A decade later, Qudrat's gift goes on

Qudrat Wardak's improbable journey from a squalid Afghan refugee camp to a state-of-the-art Indianapolis hospital captured the hearts of Hoosiers. It was a mission of mercy led by Indiana National Guard members who discovered the dying infant clinging to life in a mud and canvas hut not far from their camp near Kabul.

With help from Central Indiana Rotary clubs and Riley Hospital for Children's Gift of Life Program, the fragile infant and his father were transported more than 7,000 miles — and a world away — to an operating table at Riley, where Qudrat had life-saving heart surgery in February 2005.

But only two days after he returned to Afghanistan, on April 15, 2005, Qudrat suddenly and mysteriously died.

That could have been the end of the story. But it wasn't. Instead, Qudrat's death inspired an even more amazing story.

A decade later, the legacy of the little boy with a crooked smile and bright eyes is a tale of love and humanitarian commitment kept alive by Jim and Roberta Graham, the Brownsburg couple who took in Qudrat and his father after the 2005 surgery and became the toddler's "American grandparents."

Their brief time with Qudrat and his father inspired the Grahams to raise more than $300,000 to bring medical care, education, clean water, economic opportunity — and, most important of all, hope — to the people of a remote, impoverished area in northern Afghanistan.

In the process, Hakim Wardak — empowered by his short visit to America and the Grahams' support — experienced his own personal transformation. Qudrat's father was reunited with five children he had given up because he couldn't afford to feed them. He went to college. He built two schools and a medical clinic. And he became an advocate for women under a theocratic regime where that can be a death sentence.

It is a fitting, perhaps even divine tribute, the Grahams believe, to a child whose name translated to "power of god."

"If it hadn't been for Qudrat," Jim Graham said, "Hakim would never have recovered his children. He would never have gone to college. There would be no school, no medical clinic, no clean water, and no hope or opportunity for girls and women in their village."

Hancock County Superior Court Judge Terry Snow, one of the National Guard officials who helped bring Qudrat to Indiana, put it more succinctly last week as he reflected on the bittersweet experience.

"We like to say," Snow explained, "that the ripples of Qudrat are still being felt today."

Afghanistan to Indiana

The story of Qudrat (pronounced "koo-drawt") started in the fall of 2004 with an Indiana National Guard contingent fighting the war on terror in Afghanistan.

The deployment included Snow and the Graham's son, Major Richard Graham, who served as executive officer of the 1st Battalion, 151st Infantry.

On Oct. 24, 2004, Rick Graham sent an email to his parents, telling them about a refugee camp that sprung up not far outside of the U.S. base where he was stationed near Kabul.

His message included an evocative kicker: "There is a baby boy with a bad heart that will die without heart surgery."

Military medical personnel who examined Qudrat, then about a year old, determined his heart problem was too complex to be addressed in Afghanistan. When Snow heard about it, he thought he might have a solution.

"We've got a (Rotary) program where we bring kids back to the United States to fix their heart,'" Snow told the medics who examined Qudrat.

"So I got on the Internet, contacted my contact back here in Greenfield, and she gave me the name at the hospital. I contacted them and in 48 hours we had a reservation for him at Riley for heart surgery. But it took about two more months to actually get him out of the country."

A broken heart

When Qudrat finally arrived at Riley on Feb. 25, 2005, doctors determined he had been born with reversed blood vessels in his heart. That meant oxygen-rich blood was being pumped back into his lungs, while the blood flowing through the rest of his body was mostly depleted of oxygen.

They also were honest about his stark prognosis: Qudrat had less than a 50-50 chance of surviving the complicated surgery. But if they did nothing, he was certain to die — and sooner rather than later.

On March 8, 2005, doctors at Riley defied those odds. They fixed Qudrat's heart in a six-hour operation, and his health and strength immediately improved.

When he was released from the hospital in late March, Qudrat and his father moved in with the Grahams. They would spend the next three weeks there as Qudrat recuperated before making the trip back to Afghanistan.

The transformation was amazing. When Qudrat arrived in the U.S. he weighed 10 pounds and was so weak "he toppled like a rag doll" when he was placed on a blanket on the floor. By the time he left, he had plumped up to 19 pounds and was hoisting himself up on the Grahams' couch, trying to walk.

"We saw in three and a half weeks," Jim Graham said, "a child gain one and a half years of maturity."

But there was one minor disappointment for the couple as they said goodbye to Qudrat when he left April 11, 2005, for Afghanistan.

"We kept trying to get him to say 'grandma' and 'grandpa' in English," Jim Graham said. "If somebody was holding him, and I would say 'grandpa,' he would look toward me and reach up and try to get me to pick him up. And he knew (Roberta) as grandma, but he didn't say the words to us."

