Michael Saba is taking a stand.

After nearly six decades of traveling the world, meeting with powerful leaders and in some cases cheating death, the “international man of mystery” sees trouble at home.

Saba, a 75-year-old development consultant for the Avera McKennan Foundation who previously worked for Sanford Health, is running for one of two open District 9 House seats in 2016 after becoming concerned about South Dakota’s direction during the past legislative session.

“I’m not a professional politician by any means, but I think I can make a difference,” says Saba, a Democrat who grew up in North Dakota and ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in that state 36 years ago. “When some legislators are more concerned about daylight savings time than taking care of education for our kids, it worries me.”

Don’t be surprised if Saba, who came to Sioux Falls in 2007 to aid Sanford’s effort to build international clinics, spices up the political scene. He has met every U.S. president going back to Dwight Eisenhower (with the exception of George W. Bush) and once spent several days in the Arabian Desert with Nelson Mandela.

Saba, whose father was a Lebanese immigrant, was among a group of Americans taken hostage in Iraq by Saddam Hussein during the 1990 Gulf War and escaped through the Jordanian border, leading to appearances on “Nightline” and “Oprah.”

Saba served in the Peace Corps in Malaysia and helped build a children’s hospital in Egypt. He has published four books on international affairs. These experiences provide cultural perspective in increasingly diverse Sioux Falls, where Avera and Sanford are expanding their global reach.

“Mike has broadened our horizons,” says Tim Kromminga, president of the Avera McKennan Foundation. “Whether it involves international partnerships, telehealth or genetic research, he delivers insight on how these things might work on a broader scale.”

The question of whether those skills translate to politics could soon be answered. The only thing Saba has previously been elected to was the school board of the American School in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

He has a key supporter in longtime friend Jim Abourezk, the former U.S. senator and congressman who lives in Sioux Falls and offers a succinct assessment of Saba as a candidate to serve in Pierre.

“He’s a smart guy,” says Abourezk. “We could use some smart guys up there.”

Seeing the world

Despite growing up in Bismarck, N.D., amid conservative Midwestern sensibilities, Saba saw life through a wide lens. His mom was from Minnesota, but his father had relatives from the Middle East who talked about their travels and made Saba eager to experience life beyond the prairie.

“I remember looking through encyclopedias all the time as a kid,” he says. “I would look at all the different parts of the world and think to myself, ‘I’ve got to get there.’”

While attending North Dakota State in 1960, Saba went to see presidential candidate John F. Kennedy give a speech and shook the senator’s hand. Kennedy spoke that day of allowing young Americans to represent their country internationally in ways that did not involve the military, and Saba was intrigued.

“He was talking about the Peace Corps before it was even named,” he says.

After leaving college and letting his wanderlust take him down to Mexico, where he spent his 21st birthday working on a shrimp boat in the Gulf of Mexico, Saba returned to college at Minot State to earn his degree and got married to his first wife, Marna.

Kennedy had been elected and lived up to his promise to form the Peace Corps. The young couple signed up and soon found themselves headed to Malaysia, a newly formed country in Southeast Asia that couldn’t be found in any of Saba’s encyclopedias.

He taught biology and helped with agricultural outreach. When on leave, he and Marna journeyed through Bangkok, Manilla and Hong Kong as the North Dakota kid lived out his dream of seeing the non-Western world.

He had several college buddies serving in Vietnam at the time who would come down and stay with him in Malaysia during R&R. The difference between the Peace Corps mission in Asia and the American military objectives was striking.

“It was a very similar environment, but we were working alongside people in the paddy fields and my buddies were shooting and getting shot at in Vietnam,” says Saba. “I always felt that there were other ways to settle these things and deal with people. That was something I wanted to explore.”

Bridging the gap

There is a Forrest Gump-like quality to Saba’s story, owing to his uncanny ability to find himself among famous people and moments. After the assassination of JFK, when President Lyndon Johnson made a side trip to Malaysia during a Vietnam tour, Mike and Marna were picked out of a group to meet Johnson at the airport.

“He told us that our (Peace Corps) service was very important and he appreciated our efforts,” recalls Saba. “Lady Byrd just sort of wandered around in a red dress.”

By the time the couple returned to North Dakota, Saba had met two presidents and had traveled to 30 countries and five states. He was 23 years old.

Through his father, he had learned to appreciate different cultural attitudes and customs, the first steps to finding his expertise as someone who could bring people together and bridge gaps.

