My Story

The philosophy that informs my life and way of doing business is rooted in my days as a child in an ancient small town on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. My father’s reprimand to me for the destruction of ant colonies in order to satisfy my curiosity about these industrious and organized insects taught me respect and admiration for life’s smaller creatures. After his strong reprimand, I took up the more constructive enterprise of building suspension bridges, with popsicle sticks I bought with my allowance and sewing thread I took from my seamstress aunt. I placed these bridges over holes that I dug in our rose garden near a jasmine vine trellis; that was my first engineering project.

My teenage years brought with them more learning that informs my life today. When I was 15 my father put me on a commercial ship at the port of my hometown of Tyre in order to spare me a fate of early death or mutilation like that suffered by so many others during war, including many of my friends. He then sent me to the United States at age 19 as war continued to rage. There, he had hoped that I would make my way and help others of my family; I was unprepared for the extent of adversity awaiting me as a young man. I persisted in a foreign land through hard work and completing my education in engineering, never breaking my unspoken promise of being the hope and a helping hand for others.

If it can be said that I have been successful, it would not only be because of toiling against the odds but also because of the helping hands of others, among whom a wonderful woman for a wife and partner.

I learned to embrace adversity; for without it neither strength of character nor a keener mind would be possible and for within it opportunity lies waiting to be mined with passion, labor, and toil.

It is this strength of character and the keener mind born of adversity that I always strive to build in myself and to exercise in my professional practice in serving clients.