Westminster president offers new home to Afghani translator

On the computer screen inside of the president's office at Westminster College, a slide show of photos begins.

A bombed out building.

The remains of a Soviet tank.

The skyline of Kabul, Afghanistan.

As he moves through the pictures he took there, George “Barney” Forsythe recalled his experiences in a foreign country.

“This is the soccer stadium in downtown Kabul that the Taliban used as an execution venue,” he said pausing on a picture of the stadium. “People who would violate the religious laws would be shot or stoned here.

“The infrastructure in Afghanistan is terrible. There 2.2 million people, no functional public utilities and no functioning stoplights.”

In October of 2003 Forsythe found himself in the Middle East with the goal of improving that infrastructure. Forsythe, who at that time was the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at West Point, was part of a United States coalition team assigned with the task of helping the Afghan government establish a similar academy for their new army.

“We were given six weeks, a blank sheet of paper, a Turkish officer and 10 Afghan officers, and given the mission to write a concept plan for a new academy that would open up no later than 18 months later,” Forsythe said.

This is when he met Sardar Sherzad, a man who Forsythe said was a key component in the completion of his mission.

“Since we were working in a variety of different languages we needed to hire a variety of translators and interpreters to help us with the report,” Forsythe said. “We got to Kabul and met the folks we would be working with, and the next day on the job Sardar appeared with a couple of other colleagues looking for jobs as translators.”

Sherzad at the time was in his fifth year of medical school at Kabul University, but because of his intelligence and ability to speak and write English, took the job as a translator for the project.

He became the head of the team of translators - which was made up of other medical students - and in their work together, taught Forsythe invaluable lessons about the culture of Afghanistan and the nature of Islam.

“(The translators) were absolutely critical,” Forsythe said. “We would write day and night, and we would print stuff and they would read it and then we would have a discussion.

“We would ask questions like ‘how do you fit prayer into business, how do you schedule things, what do you do when you are in school and it's time for prayer?' Then they would talk to us about that and help us understand how their religion fits into their lives and help us work through stereotypes that people have with different religions and to help us understand them.”

Looking at a picture of the team of translators, Forsythe explained why this knowledge was so important to his work.

“We created a hybrid of different academy models that would make sense in Afghanistan,” he said. “A person would say that we just cloned West Point, but there are a lot of things that are different that make sense in that country.

“Thursday afternoon and Friday are weekends, and we had to insert prayer times into the daily schedule,” he continued. “They were very helpful in helping us understand culture, history and religion, so working through things like honor codes, ethical development or leadership we had to talk about customs and traditions and those kinds of things.”

After six weeks of intense work, Forsythe and his team completed its mission, and gave a proposal to the Afghan government.

He would not see Sherzad again until he returned to the country for the opening ceremonies of the training academy he had helped build. During that trip, Forsythe began to realize that Afghanistan was becoming more dangerous than when he had lived there.

“We've seen a resurgence of the Taliban, and translators that worked with the coalition were becoming targets of terrorists,” he said. “Sardar saw other translators whose lives were threatened or were killed.”

A year an a half after he returned to the United States, and shortly after he retired from the Army and became president of Westminster, Forsythe received an e-mail from Sherzad, saying he and his family were moving to America, and asking for help. Forsythe, without hesitation, took his opportunity to repay the man who had helped him so much overseas.

“He shot an e-mail to everybody who worked on this project and said he had a visa and was bringing his family, but he needed a host family to sponsor them because they had no idea what to do when they got to the US,” Forsythe said. “I replied before I even asked my wife.

“They helped us. He is a real hero and a patriot because he helped his country and put his life on the line to help,” he continued. “This is the American immigrant experience. It's how we all got here - one way or another - and I felt an obligation as a citizen of the world to help them make this transition.”

As Forsythe changed the photo on the screen to a picture of Sherzad, his wife, and his three children, he explained the reason why the Sherzad family now resides in Fulton.

“He was making more money as a translator than he was as a doctor. He gave up a very good salary by Afghan standards and the opportunity to practice medicine which was a high-status job,” Forsythe said. “He gave all that up to come to a country where he is going to start all over again, and he did it for these four people right here.