Word: stewart
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...appearances are deceiving. This onetime deputy governor of an Iraqi province and two-time author isn't garbed as a City banker in order to project upper-class Britishness, but, he says, "to show respect" to Afghans. In Stewart's latest incarnation, as President Hamid Karzai's appointed reviver of traditional Afghan architecture and crafts, earning the respect of the locals is crucial-especially because the work must take place in a war-ravaged country with no real peace on the horizon. How can preservation be achieved amid so much destruction...
...Stewart does it through winning community support. For the past year, he has labored tirelessly to transform the Murad Khane slum in Kabul's 200-year-old city center into a heritage district and tourist magnet for Afghans and foreigners alike. At first, local reaction was about the same as one would expect if some bowler-hatted Brit showed up at a Rio favela and proposed that he help residents spruce the place up. "I told him he would fail," says Palawan Aziz, the neighborhood's headman and now the project's strongest supporter. Stewart persevered, visiting residents and charming...
...paved roads. These measures, while essential for a country that has been without effective central government for nearly 30 years, take time, and Afghans first need to see tangible results-like garbage off the streets-before they can have faith in higher-minded, longer-term pledges and objectives. Stewart's cleanup of Murad Khane has thus given him the license to embark on the cultural projects that are his real passion. He is directing the area's architectural restorations, and he has set up the Centre for Traditional Afghan Arts and Architecture to teach craftsmen the skills they will need...
...school is based on Prince Charles' School of Traditional Arts in London, which so impressed President Karzai on a visit to the British capital that he decided to set up something similar in Kabul. Stewart-who while in Iraq had set up a carpentry school and helped refurbish an old bazaar-was asked to launch it and arrived in Kabul in 2005. Under Stewart's stewardship, the school has become a substantial development program that provides jobs and has improved the lives of the 700 residents of Murad Khane. "I wouldn't see the point of teaching this stuff unless...
...Britain's consul general in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, Stewart grew up in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Scotland before joining the Foreign Office himself and serving in Indonesia and Montenegro. In 2000, he took two years off to walk 9,600 km across Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal and India, seeking to better understand the countries now so important to the West. Then, for 11 months he served as deputy governor of a southern Iraqi province under the Coalition Provisional Authority-a stint that yielded the searingly honest The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year...