zia

The University's affable and brilliant engineering dean, and the brave broken country he came from, and how America might still help heal it...

By Todd Schwartz

On a hot August day in 1978, a thirty-year-old electrical engineer and university professor named Zia Yamayee sits in his apartment in Kabul, Afghanistan, carefully placing $820 here and there between the pages of an electrical engineering textbook, then gluing the edges of the pages together so that if someone flips through the book, the money will not be revealed.

Soon Yamayee will leave the country, on his way to Germany to present an academic paper, and the new Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan — which after weeks of applications has granted permission for travel — only allows travelers to take $200 with them. He glues the last of the pages together. It is all the money he has. He takes up a pen and begins to write a letter to his younger brother, who is his roommate in Kabul, and to the rest of his family, which includes his parents, and a sister, and an ex-wife with whom he has four children. He searches for the right words to explain why he isn’t coming back.

In the months that follow, his family, especially his father, cannot help but feel that he has abandoned them, ab-andoned his heritage, abandoned his country. But they live some 600 miles west of Kabul, in the out-of-the-fray town of Herat, and they do not understand the brooding danger in Kabul.

Soon they will.

Yamayee, as he writes his letter in the heat, has been back home in Afghanistan for only five months, after earning both his master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering at Purdue in a mere three years. He had arrived home in March and had immediately been named head of mathematics, physics, and electrical engineering at Kabul University. In April, the pro-Soviet political groups Parcham and Khalq joined forces to stage a bloody coup, killing the Afghan leader Mohammed Daoud, who five years earlier had himself overthrown Afghanistan’s king and its constitutional democracy. Since that day Yamayee — schooled in the United States, and not only never a supporter but even quietly a detractor of the pro-Soviet parties — had been on very thin ice. Then his research paper was accepted for presentation in Germany, and Yamayee made the decision that he says now saved his life.

A few months after he leaves, government police come for his brother, who has been active in anti-Communist groups. No one ever sees him again.

*

Take three pieces of wood, each two feet long by three inches wide by one-eighth of an inch thick, lay them flat on top of each other, support them at each end, then step on them with one foot. They will break almost immediately.

But every engineer knows that if you construct those same three boards into a triangle-shaped beam, it will support a normal adult’s entire weight.

Zia Yamayee, now sixty years old and dean of the University’s engineering department since 1996, is a sweet, quiet, relentlessly positive, triangular beam of a man. His life and experiences are a structural element in the incomplete bridge between the United States and Afghanistan, a country roughly the size of Texas, where we are at war with terrorists and with the Taliban and with tremendous past blunders. As with most of the countries in which we have fought wars over the past half-century, Americans in general know very little about Afghanistan, and understand even less.

Landlocked in the center of Asia — bordered today by Iran to the west; Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to the north; China to the northeast; and Pakistan to the east and south (the border with Pakistan was drawn arbitrarily by the British in 1893 and has been contested ever since) — Afghanistan is mostly mountains, many of which rise to nearly 25,000 feet. Generally arid, only 12 percent of the land can be cultivated. There hasn’t been a reliable census in decades, but the population is estimated to be about 31 million. Many ethnic groups are represented, with four in 10 people being Pashtun, three in 10 being Tajik, and the rest being a mix of Hazara, Uzbek, Turkmen and others. But they have all shared this land for centuries, and the name, Afghanistan, simply means “land of the Afghans” (“-stan” is an Iranian suffix meaning “place”). Two main languages are spoken, Dari (Persian) and Pashto. More than 99 percent of Afghans are Muslim, with about three-quarters being Sunni and the rest Shi’a. Conflicts and drought have made Afghanistan one of the world’s poorest and least developed countries, with 40 percent unemployment and two-thirds of the population living on less than two U.S. dollars per day. The United Nations reports that more than three million Afghans are involved in the production of opium, which reached record levels in 2007. U.S. troops have been fighting in the country since late in 2001.

Afghanistan was a monarchy, ruled by King Zahir Shah, when Yamayee was born in Herat in 1948. Yamayee’s father was a schoolteacher, at a time when less than 10 percent of the population could read or write — Yamayee’s mother was illiterate, and her age is uncertain, since there was no one in her village who could write down the date she was born. Yamayee’s grandfather was a mullah, or Muslim cleric.

In the earliest example of what would be a standard occurrence, Yamayee finished first in his elementary school class, and was one of three to win a scholarship to a boarding school which trained teachers like his father. So, at age 12, he left home and traveled the 400 kilometers by bus over a high mountain pass to his new school. He didn’t see his family again for nine months.

