A journey from Iraq: Part I

Rozelyn and Nabeed are both refugees from Iraq who recently were resettled into a crowded apartment complex in one of the poorer neighborhoods of South Central San Diego. They share a son, a life-filled jubilant 4 year old who literally has twinkles in each of his eyes. Rozelyn, fluent in English, shared with me a few months ago that she and her husband Nabeed were looking for work. They desperately needed jobs. I verbally informed her of a few job leads, one of which had great promise in landing in employment, however she rejected each one. Initially I was frustrated. When a person says they desperately need work, when they call me and leave messages of "Please help, help me, help me we need work" I expect them to compromise.
I wasn't sending her to a strip club, or a Port-a-Potty cleaning crew, it was a nice solid full-time position as a caregiver.
"Miss Kacie, I can't do that. I am sorry."
I spoke with her a few more times all of which held the exact same result. I decided she was not ready for a job developer, that any help I could give her she was not willing to receive, so I crossed her name off my list, never input her in to the system, and moved on.
Rozelyn happens to live next door to one of my clients, a man from Sierra Leone who was in need of work boots. Just as I was dropping off the goods, leaving his house I noticed her son Isa leaned in their doorway smiling at me. I walked over to him and ruffled his hair while he grabbed my leg and hugged it tight.
"Hey you." I said, tickling his sides.
He ran in to the apartment.
Rozelyn was inside cooking lunch, and on their small round dining room table lay a spread of food that looked as if it had taken quite a lot of time to prepare.
"Oh hello Miss Kacie. It is so nice to see you." She smoothed her coarse hair and extended her hand offering me a seat on their couch. Isa ran over and pounced on my lap.
"Isa!"
"It's okay. I don't mind."
"Oh I am so sorry Miss Kacie, he has so much energy you know! I am sorry. Please make yourself comfortable. Can I offer you some tea?"
"Sure."
"Or will you stay for lunch? It is almost ready. Oh I hope you will stay for lunch."
She opened the stove and hot air escaped past her face and above. It smelled of meat and onions and it was lunchtime and I was hungry.
"Yes I'd love to have lunch with you."
"Oh wonderful Miss Kacie wonderful. Nabeed he is not home but anytime now he will come back. Isa!" She spoke rapidly to Isa in Arabic and then turned to me, batting her eyelashes and smiling. After each reprimand he would creep off my lap but slowly return while his mother tended to the big boiling pot.
"Your apartment looks great." I said, exaggerating slightly but considering relativity.
"Oh do you like it? Everything is other peoples trash!" She clasped her hands together and moved through the room pointing out everything she had salvaged from the dumpster outside. "That is how it is here. Our monthly check is very small, we get about $750, rent is $550, and gas, and groceries, and laundry detergent- you see? Life is very difficult so I cannot go and buy things to make my house look beautiful. But I love decorations. In Iraq, I had a lot of money Miss Kacie. And here I do what I can."
Nabeed walked in smoking a cigarette and gently bowed his head to my presence. His thick black feather eyelashes glanced in Rozelyn's direction and he gave her a loving smile. Isa ran to him and jumped around his legs, while Nabeed flicked his ears and tried to hide from his son's constant swivel.
"Lunch is ready!" They didn't have enough chairs to accommodate my dropping in, so Isa regrettably had to sit at the couch and eat his meal. He kept peering over and asking questions that his father finally gave in and made a makeshift seat so he was able to dine with the grown-ups.
So much trust can be built over something as simple as a meal. I sometimes feel guilty when I accept an offer to eat with my client's. I have so much fun doing it, and it usually lasts longer than my mandated 1 hour lunch. But the information, the stories, the understanding I receive far surpasses anything I could get in my office. Therefore, I have unofficially written "family meals" in to my job description.
On this day, I was reminded that what you see is usually not what you get. What had first appeared to me as laziness or pickiness, neither of them accepting my job leads, was actually something much more.
I wanted to know how they met, so I asked between bites and she put down her fork and told me the story.
Rozelyn and Nabeed were family friends and had known each other their entire lives. Both had a strong attraction towards one another, and decided to marry despite the fact they believed in different religions. "Nabeed is the sweetest, most gentle man I know. He knows my heart. We are okay that we have different religions because we trust one another with everything."
Christians are heavily persecuted in Iraq. Nabeed, driven by love and sustained by his Muslim faith, had risked quite a lot in asking her to marry him. Rozelyn, a Christian woman having married a Muslim man, was now like a wife with a bulls eye tattooed on her forehead.
