Sarah:
A Host Mother’s Story
Her pictures
intersperse with our children’s on the desk, on the dresser. We
tell her story to relatives and friends and we often reminisce about
her at family dinners. She was a beautiful child with inquisitive
dark eyes and an infectious smile. She became our youngest daughter,
Monika’s, ‘little sister’; they were inseparable. Monika taught
her English and Chopsticks and read her stories in the hospital.
Sarah was one
of the many children Medicine For Peace (MFP) took from Iraq to
the US in the Nineteen Nineties for a heart operation. She was what
is commonly known as a ‘blue baby’, because her lips, fingers and
toe nails were a dark purplish-blue due to a lack of blood flow
to her lungs. The operation for her congenital abnormality, Tetralogy
of Fallot, is wonderfully restorative, and following surgery children
who have been carried all their lives, run into their parents’ arms.
Sarah lived
with us months longer than the other children in the program. We
took her to family get-togethers, on vacations, and she played with
our friends’ children. It was a difficult parting, but we all retained
hope that we would reunite in the future.
I traveled to
Iraq with Sr. Chris Mulready. Chris was a woman of great strength
and warmth and spirit. She recognized the ugliness in the world
but sought its beauty. We talked about life and politics and religion
on the sixteen hour drive across the Syrian Desert. It was summer
and we traveled in a non-air-conditioned ten year old sedan. I remember
using some of our bottled water to pour down Sara’s back to cool
her and within minutes it had dried. She dozed on my lap lulled
to sleep by the leaden heat and the endless desert surrounding us.
We arrived late
evening in Baghdad. Her entire family waited in exuberant expectation.
They were so happy to have Sarah healthy, and her parents Faiza
and Sabah, shared their joy by inviting us to journey to their home
in Kirkuk for a celebration.
Kirkuk, in the north of Iraq, is the center of one of the richest
oil producing areas in the Middle East. Pipelines connect it to
the Mediterranean port of Tripoli in Lebanon and the Yumurtalik
Port in Turkey. It is an arid land mottled with oil wells and huge
oil cisterns.
Their house
was modest, neat, and comfortable with the primary focus on the
children’s needs. Sarah had a twin sister, Hajar, and a one year
old baby brother, Omer. I persuaded our Government minder, Adhullah
that we must stay with the family, not at the government hotel,
and assuaged his fear of recrimination by the Baathist authorities
by promising not to tell anyone.
The evening
of our third and last day in Kirkuk, everyone dressed in their finest
eighties fashions, (the sanctions imposed for twelve years severely
limited the finances of the people) and Abdhullah drove us to the
party. Sabah had rented the courtyard of a hotel in the city and
as each of the many guests arrived they put a money offering in
a copper bowl towards payment for the meal and garden rental. Only
Sr. Chris, Sarah and I ate. Everyone gathered around us and watched.
Then the musicians picked up their ancient instruments to play traditional
music, and much fun and laughter ensued as we tried to learn the
Turkoman dances.
I sensed that
Sarah knew I would be leaving soon. She eyed me suspiciously, as
if I were betraying her and turned her head when I kissed her goodbye.
That was in
1994. MFP tried to maintain communication with the Iraqi children
and their families over the years but we were cautious not to cause
them difficulty with the Saddam Hussein government; with the advent
of the Second Gulf War, contact became impossible. In 2005 Iraqi
doctors did a study for MFP on the lack of hygienic conditions in
hospitals in Baghdad. One of the doctors was able to contact Sarah’s
family, and we received a disturbing message that Sarah was dead.
Michael and I refused to believe it and did not tell our children.
In 2006, an Iraqi friend sent a trusted colleague to Kirkuk on our
behalf. A week later, I received a telephone call from Sabah.
“Miss Kathleen,
someone wants to speak.”
I held my breath,
“Mommy, it’s Sarah. How are you?”
In July of this
year, while on a MFP mission in Jordan working with Iraqi refugees,
my husband and I traveled to Van, in the eastern most section of
Turkey adjacent to Armenia, Iran and northern Iraq, to meet with
Sarah and her family. Her parents and five of their six children
journeyed north by bus, a trip that proved harrowing on the treacherous
unguarded roads through the mountains of southeastern Turkey. Their
trip was interrupted by harassment and humiliating encounters at
the border which translated into an extra day in a 48 hour trip.
Van felt to
us like the end of the world; a wild- west town crowded, and loud
and dusty. But Sabah had left a message at our hotel.
“We’re waiting
for you at the Akdemar Hotel.”
Could this really
be happening or was I only dreaming?
Sabah and Faiza
greeted us warmly. Their sufferings through the years had aged this
handsome couple prematurely, and they were keenly aware of it. Their
eyes filled with tears as they looked longingly at us, kissing and
hugging us like they would family. The children appeared then, inquisitive,
smiling, taking our pictures, lining up to give us the traditional
three kisses reserved for loved ones. Sarah was last, her face streaming
with tears as she hugged me tightly.
“Mommy, Mommy”,
she cried.
I drew away
wanting to look at her. Sarah was the same enchanting child with
her beautiful dark eyes and infectious smile, only matured into
lovely young womanhood. She sat next to me, spontaneously hugging
me or grabbing my hand and smiling into my eyes. I did the same.
The next three
days, Michael and I were educated to the particulars of life in
a war torn country occupied by foreigners. What it was like: for
a teenaged girl to constantly call home when at University so her
parents would be assured she was still alive; for a mother whose
friendless children were always home when not in school because
it was not safe to play in the park or in the backyard; for a Father
who was the target of two foiled assassination attempts, as is now
commonplace in Iraq. The children worried that their father would
be shot down in his car, and their parents worried that they would
be kidnapped at school.
I’ve thought
a lot about Sarah, about all the children. They smiled, and laughed,
and teased like a family will do who care for each other, but there
was a quiet dignity about each of them from Sarah and Hajar, to
Mohammet, the charming six year old, a dignity rarely seen in children.
Or maybe the
dignity was sadness: a sadness born of war, of fear, of suffering
and a child’s unnatural realization of the fragility of life: the
life of their Mother or Father, their sister or brother, and the
intrinsic value of each to them.
In Arabic there is a saying Inshallah, meaning, God willing. As
Faiza and Sabah and the children got on the bus for Kirkuk, they
turned to us, “You will come one day and visit us in our home. Inshallah.
“
“Inshallah,” we repeated.
In a violent
world the intangible becomes substantive; it allows us to hope.
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