Ahmad Al Halabi Storey - Chapter Two

Chapter Two: An Immigrant’s Tale

      Sitting a court room surrounded by uniformed airmen, I was about to stand front of military judge Col Barbara Brand and recite my plea in a statement. “All Rise” The unnamed voice called, and there I stood, proud to be in the blue uniform, confident I started:

You can’t just move to the United States, it takes a lot of preparation and perseverance to achieve such goal.  I remember someone describing the States as the afternoon sun – so close, yet so far.  Meanwhile, in Michigan, my father was paving the way to let me have my chance at the American Dream.  And in 1994, he petitioned for all of us to come the United States.  Two years later, I got word to visit the U.S. Embassy in Damascus and get the process started to immigrate.  I felt like the luckiest person in the world.

The people at the Embassy gave me a list of documents I had to complete.  This was the start of what would be a year-long paperwork battle.

Around my sixteenth birthday, I received the one thing I had been waiting for – a stamp from the U.S. Embassy giving me permission to travel to the United States.

They gave me an envelope to take with me on the trip. I was told to hold on to it tightly, and then hand it over to the boarder agent when I arrive there.  It was like a traffic light turning green; I was being handed the kind of freedom I only saw in Hollywood movies. When you come from a place like Syria, it is hard to imagine people actually having the right to say what they want, to criticize their government without being put in jail, having real freedom and real rights.  You only have all these rights when you live in the United States.  I wanted to have those rights for myself, too.  

Overview of Damascus, Syria from Qasioun Mount

Getting to America was an experience all by itself.  February 25th of 1996 was one of the happiest days of my life.  It was also one of the scariest.  I had never flown on an airplane before, and there I was saying my good byes at Damascus airport; sixteen years old, didn’t speak a word of English, had no guide, and no idea where I was supposed to find my plane.  I almost missed the flight … partially because I was staring out the windows, mesmerized by the giant white wings on the jets.

Suddenly, I heard my name called out over the airport intercom system, and I found a guard who could show me where the KLM gate was and where I needed to go. 20 hours later we landed in Detroit, Michigan, I just followed the crowd until I saw an immigration officer in uniform.

He was trying to tell me that he needed my envelope, but I couldn’t understand a word he was saying.  He was reaching for the envelope, but I wasn’t about to give it up; it was the most important thing to me.  It was my ticket to freedom.  Fortunately, a kind person who spoke Arabic came up to me and explained what was going on.

After I made it through customs, I saw my father and ran to him.  We just hugged and hugged under the dark clouds of a Detroit winter.  It was cold, there was snow everywhere, but not the white snow I know and see on television, it was dirty partly because of car exhausts and mud, I was exhausted from the flight, and needed to rest.

Within 48 hours of touching down in Michigan, I was standing next to my father in the restaurant he worked at with an apron on chopping vegetables and seasoning meat.  Jet lag was never a problem, I was inline with the time zone in couple of days.

My father and I lived in Lansing, Michigan, in a house with three roommates to save money.  There was a small Arabic community, which made for an easy transition.  Everyone spoke Arabic, so I didn’t have to know a lot of English to get by.  There was always someone around who spoke enough English to help out if I got in a jam.

The restaurant I worked in was surrounded by the huge Michigan State University campus, and about half of our customers were college students.

Love was in the air.  “Love of knowledge” that is.  It seemed like everyone was a student where I worked – the waiters, the customers, and even the restaurant’s owners.

My father kept telling me I needed to take advantage of all the opportunities for a good education, and I knew he was right.  The first obstacle, of course, was that I needed to learn English before I could do anything more than work in a kitchen.

It got very frustrating and embarrassing at times when people would ask me questions, and all I could say back was “me no English” and then smile.  They would smile back, but I could never tell whether they smiled with me, or if they were laughing at me.

I found a local church that had a program teaching English, and I quickly enrolled in to what would be my first step to learning the English language.