There were 17 students sharing his dormitory room that first year, and only four of them spoke the same mother tongue, so they got along in a seventh-grade mash-up of three languages. The rules were these: graduate and you become an elementary school teacher, to be assigned somewhere in the country by the government. Graduate in the top 33 percent of the class, and you can go on to the university in Kabul to become a high school teacher. Be one of the top three graduates, and you can go on to the university and study your choice of law, medicine, or engineering.

Those were the academic rules. But there were other responsibilities for a young Afghani. When Yamayee was a child, it had been arranged that he would marry a distant cousin of his mother. One day at the end of ninth grade, Yamayee’s uncle arrived and told the 16-year-old student that they would be leaving the following day for the west, the village of his bride, and his wedding. His bride was most likely 14, but again there were no written records of her birth. She was attractive, and Yamayee remembers being “a pretty happy guy.” As was the custom, his new wife moved into the house of Yamayee’s parents, and he went back to school. By the time they split, some 10 years later, Yamayee and his young wife would have four children.

The same year Yamayee was married, in 1964, Afghanistan became a constitutional monarchy and began an all-too-brief experiment with democracy. Political parties sprang up, and a legislature was elected. The country began to look a little more like it belonged in the twentieth century rather than the seventeenth. Again Yamayee graduated first in his class. His father wanted him to study medicine, but Yamayee had neither the stomach nor the brain for it — he hated the sight of blood, and biology had never been his strength. Law held no interest for him, but understanding math and physics had always come as easily as breathing, so Yamayee chose engineering. In the autumn of 1967 he walked into his first engineering class at Kabul University, and right into another language problem.

As a child Yamayee had learned Dari (or Farsi, as the Persian language is also known), then learned Pashto in fourth grade, then began to study English and Arabic in seventh grade. By college, Yamayee knew basic English, but when the female engineering professor walked into class and began teaching in rapid-fire and technical English, Yamayee was stunned. “We had assigned seats,” he says, “and I was number 725, so I turned to 723, who told me that all the classes were taught in English! It turned out I was the only one from a little teacher-training school who hadn’t been given the special intensive three-month English class. The next class was taught by a German professor from the U.S., and I couldn’t believe anyone could write that fast or talk that fast. I almost quit right then.”

But he didn’t quit. All through that first semester, his strategy was to read ahead in the textbooks, underline the words he didn’t understand, look them up in the dictionary and memorize the meanings, and then read the books again. He barely passed. But by the time he graduated in 1972, he was, of course, number one in his class.

Graduating at the top gave him an automatic job as an instructor in electrical engineering at Kabul University, and that in turn led to a scholarship to study in the U.S. The school of engineering at Purdue had been among the group of U.S. universities that helped create the engineering school in Kabul, so it was to Indiana that Yamayee came in 1974.

He was prepared for the schooling in America, but was quickly confused by many of the local customs and strange foods.

“I remember being on the plane coming to the States,” Yamayee says, “and they told me they were serving hot dogs. I knew the word ‘hot’ and I knew the word ‘dog,’ but together? I was not excited to eat that animal at any temperature! I was very relieved when I learned what a hot dog was...” He moved into a dorm room with an American roommate, so he could refine his English. By the spring of 1978 he was a newly minted doctor of engineering, proud to return home. By the end of that summer he was alone in Germany, applying for immigration to the United States, Canada, and Australia.

*

On December 27, 1979, more than 100,000 Soviet troops marched and flew into Afghanistan. The Soviet-backed Afghan government was in danger of falling to a populist uprising led by the rebel fighters known as the Mujaheedin, and Moscow moved to shore up the regime. Ten years later, the Soviet troops were forced to leave the country, having lost the war to the Mujaheedin, who were backed and funded by the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia. As many as 1.5 million Afghans were dead, five million were refugees, and buried under the land of the Afghans was one unexploded mine for every man, woman, and child in the country. The Mujaheedin had split into 10 competing groups, and soon the fighting between them destroyed Kabul, the only Afghan city that had survived the Soviet occupation. Yamayee watched his country slip into war and chaos from Palo Alto, California. The U.S. had accepted his request for immigration, and he had three job offers within a month of arriving in America. He worked on managing the flow and maintenance of utility power grids, on battery storage technology and even did some early solar power studies. In 1981, Yamayee took a job that brought him to Portland for the first time, working with the utilities of the Columbia River basin to perform regional electricity resource planning.

