Children of War (10 page)

I remember Baghdad very well. I miss it. I miss my grandparents,
and I miss my friends. I wrote a letter to my best friend in Baghdad, but I can't
mail it because there is no mail delivery service to Iraq yet. Here is the letter. Maybe
she'll read this book and will know that I am thinking of her.

My dear friend:

I hope your day is full of flowers. I love you and miss you too much.
I hope you will forgive me for not sending you a letter sooner. I write you letters, but
then I just put them in a bag because I don't know how to send them.

What are you doing now? Do you still play the same games that we
played together? Do you remember me and miss me? We had a lot of fun.

I hope that we will come back to you soon, back to our homeland. I
have good news. I believe that when I get into the fourth grade, we will go back to
Iraq,
because in the fourth grade I will learn many new and
important things. So, maybe I will see you soon. Inshallah.

My mother says hello to you, and that you should be well, and not
cause your mother any worry.

I am out of room, so I say goodbye for now.

Your friend,
Shahid

If we learn of someone going back to Baghdad, maybe they can take my
letter and deliver it for me.

The neighborhood where we used to live in Baghdad was very beautiful. It
was full of shops, the sort of shops people would want to go to. They could buy dresses
and new televisions. They could go to a furniture shop and tell a carpenter what they
wanted, and the carpenter would go right to work and make it for them.

And we had the best food in Baghdad, too, in our neighborhood Al Ameed.
The best kebab, the best baklava, the best restaurants.

We are Sunni Muslims. My father was a first lieutenant in the Iraqi army,
but he hated Saddam. He left the army for medical reasons before the Americans came, and
he was very glad to see Saddam gone and be killed.

“Iraq will be better now,” he said. “We will have
freedom and good laws and proper leaders.” He was glad that my brother and I would
be growing up in an Iraq without Saddam. He was very disappointed that everything did
not work out as he wanted. But even after things started to fall apart, he kept thinking
that they would get
better. “We shouldn't expect the
Americans to fix everything for us,” he said. “This is our country. Iraqis
have to do the work to make it better.”

That's why he volunteered to work with the Americans. He thought he
could do good work to bring the country together again. Most Americans can't speak
Arabic, so they needed someone to help them communicate.

Our beautiful neighborhood became full of men with guns who shot at
people. Bodies would be found on the side of the road and in alleys.

Our father was very secret about working with the Americans, but people
found out anyway. Men would stand at the gate to our house and yell at my mother.
They'd say, “We know your husband is working for the Americans. We will blow
up your car. We will blow up your house. One day you will be surprised because we are
coming after you.”

There were a lot of men with nothing to do but watch other people and see
what they did, and if they saw things they didn't like, they'd shoot or blow
things up.

I would hear my parents arguing about it. My mother thought we should get
out of Iraq. She was afraid we would be killed. My father thought it was important that
we stay, that if all the good people left, Iraq would be lost.

The Americans built a sort of a wall around my neighborhood, so the only
people who could come in were the people who lived there. There were fewer killings for
a while, I think, but it was like a dead city. The shops closed, and all the things that
had made it a good place were not there any more.

The threats kept coming against my father. He went to
the Americans and asked them for protection for us, but they had no help to offer.

Finally, he and my mother made the decision that we should leave our
country and come to Jordan.

They sold their car, and as many of our belongings as they could. A lot of
families were trying to sell things to get money to leave, so they didn't get as
much money as they thought they should. I would hear them complaining about it.

We had money when we first came to Jordan, but now it's mostly gone.
My father is not allowed to work here, and if he's caught doing a job, he'll
be sent back to Iraq, where maybe he will be killed. Sometimes our grandparents send us
money from Iraq, and my mother works as a cook. In Iraq, my mother had a degree from a
business college. Here she prepares Iraqi dishes for people who have more money than we
do, who pay her to cook for weddings or special days.

Her best dish — the one I like best — is koba. It's a
rice dish with meat. It's very good.

My brother and I are both in school this year. I'm at the top of my
class. My best subject is Arabic. My teachers are all good to me, even though they are
Jordanian and I am Iraqi. They don't care about that. They just care that I am a
good student and try my best.

I think I would like to be a teacher when I grow up, so that I can be kind
to children who have had a hard time. My classmates are friendly, too. There are other
Iraqi kids in my class, but there's no difference between us and the
Jordanians.

My brother wants to be a painter when he grows up. He
wrestles with me a lot because he has all this energy he has to get rid of. He's
usually good company, but if he gets to be too much trouble, I just give him a swat. He
backs off then. He knows who's boss.

My father did a very good job when he worked with the Americans. They even
gave him a certificate saying what a good job he did. It was signed by Mr. Kevin Barry,
the instructor at the Baghdad Academy. So they know my father is a good man. We've
applied to be allowed to move to the United States. Having that certificate should help
us get in.

