Bashir Ahmad's first gym was opened in Lahore, Pakistan, in a third-floor apartment that doubled as his home. A beaten heavy bag hung suspended from the ceiling. The floors were covered with blue mats, which also doubled as his bed.

When he finally obtained a cage, it was stored on the roof, much to the consternation of some of the local population.

View photos Bashir Ahmad (Photo credit: One Championship) More

Eventually, he moved from that tiny apartment and opened a full-fledged MMA gym that he calls "a hip place" in a well-to-do area of the city that attracts celebrities in the music and movie industries, among others.

"It's great for me that I'm able to support myself off of that now from something that began as a passion," said Ahmad, a One Championship featherweight who on Feb. 20 will meet Jimmy Yabo at One's event in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Ahmad is a well-spoken man with a Bachelor's degree in Global Affairs from George Mason University and a Master's in exercise science from California University of Pennsylvania.

He served as a medic in the Army from 2002 through 2008 during the Iraq War.

He can speak authoritatively on a number of topics and plans to write a book some day. He's a voracious reader and consumer of world news.

Ahmad describes himself as an "extraordinarily complex" human being with grandiose plans for his future. He's already known as the godfather of MMA in Pakistan, where he was born in 1982.

His parents emigrated to the United States when he was 2 so his father could complete an engineering degree at West Virginia University.

The gym run by Ahmad and his partners in Lahore, a city of 11 million known as Pakistan's educational capital, is doing well and has a promising future.

Simply running a successful MMA gym wasn't what Ahmad set out to do, however, and he wasn't satisfied to simply stop there. He had far loftier goals and dreams.

"The gym is successful and I'm pleased with that, but it's not why I went there," he said. "So I went and opened a gym right in the slums, which is not very far from where my current gym is. The goal of that gym is to, well, I want to make it a place where we create model citizens. Model citizens of Pakistan, but really, good citizens wherever they are."

The second gym has been open for six months and remains, as Ahmad admits, a work in progress. About 15 of the local residents are training there now, but he envisions it becoming something of a community center for this extraordinarily impoverished area.

The gym is located in Charar Pind village, a densely populated enclave in the center of the city.

"It's hard to even describe [Charar Pind] to people who live in the United States," said Ahmad, whose home is in Northern Virginia. "We have a vision of what poverty is like here. But unless you smelled it, you couldn't possibly understand what it is like there. There are open sewers. The smell of human feces is overpowering, and very common.

View photos Bashir Ahmad (top). (Photo credit: One Championship) More

Story continues