“When you try to explain a nursing home to non-Western people, they look at you like you’re crazy,” says Saba. “They’ll say, ‘You drove your parents out of the house?’ And the more you try to explain it and offer rationales, you start thinking about it from their perspective and realize that maybe there is a better way.”

He took a job as a Peace Corps trainer and was later named education coordinator for the group’s Africa outreach program. Before that, he set up a training program on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota, where non-Native Peace Corps volunteers struggled with a cultural divide.

“They’d help the Indians during harvest season and stay with them,” says Saba. “And these volunteers would say, ‘It’s fine during the day when we have work to do, but then we come home and sit with them and they don’t say anything. We try to make conversation with them but they just sit there.’

“My response would be, ‘Well, maybe they don’t feel the need to talk all the time like you do.’ And the volunteer would say, ‘Well, I guess I never thought about it that way.’”

Expanding his reach

Saba’s cultural insight, combined with his ability to speak Arabic, led to a strong connection to the Middle East that defined much of his life. In the early 1970s, he was hired as executive director of the National Association of Arab Americans political advocacy group in Washington, D.C.

During this time, he helped facilitate a trade delegation trip involving the North Dakota governor and agricultural representatives to the Middle East, where they met with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Jordan’s King Hussein.

Saba fondly recalls a moment when an Egyptian farmer wearing traditional robes took his North Dakota counterpart into a field as the sun was beginning to set.

“Because they couldn’t speak each other’s language, the Egyptian reached down and picked up some soil and sort of rubbed it in his hands for the North Dakota farmer to smell,” recalls Saba. “That’s the kind of communication I like and there is so little of it done. It was the language of farmers.”

Saba’s first foray into politics came in 1980, when he ran for U.S. Senate in North Dakota and promised more attention paid to farmers and small business. He was defeated in the Democratic primary by Bismarck lawyer Kent Johanneson, who tallied 24,182 votes to 7,154 for Saba and was then routed in the general election.

“When you’re running as a Democrat around here, it can be risky,” says Abourezk.

Saba’s next move was a job with Mobil Oil as a cross cultural manager, helping American executives become more efficient during Middle East stints. He also found time to earn his master’s degree and make a fond return to Malaysia with his second wife, Irene, and their young son.

In 1986, the couple founded an organization called GULFAMERICA, a business services company that facilitated trade between the United States and the Arab Gulf. As part of that effort, Saba had a chance to lead a conference in Bahrain, a small island country in the Middle East.

The trip would also take him to countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Arab Emirates and Iraq. It was the summer of 1990.

“Irene was eight and a half months pregnant and wasn’t happy that I was going,” says Saba. “There was talk of a crisis because the Iraqis were at the Kuwaiti border, with Saddam Hussein claiming they were going to do something if the Kuwaitis didn’t stop lateral drilling. But this had happened before and everyone I talked to on that trip said it was still safe to go up to Baghdad. I’d say, ‘Are you sure it’s OK?’ And their reply was, ‘Oh, yeah. Saddam’s just a big bluffer.’”

Lives in danger

After meeting with foreign companies and government officials in Baghdad, Saba was scheduled to fly back to Bahrain on Aug. 2 and return home. His son, Daniel, the youngest of Saba’s five children, was due in mid-August.

He was staying at the Sheraton in Baghdad and tried to get a cab to the airport for his afternoon flight. “The airport is closed,” the driver informed him. “It happens every once in a while.”

Saba returned to his hotel room and turned on the TV to see troops moving around on CNN. The phone rang and it was his wife, wondering if he was OK. “Yeah, what’s going on?” he asked. The Iraqis had invaded Kuwait, she told him.

As President George H. W. Bush responded by mobilizing U.S. forces to prepare for the Gulf War, Saddam ordered Americans and other Westerners rounded up and placed in the Al Rasheed Hotel. They were free to move around the premises and even get briefings from U.S. embassy officials. But they were not free to leave.

“He called us his guests,” says Saba of the hostage situation. “We weren’t shackled to the radiators or anything. There were about 100 of us, and some of the (hostages) hung out in the lounge and just got drunk the whole time. There were some Irish nurses who had some great parties in the basement, actually.”

After 10 days, Saba had seen enough. He had to get home. Saddam was unpredictable and the hostages could be collateral damage if U.S. military forces decided to push into Baghdad.

