Born in Iraq
Age: 24, 20
September 22, 2021
Noor: We left Iraq when I was in third grade. I mainly remember kindergarten and elementary school. I remember that it was fun for me because I used to have a lot of friends but at the same time I do have this one memory always that at some point before we left they started kidnapping kids that were going to school. They even put bombs close to schools just because that’s where a lot of people gathered and that's what they tried to target. I remember at some point I told my mom, “What is the point of going to school if I'm going to die anyway?” That was a huge part of my mom deciding that we needed to move somewhere else because it wasn't safe anymore.
Dhelal: I was in seventh grade when we left. It's hard to explain. My first year in elementary school was when the war started. It was completely different, people were scared and worried. My mom would drive us to school and she would wait until we went inside and sometimes in the middle of the school day she would come and check that everything was okay. It was a lot of stress and pressure.
Noor: My mom was the one that decided to leave. She was like, it's over. Enough. That's enough. There is no safety for my kids, there's no future.
Dhelal: My mom left with my brother and they went to Syria. After two months, when we finished school exams, my dad took me and Noor to Syria to be with her and our brother.
Noor: My mom didn't want to destroy our life just to get up and go somewhere, she made sure that we continued with the school because if we just moved they wouldn’t have counted that year for us. So she made sure that, even though it was hard for her to leave us because we're so close to each other, she went with my brother to start a whole life there for us so when we got there it would already be prepared. When we went to Syria that was our first time traveling. Our first move was to Syria and we were there for a year and a half. At first, it was really fun, we were adjusting. I'm the type of person that can blend in really quickly and if you put me anywhere I'll just talk and make friends. It's a little bit harder for Dhelal, but for me, I just went with it. My brother and I started going to school together because in the Middle East elementary and middle school are together. I would wake him up, get ready, make breakfast, I was kind of in charge of him school wise and we got so much closer there. Whenever the war started, which is what I actually always tell the people that asked me, I remember the Syrian war more than the Iraq war because I was older so I knew what was going on. The fighting, the bullets, the soldiers in the streets, the bombs. They started going into buildings and shooting from buildings. One time, we had our table and then had a big window out to the street. I was cooking food and then walking towards the table and at the end of the street, out of nowhere, a bomb just exploded. I was frozen for a whole minute and I was just screaming. I had no idea what to do.
Dhelal: Before we left Syria, we tried so hard to move to Jordan because it's really close. We did the paperwork but we were declined because we were residents of Syria. They didn’t want to accept anyone from Syria or anyone who had lived in Syria, so we had no other choice than to go back to Iraq.
Noor: It was getting worse and worse, so that made us feel like we had to figure out what was next. We already ran from something and we got into something else. Things like bread started getting expensive and we couldn't get any food. It was really hard and we couldn’t do it anymore. Whenever we left, I remember the driver that took us to the place with the cars to go back to Iraq, he was like I can't go near your area because there is shooting and they just shoot any car. He was like, I have kids, I don't want to, you know, basically get killed. So we waited for a while until the shooting came down and we just left, and I remember you could hear the bullets. The streets and the buildings - it was a war. We just didn’t have any time. It was getting worse and worse by night. I remember my brother was sleeping one night and we could hear shooting off in the distance with different types of ammunition, sometimes strong and sometimes soft, and my brother woke up and named the ammunition - he was a child. It was not right.
Dhelal: The war just started to get worse and worse. When we left, we left the house full of stuff. All our clothes, full of everything. We just took wherever we could take that was small, our paperwork, and we left for Iraq. We went back for four months and that was like the worst four months of my life. We tried again to go to Jordan, but we weren’t getting approved so we had to find a plan b. That’s when we decided to go to Turkey, so we went to the embassy to do the interview to get the visa and they said maybe we would be accepted and maybe not. Each passport cost money, so we paid and we were just waiting, hoping we would get that visa. Then they called us, said we received the visa, and that we could come and pick up the passports.
Noor: In this whole process, even whenever we got approved, we were scared of where we were going because we didn’t know where we were going.
Dhelal: We didn’t know anything about Turkey, what language they spoke, what religions they had, what they did, we had no idea. At that time the internet wasn't a big thing, so it’s not like people have that idea of if you want to go somewhere you search about this country or city. We just were going, whatever was going to be in Turkey was not going to be as bad as what was in Iraq at that time. This was all my mom's decision.
