Facing The Fear - Kailia's Story

Kailia El-Amin and her family had moved here from Iraq when the house across the street from theirs had been accidentally blown to pieces when a stray bomb fell out of the sky on top of it.

Kailia, her husband and her son had been hiding in their basement at the time. They huddled together under the stairs, as they had often done before. Then suddenly there was a noise like a freight train and a massive wave that ploughed through the house with a light as bright as the sun and everything went white and then black. They didn’t even have time to scream.

When Kailia woke it was to darkness and she couldn’t move. She thought she was dead.

But instead she was buried under the rubble that had been their house. They were alive but trapped. All they could do was wait as their family and friends took 2 whole days to dig her and her husband and son out of the wreckage that was once their house and all their memories.

A week later they moved here.

I met Kalia when I was teaching English. She told me about the fear.

She said the fear wasn’t so obvious in this part of the world but it was there. If it had been obvious, it might have made it easier; but it was subtle. In the subtle looks that people gave her when they passed her on the street. In the subtle way that people moved away or picked up their bags when she got onto the bus or the train. In the subtle way people stopped talking when she walked past them. In the subtle way they smiled too widely like they had a forced friendliness when she was around.

Two weeks after her son Karim started high school he came home with a black eye. Kailia was furious and went to see the principal the next day. He was a middle-aged man with short dark hair, narrow glasses and narrow eyes. Kailia still wasn’t used to talking to men in authority, it made her nervous, which in turn made her talk louder than she meant to.

“My son, Karim, is being bullied,” she said. “At your school. What are you going to do about it?”

The principal looked at her steadily. “How do you know your son was bullied at our school?”

“Look at him.” Karim was sitting next to him and she grabbed her son’s arm to bring him forward. She wanted the principal to have a good look at his black eye as well as some of the other minor cuts and scratches so she pulled her son forward so he could see. The principal reacted, not at the black eye but at the way Kailia had handled her son, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him.

The principal stared at her. She could see a flicker of fear cross his face just for a second before he hid it. She let go of Karim’s arm instantly and gestured at his face. The boy just looked down, embarrassed to be there.

“Where do you think he got those bruises?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. He wasn’t looking at Karim, he was looking at her hands. His face showed that he had an idea where the boy had gotten them from and it wasn’t the school.

“Some boy at the school did this to him,” she said

The principles eyes went to Karim, his voice softening. “Can you tell me who did this?” she asked.

“I don’t know his name,” Karim mumbled.

“Speak up!” said Kailia. She wanted to get to the bottom of this quickly. Whoever did this to her son needed to be punished and if the school didn’t do anything then her husband would get involved, and that would not end well.

“I don’t know his name,” Karim said again louder.

“You know who he is though, yes?” said Kailia, “You could point him out, yes?”

“Mrs. El-Amin,” said the principal. “I think the school is perfectly capable of dealing with this matter if you don’t mind.” He stood up. Suddenly the meeting was over even before it had really begun.

“What are you going to do?” she was getting flustered and suddenly couldn’t remember his name. She nearly said ‘…Istaaz’ meaning Sir, but stopped herself. She didn’t want to defer to him, if she let this slide then there was no guarantee that anything would change

“We will talk to the students, he said, “And if we find the person responsible then they will be punished.” The man went to the door and opened it. Apparently, it was time for her to leave.

Kailia stayed where she was. “How?” she asked, staying her ground “How will they be punished?”

“That’s not really your concern Mrs El-Amin. This is the school’s responsibility and we will deal with it.”

“When you find out, I want to know who did it.” She stood up to be on the same eye level and he reacted, stepping back slightly. Again, she could see a tiny flicker of fear cross his face like a shadow. She wondered why. She wasn’t threatening her, but he kept staring at her, as though he thought she was going to do something. The principal looked at her through his thick glasses. She had the uncomfortable feeling that she was being examined, like she was being compared against some kind of invisible checklist that he had in his head.

Kailia had the same sudden uneasy feeling that she’d had back in Iraq, that somehow, she’d walked into the wrong street and she could hear gunfire up ahead but she couldn’t find her way back out again. That men were coming to get her, to take away her son and separate their family and she had to get him to safety. The office was air conditioned, but she began to sweat. Silently she breathed in the stale recycled air and felt the back of her throat drying up. The English here was different from the English she’d learned in Iraq. She hated talking about these things and found these conversations difficult and uncomfortable.

She started again. “I… I just want to talk to him,” she said. “To, to find out… What he was thinking?” She was justifying herself. Why did she still feel the need to do this?

“I don’t think that’s really school policy,” said the principal. He didn’t blink, he just stared at her. He was watching her, as though he was a sniper on a rooftop, waiting for her to make a wrong move, to move left instead of right, and then the bullet would be fired and they would take her son away and she would lose everything. Even more. Even more than before.

She swallowed. “I suppose I better be going then,” he said. “You can find the person responsible.”

The principal nodded very slightly. His expression didn’t change but very slowly he raised a hand and gestured towards the door.

“Thank you, Mrs. El-Amin,” he said. “We’ll see what we can do.”

Kailia looked down at Karim and then at the principal. She tried to find the right words to say in the context to make sure he understood the depth of her feeling. “The boy who did this,” she said, “He should go to jail.” That probably wouldn’t happen in Iraq but it should happen here. Wasn’t this a better country?

“Thank you, Mrs El-Amin,” said the principal, “We’ll take that under advisement.”

She felt like he’d brushed her off but she couldn’t say anything. He stood firmly by the door until she’d gone out then behind her, she heard him close it with a loud click.

Kailia walked home deep in thought. They could take Karim out of this school and enroll him in another private Muslim school somewhere else, but at the moment they couldn’t afford it. She was working double shifts but it wasn’t enough. And besides she didn’t want his son to run or to fight. They wanted to teach him that things could get better that he had opportunities here. That he had a family and a community that cared about him. Back in Iraq they had always run from trouble. They had dug down and always stayed away from anything that might possibly go bad. Now though it was different. Instead of digging, now they had the possibility of building.

Within a week she took on extra cleaning work, which meant late nights in office blocks scrubbing toilets and vacuuming floors. Her nursing qualifications weren’t recognised in this country so that was the only work she could get. She didn’t care. It wasn’t difficult as much as boring. It took her less than a day to learn how to operate the equipment and less than a week to work out how to clean the entire office complex in half the time. She didn’t mind the work so much but she missed her old job in the hospital. She used to be in charge of thirty staff at a time, now she wasn’t trusted to clean the toilets properly. She’d heard that there was even a shortage of nurses in this country, but she didn’t know if that was true or if someone was just trying to cheer her up. Either way it didn’t matter.

The last time I spoke to Kailia was at the graduation from my English class. She told me they had removed Karim from the school he was at and enrolled him in a muslim school on the other side of town. Here in this place, she said, it was a new country, a new start, a new life. But it didn’t mean that they would stop running. The only difference was now that perhaps instead of running away they could be running towards something new.