The day that started it all

Time: November '06, Place: Baghdad, Iraq....

It is the first week in my third year in college I've just switched majors and I'm incredibly excited about it, new place, new teachers and great friends and family, mom has just started feeling better after long painful nights suffering from the excruciating pain of herpes zoster and to top it all I've just lost 10 kilos it sounds like life couldn't be better right! but the truth is everything around me was falling apart, life as we knew it was long gone and everything around me was different and as hard as we all tried to just act as if everything around us was fine we couldn't since it's realy hard to avoid the sound of bullets passing over your head or your car!! and all the dead people on the streets, the bombs, the killing, the kidnaping oh my god whats hepenning to my life? did I dtep into a westside story-type movie by accident??? all we're missing is the horses and the cowboy hats and there you go a live show, but the only difrence was that Steven Spielberg was not behind the camera to master a production like this it was real life, real people and real distruction.

A roumur started that morning saying that the minister of higher education was on TV last night and stated that schools and universities will close this year due to the bad situation in Baghdad, it was chaotic everyone was talking about it people were crying, the one thing we all were certain about regrding the mysterious future we were facing was our education and this is being taken away from us, I was furious I felt like I had no control what so ever on my life and that my life and everybody's was controlled by complete strangers who couldn't care less about anyone of us...

The day ended and we all agreed on taking the rest of the week off just to see what will happen and if nothing bad (reletivly) happens we'll be back on sunday, screw the system and the government and who ever it is that tries to mess with our lives, i kept telling my self that its only acouple of days and I'll go back to classes and this will all be history and one day we'll look back and laugh on how naive we were, but the truth is this little voice inside my head kept telling me that things will changs and life as I knew it will, once again, change but this time it will be dramatic and as hard as I tried to keep that voice down I just couldn't. I went back home and found mom packing!!" honey we're leaving if we don't Layth (my brother) will be killed by tomorrow morning".....I'm leaving my life heading to Erbil the city I hated everything about, I started packing quickly and I could almost hear that little voice inside of me saying I told you so!!!