"Baba": Daddy [Part Five]

There was one problem on the whole job hunt in Greece; my father could only speak Chaldean!

So he was summoned to the factory.

My father’s first job was at a can factory. Not like canned corn or anything but just a factory to make cans. I guess I never really thought of a factory to make cans only; I mean someone has to make them. I remember my father telling me that it was the loudest place he has ever been. Just imagine, thousands of empty cans clanging together in a huge factory. He told me he can still hear the noise today.

After his job at the can factory, he decided to look for a better job that would at least let him keep his hearing for the rest of his life. So he picked up a job at yet another factory, but this time would be a sliding glass door factory.

Less noise this time but it was not very safe. I remember my dad was always given third shift and worked at the part of the factory floor that caught the sliding doors as they would come off the belt. This didn’t seem like an exciting job to me at all. However, the way my father told the stories of his shift shenanigans it seemed like the ideal job.

Maybe it seemed ideal because of the one man who shared his shift all the time. This man’s name was Mike and he was also an immigrant from Iraq. Mike was from a village near Bagdad so in a way my father and mike were from two different worlds. But in other ways they felt at home when they would be working. My father learned that Mike was also on his way to America and had been on the American Red Cross waiting list for almost a year.

They became the best of friends during their factory days and only God knew where their friendship would lead them.

"Baba": Daddy [Part Four]

When my father and his brother finally got everything situated they were off. They began by buying a round trip plane ticket to Turkey. Turkey was a safer and a more convenient country to get to America.

There they met up with a man that knew someone who knew someone from their village. Now this part got a bit fuzzy when my father told me the story, but he help my father and his brother get into Greece.

Greece was beautiful my dad said. This was the waiting ground between them and America.

In Greece there were at lot of other Chaldean immigrants waiting for their green card to be able to come to America. He said you could just smell the freedom.

To get on the American Red Cross waiting list to be eligible for a green card, you had to be interviewed. So my father and Peter walked in and were both interviewed separately on their life story; why they wanted to go to America, why they left Iraq and so on and so forth.

The average waiting list time was said to be five years. That’s five years! In the meantime, my father and his brother decided to get a job and try to make money.

"Baba": Daddy [Part Three]

After my father was discharged, he knew that’s when he had to leave the country. Since one of his brothers (who was a little older than my father) was enrolled in college, he was not drafted. That night my father and his older brother, Peter, decided that they were going to start their journey to America.

It wasn’t as easy as just buying a plane ticket to New York. It was much more difficult. Since Saddam Hussein was in power, he did not want people leaving his country for good. To even get out of the country, you had to prove to Saddam and his people that you would come back. That meant not taking a significant amount of money or belongings as well as purchasing a round trip plane ticket.

This is how they kept the Iraqi people coming back, because without money it’s that much harder.

Coming to America was a big step for my father and his brother. Not only were they poor but they were the first ones from their family to journey out here. That means that if they did get here that they would have to start from the ground up.

"Baba": Daddy [Part Two]

I couldn’t believe that my dad was training to be on the front line. Why? Mostly because he clearly could have died and that I never thought my dad could even do that.

 I was thinking to myself during his story time, as impatience as I am, Well how did you get here?!

This was the kick off to it all. If my dad could be awarded anything it would probably be “The Luckiest Man Award”.

During his time in the army, he came home for a couple days to see his family. During this time an old man (who was looked up to as the wise man of the village) told my dad with such urgency and happiness that there was a way out of the army.

Now let me tell you this, no one, I mean no one, could ever get out of this army. He was clearly drafted and was putting in his time. There were men in there that had been serving for over five years and had yet to find a loop hole in the system.  

But for my dad there was a loop hole.

Because my father’s village was so far north in Iraq it was legally considered too close to be drafted. So there was a way out but he had a lot to do in such a short time.

Go to the village “lawyer”. Get the proper paper work. Take a taxi into the city. Sleep on the roof of a hotel. Wait until the he place opened where he could check get his paper worked check out. Wake up on time (without an alarm clock!). Get himself checked off. Then take a taxi back, all this just in time before he was sent back to base to get the official ay okay.

My father had it, The Golden Ticket, the ticket that everyone wanted.

Just like that, after not even a full year, my father was discharged.

Did I tell you my father was lucky? Make that blessed.

“Baba”: Daddy [Part One]

This is a story that I would like to take up a couple posts on.

This story is about my hero, my father.  My father never told me his journey about how/ why he came to America. He never told me, until two weeks before I left for my freshman year of college.

Why he picked this time to tell me? I don’t know. But he did and I am glad.

My father and I always get in deep conversations when he comes home from work that will go on for hours and hours into the night. We would talk about politics, religion, the current world, anything and everything in-between.

This night was special. This is the night that I started to look at my father in a different light, where he just wasn’t my dad, but my hero.

He started at the very beginning where he was just a boy, not more than 17. He was small and frail and wasn’t in college (not most northern village boys attended college). But he was considered for the Iraqi army and was drafted not much after his birthday.

He told me that for months they would just  dig holes in what seemed like 1,000 degree weather and there only source of water would be from there snack break; watermelon.

He also told me he was training to be one the brave men on the front line…this right fact shocked me.

“Leethan dooktha”: Country-less

Because Chaldeans are so few and so old, not many people have heard of us. It is hard enough to go day by day to having people ask my sister and I if we’re twins (even though we’re over two years apart) but it is even harder when people ask me what nationality I am.

I always get the question, “Are you Hispanic?” or I get an “HHHhHHHHHHola!” once in a while.

But when I say that I am not Hispanic, I get the look of well what are you then?

It’s really hard to explain the Chaldean culture in those short few seconds a stranger would think it would take to explain it.

Chaldeans are country-less because back in B.C. the Persians conquered the Chaldeans and that is why Chaldean’s old country is known as Iraq today.  

What I mean by that is, that it’s not as easy as saying “Oh, I’m Lebanese for Lebanon.” Or “I’m Australian.”

It’s way more difficult. Mostly because I do not consider myself Iraqi, so I don’t really say that I am Chaldean from Iraq. This is something struggle that I tend to go through daily (especially if I am around new people) and it gets old real fast. . I really have the urge to just yell “WHY DON’T YOU LOOK IT UP!” This is something that I am trying to perfect, where I could explain who I am in less than ten seconds and try not to be rude at the same time.