Caught off guard

Qudrat's death just two days after returning home caught everyone off guard. And because of Muslim customs — there was no autopsy and he was quickly buried — the cause will never be known.

The Grahams received the crushing news in a late-night call from their son. He followed it up with an email. "Today was supposed to be a fun day on our base camp ... but, as you know, today is instead a sad, sad day. Little Qudrat died last night," Rick Graham wrote.

A few days later, Rick Graham met with Hakim and handed over $13,000 that had been raised by Hoosiers to help the family.

That was the last anyone from Indiana heard from Qudrat's father.

Jim and Roberta Graham, like others touched deeply by Qudrat, were devastated. But they went on with their busy lives, savoring the memories of the little boy they had given a better life — even if it was only for a few weeks.

Reconnecting with Hakim

Jim Graham was elected governor of the Central Indian Rotary clubs in 2006. In that role, he attended a Rotary event in California, where the organization's president asked him if there were any projects he wanted to pursue.

Inspired by Qudrat and curious about the fate of Hakim, Jim Graham said he wanted to go to Afghanistan to help eradicate polio.

Two weeks later, he received a call from the United Nations. He was to leave for Kabul two weeks later. While he was there, Jim Graham hoped to reconnect with Hakim. But all he had was an old email address. He didn't know if it was still good, or if Hakim was even alive, but he took a chance.

" 'Hakim, if you get this message, I'm going to be at the Serena hotel between this date and this date,' " Jim Graham recalled writing in 2007. "If you have the opportunity, please come by and see me."

Four nights after he arrived in Afghanistan, Jim Graham got a call from the hotel desk: A man wanted to see him. It was Hakim.

After exchanging hugs and small talk, Jim Graham turned serious. "I said, 'The people of America would be very interested in what you did with the $13,000,' " he recalled.

The question opened the door to another side of Hakim new to Jim Graham and everyone else involved in the 2005 mission of mercy.

"Hakim got out pictures of his kids," he said, "and that's when I began to learn more about his life."

In all his earlier dealings with the Americans, Hakim had presented Qudrat as his only child. He had been ashamed, he now told his American friend, to admit he had been unable to feed or care for five other children while living in a massive refugee camp in Pakistan.

Hakim explained he used some of the money from Indiana to retrieve his children and repay the families that had taken them in when he and his wife were so destitute. Then he returned to his family's home in Hajji Abdad, a village of about 1,800 that had been devastated by years of Soviet occupation, and fixed it up for his reunited family that now included a baby girl born about 18 months after Qudrat died.

Then he traveled to Pakistan, using some of the donated money to study medicine. When he reconnected with Jim Graham, Hakim had just completed his schooling and was heading back to his family and village — committed to providing education, health care and opportunities for women.

"It was the most noble thing I had ever heard of," Jim Graham said. "I had suspected, like a lot of young people, that he might have used the money to buy a motorbike and live the high life. But Hakim was dedicated to using the money to help his village."

Inspired to do more

Hakim's surprising revelations renewed Jim Graham's faith in the man he and his wife now call their "Afghan son."

"That's what convinced me and Roberta," he said, "to do whatever we could to help him out."

In the years since that meeting, the Grahams — both now in their early 80s — have used their business, community and Rotary connections to help Hakim reach his goals of improving health care and education in his region now controlled by the Taliban.

"It was our project," Jim Graham said. "But we had connections with Rotary and weren't afraid to call a club in, say, Durango, Colorado, or Rochester, Minnesota, and say, 'We have a story we would like to share with you.' "

And it worked. They've raised more than $310,000. In addition to building two schools and a medical clinic, installing a well and latrines, the money has been used to buy sewing machines and material that more than 100 women are using to generate income.

Hakim's effort to educate and empower girls and women is one of the things that brings the most pride to the Grahams. More than a third of the students in the "Qudrat School" are female, a rate well above the average in Afghanistan, and they are now raising money for a women's health clinic they hope will reduce the high rate of women who die during childbirth.

"Hakim said he wanted to uplift the women of Afghanistan," Jim Graham said, "because he saw how much women in America did."

And Hakim will soon have another partner in his work. His oldest son, who graduated from the school his father built with money raised by the Grahams, is now in medical school.

When he graduates, the young man who calls the Grahams "my dear grandparents," plans to return to his village and continue building on the unlikely partnership between an Indiana couple and a grieving father — a mission of love and mercy that started with Qudrat.

Call Star reporter Tim Evans at (317) 444-6204. Follow him on Twitter: @starwatchtim.

How to help

To make a tax-deductable donation, make checks payable to Rotary 6560 Foundation and mail to P.O. Box 412, Brownsburg, IN 46112.