Salah Arafa’s life plan changed completely at a dinner party at Sweden’s Uppsala University in 1972. The young scientist and physics professor at the American University in Cairo had been invited to speak to guests about Egypt. His lecture was well received, but the casual conversations afterward made it clear to him how little he actually knew about his country.

When asked socioeconomic questions about the nation’s poor, illiterate and unemployed, Arafa says, “Answering the questions was easy, but it immediately gave me the feeling of being ignorant about my own country.”

“[W]e wanted to depend on ourselves and not to beg [for money] all the time.”

From that point on, Arafa set out to learn about national problems and use this knowledge to offer help were it was most needed. He chose Basaisa, a village of about 1,000 people in his home governorate of Sharqiyya, as the birthplace for his pioneering vision of community development. Over the next 35 years, Arafa mobilized the villagers to helm a variety of improvement and sustainability projects using their own skills and resources. Today, Basaisa stands as a role model for sustainable communities, boasting solar power and bio-gas reserves as well as substantial improvements in literacy and public health.

Thirty-five years after adopting Basaisa, Arafa, 67, was honored by the Society of Writers for Environment and Development in Egypt with the prestigious Man of the Year Award.

Despite his initial confession of how little he knew about contemporary Egypt, ‘ignorant’ isn’t a word often used to describe Arafa. He graduated with double majors in physics and chemistry from the Faculty of Science at Cairo University. He earned a master’s degree in nuclear physics with the Atomic Energy Establishment in Egypt, followed by a PhD in solid-state physics from Cairo University. In 1968, he joined AUC’s staff.

“My ultimate goal in the first part of my career was to study things like radiation effects, rocks coming from the moon [],” he says. “I was not interested in anything apart from physics.”

After the dinner at Uppsala University, Arafa realized that his knowledge was limited to the sciences. “I had a long, sleepless night. I kept asking myself: ‘What am I doing with all my knowledge?’”

He decided that he wanted to apply his academic knowledge to make a difference in the lives of those less fortunate than himself. Being the scientist that he is, Arafa approached the problem through research; he read extensively about local society and economics, looking for the answer to one question: “If development is a change from one state to a better one, who is responsible for the change?”

His logical conclusion was that if the person who has the knowledge is the one who can institute change, then: “Salah, you are responsible.”

Arafa learned that the bottom of the nation’s basic socioeconomic pyramid consisted of satellite villages with populations of less than 1,000. In the early 1970s, there were 35,000 satellite villages, a number that has since grown to 45,000. Residents in villages like Basaisa have the lowest incomes and socioeconomic status in the nation and are in dire need of help.

However, Arafa realized that his help was useless unless the beneficiaries were part of the development process. “My strategy was to open dialogue [with the villagers], get the people to participate in sharing their thoughts and ideas on how to develop their community and then development can happen.”

Before he could enlist the support of the villagers, he had to gain their trust. Starting in 1974, Arafa went to Basaisa every Friday and prayed with the villagers at their mosque. Then, with the sheikh’s consent, he used the mosque’s microphone and speaker system to conduct discussions with the villagers after prayer — even the women praying at home could hear what he had to say.

It was no easy task for an outsider with no money, equipment or authority trying to convince the residents that they could vastly improve Basaisa through their own efforts and with limited resources. Arafa recalls people telling him, “Doctor, there are three types of people who come to our village: those who are forced to come, those who are paid to come and those who come for their own interest.”

But Arafa never lost faith in his ability to make a difference. Egypt’s victory in the 1973 War had inspired the young scientist, proving that surprising successes can come from good planning.

One Friday, during his weekly speech at the mosque, Arafa asked everyone present to move with him to a larger place to continue their discussion. They gathered at a madyafa (guest house), only to find it dirty and inhospitable. This sparked the community’s first project: Arafa told everyone that by working together they could make the guest house a clean, appealing and comfortable space for future gatherings. “They all did that enthusiastically,” he recalls. “It was fascinating.”

Arafa’s later meetings with the villagers helped identify Basaisa’s needs and come up with programs to address illiteracy, sanitation and environmental sustainability in the village.