"We would go to the grocery store and men would walk by me and whisper that they were going to kill me, all because they knew I was a Christian."
She shared that she lived in constant fear, but in Nabeed she found rest. They continued to live under verbal threats or dodging bullets shot through their house. The war in Iraq was devastating everything. "My people, they have black hearts. There is something wrong in Baghdad and it is in their hearts." She continued to live, and work, and love. And soon enough, she found she was pregnant.
4 months after Isa was born the front part of their house was destroyed by gunshots. She was asleep with her baby when it happened. She and Nabeed were so terrified they did not leave their house, and the fear sat in their stomachs and leaked in to their bones. Rozelyn found she could no longer produce milk but could not leave her house, so she fed her baby water mixed with sugar for over a week.
"The doctor told me I had become too fearful to make breastmilk, so we wanted to move to go someplace safe. But then that is when they kidnapped Isa."
Her son was taken from her for over two weeks, while messages relayed from a murderous tag team only solidified that her future remain very uncertain. "He was very young and he needed to be fed. The kidnappers called me and asked if I wanted him to live. They said they weren't feeding him anything, and if I wanted Isa to eat I should send some money."
Isa was returned, and on the night they had planned their escape, Nabeed was dragged from inside his house and beaten outside.
I looked at him eating the french fries, smiling at his son, stiffly turning his body and reaching for a second helping. He held the scars from that day, not in his face- or his eyes- or his soft easy smile, but his body was unnaturally erect as if someone had slipped a wood board down his shirt. His neck and spine were damaged, he moved in small calculated doses.
"The bad men told Nabeed that if he did not divorce me the very next day they were going to kill me and kill Isa."
They packed up their things that night and left while it was still black out. "We had money, and before the war we were very comfortable, but now it is very different. Can you imagine Miss Kacie?"
After safely arriving in Syria, and spending 8 months trying to gain status as refugees and begin a new life in a new land, they landed in San Diego. I asked them how they like it here. "It is a nice place. It is safe. But I am sorry, I cannot talk to these other Iraqi's who are here. I cannot look at them. I cannot make friends with them. I do not trust them." I did not feel it was my place to remind her many of them had been through similar traumas.
She went on to tell me that she never leaves Isa alone, there is always one pair of protective eyes on him. "When Isa is sleeping, I stay up and watch him. After 4 hours, Nabeed will wake up and I will sleep. That is how we live." I realized the job I referred her to required overnights.
The dark circles under her eyes now held a reason, and the general nervousness that leaped off her every pore was rooted in an awful reality. Despite it all, despite their battered bodies and their wearied souls, their love for each other and for their son was easily felt. "Isa is our hope. We are tired Miss Kacie, very tired. This life has been very difficult and terrible but we look at Isa and we know it is good."
Each time I cleared my plate of food a large spoon dangled above it and dropped another load of salad, french fries, or a weird portion of that meatloaf looking dish. Nabeed would laugh and point at my stomach, motioning for me to fill it up. I wondered if he knew the story his wife was telling, as he doesn't have any English speaking skills. I sensed he did, that it was now as much of a part of them as anything else.
There was a long silence and some chewing noises and I decided to ask Isa if he had made any friends in the complex. He gave a little nod.
"Oh really? A best friend?"
Another nod.
"What's your best friends name?"
He smiled, looked at his mom and dad, and through the gap in his front tooth, his little pink tongue spun around in circles and said "Thu-thu-thuthu-thu!"
I thought he was speaking Arabic, so I asked his mom to translate. She said she had no idea what he was talking about, so I asked again.
"Who is your best friend?"
He kicked his legs under the table excitedly and tried to convince me of his best friends name: "Ha-thu-thuthu-thal!"
Small sounds began to emerge and resemble something Mexican.
"One more time?" I asked, and he repeated. After a group effort of trying to figure it out, we asked "Is it Jose Salazar!"
He jumped from his chair and danced around the table. "Yes! Huh-thu-thuthu-thal!"
His mother explained to his father, in Arabic, about the confusion that just took place, and we all broke out in infectious laughter as we watched the space between the teeth fill up with Isa's wild twirling tongue.
We didn't return to the story she had been telling before, instead we moved on and let the refreshing antics of an inspiring 4 year old cheer us on into another chapter of the day, if not into another chapter of the future.