Here I am, drinking vodka alone at 3 in the morning, in the house of my family. One year ago I was staying in Amman, waiting for my visa to go to Saudi Arabia to marry my first love and ex-fiancé, I was finishing my studies for Masters Degree, and I was working as an architect in a small engineering office.
I will not exaggerate and pretend this is my first jump between my parallel universes, because I had previous heroic hyper jumps in the past.
But this year witnessed two jumps.
Jump raed jump jump jump
The first was on the 19th of Feb. of last year, when I decided to leave my work, my house, and to leave heba and come to Iraq.
Why?
She didn’t answer my calls, so I pushed the disappear button.
This is when everyone starts to wonder “where is raed”
I came to Baghdad, I was completely destroyed, without energy, sleeping all the day and night waiting for war to happen, to conceder it the as the “reason” for my miserable life. The war started and explosions helped me forget the rest of my feelings towards heba.
War stopped, and statues were pulled in a dramatic way.
My national feelings pushed me to start something that can make the world see how bad this war was, so I started working on a massive scale survey on war casualties, for months, going on trips to the nine cites of the south weekly, and establishing a huge network of volunteers, monitor them, designing the survey forms and administrating the data input procedure.
More than 4000 injured, more than 2000 killed, just from civilians, all with full documentation and details about the time and place of incidents, and their addresses. My American partner was supposed to publish the results, but she didn’t.
After we finished the survey, I started establishing another network of volunteers .. Emaar .. in the nine cities of the south and Baghdad. 100 volunteers were the result of one month selection period that I met around 1500 persons in, around 30 of the 100 were girls, working all together in teams to identify small problems in the neighborhoods and implementing micro projects depending on the local people’s contribution, to give them more trust in themselves and to market the political idea of giving Iraqis the chance to rebuild their countries by themselves.
Meanwhile I had a romantic story that was getting more serious day by day, and making me a worse person day by day too.
After the UN explosion, fund raising started being impossible, and our only funding agency stopped to fund us for political reasons.
My private life was falling apart in parallel to Emaar, slowly and painfully.
Even working with salam, for the BBC, and writing stuff on this blog wasn’t making me comfortable. For many reasons.
Today was a special day
I stood in front of everyone in the NGOs meeting, and told them “I’m sorry to announce the death of Emaar in 9 of the 10 governorates that we used to work in”
We still have work in the marshes of Nasrya.
I’m tired, and I cant knock more doors
The team of Nasrya are arranging themselves without needing me for support.
Good for them
Emotional wise.
I erased her phone number from my phonebook, preventing other stupid attempts of going back.
Why?
Because she cannot say good morning. I want her to say good morning when we wake up.
But she can’t.
Salam:
I’ll stop blogging here. Without swimming in the mud of details: you are not the best partner in the world, and I’m not the best blogger too.
I emailed the Jordanian University to tell them I’m not going to resume my masters degree studies. Its way too complicated for me now. I’ll take my diploma certificate and stop.
And I emailed a friend in London telling her about my great achievements of today.
I burned out myself. Wzzzzssssss……
Today was a special day, but this Russian vodka made it better.
Jump jump jump
:”)
