Thomas Eighmy This is Me

 Web References

1. 1. mcall.com - Valley man's mission: Aiding Afghanistan

   www.mcall.com/news/local/all-4 - [Cached]

   Last Visited: 8/4/2002

   Thomas Eighmy remembers Afghanistan as he first saw it in 1971, a beautiful land of hope, but one with a current of tension.
   
   Then a professor of quantitative economics and geography at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he traveled to Afghanistan to do the country's first-ever census. In the four years he and his wife, Beverly, spent there, he saw Afghanistan as "an underdeveloped country on a hopeful path."
   
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   "Kabul was unbelievably destroyed," said Eighmy, now retired and living in Lower Saucon Township. "It looked like Hiroshima."
   
   Over the last three decades, Eighmy has seen Afghans struggle against Soviet invaders, surrender to the extremes of the Taliban and welcome aid workers under the fledgling government of Hamid Karzai.
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   Memories of Afghanistan fill the couple's home - intricately woven rugs that carpet the hardwood floors, huge puffy pillows that visitors sat on in their homes in Kabul, hammered copper pots and a rug with a depiction of a Kalishnikov rifle woven into it - and it's clear the devastation of the country and its people weighs heavily on Eighmy.
   
   "Who hasn't, one way or another, seen loss of family members in executions, war wounds, mines and disease?" he said.
   
   Don Ritter, the former Lehigh Valley congressman who founded the Afghanistan Foundation after leaving office in 1992, traveled with Eighmy on a fact-finding mission there in 1998 and considers Eighmy "an encyclopedia" on the country.
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   "I remember when a load of trees passed us on a road, Tom gave a discourse on where they got the trees, deforestation and who would buy the trees," said Ritter.
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   On that same trip, Ritter and Eighmy visited key Taliban ministers, who treated the Americans politely, even though they spoke pointedly about the Taliban.
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   Eighmy serves on the advisory board to the Afghanistan-America Foundation, a new organization created by Ritter to "call attention to the plight of the Afghan people."
   
   Eighmy's assignment to Afghanistan ended in June. Eighmy worked under contract with Ronco Consulting Corp. of Washington, D.C., to prepare the way for U.S. Agency for International Development workers and to support the interim Karzai government until the June meeting of the loya jirga, or national assembly.
   
   Along with a staff of 30 Afghans, Eighmy worked in Kabul to get electricity, water, telephone service, e-mail, satellite communications and everything else needed by the office staff that was to follow.
   
   Though Eighmy retired in 1998, he readily accepted the offer to return to work in Kabul. Thirteen days after he came home in June, Beverly Eighmy went to Afghanistan on a six-month assignment as a crime and narcotics adviser with the U.S. Embassy.
   
   "It is the people who draw you back," he said.
   
   "Things are so much better than anyone had reason to hope for. This is why there is hope and why I went back to help."
   
   But conditions are delicate. He said the Taliban took over the country rapidly, and another group could do the same and put an end to Afghanistan's fledgling experiment with democracy.