Tariq’s prison cell is close to 110 degrees, and the only water is so hot and brackish that it's almost impossible to gag down. Three days is the longest the human body can survive without water, and that is how long he has been captive here, measuring the hours of torture by the distant azan calls to prayer. Because he still won’t give his captors what they want, they will beat him again tomorrow. So he forces himself to drink.
“You are spies,” one of Amna’s interrogators shouts at her across a table. “Why else would you call the Americans? We are in charge here. If you had a problem, why didn’t you come to us instead of crying to them?” She tries to appear calm, to stop her body from shaking. In this cruel game of gaslighting, she knows there is no point in stating the obvious: Because you are the ones who took my husband.
Somewhere in the American Midwest in a cramped hotel room, Amna sits on a bed with their two-year-old son on her lap. She is squinting at her phone and trying to decipher Form i-589: Application for Asylum and Withholding of Removal. They arrived just a week before with six-month visas, but the asylum process is long and precarious, and time is ticking away. On the other bed, Tariq is trying to soothe their sobbing four-year-old daughter. She wails in their native Arabic, “I can't understand what anyone says here! I want to go home.” But this strange new land is home now; it will have to be, somehow. They can’t go back.
The longer I know them, the bigger Amna and Tariq’s story grows in my mind. It encompasses the whole range of human experience, from terror to joy and everything in between. But the extremes of life are hard to inhabit, even secondhand. After enough ordinary days in a row, they tend to recede like scenes in a movie or distant mountains on the horizon.
Some days, thinking of this family’s journey, I blink in disbelief:
How could they have struggled to survive in such terrifying conditions, when now they’re having normal school-morning battles to get the kids to zip up their coats? How could they have had to run for their lives, leaving their home and families behind, when now they're laughing at The Grinch (all three versions) and the youngest child is munching Cheetos and playing with his toy dinosaurs?
But the past is still viscerally real for Tariq and Amna, even while they and their family make new memories. We met at a time when they were wrestling with a very different set of questions:
Where do we go from this sketchy hotel in a strange city in the middle of the U.S.? How will we get work, an apartment, and everything else we need to start over?
And that ever-present American question:
How do we fill out all these forms?
The traumas of the past and the challenges of the present are very real, but so are this couple’s courage, humor, and resilience.
Tariq’s heroic actions to save American lives and the near-fatal consequences of those events are why they are here, and why I and their other American friends have the privilege to know them. In some ways, just because of who they are, they’ve already given back far more than they’ve received.
In the spirit of giving back, they’ve decided to tell their story. I’m honored to help them tell it.
You’ve had a glimpse of the highest crisis point: the desperation whose memory still brings tears to Amna’s eyes and causes her to tremble and wrap her arms around herself; the physical and psychological trauma that still makes it hard some nights for Tariq to sleep. From there, they fled twice to safety. The second time, with three small children and a few suitcases, they boarded a plane to the United States.
No one was waiting for them at the airport that night, not even to help them get a taxi and drag their exhausted selves to a hotel. They were like a family on a breakneck rollercoaster ride who find, on the final drop, that a part of the track is missing. (That broken track will need its own chapter.)
Yet there was something about this family that called to the people who met them, and they soon found advocates to help supply or build the missing pieces. Although nothing was simple or easy, a way forward became clear. Friends would be waiting for them at the next airport.
Before we get there, though, the past needs a voice: not just the crisis point but the wholeness of their lives before it.
What will follow here week by week is a story of love, struggle, and survival against great odds. (And a few recipes and funny anecdotes.) Names, locations, and other identifying details will be changed or blurred for their safety and that of their families. However, the arc and spirit of the story will remain true.
To me it is a quintessentially American journey.
Okay, I'm hooked!