Pakistan. Afghanistan. Tajikistan. Uzbekistan. This jumble of hard-edged consonants may be fun to say when strung together as a tongue-twister, but most adults know there’s nothing funny about the troublesome news spilling from this part of the world. Terrorism. Earthquakes. Genocide. The Middle East seems fraught with tension. Yet for Randall Olson, it is also a place of generosity and magic. “I’ve lived in, worked in or traveled to every ‘stan.’ I’ve spent 18 years overseas. I’m fascinated with the Middle East,” he says.

This fascination for Middle Eastern ways has, oddly enough, landed Olson in Maple Grove. It is here, from a nondescript office building overlooking I-94 and the Arbor Lakes retail development, that he oversees Shelter for Life International (SFL)—a  nonprofit organization that builds homes, schools, clinics and more in a handful of devastated nations. “We go into the most difficult parts of the most difficult places,” Olson says. “We’ve built 32 schools and 20 clinics in the Taliban-contested areas of Afghanistan.”

“We’re not the Red Cross. We don’t offer immediate relief from a disaster. We don’t arrive and hand out tents. We go in 30 days later, when the tents are wearing thin, and start to rebuild homes, replant trees, focus on education and job creation,” Olson says. “We believe that the best way to demonstrate our goodwill is to provide tangible results. That’s why we focus on building projects. People like to look under the hood and kick the tires, so to speak. If they can touch it and see it, they know that it is real and that really communicates,” he says.