I must have told this story in bits and pieces hundreds of times. It’s the kind of story that’s brought on by a simple question from some unsuspecting individual, unaware of the flood of other questions that inevitably follows. I often dread that initial question. It’s no short story. It’s not a simple one either. Like an occasional break in a levy, you just never know how much water will spill over. I suppose it is this constant experience of having to retell it that leads me to write it all down, basically, in self defense. I feel compelled to tell this story, and yet I get tired of telling it, as its sheer content is overwhelming. I often feel that I will never be able to tell it enough or to the right people who can make a difference.
By 2005 my husband and I had been hosting international students for quite a number of years. We had welcomed students from many different countries and cultures. Our first student came the year our two older children decided that they wanted to learn French. It seemed logical to us that when our friend Deb Kirlin was putting together a new program for French students that we help her out by hosting a student from Paris for a few weeks in the summer. The kids would get some French language practice and we figured a short program would be a good introduction to hosting exchange students. We also figured, it if was a bad experience, at least it was a short period of time before we would be sending a student back home. So Natalie arrived and it turned out to be a wonderful, and too short, three week experience. That started it! After that we were hooked. Year-after-year we found ourselves hosting yet another international exchange student. In addition to Natalie, we’ve hosted a student from Japan, two from Korea, one from Kuwait, and even a “domestic” exchange student from California. Our oldest daughter even had the opportunity to travel with an organization called People to People and stayed with a family in Austria and in exchange we “hosted” the whole family for a couple of weeks one summer years later. All-in-all we love the exchange of culture, language, food, and friendship. I would recommend hosting exchange students to any adventurous soul who wants to travel the world, but may not have the luxury of leaving their home country.
In the summer of 2005, the community representative of the organization that I hosted for suggested that, since I do so much work to find host families and schools for other students, why don’t I just sign on to be a community representative like her and get paid for it. It seemed to make sense, so I did. I was now working as a Community Representative for AYUSA Global Youth Exchange – one of the premier student exchange programs in the United States. Two years earlier AYUSA had been awarded a major grant from the US State Department to administer Colin Powell’s YES Program (Youth Exchange & Study), a peace initiative to “build bridges of understanding” between the U.S. and the predominantly Islamic countries of the Middle East. This initiative was a result of Congressional discussions following the events of September 11, 2001. By the time I started working with AYUSA the YES program was under the leadership of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
That year approximately 200 high school students would come to the U.S. for one full academic year. Actually AYUSA stands for “Academic Year in the USA”. When this group of 15-17 year olds arrived, they would first receive orientation and training in Washington, DC. Since these young people were here as youth ambassadors, the rules and expectations were made quite clear. Smaller groups called “clusters” would then travel to the regions of the US in which they were assigned. There they would go through a local orientation and would be acclimated to their host families and their host communities. Typically, they would attend a public high school; do community service hours; travel to a number of leadership trainings throughout the school year together; and were expected to share their cultures in unique and interesting ways through public speaking experiences.
These students from the YES program can never return to their countries unnoticed, especially students from countries like Iraq where outside influences have been carefully filtered for so long. They are the best and brightest of the Middle East. Their families are well known, some even celebrities in their own right. If the student who would eventually change my life forever had returned his native country of Iraq, the changes in his language skills and Americanized demeanor would not have gone undetected. He would be seen by others as a traitor or, worse yet, an American trained spy. In reality he, like the other students from Iraq, was simply a nice kid who wanted a chance to go to school in peace and whose parents simply wanted him to live in safety and not die in the streets of their own neighborhoods.
I had the unique privilege and honor to experience the war with a unique close-up perspective, by sharing their fear as we chatted online, becoming a virtual part of another family’s life. I often felt at the time that I was right with them, but knew of course that I was at a safe distance from the dangers that they were experiencing.
My purpose in putting this story in written word is twofold. One is the urgent request of this beautiful family that I came to know. There were times after one of them would share a particularly emotional story that one or the other of them would ask me, “Please Janice, tell the Americans what is really happening her in Iraq!” At the time, not being a writer or journalist, I felt handicapped, with no ability to spread the word and bring about any significant change for this family or their neighbors. Questions like “What should I do?” and “What could I do?” and if I knew, “How can I do it?” ran through my brain like a screaming freight train.
The second reason is to share a small piece of that experience, so that others might understand from my perspective, rather than that of the media, of what life was like for this family after the US led occupation of Iraq.
The e-mails and instant messages that make up the majority of the book are primarily between Meme and me, with a few significant communications from other family members. What I’d like people to take away from the reading of this book is just how similar people are, especially mothers, no matter where they are from. Neither geography, nor culture, nor religion can overpower the love that mothers have for their children and the empathy that one mother can have for another. People have often asked me, occasionally with a judgemental tone, “Why are you helping these people?” My answer is simple, and somewhat “instinctual”. At some point during our almost daily chat sessions, I would think to myself, “What if this was my child?” and “What would I want someone to do to help me to protect my child?” Telling the story became just as necessary as what I knew I had to do at the time.