Saba and a few others had discussed making a run for the border of Jordan or Turkey, knowing it would be risky. But Saba took it as a sign when he heard hotel speakers playing the Musak version of a familiar Engelbert Humperdinck song: Please release me, let me go…

“I said, ‘Engelbert, thank you, brother, I’m out of here,’” recalls Saba. “I decided to make a run for it.”

He and another American managed to get a taxi for $100 and headed for the Jordanian border, an eight-hour trip that included several close calls when they were stopped by Iraqi troops. But Saba and his fellow escapee spoke Arabic, which helped smooth the path to freedom.

“I told them, ‘I’m an American of Arab background, and my wife is pregnant,’” recalls Saba. “I’m just trying to get home to be with her, and I have nothing against you or your government.’ And they would sit down and say, “Oh, you’re welcome. Sit down and have tea with us.’”

The border was mayhem, but Saba made it home three days before Daniel was born. He was already a celebrity after giving a “Nightline” interview and being featured in USA Today. Humperdinck heard his story and sent a limousine for him to attend a concert, bringing Saba on stage during “Release Me.”

Saba testified before Congress and appeared on “Oprah” to discuss efforts to bring the other hostages home. He was invited to be a presenter at the 1990 Emmy Awards. Through his friendship with a prominent Saudi prince, he met Mandela in the desert soon after his release from prison in South Africa, sitting by the firelight and learning about his ordeal.

A few years later, Saba met Vice President Dan Quayle at a charity event and introduced himself. Quayle took one look at him and exclaimed, “Hey, I’ve seen you on TV!”

Path to Sioux Falls

The idea to blend Saba’s international relations expertise with health care expansion came from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., which was being run by one of his former colleagues.

St. Jude was spending a lot money to treat children suffering from catastrophic diseases from countries in Central America and South America. Saba and a deputy director persuaded the board to open clinics in some of those areas and train local medical staff to provide pediatric care.

“We told them that ultimately they’d be able to raise money to support programs from the ethnic communities they were serving, and that’s exactly what happened,” says Saba. “The first children’s hospital as part of that program was in El Salvador.”

St. Jude’s international outreach program expanded to include more than two dozen partnerships in Central America, South America, the Middle East and Asia, providing a template for world clinics that would soon draw interest in Sioux Falls.

When T. Denny Sanford staggered the industry in 2007 by donating $400 million to the health system now known as Sanford, part of his vision was to develop a network of clinics. That effort started as a domestic initiative but gradually expanded to include global objectives.

When it came time to find someone to open doors internationally, Sanford reached out to Saba.

“He had profound friendships and relationships earned over a lifetime of travels that attracted us to him,” says Sanford chief executive officer Kelby Krabbenhoft. “He had significant Middle Eastern and Arab kinships that put us in the middle of opportunities there, but world events made it impossible for me to send Sanford people into what might be harm’s away.”

Sanford ultimately settled on Ghana, where it has 17 operational sites, and China and Germany as locations for its world clinics. Saba has since moved over to Avera as a consultant, working to expand the health system’s genomic sequencing expertise and telehealth network domestically and internationally.

Along the way, he reaches out to non-Western physicians, staffers and patients on a regular basis, learning more about their needs and desires and sharing some of his own.

“He opens people’s eyes,” says Avera’s Kromminga. “As a native Midwesterner, I can sense my own reluctance at times to reach out to people from the broader global community. But Mike seeks them out. He wants to learn more about them.”

Seeking solutions

Saba’s continuing curiosity could partly explain his decision to run for state legislature at the age of 75. The Wall Lake resident “tends to find new journeys and adventures in life,” according to Krabbenhoft, and he’s clearly not ready to slow down.

The Democrat plans to emphasize education, economic development, health care and volunteerism during his campaign, when he’s not serving as a substitute teacher in the Sioux Falls School District. Also running for District 9 House is Democrat Mark Guthmiller and Republicans Wayne Steinhauer and Mike Clark.

During the past legislative session, Saba said he was disturbed to see so many bills that critics viewed as discriminatory against the LGBT community.

“I’m a fixer,” he says. “I build bridges, and this is just another cultural issue as I see it. Rather than picking fights and pointing out the enemy, we need to talk to each other in more meaningful ways and find out exactly where each side is coming from. That’s what I think is lacking.”

From the Peace Corps to presidential handshakes, surviving as a hostage and spending days with Mandela, the international man of mystery learned that the world is less intimidating if you look it in the eye and listen. By comparison, finding peace within the scope of party politics should be a breeze.