Five Years In The Making

Sixty three months after I last saw him, Muttaz Ibraham and I finally met again at Newark, New Jersey's Penn Station this morning. Emotional moment to say the least. Muttaz worked for me in Baghdad five years ago and we developed a strong friendship. He and his family were granted asylum in the United States last November.

Instrumental in helping get him here is his best friend Mansour, who made it here 3 years ago. The both of them were on the staff of Knight Ridder's Baghdad bureau after the war started. Mansour runs a salvage yard and auto export business now. Wonder whatever happened to that car you crashed and totalled? Guys like Mansour buy them from insurance companies, fix them up and export them to Iraq.

Times are tough for Muttaz's family. They moved here in the middle of horrible economic times. Muttaz still has not been able to find work. Despite this, they insist on being wonderful hosts, and his wife is the hostess with the mostess.

Don't even ask me to tell you the name of this Iraq dish. Looks like chicken fried rice and has a lot of the same ingredients, but it uses spices that make it much more unique than any rice dish I'd ever had prior. When I arrived at the apartment today, this dish was being prepared and the smell of it cooking took my mind right back to Iraq in an instant.

During dinner, the two told me a lot of stories about what they endured after I left Baghdad in the fall of '03. You can probably imagine: Lots of death and suffereing. They're both lucky they're alive today.

Yousif was three months old when I was working in Iraq. Now he's five, and his english is getting pretty good.

Muttaz's daughter was born while they were living as refugees in Syria two and half years ago. She's the first two year old I've ever met who is not one single bit ticklish.

Lots of culture shock for this family, as you can well imagine.

Nothing today touched my heart more than this moment. Not even the reunion in the train station. When I imagined Muttaz coming to America, it was a scene like this that I always imagined.

This family have had their lives wrecked over the last five years. For years they had no place to call home. Their suffering is far from over. If Muttaz can't make a go of it in this country, they may have to return to Iraq.

But when I watched him walking his son across the street while picking him up from kindergarten, I could tell that they're on their way. He told me tonight that all of this, all of the homesickness, all of the worry... the suffereing, it's for the kids. He never wants them to have to go through what he did.

He was a damn good employee to me. But he's also a damned good dad.