A Lesson from my Mother by Amy Madsen

When you meet Asha, the first thing that strikes you is her head of big, wild frizzy hair and her even bigger, brighter smile. Small in stature, she just draws people in with her sunny personality.

What inevitably follows is a question: how can this beautiful person be a product of Iraq’s many wars? If I had had the childhood she had I imagine the trauma would have rendered me incapable of getting up in the morning. Asha’s saving grace was her mother.

Asha first learned about war when she was seven. Her next-door neighbor/soccer coach/best friend was killed on the frontlines of the Iran-Iraq war. When his mother heard the news, her horrible, gut-wrenching screams reverberated up and down Asha’s street. She’ll never forget that scream, that howl of total and complete loss by a mother of her only son. It haunts her to this day.

The Iran-Iraq war lasted eight long years, taking Asha through elementary and middle school. Living through it she learned things kids shouldn’t know or have to worry about. Like the importance of keeping her bedroom window cracked open at all times, that way it wouldn’t shatter during a bombing raid; that nearby explosions and gunfire didn’t necessarily mean immediate danger, but the wail of a war siren did. The sound of explosions became part of her everyday childhood. Background noise.

Less than three years after the Iran-Iraq War ended, Iraq found itself at war, again. Asha was getting ready to graduate from high school. It was supposed to be a time of excitement for her. A time of limitless possibilities. Instead, she said, Iraqis faced sanctions that completely destroyed the economy and left middle- and low-income families in dire straits. She saw friends and family flee the country. But, through it all, Asha and her family stayed in Baghdad. It was their land, their country, their home. They weren’t ready to give up on it. Despite the years of war and the sanctions against Iraq, Asha managed to graduate from college.

After college, Asha thought she was finally ready to start her life, then there were the bombing raids in 1998. Although they only lasted for four days, they served as a horrific reminder of the devastation war could bring. For many of her close friends and relatives it was one war too many to bear. They started selling all their belongings and desperately tried to find ways to leave the country, by becoming refugees or asylees. But Asha and her family continued to stay in Iraq. It was their land, their country, their home.

In 2003 all Iraqis knew war was inevitable. Yet again. And Asha was done. She told herself she was not going to live through the second Gulf War. Asha thought that she was going to be killed by the Americans or that Saddam would blow-up Iraq, with a nuclear bomb, instead of surrendering.

Asha remembers telling her mother about her fears, saying she believed she wouldn’t survive another war. She couldn’t survive yet another war. She couldn’t go through the bombings and seeing the bodies pile up and hunting for scarce food and resources and the anxiety of it all. But her mother was having none of it, “Asha, you have to live like a survivor. None of us know what will happen next, but you can’t give up and live like you’re already dying. Even in the most horrific natural disasters, like earthquakes and tsunamis, there are always survivors. And that’s what you are. You are a survivor Asha.”  With those words Asha started living her life like a survivor, focusing on hope and beauty and sunshine wherever she could find it.

I’m happy to report that as her mother predicted, Asha survived. In fact, by many standards she thrived. And even though she left Iraq over a decade ago, she still talks about its richness, its culture, its history and its natural resources. She bemoans what Iraq has become after decades of war and strife. She is saddened by the fact that she hasn’t been able to return, that it isn’t safe for her to go back. She once said that she will be half a person until she can; it was her land, her country, her home. Until then, she will continue to heed the words of her mother and live like a survivor.