In Michigan, I saw people from all different nationalities and backgrounds who had been in the States for decades but couldn’t speak hardly any English.  It seemed to me that if you are going to live in this country and take advantage of the opportunities my father was talking about, you should at least learn the language.  Because of this, I made a promise to myself to further my education, and strive to be the best I could be.

My father and I survived on little at first.  We would take leftovers from the restaurant and the bakery next door.  My fatehr and I worked relentlessly in Lansing, we decided to move to Dearborn about ninety miles east … where there is a bigger Middle Eastern community, and my father had many friends, so we did move and worked at another restaurant. 

Soon after we arrived in Dearborn, I decided to start school.  So I enrolled at Fordson High School, starting the ninth grade in 1996 when I was seventeen.  Within three years, I graduated with a 3.3 GPA at the age of twenty.  It was January of 1999.

I enrolled in Henry Ford Community College for few months while still working full-time in the restaurant to pay for my increasing expenses.  I saved whatever I had left over to send back to my mother and siblings back home.

The idea of earning enough money to pay my expenses, and also help my family was completely different from life in Syria, but at the same time, I knew I could do more with myself than cooking for a career.  I envisioned a bigger goal, one that would make me proud and respected.

After awhile, I started receiving fliers in the mail about joining the Air Force, so I visited the local Air Force recruiter.  In his office, he had a massive poster with an F-16 on it, and giant words that said “Aim High.”  Right away, I wanted to be part of that.  By the time he explained to me I’d have a great career and be able to get a degree, I was sold.

Ahmad Al Halabi's Tales

Chapter One: Meager Origins

      My father Ibrahim use al always say: there are two important things in life; knowledge and fitness. He was born on January 7, 1931, in Beirut, Lebanon, to his Syrian father, which meant that under Syrian law, Ibrahim was automatically assigned his father’s Syrian citizenship, regardless of the fact he was born in Lebanon and that his mother was Lebanese.

    

Ibrahinm Al halabi at age 85

His mother died after he turned five years old, and when his father remarried many times throughout his life. As a family, they moved to Damascus, Syria.  My father’s childhood was split between Syria and Lebanon, as his father and step-mother moved back and forth between the two countries until Ibrahim met my mother Wafica Al Zayat, the woman he would marry in 1959.  He said he met her 10 years earlier when she was only 8 years old with nothing on her mind but to play. When he saw her 10 years later, she was all grown up and beautiful. Ironically she was engaged to some unlikable guy, and coincidently Wafica was ready for the break up, and she did. My dad was in the picture at the right time. Ibrahim proposed, and the wedding took place only 7 days later. The couple lived in Lebanon, with Wafica giving birth to five girls and three boys. Three girls and one boy were born in Lebanon, but mom would travel to Syria for the birth of the others.

      My family loved Lebanon not only because of its picturesque Mediterranean beaches and the mountains which offered refuge from the sweltering summer humidity, but also because of the job opportunities – something Syria had a real deficit of.  Ibrahim worked two and sometimes three jobs as a chef in order to send his children to school.  Although he dreamed of obtaining a Lebanese citizenship so that his children could have the citizenship, too, he could never afford the exorbitant fee.

      The family lived in a middle class neighborhood near the Arab university in Beirut.  The Lebanese civil war erupted in the early 1970s, and Lebanon was divided up into enclaves based upon religion with intense fighting between the Christians and the Muslims.  The neighborhood he lived in became increasingly dangerous, and in 1974, a cab driver neighbor was beheaded.  His car was driven back to the neighborhood and left on the street with the driver’s head  displayed inside as a warning.

      Fearful for his family’s safety, Ibrahim, Wafica and their eight children fled in the family’s 1952 Mercedes Benz, leaving all their furniture and belongings behind. They even forgot to take important documentations and their identifications. Reaching to Syria’s boarder, my dad pleaded with the officers to let them in, and after five hours wait, they were let in. Dad went to the authorities and obtained identifications for everyone.

