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Hawa Meskinyar, Arch 95, M CP 98, left her job in Washington, D.C., to return to her native Afghanistan, the country she and her family had fled more than two decades earlier, to help improve the lives of impoverished women and children.
Meskinyar formed Join and Help Afghanistan Now, a nonprofit humanitarian organization, in 2001. The acronym JAHAN stands for a word that means world or universe in the Dari language of Afghanistan.
For her humanitarian efforts, Meskinyar was named the 2006 outstanding alumna at the Women's Leadership Conference at Georgia Tech in November.
Other outstanding women honored were Mary Frank Fox, a professor in the School of Public Policy, winner of the faculty award; Elizabeth Miller, an academic adviser in the Ivan Allen College, staff; Karen Feigh, School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, graduate student; and Katie Fluke, School of Biology, undergraduate student.
Meskinyar, the granddaughter of an Afghan diplomat, was 8 years old when she fled the country with her family after the communist invasion in 1979. Her mother had worked at the TV station in Kabul. Her father was a civil engineer. They moved from Pakistan to Germany and finally to the United States, where the family settled in Stone Mountain, Ga.
Meskinyar returned to Afghanistan on a personal mission to help widows and orphans in 2000. That trip prompted her to found JAHAN after her return to the United States. In 2002, she married childhood friend Nadim Amin, who had re-established family business ties in Afghanistan. A year later she quit her job as a program analyst for the Office of Research on Women's Health at the National Institutes of Health and the couple moved to Afghanistan.
Meskinyar works in Afghanistan as the general coordinator of clinics for International Relief and Development Inc. and donates her time to JAHAN, which was designed to pair sponsors with needy children. A suggested monthly donation of $30 covers some of the living expenses and enables youngsters to go to school rather than beg on the streets to help their families make ends meet.
On the organization's Web site, Meskinyar explained that she tried to come up with a standard form to provide information on the Afghani children in need. "I thought it would be nice for the sponsors to know a little about the interests, hobbies and aspirations of each child," she wrote. "So I asked a 10-year-old little girl what she enjoyed or liked and she just stared at me blankly, not even knowing what to answer."
Meskinyar coaxed the child, asking if she wanted to be a teacher, doctor, nurse or baker. "She looked up at me and in her soft voice said, 'I'm not supposed to be anything. That's not the way things are here.'"
The Web site, www.jahan.org, also includes excerpts from letters written by children who have been sponsored through the organization. A child named Farida wrote, "I am in the third grade and have the third best grade in my class. I used to sell matches and toilet paper with my sister Masooda in Share-now, but since I've been sick she has been going alone. Also, since I'm getting older, my mom does not want me to go anymore, so she is trying to learn to read and write so maybe she can help support us."
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