Please help Sarmad Ali’s family

My good friend Sarmad Ali recently left New York to visit his family in Baghdad for the first time since he first arrived in the United States in August 2004.

Since then, his life has been full of astonishing (and sometimes amusing) triumph: he graduated from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism with a Master’s in journalism with me in May 2005, got a job as a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, and now has a green card and is a permanent resident. He’s well on his way to becoming a US citizen. He’s traveled in Europe and the US, and has been welcomed at the homes of my family in California, Washington DC, and Connecticut, the homes of countless others in New York, Michigan, New Jersey, Texas and this summer traveled to the Grand Canyon and explored the American southwest.

However, things have been unimaginably difficult for him too. He’s been unable to travel to Iraq until very recently and can only interact with his family by phone.

Further, his father has disappeared nearly three years ago, and in all likelihood, tragically, has passed away. He wrote a follow-up to that piece in late 2007.

Upon his recent arrival in Baghdad, Sarmad wrote to me, describing that his childhood home had “completely collapsed,” and that there was not adequate access to potable water.

His older sister and mother need medical attention, while his younger brother and sister try to make what’s left of the family survive as best as they can. Sarmad, meanwhile, does what he can from abroad and is now home to try to improve the situation as much as possible.

He wrote to me recently:

Rubble, trash and checkpoints are ubiquitous. The city is covered with dust, and at first glance it sounds as if no one lives here. Everywhere you go you get a sense of absolute hopelessness, helplessness and misery. Driving in this god-forsaken place makes you want to vomit. Everything is ruined and nothing was rebuilt. Everyone you talk to says it’s way better than last year or two years ago when things had fallen apart completely but what I see now is a pretty desperate situation.

Some friends and I are collecting money online — we’re shooting for $10,000 by the end of October. With your help, we can make this goal and can help out his family.

If you’re reading this, chances are that you have it off far better than Sarmad’s family. You probably have a roof over your head and easy access to clean water.

Even in these tough economic times, if you could spare even ten bucks for Sarmad’s family, it would be greatly, greatly appreciated.

And again, thanks.

September 14: Cyrus on PRI’s The World

Dear Friends,

I’ve been informed that my radio piece on the new Iraqi law to censor the Internet is airing today.

It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams):

NYC – 3 pm Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org
Washington, DC – 8 pm Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org
Los Angeles – 12 pm Pacific – KPCC – 89.3 FM – www.kpcc.opg
Boston – 4 pm Eastern – WGBH – 89.7 FM – www.wgbh.org
San Francisco – 2 pm Pacific – KQED – 88.5 FM – www.kqed.org

You can also find it on The World’s site later in the day and on my site if you miss the broadcast.

Also, don’t forget about The World’s Tech Podcast, hosted by my boss, Clark Boyd. It comes out every Friday.

Lemme know if you hear it!

Update: Audio is here.

WSJ: Some Iraqis Dream of Michigan; Others Make it Home

Big ups to my man Sarmad Ali, for this fascinating blog post about Iraqi communities in Michigan.

WSJ:

As we drove through Detroit’s suburbs, we passed movie theaters and subdivisions, large strip-malls and sleepy neighborhoods. We stopped at Ryan Palace, a restaurant named after the street it is on in the city of Warren. The entrance was painted light blue with glazed bulls and dragons to make it look like Babylon’s Ishtar Gate. Arabic tabloids were stacked near the door. Inside, the spacious restaurant was packed with men playing cards, smoking cigarettes and water pipes and drinking Heinekens and vodka. The tables were large, as if designed for big parties.

There was a ubiquitous presence of alcoholic beverages, which are strictly prohibited in Islam, which led me to assume that the non-Chaldean drinkers were secular Muslims. Not wanting to seem awkward, even Mustafa, who at first was reluctant to drink, finally succumbed to others’ wishes and had a few glasses of vodka mixed with juice.

Aside from the two waitresses, one Iraqi-American Chaldean and the other Greek, there were no other women in the restaurant; all of the customers were male and most of them were Iraqis, mostly Chaldeans. It reminded me of a conversation I’d had with a woman in Iraq a few weeks ago, a doctor who said that despite the relative safety of where she lived in southern Iraq, she couldn’t go out to eat in a restaurant in the city with her female friends because tradition left them mostly male spaces. “We can go to a family restaurant, but we can’t just walk into regular restaurants,” she told me. ” Our customs forbid such a thing.”

WSJ: There’s No Ham in Hamburgers, and Other Lessons I’ve Learned About American Food

Sarmad Ali writes:

Throughout my entire year at Columbia, I was scared of almost all other ethnic food, especially sushi, which I found weird and repulsive. “Eating raw fish?” I would say to a friend in disgust. Just before graduation, a close friend from California said he would like to have me try sushi with him before he went back home. Not wanting to disappoint him, I went with him to a sushi place. He ordered for both of us because I had no clue what the stuff was. He was talking to me but I wasn’t really listening. I was staring at the two wooden sticks next to my plate trying to figure out how I was going to eat with them. But luckily, when the food came, I figured it out quickly.

In the summer of 2005, another friend took me to one of the best sushi places I have been to, and since then sushi has become as essential in my diet as Indian food. I moved from simple veggie rolls to a variety of fish pieces and then to special rolls with lots of different ingredients. I have taken some Iraqi friends who have visited out for sushi but they have found it hard to swallow.

I’ll give you guys exactly one guess to figure out who this mysterious character from California is. 🙂

WSJ: Stresses From Iraqi Father’s Disappearance Strike Family Hard

This is from my good friend and Columbia classmate, Sarmad Ali, who has written a follow-up piece to his story from last February.

I wasn’t there in Baghdad; I couldn’t be there. I am an Iraqi citizen caught between two worlds. I’m a guest in the U.S., where I have lived since 2004, studying and working for this newspaper. But I have no U.S. travel documents. And my Iraqi passport has been invalidated.

More unsettling, more disruptive than the possibility of my father’s death has been the uncertainty about his fate. I mourn close friends who have been killed in Baghdad’s violence, but sometimes I envy their families for being able to bury their loved ones.

My experience — the distance and uncertainty that corrupt my ability to grieve — isn’t unique. Many people have fled Baghdad and left family behind to survive in a war zone in which people go missing and casualties are often unidentifiable.

Over the past year, my relatives in Baghdad have continued to look for my father without me, his oldest son. I have grown more distant from them, and strains between us have deepened.