Iraq and the Islamic World

Our family Thanksgiving dinner this year included my parents, all their children, two of their grandchildren, and some in-laws– along with five Iraqi refugees my sister-in-law has become involved with through her community volunteer work.  Two are Iraqi women, and they brought their children, aged 10, 5, and 2.  One woman and her two young kids arrived by way of Jordan 11 months ago, the other and her son have been here 8 months.  (In order to avoid making their transition even more difficult, I’ll avoid using their real names.)

While their current living situation is clearly more secure than life in Baghdad, their integration into New England life has not been easy.  The weather, while completely different from the hot desert climate they come from, is not their most difficult challenge. 

Danez is trained as a network technician; she’s got a certificate from a school in Baghdad and several years of experience.   My brother and sister-in-law helped her format her Curriculum Vitae as an American-style resume.  But here in New Hampshire, prospective employers hire American-born candidates who are far less qualified.  Danez never even gets called, much less interviewed.  Apparently, employers are reluctant to consider a candidate whose name they can’t pronounce– or else they really do think all Middle Eastern people are terrorists. 

Both women currently work at Wal-Mart, for wages that won’t pay their rent once their federal assistance runs out.

Danez’s son Ali is in the sixth grade.  His English is limited, and he doesn’t yet understand how American children interact.  Worse, he’s small for his age, and he gets tormented by some of the kids– American and otherwise– who call him “terrorist.”  One told his teacher that Ali planned to blow up the school.  And his teacher believed it.  Several times, Ali has been caught in a he-said-she-said situation with a group of African refugees.  His teachers believe the Africans without question.  Ali recently got kicked off the bus because a Somali kid told the teacher Ali called him a racial name.  However, Ali doesn’t know any racial names.  One of the African kids called him “white boy,” and he had to ask us what it meant.

Danez had a driver’s license in Iraq, so she went for her driver’s test here.  She passed the written exam with no problem, but flunked the driving part.  Three times.  In this state, that means she can’t test again without a hearing.  She had her hearing last week, and the results of the test were produced as evidence: in the third test, she’d done everything right, but then made a left turn in a manner the instructor considered unsafe.  That one error caused her to fail.  (Her driving test was much more involved than those of some American-born kids we know who recently got their licenses, and who passed despite a number of errors.)

For Thanksgiving, my sister-in-law drove out to pick up the women and their children.  They joined us for their first Thanksgiving meal.  Interestingly, when told of the origin of the holiday, they asked, “Didn’t Americans and Indians fight each other?”  That came later, I explain, after the elder leaders (Edward Winslow of the Pilgrims and Massasoit of the Wampanoag) died.  “Is there a fast before Thanksgiving, like our Ramadan?”  Not today, but the settlers who began the tradition had been starving, and half of them died during the first winter.

I watched our Iraqi guests taste with interest the roast turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie– all foods they appeared unfamiliar with.  We compared spice names– hech we identified as cardamom.  And my sister stepped in to care for the Turkmeni-speaking two-year-old, proving once again that a child is a child in any language.