From land of war to land of wonders

June 22, 2008, 7:10AM
From land of war to land of wonders
Car-bomb victim one of 165 refugees from Iraq resettled in the Houston area

By LINDSAY WISE
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

STARTING OVER

According to the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, 4.7 million Iraqis have been driven from their homes. Although more than half are still in Iraq, about 2 million have fled to neighboring countries, primarily Syria and Jordan.

Five resettlement agencies in the Houston area have agreements with the U.S. government to help refugees start their new lives in America. Here's what an average refugee can expect:

• An apartment with basic furniture, housewares and food. Refugees usually get three months of rental assistance and cash support.

• Eight months of Medicaid.

• Help applying for government documents and identification like Social Security cards and driver's licenses.

• Help enrolling in English classes and with enrolling children in schools.

• Help orienting the refugee to the community, from the importance of paying bills, to cultural norms, to the location of the grocery store.

• Help finding a job.

Source: Aaron Tate, director of Refugee Services, Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston


Editor's note: First in an occasional series on how Iraqi refugees are settling into the Houston area.

Ameera Shahmani never heard the car bomb explode. One minute she was laughing with a friend as they walked through the rush-hour bustle of a Baghdad bus station, the next an ear-ringing silence engulfed her, smothering her senses in smoke and heat.

"It's Judgment Day," she thought. "I'm dead."

She woke up in a hospital bed, her whole body numb.

"What happened to me?" she thought, panic welling inside her. Then she started to shake.

A nurse told Shahmani she'd been unconscious for a week. Her friend was dead, along with a suicide bomber and a dozen other people.

Shahmani had suffered third-degree burns from her chin to her knees. Her arms and hands were so damaged that she could see tendons and bones beneath remnants of her charred flesh.

Four years and 10 surgeries later, Shahmani is now in Houston to see whether specialists here can help her regain the use of her scar-warped fingers as she prepares to build a new life in America.

She is one of 12,000 Iraqi refugees expected to be resettled in the U.S. by October, with about 165 already in the Houston area as of this month.

"This is the last hope for me," she said.

But for Shahmani, a 30-year-old divorced single mother, the opportunity her new country offers is both exhilarating and heart-rending: In seeking treatment abroad, she was forced to leave behind her 11-year-old son, Hassan, who is staying with relatives in Iraq until she can secure him a visa.


Learning to maneuver in Houston

On a stifling hot afternoon earlier this month, Shahmani giggled nervously as she steered a minivan at a snail's pace along a quiet residential street in southwest Houston.

"Slowly, slowly put on the brakes," cautioned the minivan's owner, Irma Hasnain, from the passenger seat. Hasnain, 43, is a Houston school district employee who rents Shahmani a spare bedroom in her house a few blocks away.

"Why?" grinned Shahmani.

"Why? Always why. Because I'm your teacher and you listen to your instructor," Hasnain replied.

As the two women bantered, an older couple on bicycles whipped past, craning their necks to stare back at the laughing driver in a black headscarf who was inching down the road.

"Maybe they think I am a terrorist," Shahmani quipped.

The joke wasn't so off base. About 15 minutes later, a patrol car pulled the minivan over. Neighbors had reported a suspicious vehicle in the area. After checking the women's IDs, however, the officer let them go.

To Shahmani, the whole scene was hilarious. Compared to the ever-present dangers of driving in Iraq, negotiating Houston's roads is a harmless adventure. She rolls the windows down and doesn't even mind the heat, which she swears is nothing compared to the inferno of Baghdad in the summer.

The only thing that reminds her of her hometown is the potholes and cracks in the roads, "like from the bombs."


Joy turned to despair
Shahmani brings the same girlish enthusiasm that characterizes her driving lessons to all her new experiences in Houston, whether she's sampling Mexican food for the first time, or stepping on a treadmill at the local YMCA.

But every new discovery — from the guilty pleasure of eating ice cubes from the freezer to the wide-eyed wonder of strolling the Galleria's endless maze of shops — tugs her thoughts back to Iraq and her family.

"They don't see any good days," she said, her eyes darkening. "There's no electricity and nothing there. They just sit, don't do anything. You can't have normal life."

When American tanks rolled triumphantly into Baghdad in 2003, Shahmani and her relatives rejoiced. As Shiite Muslims, they had been persecuted under the rule of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim who led the nationalist Baath party. Five of Shahmani's cousins had "disappeared" when Saddam crushed the Shiite uprising in Najaf at the end of the first Gulf War. An older brother barely escaped with his life.