      Life in Syria was much harder than in Lebanon.  Jobs were scarce, and the pay was abysmal.  The family lived at his step-mother’s house until Ibrahim could build a two-bedroom house on a fifty square-meter plot of land in the Damascus suburb of Dummar for the ten of them to move into.  The Syrian government waived the import tax on the car – which was three times the value of the car – for a year while Ibrahim used it as a taxi.  At the end of the year, he had to return the car to Lebanon and sell it there because he wasn’t able to earn enough to pay the tax on it.

      After five years, Wafica gave birth to her fourth son, me, in Jan 1979.

      The Syrian economy was stagnant, and Ibrahim’s meager wages were barely enough to keep his family fed.  He’d get paid on the first of each month, but it got to the point that the family would be broke by the 20th.  He was taking loans from his employers to make it to the end of each month.  Ibrahim knew that he wouldn’t be able to support his family by borrowing money for much longer, and he set off to find a better way.

      Ibrahim had a cousin in Germany who had opened a restaurant, and the cousin offered him a position working there.  Ibrahim went for the four months his visa allowed, but was forced to return to Syria when the Germans refused to extend his visa.  He traveled to Saudi Arabia, where he worked as a chef for seven months.  He also looked for work in Paris, Palestine and Libya, but couldn’t find anything but temporary jobs. 

      Ibrahim had heard about the opportunities in the United States, and after saving for almost three years, he was able to afford a plane ticket here in 1988.  He flew in to New York with a tourist visa and stayed for a couple of weeks until he heard about the large Arab community in Dearborn, Michigan.

After about three weeks of looking, he landed a job as a chef earning $200 a week.  He obtained a green card, and was able to stay indefinitely in the U.S. as a result.  Finally, in 1993, he obtained his U.S. citizenship.

      He had been calling for his sons and daughters to move to the United States.  He knew they had no future in Syria, but that in the States, they could get a real education and make a decent living, as long as they put forth the effort.  

“He told us that in the U.S. they had more money, more freedom, more education, more everything,” said My brother, Abdulkarim.  “You can say whatever you want here.”

      By this time, however, most of his children had married, had children of their own and were unwilling to uproot their families without any guarantee they would be granted citizenship in the States.  I, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to leave Syria.

      Moving to the United States was what every young Syrian male my age dreamed of.  They imagined a “dreamland” from what they saw in the Arabic-subtitled American television shows and movies they would watch when they could find a neighbor with a television or save up enough to buy a movie ticket.

      My older sister, Amina, was the first to move to the United States in 1992 after she was married to Nazeir, a printing supervisor working in Anaheim, California.  

Ahmad Al Halabi (USA)

It was February 26, 1996, and I (Ahmad Al Halabi)  had recently turned 16 years old a month earlier, and my big day was fast approaching; Travel day. It was my first time traveling alone; after I completed check-in procedures and went up the escalator at Damascus International Airport, I thought my plane was the only one there waiting for me. I was taken by all the people and duty free, I almost missed my plane!  

My brother, Abdulkarim, came next with his wife and daughter after completing his mandatory service in the Syrian Army.  I was 16 when he left Syria, so I was able to avoid the mandatory service, however, I was at risk for immediate conscription if I ever returned to Syria, as the Syrian military enforces the mandatory service, regardless of the age of the conscript.  Amina became a U.S. citizen in May of 2000, and Abdulkarim and his wife earned their citizenship in November of 2002.

      Even though they had to renounce their Syrian citizenship to become United States’ citizens, the Syrian government takes the view that once a person is a Syrian citizen, he or she is forever a Syrian citizen, and would have to serve a mandatory two-and half year military service.  As a result, any expatriate male who has not served in the military and who wants to visit Syria must obtain a deferment of that service and special permission to visit, lest they be immediately drafted into the service upon entering the country.

End of Chapter One

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