Travel stories 1
Saturday, April 22, 2006
I just arrived in Ottawa tonight...Long trip, interesting encounters, short day...
In the plane over, the flight attendant noticed me reading about Opus Dei, which she called "Opus Die" .She asked me if I had read the book. I said I hadn't. So she startes talking about how excited she was to see the film because Audrey Tautou was in it. She only needed to mention Audrey's name to get my instant attention. I asked her if she had seen "Amelie" yet...She said that was her favourite movie of all times, which immediately got us to "friends" status in the conversation. We started talking about how the film has a positive aura to it.
Margaret [that was her name], started telling me about the first time she saw the film. She was in London, for an overseas flight. She had a morning to do nothing, so she rented the film from the hotel's pay-per-view service...She left the hotel with an amazing feeling that starting on that day, she would be a happy Margaret. Though I find giving films such an important role a bit corny, I could easily agree with her. "Amélie" has the power to instantly put one in a positive mood...And so Margaret told me the amazing story of finding out she had a sister whom she hadn't known she had had until two years ago. Margaret, a 54-year old woman who otherwise seemed a stern lady who likes cleanliness and hygiene, told me the story of the emotional reunion with her sister who was adopted at a young age and has lived in England most of her life. I could see how excited she seemed, talking about the sister who she says looked like her twin. I suppose that would be a compliment, seeing as Margaret is two years older.
So, Margaret and I had a chat in the back of the plane, talking about life and though I am not very extroverted when it comes to telling stories from my life, I was fine telling her about my childhood and life. I suppose telling a flight attendant whom you've never seen before and probably never will is a safe way of going through some therapeutic storytelling. Margaret treated me to a half-liter container of milk and half a dozen chocolate chip cookies while we talked about The Da Vinci Code, a flight attendant's career and the headaches flying thousands of feet up sometimes generates. It was a nice change from the faces you see in those uniforms sometimes. Air Canada does not have the best customer service, EXCEPT when women like Margaret work for them :)
On my way from the Ottawa airport to the bed and breakfast where I was staying, I heard Sharif's story. A principal of a high school in Baghdad during Saddam Hussein's regime, he was subjected to torture and severe beatings by the authorities when he refused to belong to a political party. One day, after the Friday prayers, the authorities came to the mosque where he prayed. They told him they had informed his family that he would be "busy" that summer afternoon. They hadn't. The only thing he remembers from those beatings that left him unconscious numerous times is "We pay you and you will not support us! You disgrace!" He was kept in a 6 by 8-foot cell for more than a month, his family unaware of what had happened to him.
After being freed, Sharif applied for a travel and exit visa to go to Morocco to teach. As a graduate of the Faculty of Islamic Studies of the Baghdad University, Sharif applied to teach Islamic way of life at a Moroccan madrassa, a religious school. After he was granted the visa and began teaching, he did his utmost best to find a way out of Morocco before his work visa expired. With the help of a friend, Sharif arrived in Algeria and from there sought asylum at the Canadian Embassy.
He arrived in Ottawa in the winter of 1987. He said what the embassy officials had forgotten to tell him was that the Canadian winters were cold...I could sympathize with him on that one. He quickly integrated into the Canadian way of life and a few years after his arrival, began teaching at the Islamic School in Ottawa. That stopped in the mid-1990s, when the school's funding diverted from a number of donors to primarily the Emirates. For the new funders, Sharif's preachings were too lax, too different from the wahabi-esque school of thought in Islam. So, desperate for a new job, Sharif began work as a taxi driver. In the car, I see books under his seat, prayer beads by his mirror and in the mirror, a man who has lost hope of someday, doing what he is most passionate about: teaching.
As we approach the end of my bed and breakfast, I ask Sharif if he could tell me what the problem in Iraq is...He looks at me in the mirror, and though I know he will tell me it is a complex situation, I have no idea beyond that what he is about to say. He tells me that when he sought asylum to the United States, the embassy refused him, saying Iraq was a safe country and one that was a partner of the United States. "Today, the reason why the United States is in Iraq is because Iraq used the power granted by this "partnership" to bully neighbouring countries in a way taught and tolerated by the American political system." So I ask, will thousands of American and British soldiers continue to die, despite wanting to create a different Iraq, a "free" Iraq [a loose term at that]. He tells me how the United States is trying to impose a way of governance in Iraq. He tells me how his mother was Sunni and his father a Shi'a and how they never had problems in the community until the United States began making the whole problem a "religion-based issue". He said THAT was absolute nonsense...I had no comment and still don't, seeing as I haven't seen the levels of division between the two peoples firsthand. I feel for so many, but my sympathy has no effect on the improvement of life for the soldiers who serve there, many of them barely 18 years old; I feel for Iraq the most because I can only imagine the life that the young generations are going through today...They will have stories to share with their grandchildren, hopefully at a better time.
The B&B where I stay is an a live-in museum of sorts. Everywhere you turn, there is something that is hundreds of years old...Mind you, not things I'd like to have, like portraits of captains and soldiers, the nobility, old tools, the use of which is now unknown by the owner.
