At end of road, a new home

In Tripoli, Lebanon, the roads are paved with good intentions but sometimes are a little short on actual asphalt. These are the kinds of things Ahmad Jaber notices now when he returns home to visit.

On his arrival in Tripoli this summer, for example, he noticed a large pothole in front of his father's shop. The pothole — so large that a car driving over it would fall in and have to be hoisted out — was still there when he departed a month later. It's the kind of repair delay one has come to expect in his hometown, where the red tape is long and the infrastructure is only now beginning to recover from the 15-year civil war that ended in 1990.

Jaber is tuned in to infrastructure because in his adopted home he's in charge of design, construction and maintenance of all state roads in six northern Utah counties. As a regional director with the Utah Department of Transportation, Jaber oversees state highways and freeways in Davis, Weber, Box Elder, Cache, Rich and Morgan counties.

The road to UDOT began in 1975 when he left Lebanon, at age 20, to study engineering at Utah State University. The civil war in Lebanon had just barely begun, as Christians, Muslims and two factions of Palestinians engaged in sectarian battles.

Jaber figured that by the time he got his master's degree the war would surely be over, and he would return to Lebanon. But the war dragged on and on, and in 1978 his parents' home in Tripoli was destroyed, hit by rocket fire after the family fortunately had already fled to the mountains. Five years later, with the civil war no closer to being resolved, Jaber returned home to give life there a try. By then he had an American wife and two small children.

Macromedia Flash fileListen to Ahmad Jaber — his story, his voiceRequires Macromedia Flash Player.

But he discovered that he was too Americanized himself to really enjoy the slowness of life in Tripoli. Yes, he missed the smell of orange groves in the spring, and the view of the Mediterranean from his family's balcony, and the taste of cactus fruit. But he had also become too impatient, and too much of a workaholic, and was now used to what he calls America's "amenities and freedoms" — getting a phone when you apply for one, not having to show your I.D. ID if you want to travel from one city to another, getting a job based on what you know, not just whom you know.

In America — he still marvels at this — a man like him can get a job overseeing highways even though he comes from another country, a country where the roads are narrower and it would take two years to build the kind of bridge that takes three months in America.