Noor: That was the worst four months of my life and especially my mom’s life because she was struggling, she got super sick, she didn’t want to be in Iraq, that’s why she left. She wasn’t comfortable being there. She had to figure out everything. We moved to Turkey on December 17th, 2012. We went in a car that travels from one country to another. We didn't have money for airplanes so that was the cheapest way to go. My mom didn't know anything about Turkish culture so she actually had hijabs in her purse for us because we don't know where we're going, and it was better to have them just in case. When we started driving and we got into Turkey, as we went from one city to another she noticed that there were a lot of mosques, where we go pray as Muslim people. Turkey is actually known for its mosques. She realized that it was a Muslim country and that gave her a lot of relief. We first went to Ankara and then we signed up with the UN.
Dhelal: The immigration program with the IOM (International Organization for Migration).
Noor: We went there for our appointment, and because we already had our case in Syria with them, we transferred our case from Syria to Turkey. You can't stay in Syria or Turkey unless you are a business person or you're under the coverage of a refugee. The only way we’re able to stay in Turkey was if we got accepted by the UN. My mom, this was all my mom, she did the interviews. It wasn't like a guarantee of being able to leave Turkey at all, it just gave us the ability to stay and not get kicked out, and that’s all we wanted. The interviews were hard, they asked so many details and they wanted to make sure that you have the same answers over and over from your old case to your new case. After all that struggle they let us choose a city to stay in. They give you a list of cities with openings and you have to choose one. My mom had no idea about the country, so she randomly chose Eskisehir. I’m really grateful that she chose it because there are some cities over there that are really old, some don’t have power.
Dhelal: We started life there.
Noor: The hard thing was that we didn't speak Turkish. We just had a booklet that had translations between one language to another, we don't have phones with Google. We had to find a place to rent and had to start school. It was a really tough time in the beginning for my mom and Dhelal to manage all of it. My brother and I went to school but Dhelal wasn't able to go to school because of the age limit. As a refugee you're not allowed to go to high school, they accept you for elementary school and middle school and that's it. I started going to school and it was a good part of my life. I always say I want to go to Turkey because it was a good part of my life, even with the struggle and everything.
Dhelal: It was a hard situation but at the same time it was helpful because I was helping my mom with a lot of paperwork. After they assigned us to a city, we needed to go twice a week to the police station to sign, proving we were still in the city, making sure that we lived there. I was like helping her with many things, like bills, building a new life, learning the language, helping each other understand what was going on around us.
Noor: It was a recovery time for my mom. I remember she used to pray a lot. She needed time off.
Dhelal: She was tired from what she had been through between Iraq to Syria, Syria to Iraq, Iraq to Turkey. There was a lot of pressure on her. Turkey was like a recovery for everyone. We were there from December 2012 until July 2014. When they approve your status as a refugee they open an online account for you where you can check to see if any country has picked you to go there. We were always checking but there was nothing showing. I remember one day we woke up in the morning and my mom was in her room crying. I went there and I opened the door and I was like what's going on? She was like we just got accepted to go to the US. We felt like there was a new light so we were excited, but again it’s a big change. We started the interview process with the US this time where they could either approve us or decline us.
Noor: There were three interviews my mom had to go by herself because we were younger than 18. She was saying that it was over and over the same questions from different people just to make sure that you're saying the truth. It was like a lot of stress because you have to relive the moment again and again just so you can explain to people what happened. Then they did bloodwork, x-rays, everything. I have never had that many medical tests in my life. Then they approved us and gave us our flights. During the whole process, we tried to pack to make sure that we were ready. It took around a year, but it was worth it.
Dhelal: We got to choose what state we wanted to go to. The state they picked for us was New York, but the choice we picked was Texas because my uncle is here. My uncle had been here a while before us, so we were planning to move here, stay a little bit, see how we like the vibe of the state. If we didn't like it, we could move to a different state because it was our choice, we could go anywhere. But after we came here we just fell in love with Texas and Austin. Now it’d be really hard if you asked me to go to a different state. I was 17 when we got here and Noor was 13.
Noor: To get here was a long, long flight. We were scared because we didn't know what was going on, we didn't know where the steps were. We had never been to an airport before. My mom was the only one responsible for us. Our first official moment was getting to the Florida airport, that was our first actual stepping into America.
