She had survived the trip and came back in one full piece thanks to your prayers and well thoughts which were her guardian angels all the way until she said good bye to the airport and let her wings take her above the clouds and so high in the sky.
Follow me after the fold if you are interested in knowing more
Since I have come home and I am continuously recalling what I have seen and heard. I tried to disclose my anger and displeasure through few words that might give them a meaningful disclosure:
If you asked me again, what’s your name?
I will say it with full of pain
My name is Baghdad, I am ugly and not glad
My name is Baghdad, I am full of dust and full of potholes, I’m sad
My name is Baghdad, I am a wreck, and I look like an old shack which will not come back
My name is Baghdad, so did you get that
How odd is to drive through places and find out later that they were blown up into pieces?
How odd is to cheer up someone and find out that he/she has been chopped up by a bomb?
Well, it’s not odd but a fact right now in Baghdad
I know I was in a war zone. I know that well when I made my plan to head to the unknown. I felt what any deployed military man or woman would feel when he/she gets deployed to the battle field. I felt what every one who lives in Baghdad would feel and how they count their hours till the end of the day and say hooray for surviving another day.
The moment you get out of the airport, the moment you feel that you are in a different atmosphere. You start seeing those ugly concrete walls. While you are driving along those walls, you feel that the death is walking along them too making Baghdad its favorite home and the best one from anywhere.
Desperate you try to find your home and you get lost in your own neighborhood; a new urban place that was reshaped upon the status quo and the necessity of any urgent due. You will see different faces and different places which all greet you with "welcome home" but you still feel that you are lost among them all and will not be found no matter how you call. Everything has changed not for the better definitely but for the worse, leaving you with nothing to say but what a shame!
Every place has its story and every heart has its loss, but no one complaint at all they just want to survive the toll; the toll of death and what can be worse than this toll.
I was asked by friends to write about what I will find when I go to Baghdad. Honostly, I have lost the words and it took me a while to arrange my thoughts. I needed a better lens to see through the ugliness of war. I needed a stronger pen to write about my pain. I needed the help of yours to write better than me, off course.
One of the things that hurt me a lot was facing too many walls and too many blocked roads. I was told not to take a picture fearing that someone might think that I was a penetrator who wanted to cause harm to everyone. But all that and more did not prevent me from walking down the roads that I used to dream of walking down them fearing the bullets and seeking a hidout for a menite.
One will think for a moment and ask if that what was planned for it in advance, having separated zones and segregated green zone? One will say is that what was all about? Or was that the ultimate goal; the ultimate freedom and democracy for all?
Let me tell you something before I say it all, I am a Muslim Shia who went to a catholic school. I was raised by nuns and taught by Sunni teachers and Profs. I had Christian friends and Muslim ones as well as Kurdish and Turkmen. I prayed in a Mosque as well as a church and did not forget to light a candle in each place. I grew up in a neighborhood that was a nonsectarian place. The same thing could be applied on every part of Baghdad. Don’t listen to what the media used to say and continue to repeat that we used to fight each others for thousand years. Don’t believe that or any other advice that says in order to survive the past we should have been set apart.
Segregation and devastation, that all I have seen, plus frustration and desperation for any good reason to make you dream of better future that is full of roses and open horizons with no more walls to separate us at all.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanza , Happy Eid, Happy Days and Happy Years to everyone indeed. With all my hopes for a better world full of peace and no more tears. Amen
Thank you again for reading through my pain