[zalzala] Pakistani wins huge lottery... Will rebuild his district
- From: Adil Najam <adil.najam@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Adil Najam <adil.najam@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 12:05:37 -0500
Folks
You might find this news item of great interest:
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/world/14112842.htm
Regards
Adil Najam
-------------------------
ADIL NAJAM
Associate Professor of
International Negotiation & Diplomacy
The Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy
Tufts University
160 Packard Avenue
Medford, MA 02155, USA
Phone: 617 627 2706
Fax: 617 627 3005
Email: adil.najam@xxxxxxxxx
http://fletcher.tufts.edu/faculty/najam/profile.asp
`Lottery Man' betting on Pakistani district
BY KIM BARKER
Chicago Tribune
BATAGRAM, Pakistan - The mayor looks at the shabby tents where earthquake
victims have lived for the five months since their mountain village was
destroyed.
Ihsan Khan, 47, is not like any other government official in this country.
He is a former Northern Illinois University student, a one-time cab driver
in Washington, D.C., and a citizen of both the United States and Pakistan.
He is also a multimillion-dollar Powerball winner who was elected mayor of
his hometown district in Pakistan two days before the devastating Oct. 8
earthquake.
Now Khan is helping his destroyed district with his lottery winnings.
On this day, Khan is not happy with what he sees in the government refugee
camp - the people cooking over stoves in cramped tents, the tent that caught
fire the day before, the tents pitched on sticks.
"This is appalling," Khan said. "What you see here - they could have done
better than this."
This is his home, and he feels it is his responsibility. After spending half
his life in the United States, Khan has left his American Dream behind, or
at least put it on hold, to help the place where he grew up. Khan won
election as nazim, or mayor, of Batagram district after deciding to run
against the local families who had controlled this region for generations.
Nothing his opponents called him - "American Dollar Man" or "Lottery Man" -
kept him from getting votes.
Maybe the name-calling helped. After all, no other town in the wild
North-West Frontier province of Pakistan, run largely by conservative
clerics, has a mayor who won $18 million in the lottery, after taxes, as
Khan did in 2001.
In Pakistan, the average annual income is less than $500. Even before the
earthquake turned buildings into piles of rocks, Batagram was a hardscrabble
place nestled in a picturesque mountain valley, essentially a subsistence
farming town. Donkeys still lug bags of wheat on rutted roads. Children play
with a handful of rocks or a wheel and a stick.
Khan is trying to rebuild the entire district of Batagram, where 4,500
people died in the quake. He said he has already spent about $300,000 of his
own money on drugs and medical supplies for survivors and tin roofs for
shelters. He is paying to send some local young people to college. Khan also
plans to build a school, to be named for his late mother.
On a recent afternoon, Khan walked around a refugee camp, home to 3,040
people from a town on the far edge of Batagram district. Many are not happy.
They are deferential to Khan, and walk up, one by one, to shake his hand and
share their sorrows.
The national government expects them to move back to their remote mountain
village the next day. This will mean a four-hour drive followed by an
eight-hour walk. The people say that they have no homes left.
"I'm happy here," said Abdul Rahman, 47. "And they brought me here in a
helicopter. I want to go home in a helicopter."
Sayed Zarin Shah, who guessed he was about 60, pulled his right pant leg up
to show off a gnarled scar from an earthquake injury. He leaned on a cane,
and shook with the effort of standing.
"We don't have a place to go," Shah told Khan.
"You have to go from where you came," Khan replied. "There will be a lot of
stuff going with you."
This is a role that Khan is not entirely comfortable with. He does not like
politicians or government, although he graduated with a political science
degree from Northern Illinois University in 1987. There is little that he
can do about regulations that require all refugee camps to close this month.
There is little a nazim can do except shake hands. He has no real
policy-making authority. He can only set out plans for rebuilding, which
will take years to complete, even with him providing seed money.
Many times, Khan seems more American than Pakistani. He walks with a
barrel-chested swagger, punctuates his sentences with what could only be
termed a guffaw. His most frequent phrase is "way too," as in "way too much
money" or "way too different." His campaign posters featured him in a tie,
rarely seen in the North-West Frontier province.
Khan is blunt. He complains of refugees wanting "more, more, more."
At the same time, for all his discomfort being mayor, Khan has done what is
rare in the world of lottery winners, better known for squandering their
millions than for trying to do good.
"Why I came here is I had some obligation, something to pay back," Khan
said.
Most of his life, Khan seemed to be running as far away as possible from
Pakistan and poverty. At about 21, he moved first to the Chicago area, and
after marriage, a son and a divorce, to Washington. He lost touch for years
with his Pakistan family, who thought he was dead.
Eventually Khan came back home. He married a Batagram woman. But he stayed
in Pakistan only a month here, a month there. Always, he returned to D.C.,
where he drove a cab, making about $3,000 a month.
The dream came to him in the early 1990s - a "beautiful" dream, one with
diamonds and rubies and Khan speaking to a crowded room of "way too many
people." Then the numbers popped up: 2-4-6-17-25-31.
Khan says he played those numbers for years. In November 2001, with no. 31,
he hit a $55.2 million Powerball jackpot. Khan chose a lump-sum award of
$32,499,939.24, which after taxes worked out to about $18 million.
He gave one last cab ride - free - before walking away from his job. He
bought a million-dollar home in Virginia and a Mercedes-Benz. He started an
education foundation named after his late mother. And then he moved home.
When Khan was elected mayor, he hoped only to unseat the families who had
run the district for years. The earthquake hit as he walked through the
cemetery. He felt the ground shake, saw cracks snake up the buildings. "I
saw houses to the right and left, falling down," he said. People crawled out
from under the rubble, crying, yelling, blood running down their faces.
"Some dying before me," he recalled.
Since then, Khan has dealt with the survivors and the wreckage. He works out
of a white tent, in the shadow of the damaged district office. A phone line
has been strung into the tent. Khan sits behind a walnut desk propped up on
bricks.
At one point, while walking through the refugee camp, a crowd of 50 men
surrounded him. Khan tried to pre-empt them. "When you go back, we'll give
you blankets, food, shelter," he said. "Everything is finished here."
Gul Zarhamed, 28, wanted to know if the government would give him a tent.
Other men started shouting questions - about money, about permanent homes,
about what Khan will do.
"I will also be with you people," he said.
Nobody seems to believe him. Khan walked away, shaking his head.
"I would be worried, too," he said. "It's not the best of anything here. But
it's still something."
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