When President Bush called on government agencies last year to provide support to the reconstruction effort in Iraq, Karen Lee ’99 packed up her liberal arts skills, took a leave from her job, and headed to Baghdad. Her assignment: six months, helping to rebuild the water infrastructure, through the Iraq Project and Contracting Office.
“I had no idea what to expect,” said Lee. “All I knew was that I had a job and that I knew a couple of people here.”
A regulatory analyst in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in Washington, D.C., Lee had watched as the official war in Iraq was winding down and the provisional government was forming, and felt that the United States had a responsibility to help the Iraqi people as they transitioned to a new government and way of life.
She also felt a personal responsibility, “the hope that I could do something good,” said Lee. She started her days in Iraq as a project manager, and two weeks later was asked to lead the water sector, one of six reconstruction sectors in Iraq.
In her new job she would direct the effort to deliver potable drinking water and build sewage systems and workable irrigation systems throughout Iraq. No small task — especially for someone with no experience in engineering.
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| Karen Lee '99 was a political science major at Colgate. (Photo by Gary Fabiano) |
Without pause (or prompting), Lee points to her Colgate education (she was a political science major) as a key factor in her ability to tackle the task at hand.
“That’s the brilliance of a liberal arts education,” said Lee. “It gives you the skills to think analytically. You don’t need to be the expert in contracts, procurement, or engineering, but you know how to ask the right questions.”
Lee led the water project so successfully that the director of programs asked her to serve as his deputy director, overseeing all six reconstruction sectors — oil, electricity, public works and water, security and justice, transportation and communications, and buildings, education, and health.
“There are areas of Iraq that have an hour of electricity a day,” said Lee. “Going from that to setting up a distribution and transmission and generation system that can get them four, five, or six hours of electricity a day, and working with people to make that a reality is awesome.”
Lee enjoyed the work, although she never quite knew what to expect. The unpredictability of insurgent attacks made for a lot of late nights in the office, working to calculate and re-calculate project costs and logistics.
One day she would be working to find funding for a hospital and the next she would be working on ways to ensure that contractor programs were running efficiently.
Stationed in the “international zone,” an enclosed four-square-mile area in Baghdad, Lee said that she had to deal with the constant threat of attack.
“Once you realize that you’re going to be there for six months, you tell yourself that nothing is going to happen; whether it’s delusional or just a coping mechanism, I don’t know.”
Lee wore a flak jacket and helmet whenever she went outside. But she didn’t let the sense of danger hold her back. “You just go ahead and do your job. You can’t stop; there’s a larger mission.”
Now that she is back in the United States, Lee will continue her work with OMB and will start taking night classes at Georgetown University in pursuit of her law degree.
Reflecting on her experience in Iraq, she said that some of the smaller successes are what kept her going.
“Getting a thousand people drinkable water — it sounds like nothing, but to those thousand people it’s very important,” said Lee. “This was the most amazing experience I’ve ever had.”
Charlie Melichar
Office of Public Relations and Communications
315.228.7417
