Dr. Rifat Zaidi, a resident of Newcastle and orthopedic surgeon at Miles Memorial Hospital, visits his native Pakistan annually. Following a 2005 earthquake that left 87,000 dead and 3.5 million homeless, Zaidi began the visits as a way to assist in relief efforts.
Now, in the wake of the summer 2010 floods that left as many as 20 million Pakistanis without food, clothing or shelter, Zaidi is once again at the forefront of charity efforts to mitigate the devastation.
Zaidi, with The Rawalpindi Medical College Overseas Foundation, a nonprofit made up of alumni of Zaidi’s Alma Mater, is attempting to reconstruct the village of Basti Markankhel Wali.
Zaidi and the foundation’s past work – including the construction of a 10-bed burn center – has been significant, but the village is a much larger project.
“This time we thought, well, maybe we’ll do something a little bigger than what we did before,” Zaidi said. “Instead of just doing the nickel and dime stuff, we’ll try to build a village.”
[Basti Markankhel Wali] has 330 families in it so it basically needs 330 houses,” Zaidi explained in a recent interview in his Newcastle kitchen. “They’re just one-room houses with a small kitchenette and a WC [water closet or bathroom]. The cost is basically around $1000 for a house.”
Simple though they may be, the houses will provide the residents of the village with what they need most – basic shelter in the face of oncoming winter.
“As we speak, we’ve started construction of 20 houses,” Zaidi said. “As the money trickles in, they will start building [more].” The foundation’s fundraising goal is $300,000. Thus far, they’ve raised nearly $40,000.
“[We’re] just doing one village instead of doing a little bit here, a little bit there, buying a blanket here, buying some utensils there, all that stuff,” Zaidi said.
Zaidi, 51, was born in 1959 in Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city. He is a graduate of Rawalpindi Medical College and a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, the oldest surgical college in the world.
After further training in Buffalo, N.Y. and Baltimore, Md., Zaidi returned to Pakistan before moving to Maine in 2001. “I found a listing [online] for the job [at Miles Memorial Hospital],” he said.
Zaidi’s skills as an orthopedic surgeon proved particularly valuable in the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake. “There’s a shortage of orthopedic surgeons [in Pakistan],” Zaidi said. “The magnitude of that disaster was huge… 10,000 people had one or another orthopedic injury.”
Later, as a member of the board of directors of the Rawalpindi Medical College Overseas Foundation, Zaidi and his colleagues, at the request of the dean, built the burn center with an operating room and 30 staffers, paid for with funds raised in the U.S. and overseas. In July 2010, the foundation transferred the center to the Pakistani government.
Shortly thereafter, Zaidi began another ambitious project. “There are 12,000 Pakistani physicians in [the] U.S.A.,” he said. “They’re all highly trained and educated.”
Many of these physicians return to Pakistan regularly and offer their services free of charge. “They cannot find a place to work… You cannot actually get into a hospital and do the work,” Zaidi said.
Zaidi began forming the idea of a hospital staffed exclusively by volunteers, expatriate physicians. He acquired a piece of land in his father-in-law’s village, but the floods have derailed the project – for now.
The village where Zaidi’s late mother-in-law grew up, meanwhile, “ceased to exist” after the flood. “Her relatives there are all okay but their houses and whatever they owned – it’s gone,” Zaidi said.
Zaidi quotes United Nations figures to demonstrate the vast impact of the flooding. The floods destroyed 6000 schools, 5000 kilometers (over 3000 miles) of roads and 400 hospitals.
“Even those 400 [hospitals] were not really enough,” Zaidi said. “They were just giving basic medical care to people. Even those are gone.”
“The same goes for the schools,” Zaidi said. “Pakistan has literacy of 30 percent… A person who gets up to middle school is still considered educated.”
The Indus River, at the center of the floods, is “the only useful body of water in Pakistan,” Zaidi said. “Everything in Pakistan is related to Indus.”
The flooding of the Indus has devastated not only the country’s infrastructure, but also its agriculture-based economy. During the British rule of India, the geographical region known as Punjab, including the Pakistani province of Punjab “was the bread basket of India,” Zaidi said.
“The British developed a canal system for irrigation and that canal system is the basis of all the agriculture in the province of southern Punjab and Sindh [province],” Zaidi said. “The province of Sindh grows most of the fruits and vegetables and meat and everything in Pakistan.”
During the flooding, the Indus, in some places, was as much as 20 kilometers (12 miles) wide, Zaidi said. “An area the size of England was underwater.”
Now, “the land is so waterlogged that you can’t really grow anything,” Zaidi said. “You have 180 million people [in Pakistan] who are relying on that area to grow food. That food is not going to be there.”
About 1.2 million cattle died in the floods, Zaidi said. “That’s a huge chunk of [the] economy. Whatever they make is from raising animals, selling them for their milk or selling them for food.”
Muslims usually sacrifice a lamb, goat or bull for Eid al-Adha, a holiday in Islam that fell on Nov. 16 this year. “The prices of those [animals] have gone up by 100 percent compared to last year because the animals are not there,” Zaidi said. “It’s just not one thing. It just touches everything.”
As busy as he is with relief efforts, Zaidi spends most of the year at home in Newcastle, where he enjoys playing golf, working on his home and land and spending time with his family – wife Tasneem and children Izza and Sammy, both students at Lincoln Academy.
A practicing Muslim, Zaidi said the media unfairly maligns his religion. “The way it is portrayed and the way it is practiced by some people – that’s not the way it is,” he said. “[Islam] has a lot of good things which unfortunately do not come out in the press. Whatever comes out is all negative.”
“It’s always a minority which creates mischief and that minority, unfortunately for Islamic religion, is totally illiterate and they have their own brand of culture that they want to inflict on other people,” Zaidi said.
Islam is not alone in this respect. “You have right wing people everywhere,” Zaidi said. “Look at [the] U.S.A. Look at any other country. Look at India. They have right wing extremists everywhere.
“Taking people’s lives is a crime against the people [and] against the God that they are worshipping,” Zaidi said. “The Quran actually says – it’s very clear on these things. Nobody is allowed to take their own life or anybody else’s life. That is a Quranic teaching. Only god is allowed to give life and to take life.”
Zaidi is unsure how to change American attitudes about Islam. “America also thinks that Barack Obama is a Muslim. How do you change that?” he asked, laughing.
Without a mosque in easy driving distance, Zaidi practices his religion at home. “The Islamic religion is the only religion – as far as I know – where the common man does not need a cleric,” he said. “You can actually practice wherever you live.
“Yes, one would like to go and say a prayer on Fridays like you go to church on Sunday but it’s not compulsory,” Zaidi said. “I’m working on Friday so I can’t go to Portland just for the prayer.”
Zaidi does travel a fair distance for his religion, buying halal meat in Boston. In about nine years of life in Newcastle, he said he’s never felt discomfort or discrimination as a result of his religion or heritage. “If I had felt it I would have gone,” he said.
To read more about Zaidi, his family and their circuitous journey to Newcastle, read “The New Mainers: Portraits of our Immigrant Neighbors,” by Pat Nyhan.
For more information on the Rawalpindi Medical College Overseas Foundation and the rebuilding effort in Basti Markankhel Wali, visit www.rawalian.com.
To donate to the Rawalpindi Medical College Overseas Foundation, write a check to RMCOF and mail it to Dr. Rifat Zaidi, c/o Miles Memorial Hospital, Damariscotta, 04543. Donations are tax-deductible and Zaidi will provide receipts to all donors.