Now her family thought the dictator's fall meant never having to live in fear again.

"We were so happy, really," Shahmani said. "But we would never imagine what would happen after one year. It was so different. Everything changed. Even the Iraqis changed. It is not like before. There is no trust between them, even in the same family. And the politics are everywhere."

Even as the violence escalated, Shahmani and her relatives committed to serve their country. One of her brothers joined the reconstituted Iraqi Army, and Shahmani signed up to work as a security guard, searching women for explosives and weapons at checkpoints across the capital.

"They pay good," she said. "And I felt I want to do something."

Her new job was dangerous, but her commute was even more so. Twice Shahmani narrowly escaped bombings during her trips to and from work. The third time, she didn't.

At the hospital, a doctor recommended amputating her badly burned arms. Otherwise she probably would die from infection, he told her family.

"Leave her to die, then," Shahmani remembers her mother saying in despair. "How will she live without her hands?"

Another doctor, touched by the sight of her young son's daily visits to her bedside, offered to do his best to save her arms. The doctor warned her that the method of cleaning and cutting the dead flesh and poisoned blood from her limbs would be excruciatingly painful.

The treatment worked, and for nine months, Shahmani recovered at home, hardly able to move in her pain as she fought off infections. Slowly, with her family's help, she relearned how to feed and dress herself, but more complex tasks, such as cooking her son's favorite okra-and-tomato stew, seemed impossible.


Fears for her family
Refusing to give up, Shahmani boarded the city's buses again, making her way to doctors' offices in search of someone to fix her hands. She underwent two skin grafts and three surgeries, but her fingers just stiffened and twisted as she healed.

One day, a man from the French humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders noticed Shahmani haunting the hallways of a hospital. He offered to help. Before she knew it, she had a visa to Jordan, where the man told her she could get better treatment.

Thinking she'd only be gone a week or so, Shahmani took only a few changes of clothes and left Iraq for the first time in her life on May 7, 2007.

She ended up staying in Jordan for nearly a year.

After five more surgeries and physical therapy, however, Shahmani still had little or no movement in her fingers. She couldn't bring herself to return to Iraq defeated, and worried that her acceptance of Western-sponsored aid could endanger her and her family if it became widely known.

Shahmani saw only one option left. Even in Iraq, she had heard of the famous Shriners hospitals for burn victims. If American specialists couldn't help her, no one could, she decided, and at least she'd be safe there. She applied for U.N. refugee status and wrote down "United States" as her country of preference.

Nearly three months after her arrival in America on April 1, Shahmani still keeps the clock in her room set to Baghdad time.

Late at night in Houston, as the sun rises in her homeland, she imagines her son waking up, eating breakfast and heading off to school. As she tosses in her bed in the early morning hours, she prays he has returned home safe again.

Until Hassan and the rest of her loved ones are with her in America, she says, part of her will always be in Iraq.

"I'm just waiting," she explains. "I count days and hours and moments."

In August, her son will turn 12, his second birthday without his mother. Officials tell her it will take at least two years to bring her son and two younger brothers to America. Longer for the rest of her relatives, if at all.

For now, mother and son make do with weekly phone calls.

"How are your hands?" Hassan always asks her. "Are you better?"

Shahmani on Friday met with Dr. David Herndon and other doctors for an evaluation at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Dr. Herndon is a professor of surgery at UTMB and the chief of staff at Shriners Hospital for Children across the street.


Doubt and loneliness
Shahmani finally got some good news. The doctors scheduled surgeries for her hands for July 16 and in October with the goal of regaining as much hand motion as possible.

But because she's still far from being fully healed, Shahmani soothes her son with a fiction.

"I tell him, 'Much, much better,' " she said. "Because I don't want to tell him I'm the same. He will say, 'Then why did you leave me?' "

To keep her mind off her doubt and loneliness, Shahmani spends her days reading books of Arabic poetry and American history. On Fridays she attends prayers with Hasnain at a nearby mosque. Recently, she applied to study for her GED at Houston Community College.

Most evenings, she walks the sidewalks of her southwest Houston neighborhood, admiring the tidy ranch-style houses and grassy yards. But her American dream is simpler than a two-car garage and picket fence.

"I'm just thinking when I bring him here, I don't want anything anymore," she says quietly. "I don't want a house. Give me a tree, and I'll live under this tree. At least it's safe."

lindsay.wise@chron.com

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