I have had about 15,695 days on this planet, and they have brought many things to me, from joy to sadness, danger to happiness. My life has involved many memorable moments, and one of the ones that I cannot forget occurred when I was just four years of age.
I remember the house that my family lived in then: a squat, flat roofed thing that we all crammed into together, trying to find space. It was not a good place to live, and the times in the early 1980s didn’t make our lives any easier in Saddam’s Iraq. In spite of the difficulties we faced, perhaps because of them, my family didn’t express any strong views or philosophies, didn’t speak out in a way that could have been dangerous, and was all too aware that this was a place where the best they could do was try to fade into the background.
It didn’t work. An Iraqi special agent reported that my family was in contact with two of my brothers who had, he said, fled to the mountains and become a part of the PDK party in Iran. According to the agent, they were what were called at the time ‘Modify’ by the authorities, who didn’t want to use the term ‘peshmerga’.
These were serious accusations, as the groups they were accused of joining were engaged in fighting with government forces almost every day at that time. Equally, we knew that the government had no compunction about hurting the families of those who had joined the fighters.
Even at four years old, I knew it was serious when an Iraqi intelligence officer came to the house. He insisted on speaking to my mother in front of all of us, perhaps to remind her of how much there was for her to lose. The officer told her that she had a choice: she could fetch my brothers back from Iran, or she could leave the camp to join them, but either way, there was no place left for her and her children there.
We didn’t have to leave right then, but we did have to leave, again and again. With no warning beyond the shouts of people who were also at their mercy, we would have to leave whatever house we were staying in, hiding somewhere else and knowing that if we were caught by the government’s people, we might be killed just for being there. We had to be ready to leave everything behind two to three times a week, every week. We had to stay out of sight, or stay away, until the officials passed and we could come back.
It meant that nothing was ever stable for me growing up, never steady, never settled. Whatever we had, wherever we were, it could vanish in an instant. Even so, whenever we ran, I wouldn’t think about what we had lost, but about what there might be that was better in the future. I dreamed about a better time, when we would be free from both poverty and the threat of sudden violence. I dreamed the kind of things that a child might dream, about living in a wonderful place with all my family around me. It didn’t seem like much to ask, except that, in those days, it seemed like far too much.
We learned to call my brothers what they really were: peshmerga, or those who face death. They weren’t ‘Modify’ some aberration to be eliminated, but people who loved freedom, and the land. In the camps they tried to teach us to love their nation, but it wasn’t the one we ended up learning to believe in when we were chased from our home three times a week.
It was a nice home, in spite of everything. I don’t want you to think that I’m stuck in the past, thinking about only the bad times. Our home was pleasant enough, the same as everyone else’s, with a flat roof made from mud and nothing to distinguish it from the houses of our neighbours.
All of these houses had three windows, one normal sized in the middle and two smaller ones flanking it. For most people, the middle room became the guest room, while for us, our parents had the one on the right, and the one on the left was a kitchen of sorts. The lavatory was at the bottom of a small, mud filled garden. Life was so bad in so many ways that we managed to get excited even about such small things.
Yet there were good things there. People valued life, knowing that they could lose theirs far too easily. We didn’t have the technology that people have today, but the smiles we saw were real ones.
Throughout all of it, I was growing, and so were my dreams. I imagined possibilities for myself every day, I’m sure everyone did, but I never imagined where my dreams would take me. They took me beyond the camp, beyond Iraq, and finally halfway across the world, to Europe.
If there is a lesson in all of this, it is this: no matter how bad things get in life, no matter how many times things change, hang onto your ability to dream. Those dreams may well take you further than you could have ever believed. They certainly did with me.
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