I'd rather go home, though. My friends are there, and the rest of my
family is there. Also, the Americans scare me. They bombed my country, and they made
things go very bad. George Bush is scary because he doesn't know about how
wonderful the Iraqi people are. I always get scared when I see him on TV, because I am
afraid that what he will say will mean more bad news for my country. American children
should make their parents elect a kinder president.

Two million refugees have left Iraq. Most are in neighboring
Jordan and Syria – poor countries that have had little choice but to
accommodate the mass influx of refugees.

Meanwhile, countries like Great Britain, Australia, the United
States and Canada have shown little willingess to host the millions of Iraqis who
sit in limbo in Jordan and Syria and inside Iraq, unable to go back to their old
homes and unable to make new lives for themselves.

Haneen and her family are from Baghdad. Their lives have been in
upheaval since before the invasion in 2003, and they left Iraq for good in 2007.
They are now living in Canada.

We have been in Canada for three months. We were in
Iraq until 2007, then we went to Jordan, then we came here. When we lived in Iraq, we
lived in Baghdad.

Our mother and father thought we should leave because of all the shooting
and bombing. We lived near a police station, and there was shooting around there a lot.
One time, the shooting went on and on and it was almost like the sound of rain falling
hard.

There was a car blown up in the road by our house, too. It made a very
loud noise, and then there was screaming and shouting and sirens. There were always
things like that happening.

We left Baghdad before the invasion because my parents thought we'd
be safer in Anah, a city in Al Anbar Province. My grandparents had a house there, so we
went there, but it wasn't safer. We saw US troops everywhere, in helicopters and
in tanks.

Anah is a small city in the desert, with farms around it. There was a lot
of bombing. I remember one night when the bombing was going on. We were all together
— my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles and cousins. My parents were
angry because they thought we would be safe, and everybody was crying except for my
little sister and one of my younger cousins. They were laughing, not because they
thought it was funny, but because they were so scared. They had lost control of
themselves.

We heard all these explosions and everything shook. Glass broke out of the
windows. I thought we would all die. But the night passed, and in the morning when it
was quiet, we went outside.

All the houses around our house were bombed. But the
bombs missed us. Our house was the only one still standing.

I don't remember how long we stayed in Anah, but after a while we
went back to Baghdad. Both my mother and father are pharmacists, and they had work to
do. We didn't go back to school right away. I forget how long.

It was hard for us because there was no water and no electricity. We saw
lots of US soldiers, but we didn't talk to them. We were too scared. A tank came
really close to us one day. We saw tanks and soldiers and helicopters all the time. One
of the good things about Canada is that there aren't helicopters flying around all
the time. I hate that sound.

We did go back to school after a while, but we couldn't go every
day. Sometimes there were a lot of shootings or soldiers around, and then we stayed
home. On those days Mom would keep us busy playing games and doing things around the
house so we wouldn't sit and worry. When the electricity came on we could watch
TV, but it never stayed on for long and we never knew when we'd have it.

Then we went to Jordan, and we could go to school there. We learned some
English, and played sports and did art. Then we came here.

The war happened because Iraq has oil. And there is a high building
somewhere in America that was blown up. They thought Iraq blew it up, so that's
why they blew up places in Iraq.

Maybe I'll go back to Iraq some day, if the war ends.
Until then, I'll stay in Canada. We like everything in
Canada, especially that there is no bombing. I miss things about Iraq, like my toys and
my relatives, but Canada is much easier.

When I grow up, I'm going to be a dentist. My middle sister is going
to be a surgeon, and my little sister is going to be a teacher. My parents expect us to
work hard, but they want us to have fun, too.

The journey to safety can be a long and dangerous one. Getting
the required papers and being in the right place at the right time are often as much
a matter of luck as design. S.W. and her family applied for a visa seven years
before they were finally allowed to come to Canada, where her uncle was living and
working at two jobs to help support them while they waited for permission to
immigrate
.

I am old enough that I remember all the changes in my country.
Certainly I remember life under Saddam. He was our leader, and I thought he would
protect us.
Everyone knew the Americans were coming, but Saddam
said we would win the war. Saddam was our government, and we should support our
government, like the Americans support their government. We wanted to believe that our
government would not let another country come in and take us over.

Even up to the last moments of the war, I was one thousand percent sure
that Saddam would do something to save us from the Americans. But it didn't
happen.

I am from Baghdad, but we didn't stay in Baghdad during the
invasion. My brother has allergies, and one of the things Saddam did was to dig big
holes and fill them with oil and set them on fire. The smoke from the burning oil was
supposed to confuse the Americans in their fighter planes. I could see the fires from my
bedroom window. The air became very hard to breathe, and for my brother it was
impossible. So we went to stay with my father's second uncle in Baqubah. We were
there for three months and missed the bombing of Baghdad.