Page 336 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

the end of the phone was the only thing that was going to get the
villagers their houses.
I eventually got the call that the houses had reached the village,
but there was one last problem: there wasn’t enough labour. The
houses had been designed for the landowners to build themselves
as much as possible, but so many of them were injured or old that
they just weren’t strong enough to dig the foundations. So I called
the brigadier one last time.
‘You couldn’t let me have eight soldiers for a couple of weeks,
could you?’
It took far longer than we had anticipated – organising such a
complex task remotely was a logistical nightmare – but after three
months of conference calls and miles of fax paper the houses were
built. It was a remarkable achievement, and when I told my YPO
forum members about it they wanted to go and see what we had
done. So I called my friend the minister and told him I wanted to
bring a team in, and asked if he could organise some security for
us. Some of the guys were Jewish and fairly high-profile, so going
into a Muslim country where extremism is an issue was a concern
for them. The minister arranged for us to get special clearance and
for a UN helicopter to take us to the valley where the houses were
now standing.
We met several people who were living in the houses we’d had
built, and one woman invited us in. One of the YPO guys told her
that I was the person responsible for her house and immediately
her eyes filled with tears and she put her arms around me.
‘Thank you,’ she kept on saying, ‘thank you.’
As we flew back to Islamabad, we saw several of the new houses
and it is hoped that several more will be built. The prototype was
donated to the government with a set of plans so that anyone
could copy the design. Three years on, there is still so much to be
done, and I sometimes wonder if the best aid that can be given
after a disaster is entrepreneurs’ time. We are often so much more

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