POMONA - Shortly after coalition forces invaded Baghdad last year, Farouk Darweesh, a Cal Poly Pomona professor and Iraqi expatriate, knocked on doors across the war-struck city searching for long-lost colleagues.

Armed for his protection and working on little sleep, the former president of the College of Engineering at the University of Baghdad went searching through the tumultuous city for help to rebuild an educational system hobbled by Saddam Hussein's military regime.

When he left the United States with an aid team of other Iraqi exiles, Darweesh didn't expect he'd have to go to the homes where his former colleagues lived 30 years ago. But he found he couldn't simply sit at a desk and go through an old phone list - the damage done to schools and universities was too great.

The phones didn't work, and most records were destroyed.

"The task is immense," Darweesh reflected. "It's going to be some time before they can celebrate this."

Darweesh, 59, is among the expatriates who have been discussing how to rebuild Iraq's educational system since the early 1990s. He and many other highly educated professionals fled the country in the late 1970s after repeated threats and torture from the regime.

When the call came in February, just a few weeks before the invasion, Darweesh jumped at the chance to return to his birth country despite the danger.

He said he couldn't pass up the chance to help bring human rights and democracy to Iraq.

"We all have loved ones. We all knew what we were missing here," Darweesh said. "But still, there are risks you have to take ... if you didn't, nothing would have been done."

Darweesh became deputy director of the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council, a group formed by the Pentagon to act as a temporary government in Iraq. The council works together with the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.

The council gave itself six months to reopen schools. When they arrived, they tried to look for professors who had been educated before the Baath Party came to power, Darweesh said, because after the Baathist regime gained power, students stopped traveling abroad to study, and the influence of the political system infiltrated the schools and universities.

The council set up a democratic system so the educators could elect their own governing bodies for the universities, he said.

Despite buildings burned to the ground and equipment that had been looted or destroyed, the University of Baghdad reopened on May 17, ahead of schedule.

On the first day, more than 40,000 people clogged the roads, on foot and in cars, Darweesh said, in search of a new beginning at the university.

"People showed up, and that more than anything else, it is expressive of hope and leadership," he said. "You could see the mass of humanity."

Seven months after the beginning of the U.S.-led occupation, 3,000 primary and secondary schools reopened, according to Darweesh.

In 110-degree weather, professors held classes outdoors to accommodate eager students.

On one occasion, Darweesh was giving a tour to a few presidents of American universities in the middle of the day when they stumbled upon sleeping students. They discovered the students had taken it upon themselves to work around the clock to renovate a classroom building, painting with whatever paint - and whatever color - they could find.

"It's incredible," he said. "It's so moving."

But the rebuilding effort is going to take years, Darweesh said. Professors and administrators are having difficulty transitioning from the confining rule of Hussein to basic democratic freedoms Americans practice every day, he said.

"It's really challenging under difficult conditions, but people are doing it," he said. "Once people go through the change, the shock will wear off."

The Cal Poly professor returned to the Unites States in September but still speaks regularly by phone with educators in Iraq.

He said he plans to return for another year in a few months, along with his wife, Aleya Bashar.

"We still have a long way to go," he said.