A Lesson in LIfe

This is a revised version of a column that originally appeared Sunday, June 7, 2009

I remember seeing him in the surf at Cape Henlopen in Delaware, on what I imagined was his first visit to the beach. He kept his t-shirt on when he went in the water, even though it was not particularly cold. It seemed clear that he was enjoying himself -- a big smile played on his face -- but he also struck me as timid and careful, never ducking under the waves, always turning away from them, afraid of their spray.

He was shy and said little, the way teenagers will when surrounded by adults they do not know well. The language barrier between us perhaps made him even more bashful. He was friendly, the other way from teenage surliness, but hard to get a handle on.

How could I have known that just months before, this quiet young man had made one of the bravest, most courageous decisions that a person could make; that he had willingly put his safety in jeopardy, his life in peril, so that he could attend school? That he knew every day that gunmen were looking for him, or someone like him, to shoot in order to make an example? To put it plainly, how could I know that he had risked death, simply to have a chance to learn?

This winter, he asked me to help him proofread the essay that he would be sending to colleges that he was applying to, here in his adopted country. (I do these freelance editing tasks willingly as favors, since it is almost all I am capable of doing. Please do not ask me to help change the oil in your car; I am still paying for the seized engine from the last go-round.) The essay came to me as an e-mail, and this is what I read first when I opened it:

“As I sit here in my room in my second home, in the United States, I can still see their faces, their dirty clothes, and their guns.”

In striking detail, he recalled the day in June 2007 when he sat in his classroom at the Gifted Students School in his native Baghdad and a teacher came in to announce simply that: “They are here. Al-Qaeda.”

For months before he had walked to school in his neighborhood and seen the dead bodies piling up. “People got shot for being Shia, like me, in a Sunni neighborhood,” he wrote. “I saw something like that almost every day; it was very dangerous every day.” Now, the gunmen from Al-Qaeda were in the school office, asking if there were any Shia students in class. The teachers and staff tried to convince them there was not, that this school was Sunni. One and all were aware what would happen: if the children were found out: Any Shia student would be taken away and shot. No questions, no doubt. And so he sat and felt his teenage heart beat in his chest and thought, I suppose, of the few years he had spent on Earth. And, remembering later that cold grip on his soul, he wrote this:

“At that time, I felt that I was few minutes away from death, getting closer every second. I was scared, but not because I thought that I was going to die. I was scared because I was thinking about what might happen to my family when they heard that I got killed. My dad always told me, ‘Don’t go to school, your life is more important than your education,” but I never listened and I always argued with him because I believe that my education was important enough to take the risky chance.”

The gunmen entered the room, looked around, and went away. They stole some cars, but left everyone alive. “Those seconds felt like years, they were the longest seconds in my life,” he wrote. “I felt that everything was happening in slow motion. I can still see them, right there by the classroom door, looking at us.”

And the next day, he went back to school. And the next, and the next, never telling his family what had happened, because if they knew it would mean the end of his schooling. What parent, after all, would put a child in a situation where the alternatives are hoping to complete exams or staying alive? But he said he earned an important lesson as he walked into his school the day after the men with their guns had left. In his essay, he wrote:

“Education is an important factor for success in everyone’s life. And just like many kids, I took it for granted. But now I know how important it is and how valuable it is. There are things in life where we don’t understand their value until we either lose them or get close to losing them, and education is one of them.”

He graduated from Westtown School on Saturday. That day, I saw a photo of him with his classmates taken at the beach this spring. He is bare-chested and bold, playing beach volleyball in the sun like a Californian, with a smile as big as ever.

Congratulations, Ammar Al-Rubaiay. You are my hero. Good luck in college.