Allah Ma'ak, Haiffaa

This is the story of a great woman. I prefer my stories with happy endings, and I'll warn you right now, this is not one of those stories; it is, however, a story with a happy middle, and sometimes, that's all we can cling to.

Sometimes we forget just how big the world is. We start to believe that our triumph is more magnificent or that our loss is greater; our joy is the most radiant or our sorrow is the deepest. And that's when life slaps us upside our silly little heads with the reality that we know nothing of triumph, loss, joy, or sadness at all compared to someone else's story. And the end of this story is this: Haiffaa Ali is dead.

Haiffaa Ali was born into a wealthy Iraqi family. Her father was an important person in the government, and his salary let them live not just comfortably, but opulently even. Her only money problems were "deciding what to spend it on"...a luxury few Americans, let alone Iraqis, enjoy. She married Majeed, an important man with more power and money, and her status grew. She believed her joy was complete.

When Saddam Hussein's role as Iraq's leader was threatened by US intervention, the powerful dictator became increasingly distrustful of everyone around him, drawing lines in the sand and imagining enemies where before he saw friends. He blacklisted numerous powerful people, one of which was Majeed. Haiffaa's husband was forced to flee from Iraq to Syria, leaving Haiffaa and their children in the care of her father. But Haiffaa's now-elderly father was soon added to Saddam's blacklist, and one night soldiers tore into their home and savagely murdered him in his bed while Haiffaa watched, helpless. Her sorrow was so deep...

Knowing that it was no longer an 'if' but a 'when', regarding an attack on her own life, Haiffaa packed up her children and went in search of her husband. Reunited in Syria, they were told the refugee camp was too full, and the options were back to Iraq or onward to America. With a heavy heart, she prepared to move to the land of disrespectful cowboys who probably wanted her and her family dead too. Arriving in Denver, she was placed in Hidden Brook apartments, a Hope Communities property, and given six months to get her family back on its feet. With not a dollar to her name, no marketable skills, children too young to work, and a now-disabled husband, it was a time of desperation for Haiffaa. A dedicated employee of Hope Communities, Jessie, befriended her and helped her sign up for English classes, as well as connected her with a group of refugee women who make and sell jewelry. Slowly, Haiffaa and her family adjusted to life in America, and the day that she sold her first necklace, for eight dollars, brought her to tears. Never in her life had she done something truly on her own, and her pride--left with the rest of her life in Baghdad--had found its way across ten thousand miles back to her gentle heart.

This tiny woman with thick graying hair and a colorful scarf on her head came into my life with a smile and a cup of tea. Seated in her living room, her stilted speech was somehow...melodic, and her words were wise and honest. She practiced her speech for us, preparing for her NPR interview, and she was at once highly intelligent yet gentle and modest. She fully understood the magnificence of her triumph, but refused to accept any credit for it.

Each year, Jessie went to Haiffaa's girls-only birthday party. Girls-only meant that Haiffaa could remove her head scarf--letting her hair down both literally and figuratively. Haiffaa had clearly assimilated into American life, and loved to tell other refugees of her revelation that the American government is not the American people. She was thrilled with her new independence, and even took a vacation to Germany to visit her son. Having finally rebuilt her life, not to its old glory, but to a new kind of glory, Haiffaa decided to make peace with her past. It was time to go back to Iraq and visit her father's grave.

Haiffaa crossed the border into Baghdad on October 20, 2009. She spent 5 days experiencing a city, once home, that now felt so foreign. She prayed reverently at her father's grave and breathed deeply, exhaling all the hurt and betrayal and grief of her past. And on October 25, 2009, she made her way back to the travel agency to arrange for her next-day departure.

On Sunday, October 25, 2009, two blasts erupted in downtown Baghdad--the worst bombing in over two years. As the death toll hit 155, Iraqis took to the streets to mourn. Somewhere in the chaos and smoldering ruins, lay the remnants of a colorful head scarf...

