From urchin diving to nation building

BY ERIC LINDBERG
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

Seven years ago, Kevin Crisp was diving for sea urchins, working as a commercial fisherman out of the Santa Barbara Harbor.
A few weeks ago, he was in the Muthanna province of Iraq, meeting with tribal leaders and working on a three-year plan with the local Iraqi government.

It seems like a bit of a leap, sure, but Crisp gives a fairly nonchalant explanation.
“You hear about what’s going on and at a certain point, you want to go see for yourself,” he says. “After so long in the fishing industry, I wanted to do something different.”
So he sold his boat in 2001 and, while continuing to work as a crewman on another boat, went back to school, eventually earning a degree in global studies from UC Santa Barbara at age 43.
Now 47, Crisp is the deputy team leader of a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), the civilian arm of the U.S. presence in Iraq that is working with local business and community leaders to rebuild the war-torn nation from the ground up.
“A lot of what we are doing is teaching grassroots democracy,” he says.
The Muthanna PRT is one of 25 similar groups deployed by the U.S. Department of State as the civilian counterpart to the military surge announced by President Bush early this year.
Since he arrived at Tallil Air Base in the southern Iraq governorate of Dhi Qar in April, Crisp has spent five days a week in the neighboring Muthanna province. His work with the provincial government and Iraqi non-governmental organizations there follows essentially two tracks, the first of which focuses on rebuilding infrastructure.
“We’ve got a lot of infrastructure projects, like a pedestrian crossing over a roadway,” he says. “We kind of target the ones we know will help the most people. … Even something as simple as gravelling a road.”
Some are a bit more complex, however, such as a mud-brick, three-classroom school with solar panels that Crisp hopes will serve as the pilot location for the One Laptop per Child program developed by a Massachusetts-based nonprofit organization that builds low-cost laptops to bolster educational resources for children around the world.
The other track of the PRT program is focused on the future, working with government officials to develop a long-term, forward-looking plan.
“We’re basically asking them, what is the vision for Iraq in three years?” Crisp says.
Many current members of the Muthanna PRT have various specialties, he says, such as hashing out a budget, planning agricultural projects, funding pilot programs and advising leaders on educational ventures. Crisp is a generalist, spending most of his time managing the PRT’s operations — dealing with both day-to-day and future plans for the outfit.
When asked how long he expects the United States to have a sizeable contingent in Iraq, either civilian or military, Crisp says the plan appears to call for PRTs to remain in the country for another five to 10 years. As far as the military presence, he says while that topic is beyond his scope, he has seen positive change and remains optimistic.
“The security situation has improved without a doubt,” he says. “I know that for a fact, not just from the intelligence that I get through the government, but from talking to Iraqi families.”
While admitting that the Muthanna province is one of the quieter areas in terms of violence — and the first to officially hand over control to Iraqi security forces about a year and a half ago — Crisp says talking with colleagues in other PRTs has him convinced the country is slowly stabilizing.
“A year ago in Anbar, it was full-on combat and now it’s completely turned around,” he says, referring to the Anbar governorate that includes the battle-ravaged cities of Ramadi, Haditha and Fallujah.
“They love U.S. troops and want to see more of them.”
Change in Muthanna is not as apparent, he says, since the region never experienced heavy warfare.
“They’ve made progress, but it’s quiet progress.”
The attitude of tribal and governmental leaders is also one of optimism, Crisp says, one of willingness to work with the United States.
“They wouldn’t work with us if they didn’t want to,” he says. “…People are anxious to get back to what they once had. Iraq used to be one of the most-developed countries in the Arab world.
“I think in the next five years, you are going to see an Iraq that is politically progressive.”
Back in Santa Barbara on leave for the holidays, Crisp says he picked up the Daily Sound and saw the City Council’s recent decision to approve a resolution urging the president to cease combat operations and withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq within a year.
While commending the local community and city leaders for engaging in the issue, he says the move is likely to be “overtaken by events.”
“O-B-E, we call it.”
By way of explanation, he points out an amendment to the resolution made by Councilmember Roger Horton that provides for a plan to hand over control to Iraqi security forces and potentially UN peacekeepers.
“I think that’s already starting to happen,” he says.
On his third and final leave for his one-year term with the Muthanna PRT, Crisp will head back to Tallil Air Base on the day after Christmas. He’ll stay in Iraq until April of next year.
The beauty of his job as a foreign service officer with the State Department, he says, is that he never gets stuck in a rut. Since joining, he’s spent two years in Belgrade, Serbia, working behind the scenes at the U.S. embassy before taking off to Mexico City, taking a position interviewing visa applicants.
When his time in Iraq is up next year, he’ll relocate to Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife, who is living in Santa Barbara while he works in Iraq.
“With the State Department, you pretty much always change jobs every one to three years,” Crisp says. “That kind of goes with the job. That was part of what attracted me to the job.”
After Vancouver, he says he might spend some time in Washington, D.C.
“Then maybe it’ll be off to another exotic locale.”
With retirement still 20 years off, he has no plans to give up his position as a foreign service officer anytime soon.