I left the country today through the treacherous highways of Iraq. In 1990, my mother drove us down this same road as we ran away from Kuwait after it was invaded by Saddam and his subsidiaries. It was the third time my mother was made a refugee - the first was in 1948 with the invasion of Palestine and the creation of the Israeli state; the second was in 1967 with the annexation of the West Bank by Israel; and the third was this, with the invasion of Kuwait by the Iraqis. For me, it was only number two.
When I told my mother I'd be leaving Iraq along the road she can never forget, she sighed with the pain only a mother can ever understand. Fifteen years after her children escaped from its clutches, the road would have another chance at one of them.
The road has taken so many before me. As we drove, the man sitting with me taught me the difference between the aftermath of a roadside bomb, an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) hit and an explosives-laden car. They all looked the same to me: black scorch marks on the road. I tried to imagine what each scorch mark meant; how many deaths each must have represented; how many of them civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. There were hundreds of scorch marks, a story hidden in each.
How needless their deaths must have been. How useless. When I had a quiet moment, my thoughts would always turn to how useless I am as a human being; how absolutely trivial. I expect to change the war about as much as those scorch marks can. But it doesn't bother me that I mean nothing like those in the scorches mean nothing. I'm not upset when the most important people in my life tell me that I will never make a difference: They're right. It's OK if I die some random death while sitting on the shitter. I am insignificant, and so is everything I do.
"Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it." Mahatma Gandhi
tarek : )