How Do You Like Them Apples?

Oh, Fall in Colorado... School's back in session, the leaves are changing, the weather swings wildly from 84 to 34 degrees, and love is in bloom. Yeah, that last one is normally a spring thing, but it's not only the weather that's backwards here.

Fall is a season of change, and reflection, and blog posts about Topics (with a capital T!) like Truth and Reality. I've been working on this really great analogy about how people are like apples. We have a skin that's pliable and resilient and stays intact even when the fruit is bruised, but how easy it is for a sharp poke to penetrate our tough exteriors and damage us deeply. And how there's so much good substance to all of us--how if we just go past the skin we find the delicious fruit of personality and depth of character and a real beauty on the inside, so to speak. But we also all have these faults that we hide on the inside. Seeds of our own destruction that we work to overcome and to keep from ruining our taste. Then I snapped out of it and realized that philosophy was better left to the expert bloggers.

Instead, I'll stick with what I do best, which is exaggeration and sarcasm.

What's not an exaggeration though, is that our two apple trees have produced 2683579300134764058245 apples this season. This has given our neighbors a reason to talk to us, which they have been eager to do since we moved in. We are, after all, the source of a significant number of rumors.

"I heard they're polygamists...but the kind where she has two husbands!"

"They're never home! That's gotta be a sign of deviancy."

"Maybe that other guy is their kid, and he has some weird condition that makes him look older. Didn't they make a movie about a guy like that?"

"What if they're drug dealers with a meth lab? That one guy is always in the garage."

"Did you know they all have different last names? I know because I checked their mailbox. Do you think they might (gasp) not be married??"

I've been accosted by different neighbors on my way out of my house in the morning no less than three times so that they could ask my last name. Then they catch "that one guy" while he's in the yard and ask his last name, and then say, in mock confusion, "Oh, Bob honey, did we get his wife's last name wrong? I could swear it was something else!" So now the secret is out--we are (gasp) not married. Bring on the social pariah-ism. Fortunately, no one asks about "the other guy", 'cause with many of our neighbors being longtime AARP members, they just might not be able to live with the concept of roommates. Besides, with the new additions to the "family" arriving in January, we have a feeling they have a lot more confusion ahead of them.

So, anyway, the apples. We haven't been able to actually pick many ourselves because they're so high up, and the cripple is, well, crippled. He did get a new splint (pics at the bottom of the post), so that's been helping with the mobility, but still, no apple-picking for him. Instead, we've been telling eager neighbors that they can pick as many as they want--just leave half of whatever they take for us. This was a brilliant idea initially, but now we have 92384127 pounds of apples in the garage, in the kitchen, in buckets in the yard (steal them--please!), and strewn about the backyard...with lots more on the trees still. Our grateful neighbors have given us apple cake, homemade sweet dill pickles, homegrown tomatoes, and a promise of apple cider when it's complete. What a haul! So I've made a lot of applesauce, and we've got plans for many other apple-based items, but I'm thinking maybe we need to be that house that gives out apples at halloween? That'll teach those damn kids that play in our yard without permission. Did I mention that our house is the neighborhood bus stop? And that I have to back out of the garage, at a time of the morning that often finds me driving with my eyes closed, and avoid the children that think the world is a pedestrian crosswalk. At least they will pick my apples for me.

In other apple-related news, the third wheel of our happy little tricycle seems to have found himself a young lady to help us graduate to big kid bikes. (Yeaahhh, analogies.) We met her the other day when we toured the corn maze--and by toured, I mean gimpy pushed our pace from a fast walk to a gentle Olympic sprint to better our time, all the while chastizing kids for taking shortcuts. I tried to take some photos, but photos taken at a 6-minute-mile pace just aren't the same. Anyway, we met the new lady in our lives, and then she even coordinated a dinner-making, board-game-playing evening at our house this week. And we played Apples to Apples! The theme lives on...