups are inspired by people closest to the issue or the cause, such as someone close to a child or a spouse that dies from a disease. That is how these groups tend to get started," said Borochoff.

Biabani says he's also involved because of his Islamic faith, which counts charity among its cornerstones. ''That drive to help humanity is core to any religion. People ask, 'Why are you doing this?' It's because I can, because I've seen the poverty," he said.

Like Biabani, Stone also has a connection to Pakistan -- his wife, Shazia Bakar, 27, whom he married this year after knowing her for eight years. But he says there are other things that compel him to help. ''It's a sense that I've had that my birth in a specific place, in a specific condition, is really coincidence, or luck," he said. ''And the same person I am could have easily been born in a completely different place with nothing. And a person, no matter how well they're doing, should be appreciative of what they have and make every effort to give back."

Trying to improve living conditions in the country where one's roots are is nothing new for immigrants and their children, and Pakistani-Americans are no exception. But the 20- and 30-somethings who constitute ADP differ from members of the generations that preceded them. ''There's a new generation of organizations being run by Pakistani-Americans which are more focused, more organized, because they know the American environment much better. The generation that came earlier is less familiar with the US," said Najam, who belongs to an informal network of reform-minded Pakistani-Americans, the Boston Group, that never made the jump to a formal institution.

Today's Pakistani-Americans also know there's a battle within Islam between moderates and extremists, and that poverty is one of the best recruiting tools the extremists have. That's why Biabani believes development and democracy are critical to Pakistan's future. ''When you create an environment where there are checks and balances, and where there's a lot of opportunities, educational, vocational, recreational, then you start valuing life."