After two years, Arafa managed to gain the villagers trust, respect and confidence. He also recruited volunteers among his AUC friends and students interested in helping the community.

“I didn’t want to take anyone with me at first. [Basaisa] is not a zoo,” he says. “I only took the people who could offer real help.”

One of Arafa’s colleagues, renowned scientist Farouk El-Baz expressed interest in visiting Basaisa. Arafa responded, “If you want to go, you will have to give a lecture.”

El-Baz, who helped train America’s Apollo astronauts for lunar exploration in the late 1960s, was at first skeptical about lecturing rural Egyptians on physics, general sciences and technology. He told Arafa later that the questions the villagers asked were more sophisticated than those he fielded from university students.

Arafa brought other prominent colleagues and friends to share their knowledge with Basaisa, including the late Mustafa Mahmoud, a well-known scientist and writer, and Farkhanda Hassan, a member of Parliament and Secretary General of the National Council for Women.

To promote the guest lecturers, Basaisa villagers hired a man to travel by donkey to neighboring areas, announcing the visits on a megaphone. The lectures soon gathered huge crowds.

People in the villages were clearly excited about these big-city learning opportunities. Yet when Arafa asked the educated people in the village to help teach uneducated neighbors, they told him they did not have the time. It was not just an excuse: Arafa soon discovered that the villagers did indeed spend a significant amount of time commuting to work in the governorate capital Zaqaziq. They had to walk two kilometers to the microbus stop and then ride into the city.

After a little research, Arafa discovered that the commuters could save two hours a day in travel time by using bicycles to go directly to the city. The villagers bought 20 bikes, taking out loans that they paid back from the savings in microbus fare. Eventually, they were able to start attending literacy classes in their newly acquired spare time.

“The challenge we constantly had was that we wanted to depend on ourselves and not to beg [for money] all the time,” Arafa says. “Development doesn’t happen by just receiving; this is why they had to pay back for what they got.”

Arafa’s ideas for Basaisa’s environmental development came after his first visit to the area. He wrote down three remarks on his way back home: “Very kind and cooperative people, beautiful sunny environment and lots of waste in the roads.”

Arafa and the villagers integrated the three, employing inventive techniques to use solar energy to help convert organic waste into bio-gas for household use.

By 1978, Basaisa’s success had turned heads at the highest levels of government. As Arafa recounts with a laugh, then-President Anwar Sadat wanted to develop his own home village, Meit Aboul-Qoum, so he ordered his minister of electricity and power to “go meet this Salah Arafa and ask how he did it.”

In 1983, Basaisa’s active villagers developed two NGOs: the Community Development Association and the Family Production Cooperative. Arafa was chairman of both NGOs, and then passed on the torch to another villager after three years. NGOs in rural villages across the country now work in cooperation with Basaisa’s two NGOs to pool knowledge and learn from their experiences.

For the last 10 years, Arafa has lived in the South Sinai village of Ras Sudr or New Basaisa. Arafa’s plan is to turn the desert area into an eco-friendly, productive community following the Basaisa model.

After tracking Arafa’s work with both villages over the years, the Society of Writers in Egypt on Environment and Development, a group of intellectuals and writers specializing on environmental and development issues, decided to honor him with the Man of the Year award for 2009.

In 2004, Arafa was also selected to be a senior fellow at Ashoka, a global organization that identifies and invests in leading social entrepreneurs, but he says awards do not mean anything to him and he has never pursued the limelight. Those honoring Arafa say attention is just what the Basaisa projects need. Susan Zaki, the society’s secretary general and a writer for state-run Al-Gomhuria newspaper, says that the society felt compelled to honor Arafa this year because his work could inspire many people to start making a real difference in their own communities.

When asked about how people can make that difference, Arafa, ever the scientist, seems to have it all figured out.

“Let’s do a simple calculation. If every one of us devoted one hour a week [to help in any development project] we will get [approximately] 83 million hours a week. Let’s say only half can do that, so that’s 43 million hours,” he explains. “Let’s assume that the hour is one pound, we will have LE 43 million, and we will have a social capital of [around] LE 40 million every week. We can develop more than 10 villages every single week.” et