Laying the Foundation: Mito Bessalel 1932-2023

My father entered hospice a week ago. We lost him yesterday.?

We had known for a while that this was coming. The last few weeks, while he was still conversant, have been a time for our family to be by his side, to reminisce with him and appreciate his 91-year journey. To hear his pride in all of us. To express our collective wonderment at his zest for life and his legacy. To remind him through our presence of what he made possible.?

If you ask anyone he has met in the past 10 years, they would say my father was a writer. It is true, he wrote dozens of books. Children’s books starring his beloved Papillon, Tino. Novels based on his life experiences. A play. How-to guides. He translated his books from English to Spanish to French and vice versa. To say he was prolific is an understatement.?

In his retirement community in Baltimore, he became a minor celebrity. When I would meet his friends, they would enthusiastically tell me that they had signed copies of his poems. When his prognosis became clear and the doctor asked him what his goal was for his remaining time, his immediate answer was “to finish the book I’m writing.”? Unfortunately, that wasn’t meant to be.

Despite his newfound avocation, if you ask me, I would say my father laid foundations. Writing was what he did when he could no longer pursue his life’s work. Writing brought him joy and purpose in his retirement.

But if he had had a choice in his later years, he would have been doing what he loved doing for most of his life–traveling the world and creating a better life for millions of people. Even well into his 80s, he would wistfully tell me about USAID, World Bank, and regional development bank projects in Argentina, the Philippines or Indonesia he wished he could participate in.

By training, my father was a civil engineer. In practice, he was a problem solver. He spent more than 30 years working in the developing world, bringing much-needed infrastructure to impoverished countries. He designed roads, bridges, dams, hospitals and schools. He developed systems to improve life and clean up communities across the globe–in Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. During one of our last visits when he could converse, he told us of one project that helped bring clean water to millions of people in Jakarta.

I remember him going to Egypt in 1978 on an aid project to build a desalination plant. It was just after the Camp David Accords were signed between Egypt and Israel. The Suez Canal has just opened to Israeli ships. Stepping off the plane in Cairo, he was greeted by an Egyptian delegation. Its leader, an imposing Egyptian man named Ahmed, stepped forward and came close.?

He said to my father, “You are Bessalel?”?

My father replied, “Yes.”?

He asked, “You are Jewish?”?

With some trepidation, my father again replied, “Yes.”

With an enormous smile, Ahmed spread his arms wide and exclaimed, “We are brothers!” and engulfed my father in a vigorous bear hug.

In a world of polarization, my father was always, literally and figuratively, a bridge builder. He had an innate ability to connect with those around him. He believed that life is beautiful and he sought that beauty everywhere, finding it through a passion for photography, but more importantly, in the people he encountered everywhere he went.

Despite decades during which some of his smaller-minded work colleagues callously made fun of his thick Spanish accent, he viewed language as a conduit to the beauty of the world he embraced. One of his favorite stories was of encountering a nun in West Africa. His colleague preemptively apologized to the nun in case she couldn’t understand my father’s accent. The nun pointedly responded, “Behind that accent is a language you do not speak.”

Whenever he traveled, he took a dictionary and taught himself snippets of many languages and unabashedly spoke broken French, Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesia, Arabic, and more to make friends and build connections. But even when language wasn’t enough, he knew that a smile was universally understood.

In later years, during his many hospital stays as he fought four battles with cancer, he became the nurses’ favorite. It helped that so many of those providing healthcare in our hospitals come from the far-flung countries he had frequented. It usually started with him noticing an accent, asking a few questions or flirting, and then, with a few key phrases in their native language and stories about working in their home countries, he won their hearts.?

Earlier this year, he encountered a nurse with a distinctly French accent. Upon learning that she was from Cameroon, he shared with her that he had designed schools in several Cameroonian villages. When they put two and two together and realized that she had attended one of those schools, the celebration was exuberant. He had given to the world, and the world was giving back. What goes around comes around!

The summer after I finished high school, I went with him to Cote d’Ivoire where he was working on an urban planning project for 56 cities throughout the country. I worked in his office in Abidjan as an intern for two months, gaining a rare and precious glimpse into my father’s life’s work.?Following in my dad's footsteps, even for such a short while, shaped what I studied in college and underpinned my early career as an international management consultant.

My son Jordan Bessalel, CFA now works in infrastructure finance, funding projects similar to some that my father might have worked on. When my daughter, Sonya Bessalel , who has the same intrepid spirit as my father, wrote a novel for her senior thesis in college, my dad called her the “other writer in the family.”? When I recently published my first book, The Startup Lottery, we all joked that I became “the OTHER, other writer in the family.”? My father is the pebble that started those ripples. We all reflect much of the best of him.

At the age of 5 in Mar del Plata, a beach resort in Argentina, my father sold postcards on the street to wealthy tourists to help put food on the family table. From that humble beginning, it would have been hard to imagine the journey my father’s life took and the foundations he laid, not only through his engineering work but also for our family in the United States.?

When I think about my father’s legacy, I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotations from Indira Gandhi:

“There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there.”??

Somewhere in a village in West Africa there is a street named after my father. But his name is not inscribed on the dams or bridges or hospitals that he helped design. He simply did the work.

Few will associate his name with the magnitude of the contributions he made and the millions of people whose lives he touched through his open heart and his career. But for my dad, knowing what he did was enough. And for us too.

Rest in peace, Dad.