March 9, 2006 | Read Time: 6 minutes
Ten years ago, Bruce Parmelee had a safe, routine job as owner of a Harley-Davidson franchise in Binghamton, N.Y. Ten months ago, he was helping to organize
community projects in one of the most dangerous spots on the planet — Iraq.
While many people make midlife career shifts, few seek a change of scenery as dramatic as the one chosen by Mr. Parmelee, 57. Since 1999, he has been working for CHF International, a relief and development charity in Silver Spring, Md., that operates programs in more than 30 countries.
Mr. Parmelee joined CHF after he sold his Harley-Davidson shop, deciding it was time for a change. “It got routine,” he says. “It was an interesting clientele, but it was a business I’d run for 14 years. I thought, I’m either going to stay in this until I retire, or I’m going to roll the dice like I did when I got into this.”
He was pondering what to do next when he ran into Michael E. Doyle, president of CHF, whom he had known earlier in his career. As a young man, Mr. Parmelee worked as a volunteer for Vista (Volunteers in Service to America), then on the staff of the federal agency that operated Vista and other volunteer programs. He helped organize projects to improve child nutrition in New York, promote sales of local crafts, and reclaim strip mines in West Virginia.
“One of the thoughts that I’d had was to try to get into what I’d done earlier in my career, but to do it on an international basis,” he says.
A Start in Kosovo
CHF fit the bill. Mr. Parmelee’s first assignment: Kosovo, winter of 1999-2000. Working as a consultant, he led a project to repair 375 houses that had been destroyed during the war between the Serbian government and ethnic Albanians. In 2002 he worked for CHF in Bamiyan Province, in Afghanistan, heading projects to replenish herds, rebuild markets, and improve irrigation and shelter.
Mr. Parmelee admits he had to learn as he went along, but drew on skills from his Vista days. “You’ve got to go in and pull people together around issues that affect their community,” he says.
In June 2003 CHF asked Mr. Parmelee to start a program in Iraq.
The charity had $47-million from the U.S. Agency for International Development for an Iraq Community Action Program, an effort to help Iraqis select and complete local projects to repair facilities, such as schools, clinics, or sewer systems.
Mr. Parmelee’s daunting task: to form 50 neighborhood associations in the southern regions of Babil, Karbala, and Najaf and get them to identify projects within 90 days. Mr. Parmelee found the schools were run down, lights didn’t work, sewage lined the streets, roads were primitive.
“It was almost unimaginable to me, and I’ve been in pretty tough places,” Mr. Parmelee says. One of the biggest challenges he faced was an enormous store of pent-up anger. “The venting that needed to take place before you could move constructively in communities was a force to be reckoned with,” he says. “People were just screaming, saying, ‘Look how we live.’”
But CHF has since helped Iraqis form more than 375 groups that have completed at least 425 projects — despite erratic electricity, fuel shortages, and insurgency attacks on major traffic routes.
The program’s major success, however, is not the projects themselves, says Mr. Parmelee. “That’s almost a subordinate accomplishment compared to the way the projects have involved people in self-governance.”
Mr. Parmelee’s first stint in Iraq, as a consultant, ended in December 2003. But he returned in September 2004, this time as director of CHF’s Iraq operations. By then Iraq was a more dangerous place for anyone associated with a Western charity, so he spent about 60 percent of his time in Amman, Jordan.
Today, CHF has 12 offices in Iraq and employs more than 400 Iraqis and five expatriates, who also operate a program that makes small loans to help people start or improve businesses, using money from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
When CHF first showed up in Iraq, some people demanded to know where the group got the money for its projects, Mr. Parmelee says. He would respond, “From the people of the United States.”
While a couple of towns decided not to work with CHF, the vast majority did once they understood its approach, he says. CHF took pains to work separately from the U.S. military, and told people, “We are here at your behest and as your guest. You can choose to not work with us, that’s fine, we’ll go away.”
Mr. Parmelee — who attended a short course on security sponsored by RedR, a group that trains relief workers, about a year and a half ago — says he has never been attacked, although he has faced a few situations where the “small hairs on the back of my neck stood up.”
Once his car was stopped by a policeman at a checkpoint on the road to Hilla. His heart sank because insurgents sometimes assassinate people at phony checkpoints. But when the Iraqi driver told the policeman that Mr. Parmelee worked for CHF, he responded, “My brother worked for CHF,” and waved them through.
CHF has received death threats, however, and has moved several of its offices. One of Iraq’s deadliest suicide bombings, in February 2005, was aimed at police recruits who were lined up for eye exams at a clinic in Hilla that CHF had helped rehabilitate. It killed more than 100 people.
Mr. Parmelee, who served as director of the charity’s Iraq programs until June 2005, is now CHF’s director of global operations for Africa and the Middle East. His “desk job” gives him more time to spend with his wife, Debra, and daughter, Marcelene, 21. But he still travels about 30 percent of the time and is planning to return to Iraq shortly.
He says the recent violent clashes between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, which some fear could evolve into civil war, are heart-wrenching.
“It’s such an unfortunate setback because the progress [Iraqis] have made is so often not visible to the Western media viewer. They have come a long way.”
When asked what draws him to danger zones, he suggests thinking about what it’s like to return home after being away for a few weeks.
“You come back to your neighborhood, you unlock your door, you go to the store, whatever. You always notice small things that have changed during the period that you’ve been gone,” he says. “When you work in [a war-torn] environment, it is such an exciting time to be involved with people’s lives because you see these enormous changes that take place from day to day and week to week. And people are motivated, really motivated to make things work because they’re trying to put their lives back together.”