His family in Herat had no phone, so his only occasional contact with them was through an uncle who went to Iran and Pakistan on business, and would call from his travels. Yamayee wrote letters, and sent money through contacts in Iran. “I couldn’t speak to most of my family directly for years,” he says, “and now everyone has a cell phone. My son called just last night. My daughter lives in a village with no running water, but she has a cell phone!”

With a few years of industry experience under his belt, Yamayee felt confident to return to teaching. In 1983 he became an associate professor at Clarkson University, a small college in upstate New York. The school and the students he loved, the frigid winters and the 130-mile drive to the nearest sizable airport he did not. After two years, he was ready to move on. He had became a U.S. citizen, and he had also seen his father for the first time since he’d left Afghanistan — his father was on a pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, and Yamayee joined him for two weeks. It would be nearly a decade before he would see him again.

Yamayee’s next stop was Gonzaga University. He had been a little hesitant to take the job, after hearing that it was a Jesuit school and being concerned that everyone on campus would try to convert the Muslim engineer, as had so many other people during his years in America. But he soon discovered that Gonzaga, like the University of Portland, is a place of welcoming and accepting people. He earned a full professorship by 1987, and was ready to settle into a quiet life in Spokane, when he got a call from the University of New Orleans offering him the chairmanship of the electrical engineering department. He wasn’t especially interested, but then Louisiana Power and Light Company offered to sponsor all of his research, and it became a Big Easy decision. A year later, he was back at Gonzaga as the new dean of engineering — the previous dean had returned to the faculty, and Yamayee’s phone rang off the hook with engineering colleagues encouraging him to try for the job.

*

Back in Afghanistan, the Mujaheedin factions had formed a kind of loose coalition government, a sort of warlords’ round table, and by 1993 Yamayee felt it might be safe enough and feasible enough to visit his family for the first time in 15 years. It was still too dangerous to reach Herat overland from Kabul, so he decided to go to Iran, and from there into Afghanistan. But first he had to get a visa for Iran, not an easy task for an American. He contacted an Iranian friend he knew from his Palo Alto days, who helped him work through the Swiss embassy. Eventually he found himself on a bus bouncing through eastern Iran on the way to the Afghan border. Yamayee’s family met him there, and after an overdue and tearful reunion, they began the 115-kilometer journey to Herat. “It used to take an hour-and-a-half on a paved road in the 1970s,” Yamayee remembers. “It took us five hours. You could barely tell that the road had ever been paved. The countryside and the villages I knew so well were all leveled. Almost every field had a sign reading ‘Caution: mines.’ It was incredibly sad.”

His family urged him to move back, even though they were proud of his accomplishments in America. Yamayee hadn’t completely ruled it out, but during the course of his visit he realized that it wasn’t to be.

“I had been gone for 15 years,” he says, “and I had changed. So had they. I decided finally that the United States is my home. I couldn’t live in Afghanistan. I’ve become too used to speaking my mind, and there are a lot of things you can’t say in that society. And, while I’m still a Muslim, I don’t pray five times a day or fast during Ramadan. And my Islamic ethics aren’t geared to revenge. Justice without forgiveness means there will always be hatred.” He decided to do what he could from a distance, including buying a house for his children and giving financial help to his parents.

Yamayee returned to Afghanistan in the summer of 1995, when the Taliban, who were taking control of the country region by region, were on the outskirts of Herat. A month after Yamayee left, they took over the city. The people of Herat saw them as an odd kind of home-grown foreign invaders, who didn’t speak the local language and knew little more about the area than the Russians who preceded them. Once again, Yamayee’s family had to lie low and hope.

Zia went back one more time during Taliban rule, just before September 11. He remembers being stopped again and again at checkpoints and interrogated by young Taliban fighters who checked to make sure there were no weapons in the car, and that no music was being played — and who always demanded to know why his beard was not properly lengthy. Under Taliban law a man’s beard must exceed his grasp, protruding from his clenched fist when it is held at his chin — just one of the many rules under the strictest application of Islamic Sharia law ever seen in the modern Muslim world. Usually, when Yamayee produced his U.S. passport, bearing a Taliban visa stamp, he was quickly allowed to go on. But once, Yamayee remembers, the Taliban guard was illiterate, and couldn’t read the visa stamp. The moment grew heated and potentially dangerous — the Taliban are not known for flexibility or forgiveness — but Yamayee’s endlessly upbeat nature prevailed. After many questions and much discussion about why and where and who, the Taliban guard at last looked disdainfully at Yamayee and, with a wave of his hand, said, “O well, you are just an old man, go!” — a line which, as Yamayee notes cheerfully, has now been adopted for steady use by his wife Marlene Moore, long the University’s able dean of arts and sciences, and now the first Father Joe Powers Distinguished Professor of Biology on The Bluff.

