Impact Stories

Michael Dowling recently made a gift to AUB benefiting the Maysoon Akrawi Dowling Scholarship, an endowed scholarship fund that his late wife and AUB alumna Maysoon Akrawi Dowling (BA’ 61) established in 2002. Maysoon, who was born and grew up in Iraq, spent three wonderful years at AUB. They were not easy years though. Just weeks after she enrolled in summer 1958, King Faisal II of Iraq was overthrown and killed in a coup. The revolutionary government interrupted international connections, such as telecommunications and postal service, making it impossible for Maysoon to communicate with her family for months.  During this difficult time when Maysoon had little to no contact with her family and friends in Iraq, she began to understand what it felt like to be displaced, and uncertain about when she would see or hear from her loved ones again. Fortunately, her husband recalls stories about how supportive and welcoming the AUB community was during this time, something Maysoon never forgot.

Maysoon met Michael at the swimming pool of the Alwiya Club in Baghdad shortly after she returned to Iraq in summer 1962. For him, Michael remembers, it was “love at first sight.” They saw a lot of each other during the next two years until Michael left Baghdad in 1963. During this time, Maysoon taught at a children’s school and then volunteered at the local office of the US Information Agency. She managed the Iraq tour of the Duke Ellington Jazz Orchestra, one of the early examples of US “soft diplomacy.” Her first challenge in that assignment was to greet the orchestra on their arrival with the news that there had been an attempted coup that morning. As a result, martial law had been declared and there was a 7:00 pm curfew in place. Michael laughs. “For jazz musicians accustomed to playing all night until 5:00 am, the news came as a rude shock!” Maysoon went on to guide the musicians through several successful concerts, a tour of Iraq’s ancient ruins, and the Mesopotamian Marshes in the Tigris/Euphrates Delta.

Maysoon and Michael got married in Izmir, Turkey, where Michael was now living, in May 1964. Throughout their lives together – in the US Foreign Service and in various business ventures that Michael pursued after he left the Foreign Service in 1967, Maysoon was “ever the volunteer.” She often reminisced fondly about her life at AUB – “the friends she had made from all over the world; hamburgers at Uncle Sam’s; her outstanding professors; life in the women’s dormitory where her classmates asked her to” Say Something in Baghdadi” and laughed at her distinctive Baghdadi accent; student theater; of her undergraduate activities; and her pride at winning the University Archery Championship in 1961 and 1962, when women were not even expected to compete in that event,” says Michael. Maysoon also spoke often about what it meant to her to make friends with students from all over the world.

Maysoon was not the only member of her family to attend AUB. Michael tells a wonderful story about the time he and Maysoon met Mrs. Ethel Stoltzfus in Saudi Arabia. She and her husband, William Stoltzfus, had been missionaries in Beirut for many years. It turned out that Mrs. Stoltzfus had met Maysoon’s father and uncle: “two of the dirtiest, raggediest, little boys she had ever seen.” The reason for their appearance is that those two “little boys,” Fathalla and Matta, had just arrived in Beirut after a 90-day trip from Akra in the Kurdish Ottoman province north of Mosul.

Thanks to the foundation that AUB gave them, Fathalla was able to study medicine in France and Germany. He would go on to become dean of Baghdad University’s School of Medicine. Matta earned his PhD in education from Columbia University, was a professor of education at AUB (1963-71), served as Iraq’s Minister of Education, and worked for UNESCO.

Maysoon died suddenly of a heart attack in February 2020, a time when “the world, and the Near East in particular,” says Michael, “had begun producing a bumper crop of refugees.” It was also a time when the Lebanese economy was endangered by internal stresses, which were later exacerbated by the cataclysmic explosion in the Beirut port on August 4, 2020. “A large, hard currency endowment gift to honor Maysoon and her family, and to support refugee students at AUB, makes compelling sense to me,” says Michael.

“Michael’s generosity will have an immediate and long-term impact at AUB,” says AVP Patrick O’Connell, who worked closely with Michael and his son, Mark, to finalize the gift. “We are especially touched that Michael chose to honor his late wife and her family in this way.”