|
Nazar's PayPal Account |
|
Support thehanoudiletter.com in making a small donation:
|
|
|
|
|
The Hanoudi Letter: My Journey, From Mosul to Michigan |
|
|
|
|
Tuesday, 27 November 2007 |
I owe my friends and colleagues and the visitors of The Hanoudi Letter website a big apology for not telling you anything about what I am going to talk about today. I am very sorry for my negligence, I am sure you understand. It has not been from audacity or disrespect, but because of the troubles and continuing frustrations I had had during the last few months of staying Amman, which came to an end when we were told by the people who were processing our application for resettlement in the United States that we have been accepted and we were scheduled to leave on November 14.
In early 2007 the American government initiated a humanitarian program allowing people like us who have suffered in the aftermath of the war and the terrible violence which has swept Iraq and has turned our lives upside down for myself and my family to resettle in a third country. Ours case was a very clear. We applied, but the application went into a sometimes very frustrating wait and delays, but everything suddenly came to an end and we left Amman. It was really a family reunion as we joined Samer, my other son who had been living the United States in Madison Heights, Michigan.
Mosul my birth place is the biggest and most populous city in northern Iraq, it used to have the highest percentage of Christians in the good old days. Most of the Christians have fled the current violence to safer places inside the country or to neighboring often not very welcoming ones. This is part of the current plight of the Iraqi Christians which is not my topic of discussion for today.
I was born October 9, 1934. I have only a few memories of my early years. One of my earliest is the clanging of the bells of the churches in 1945 heralding the end of the Second World War [1939-1945] which claimed the lives of more than 40 million people. The end of the war was supposed to mark the beginning of a new era of freedom democracy and prosperity to all mankind. But it did not. Almost immediately a new kind of war erupted between the two major victors the United States and the former Soviet Union. It was nicknamed the Cold War because each of them was able to destroy the other several times with their nuclear weapons. Any war between them was inevitable destruction so they were settling their quarrels through proxies and in other countries like Iraq. My early years, those spent in Mosul were not free from trouble, but we as a family of ten were able to manage. In 1952 my entire family moved to Baghdad, and I entered medical school there.
I enjoyed my medical school years a great deal despite the fact that we were still in my family in a very serious tightrope. My father’s health started to fail from renal and hepatic failure, he died in 1960. However we survived and we survived the terrible political and social upheavals which were gripping the country. Iraq in early 1960s was polarized into two factions with uncompromising ideologies, Communists and Nationalists. I flirted with the Nationalists for a short time but later decided that politics was a kind of madness if not worse. Instead I concentrated on more productive and needed things like how to survive in that highly inflamed and explosive environment.
I graduated from medical school in 1957 and was given a job which earned me 52 Dinars a month which was a fortune at that time. I gave my mother 40 which was a great boost to the house economy. I went into ophthalmology immediately and was working as a junior ophthalmologist in different parts of the country. In 1961 I was granted a scholarship to do postgraduate Trai in Britain. British ophthalmology was even then very advanced compared with what was practiced at home. I liked the country and the British are very nice after you have reached to them. I returned in July 1963 and once again I was given jobs in various parts of the country. I got married in 1965 and had three children Nazar in 1967, Nadia in 1972 and Samer in 1974.
They were good years and then fate struck a very severe blow. There has been tremendous change in the then Iraqi ruling regime when Saddam Hussein suddenly jumped into the driver seat and the following years could be described as anything but not peaceful. They ushered in two and half decades of wars, impoverishment and deprivations which created a lot of suffering to the Iraqi people. Looking back to those days, we in my family were very lucky to survive without a major catastrophe.
There have been over the years a great deal of literature on Saddam Hussein and his regime, some of it was written by hired crooks and charlatans as part of a process of creating a hero. Most of it was worthless and full of lies and fabrications. The others are the work of scholars and professors in first class universities and famous think tanks with a good deal of help from extremely capable assistants and researchers doing their data collection and in very large libraries and excellent offices. Almost all of them were not totally acceptable because they lacked the necessary touch with the reality of the situation inside the country except in a small number of cases. I am saying this now because Saddam’s years on the top were a real nightmare. It resulted in a terrible destruction of the country and its institutions and misery and impoverishment to its people and everybody suffered but to a more or a lesser extent. We were reasonably lucky and suffered to a lesser extent as a result of his wars. However, life went on despite the hardships which followed his eight years war against Iran and his dreadful adventure in Kuwait which resulted in a dozen years of sanctions and United Nations inspections and an American containment and more and more of his tyranny and death at the end of which life in Iraq was hell.
On April 9, 2003, President Bush in a nationwide radio broadcast told the Americans that the major hostilities which were started during the early hours of March 20, 2003 Baghdad time against Saddam Hussein and his regime under the codename Operation Iraqi Freedom has ended. Saddam was on the run; his families was dispersed in various parts of the country and outside the country and the most senior members of his regime were chased by the Americans who were sitting in the presidential palaces.
The news of the Saddam’s fall was received by many Iraqis including myself with a good deal f jubilation and hope. The Bush administration has promised that after finishing with Saddam they were going to help Iraqis in the necessary reconstruction of the country and the rebuilding of its infrastructure. But that did not happen and this failure in meeting their promises resulted in a very serious opposition to their presence and the growth of a very dangerous cancer which called itself resistance and jihad from which we and the Americans have been very sad victims. Things became very tense, security was lost, the provision of some essentials like food and medicine to which many people became almost totally dependant came to almost a zero, but on top of that there were shooting and killing of innocent people and bystanders like my own who was shot on the 29th of March 2004 as a result of which he was left in a very serious and critical condition.
The shooting of my son was a real tragedy, during the previous years of turmoil wars and upheavals we in my family had our share of failures, trouble and mini tragedies but this was a real and very severe one. It turned our lives upside down. I stopped working and joined in the collective family effort of providing the necessary care to our injured son which was very complex, very exhaustive and very expensive process. We were almost on the verge of collapse. Fortunately, the American people and their government came out with a very generous program allowing people like us who have suffered as a result of the violence which is engulfing Iraq to resettle in the United States to which we applied early on in the year. We were accepted and arrived on the November 14th and joined our other son who has been living there for the last five years in Madison Heights, Michigan.
One day I was walking on the sand of a long beach and suddenly noticed that on many occasions during that journey my footprints on that sand were absent, I was curious and extremely worried, I turned my head to the heavens and said, my father and my savior, where are my footprints and the lord said, my son, my precious child, when you were in trouble and in pain during your journey I was carrying you on my back.
Najeeb Hanoudi
Michigan, USA
Monday, November 26, 2007
email:
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
|
|
|
|
|
Statistics |
|
Visitors: 319642
|
|
|