The couple met in Yamayee’s first deans’ meeting, in June of 1996, and were married a year later. “I was drawn to his warmth, the attention he pays to people, to his gratitude for the good in life. He is such a positive person,” she says. “Although I have to laugh at his total inability to fix anything electrical around the house — he claims he is a specialist in theory, not execution. So I fix everything around the house while he ponders the theory. But we laugh that our marriage, as a friend says, is the only good thing that ever came out of a deans’ meeting...”

*

Tom Nelson, the veteran and much-respected dean of engineering on The Bluff, retired in 1996, and the University looked far and wide for his successor. Yamayee found himself interested — he had loved Portland when he lived there before, he was intrigued by the University’s rising reputation, and he was interested in a challenge. Once hired, he set to work streamlining and fine-tuning an engineering school that he felt had too many programs and too few faculty. Programs went from nine to five, faculty went from 17 to 21, and in 2009 the University’s school of engineering boasts one of the nation’s highest licensing exam pass rates, a ranking in the national top forty, and a campus-record $12 million gift from engineering alumnus Donald Shiley ’51 and his wife Darlene for renovation and expansion of engineering hall, now renamed Shiley Hall. The demand for engineering specialties, says the University’s affable dean, is cyclical — when he first came to America electrical engineering was the hot ticket. A decade ago it was computer engineering, then mechanical took the forefront (perhaps the first true mechanical engineer was a 12th century Iraqi named al-Jazari, who, in building machines to pump water for ancient Turkish kings, invented the connecting rod and the crankshaft to convert reciprocating motion to rotating motion, which is the basis of the modern engine). Today, mechanical has peaked and electrical is coming back, with civil engineering (which includes environmental engineering at the University) close behind.

“The principles of engineering haven’t changed so much over the years, but the engineering student is different,” Yamayee says. “The level of interest in sustainability and in being better stewards of the earth has increased dramatically. I hope with that change will come some progress in engineering’s weakness, which is involving women and minorities. The profession is 83 percent male, and we’re actually losing women in the profession after several years of gains. It’s a puzzle to me, because the whole essence of the profession is creative solutions to serious problems, and what could be more pressing now than creative solutions to massive world-wide problems? Perhaps engineering is not seen as a discipline that helps people, but that’s not true! And engineering today is very team-oriented and international — look at the Boeing Dreamliner, which was designed in eighteen different countries.” Perhaps engineering needs its own TV show to give it the shine that medicine and even law have.

After Yamayee’s difficult 2001 trip (his visa didn’t allow him to re-enter Iran once he had been in Afghanistan, so to get back to the U.S. he had to take a taxi 480 kilometers from Herat to Kandahar, then another taxi 160 kilometers to the Pakistan border, then a bus to Karachi, then planes to the Philippines, to Japan, and to Portland), the Taliban were eventually removed from power, Yamayee’s granddaughters could once again go to a real school (instead of hiding in a teacher’s home to get their lessons), and his niece could return to college, from which all women had been banned. Yamayee returned to Afghanistan in 2003, 2006 and 2008. On his most recent visit, the infrastructure was improved — roads, water and electricity were in better repair — but the Taliban were resurgent, travel by land was once again dangerous, violence was everywhere, and chaos could be felt rising like a storm over the mountains. President Barack Obama has vowed to send more American troops to the country, and war seems to be an endless future for Afghanistan.

“The U.S. has done a lot for the country,” says Yamayee, “but it was a tragedy that in 1989, when the Soviets left, the West abandoned the Afghans. The Cold War had been won, so the West just left the mess behind and said to the Afghans, ‘You figure it out.’ The young people, including my children, have known very little other than war for their whole lives.

“I still have hope, but we can not abandon Afghanistan this time. I remember being asked during my visit in 2001, ‘Where is the rest of the world? Why have they left us to be ruled by the Taliban?’ We can’t do that again. I think the West is finally beginning to realize how important Afghanistan is, but now Pakistan complicates everything. I just don’t know if the West can make the right moves. I do know we are still needed there. I always have hope.”

It is another moment that can make all the difference.

“It is difficult for Americans to really know a place so distant and so unlike us as Afghanistan,” he says — but there is a quiet cheerful man at the University of Portland who is a perfectly engineered beam in that bridge between nations and people. How to heal a generation of war in a place we barely know? Begin by knowing the man.

Todd Schwartz (schwartz@spiritone.com) is an Oregon writer who has written many superb profiles of alumni in these pages. See www.up.edu/portlandmag.