Dhelal: Then immigration officials took my mom into an interrogation room for five hours and left all of us, under 18, alone. We were really stressed out and scared because we didn’t know what was going on. She doesn’t know what’s going on because they didn’t tell her anything. They didn’t even talk to her.
Noor: After all of that they figured out that it was a name mistake, that one letter in her name on the documents was accidentally spelled wrong. So that was our great experience at the airport. When we arrived in Austin they had an apartment for us, but we had to pay it back. We had to pay back the plane tickets, too. It’s like a loan without interest. That's a good part of it, you already have a place whenever you get here, but it starts all over again - paperwork, setting up school, getting to know the environment, blending in, learning public transportation.
Dhelal: We had one month before school started so they wanted us to finish all the paperwork before school started. All of July and August were running, running, running. It was crazy and you don't speak the language. Our case manager was really helpful with stuff. I remember one time my mom and I went shopping at HEB and we were waiting for the bus home and the bus wasn’t coming. That day we bought butter and it started to melt. The summer was so hot over here that first year we came. It was like a big transition from Turkey.
Noor: It was tough at the beginning, to be honest. I didn't know anything, even with school. At first, it was hard to understand. What is a schedule? What is a GPA? How do you choose a schedule? What is this class? You know, like, what's going on?
Dhelal: I started high school from the beginning. For my age, I should have been a senior that year because I was 17, but they put me back as a freshman. When they decided that I was so mad and I started to cry. But after that, I just went with it. I was like, okay, let me just live the high school experience again. Which is nice. I already finished it when we were in Syria but I got lucky to be in high school. If I had come here at 18 they wouldn’t have put me in high school they would have told me just to go take the GED exam. I didn't graduate high school until I was 21 and that was fine. I got to feel that experience of high school. Eventually, we both went to the same school so we started to go together and come back together. We started to forget about the age difference between us. I’m the type of person that I’m usually more friends with teachers than students. I think differently. I was like, I'm gonna talk with my teacher. She's more like me, you know? We're lucky we got a lot of good people along our way. Like with teachers and with many other people we know. Our case manager brought us a volunteer who spoke Arabic who was a high school teacher and she helped us figure out a lot of things. Even after she finished volunteering there we are still in touch with her, we see each other. She helped us move apartments.
Noor: I feel like here in the US life is like 1,2,3,4. It’s like wake up, work, do this, do that, then sleep, and do it all over again. In the Middle East and in Turkey we don't have that. Yes, we have school. Yes, we have work. But there are always things that make your day different. Over here there's nothing that makes your day different, you'll have the same day over and over again. There's a little bit of being bored with the over and over lifestyle and there is not much change going on. If you stop, if we were to say let me take off work or let me take off school, people are going to keep going to you’re just going to be staying in the back. You can't really take a break over here. That's the thing in America, life is like you can't take a break. I also was surprised whenever we moved here to see the number of homeless people and how dirty the city can be. Turkey is so clean. Teachers go to school in suits. Moving here, walking around the streets, I was so surprised. I was like, this is not the America that we see on TV, you know.
Dhelal: We know we need to be successful, that we need to graduate, but there’s also so much healing and living. I graduated high school in 2018 and I started a Pharmacy Technician program at community college. I’m still in that program working on my associate degree. My plan after that is to transfer to a university and go to pharmacy school. I’m kind of taking it step by step because I'm working while doing school so sometimes I can't take full-time classes. I love what I'm doing and it's something I chose because I want it. I’m also the head of the house, so I have a lot of responsibility for keeping up with the bills, renewing things, doing the shopping. You need a lot of time to do that, plus I’m working and taking care of my mom. After that journey, she's really tired, so I help her take care of her health by taking her to doctor's appointments. I'm starting to teach Noor some stuff about -
Noor: how to be responsible! I graduated high school in 2019. I actually had a trip right after that to Jordan. It was a school trip. I applied to community college, I took my prerequisites for the dental hygiene program, and I was able to get my dental assistant certificate. Right now I am applying to dental hygiene programs so I should have two more years of school and I'll be a dental hygienist. I do help out, I do help! I mainly help out with my brother because we're so connected. I do training at a dental office and that experience has added so much to my confidence. I was kind of nervous in the beginning but now I can keep the conversation going without being scared about it. We went back to Iraq this summer, it was fun. We each had different experiences - Dhelal definitely liked it more.
