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.