Hedayatullah Ahmadzai was born in the Afghan capital Kabul in 1955. After finishing high school there and some other work on construction he graduated from Kabul Poly Technic Institute Construction Faculty, Irrigation Department with his diploma in 1988.

Before becoming Director for Murad Khane Old Town regeneration programs and Head of the Engineering section at the British NGO “Turquoise Mountain Foundation” he already gained a lot of experience in other jobs at other places:

From 1974-1980 he worked in the Labor Force of the Afghan Ministry of Public Labor on survey and transportation
for construction of road retaining walls and culverts in Kabul, Logar, Paktia and Paktika Provinces.

From 1980-1983 then he worked in a similar position for the Ministry of Finance.

In 1989 he was team leader, doing survey of road and building reconstruction for the organization START,
based in Peshawar / Pakistan mostly for road, shelter, drinking water and water mill projects
in Helmand and Kandahar Provinces.

From 1989-1993 then he worked as site engineer, manager and Community liaison
for AASSP/DAI, Peshawar in seven different Afghan provinces, including those mentioned already before here.

From the end of 1993 to 1999 then he worked as Community Liaison Officer at UNOPS Kabul office in Islamabad. After having covered many Eastern and Southern provinces of Afghanistan in 1993-94 he then also worked in the country’s West at Herat in that position.

As a Program assistant in the Monitoring and Evaluation Unit for WFP Kabul then from 2000 to 2005 his task was to provide support for the food-aid program through project monitoring and to conduct field visits to assess project performance. This also included utilization of resources and achievement of planned targets, as well as their impacts on the communities. Construction and rehabilitation of roads, Irrigation systems, canal cleaning and buildings in several provinces, including the Central Afghan province of Bamiyan were part of his field of action then.

Following a short intermezzo as the second to Ministry of Education Engineer for the World Bank’s school building and rehabilitation program from the end of 2005 to April 2006 he then became Head of the Engineering Section at “Turquoise Mountain Foundation”.

As a Director of that British charity NGO from 2009 till 2018 he was in charge of leading the office and all field activities in its Old Town regeneration program at Murad Khane, Kabul. Within that negotiations with Government Ministries to solve related issues amongst the Government and Murad Khane community and its bodies such as  the Shia Shrine Council of the local Qizilbash community shura were as much part of his field of action as the training of staff and their improvement of skills on restoration and new construction mostly in the cultural heritage context. 

His experience was also extended by attending international conferences on this and related fields.
He’s speaking Dari, Pashtu and English. Engineer Hedayat is married and he’s living with his family in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Stefan Frischauf was born in Düsseldorf in the West-German Lower Rhineland in 1964.
In the midst 1980’s after finishing high school he did his national service as a civil service working in hospital.
Following that he visited a nursing school in the South of Germany and received his diploma there in 1989.

In the 1980’s he also has travelled many places particularly in Europe and Asia. 

Not getting accepted at the academy of fine arts, where Joseph Beuys had taught his concept of arts and the “social sculpture” in his hometown he started studying architecture there. He finished studies following a year in Berlin in 1998 / 99 with a diploma consolidated on urban history and urban development.

Slumps and family reasons afterwards let him change sides to the engineering section, working on the fields of fire protection and building laws for about 7 years. Then 2008 / 09 he got the chance to work for the British-US NGO “Turquoise Mountain Foundation” at Kabul in an Old Town regeneration program.

“Infrastructures” soon became his task to direct there. “Sustainable Urban Water Management” for the approximately 4 hectares /
9.5 acres became what he calls “the biggest challenge of his professional career”. Although the first decentralized piped low tech sewage system finalized by a small treatment plant couldn’t be realized in 2010 at Murad Khane in Kabul’s Old Town, also his consulting partner for that project, Berlin based water management engineer Harald Kraft is convinced, that systems of that kind need to be realized.

After his return from Afghanistan in 2011 / 12 he also lived and worked in Hangzhou / China and 2012 / 13 in India and Bangladesh.

He shares the word “After your return from Afghanistan to the West nothing can be the way it was before” with many veterans from all nations, who worked there or at other places of conflict. Amongst them some “armed social workers”, who also became close friends.

In his book “Fragmented Urban Development 201_” he worked out and evaluated some case studies regarding his experiences on different fields in different regions after 2010. He calls this work, he finalized in 2015 his “PhD without having a doctoral advisor”, as he just couldn’t find anybody consulting him on that. As there are no programs for that at all neither on the academic nor on social or political fields that’s anything but a surprise. Programs like that though should soon start.
On all levels and at some places. Others to follow soon.

Stefan is married and has three children living at Düsseldorf.

Carlos Jaramillo was born in Bucaramanga, Colombia in 1964.

After studying architecture he worked as an architect at many places, including Brazil and the US.
His focus mostly was cultural heritage and how to deal with that.

In 2009 he worked as a consultant for Cultural Heritage at the Ministry for Urban Development at Kabul / Afghanistan.
He later then in 2015 finished his PhD at Nanyang Technological University Singapore with the subject:
"Famagusta, Cyprus: A Third Way in Cultural Heritage".

His job description as a "Freelance Cultural Heritage Consultant" that way also brought him to places like
Cyprus, Iraq and many others recently, dealing with post-Conflict countries and ways to preserve their cultural heritage
and to continue the rebuilding process of that essential good.

Besides that he does a lot of research and field work dealing with that and related subjects.