Dhelal: I went first before the rest of the family. I went in April and stayed for a month and twenty days. I was planning to go just for one month and come back, but then when I was there I was calling Noor saying, “It’s so much fun over here, it’s like the whole family and cousins and there's a lot to do. Do you want to come?”
Noor: She convinced me to go and so I went with my mom and my brother, who is 17. Then when we got there I stayed a little bit longer than her and I was like, oh, I’ve had enough of it. It’s good, it's fun, I like it, but I probably won’t visit again for the next five or seven years. I took the semester off from college and ended up being there for three months.
Dhelal: It’s all different since we left because it's almost like 11 years ago that we were there. A lot of stuff is not even there anymore, places we used to go. The house we used to live in - when I went it was still the same. Everything is exactly the same, but the feeling is different.
Noor: Whenever I went to visit the house we used to live in, that's the only thing that kind of triggered me through the whole trip because it's exactly the same as how we left it. Just like seeing our old furniture, full of dust, it’s sad and it's just empty. You remember so much of sitting and having birthdays there, gathering there, but it's just like quiet. That was the only place that kind of made me tear up.
Dhelal: Our mom went with us, too. For her a different story because of all the stuff she went through with people and during the war - all those memories. Sometimes she was like having the pressure of just wanting to go back to her home (the US) and not wanting to be there. Other times she was enjoying her time with her sisters and brother over there. She stayed in between - she didn't enjoy it 100% and she was depressed sometimes.
Noor: Memories she mentioned that are painful for her are just looking at some streets that make her remember her siblings because both of them already passed away. That triggered some emotions for her. The most fun she had was with her siblings, her sisters, but everything else just wasn't something fun for her.
Dhelal: Our brother was a different story. For him, it was his first time going there because when we left he was like in pre-k, so he doesn’t remember anything. nothing. He enjoyed everything, it was funny.
Noor: He did so many new things that he had never tried before. Like culture-wise and things that people do that we just don't do here, you know? At first, it was a little bit hard for him to blend in, but he actually really liked it. To be honest, whenever Dhelal went, I was so scared for her. I was so nervous. I didn't even sleep for a while at night because of the time difference, so whenever they have morning we have night. Whenever she had the morning I knew she was doing something so I was worried about where she was at and what she was doing. We couldn’t say that we were coming from America just because of everything that is going on over there, and we didn’t know if someone else would say we were from America and then something would happen, so that was kind of a scary thing. Even when we went out, even if we were with family, we tried to stick together because you just never know what could happen. One time she didn't have service and she didn’t text me back and I was worried that she got kidnapped or something. I was so grateful when I came back safety-wise.
Dhelal: Safety-wise though it was okay. It's not 100% safe but it was fine. Now even the people that live there say it's way better than let's say like 2007 or 2009. It was so hard because you couldn’t say that you're coming from the US but at the same time, you don't know a lot of stuff over there. They can tell, you know, that you aren’t living there. Family told me before I went that if anyone asked me to just say I'm coming from Turkey because a lot of people are going there from Turkey and it's somewhere close.
Noor: I got asked about it and I said, “Oh, I used to live in Turkey.” or “I am living in Turkey. I'm just visiting here.” Because you just don’t know who to trust. Since we haven't been there in so long people change and we just don't know what's going on. But in Iraq families are huge, and the gatherings were my favorite part.
Dhelal: It was different for me. When the plane was landing at the airport in Iraq? Oh, God, I can't even say what I was feeling, it was just like everything was mixing together. I was happy, scared, I wanted to cry. I wanted to see what it was like out the window.
Noor: I was excited to go and I love that I had fun but the feeling of coming back - I was happier.
Dhelal: Yeah, when the plane landed in Houston -
Noor: When I saw the flag, I was like, I made it.
Dhelal: Even with a three-hour drive from Houston to Austin I was like, it's okay, I know where I am.
Noor: We've been through so much, now we are at the point - I always tell my mom, she got us here. Now she can relax. Now it's our job to do everything else: work, school, making a better life. Working for that is our job now. I am grateful for what I have right now in America, for what I have, because going back to Iraq I saw what my life would have been if my mom didn't make that decision. It made me realize that's the best thing that my mom could have ever done.
Dhelal: We're here and we're so lucky. Number one we're so lucky we have my mom. She did a lot for us. It’s all my mom.