CHAPTER 1

The Man Who Started With Nothing

“Small beginnings are the launching pad to great endings.” – Joyce Meyer

I grew up as a person without an identity. You may wonder how that could be. Most people don’t realize how blessed they are to live in countries like the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. In those countries, you have rights and freedoms that allow you to choose how you want to live.

You have access to education, and even though you may have hurdles to overcome, you can build yourself a good future. Not all countries are like that, especially the one I grew up in—Kuwait.

My dad, Saleem, was a Palestinian who went to Iraq at age 13 to look for work to support his mother and infant brother, after my Grandfather Ahmed had died when my father was seven years old. (Yes, I was named after him.)

Later, my dad went to Kuwait, probably in his 20s, in the early 1950s, to find better work. He later went back to Palestine (now Israel) to find a good wife, and that’s when he saw my mother at a wedding and fell head over heels for her; it was love at first sight. My dad married my mom, and I came along not long after that. I am the oldest of nine siblings. Not only am I the oldest of my siblings, but I am also the oldest of all the cousins on both sides of the family, and the first to graduate from college.

When a person goes to Kuwait from other Middle East countries, without a lot of money to begin with, they have no identity and no rights whatsoever. What is even more challenging for Palestinians is that they have no country to begin with. A person can’t stay in Kuwait or work unless he has a co-signer or a sponsor who is a Kuwaiti citizen. Also, only men could get work visas. Women had no rights at all at that time.

Thankfully, my dad was granted a visa since he had worked there. Here is where it gets a bit complicated. Even though I was born in Kuwait, I had no citizenship rights. I maintained my father’s citizenship, which was given to him by Jordan for travelling purposes, and I was allowed to stay in Kuwait as long as I was under 18 and had not graduated high school. Once I graduated, I would have to have someone sponsor me to stay in the country, or I would have to leave. Thankfully, I was able to leave when I was seventeen, and I will share that story later in this chapter.

As much as it was hard, I do understand why some of it had to happen. There were a lot of people coming in from other Middle East countries, and many of them could not prove citizenship to any country. Kuwait had to protect its country the best way that they could.

Will I Ever Own Anything?

Since my family were Palestinians, we were not allowed to own anything without our Kuwaiti sponsor giving us permission. That included owning a home or a car. So, we rented apartments in areas that were predominantly occupied by non-citizens.

I also was not permitted to go to public schools, which were for Kuwaitis only. That all changed when Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman, came and struck a deal with the Kuwait government to use all the Kuwaiti school buildings so that the Palestinian kids, like me, could go to school.

We were taught the same materials as the Kuwaiti children, but we did not attend school with them. We started school at 2:00pm, and went until 9:00 in the evening. By the time I walked home, sometimes it would be close to 10:00pm.

Now, Palestinian kids were always teased by the Kuwaiti kids. They always let us know in no uncertain terms that we were not welcome there, that we didn’t belong, and that this was not our place, nor our home. There is racism in the U.S., based on the color of skin. Racism in the Middle East is based on the nationality of origin, but one thing is the same: Children will tease and bully those who are different, no matter where you are in the world.

Quite often, there would be fights and arguments. I came home bleeding a few times from rocks being thrown at me. They went home bleeding too, because I was not going to put up with it.

One time I came home, and my mom said, “Your white uniform shirt is all red and grey; what happened?” Of course, I said, “I don’t know. I have no idea what you are talking about.” It turns out that I had been hit in the head with a rock, and I was bleeding. I was constantly reminded that I was worthless and shouldn’t be there. I never felt like I had a future or that I belonged.

Now, my life was not totally miserable. My mom and dad worked hard to make things fun and secure, and to give us the things we needed. I played with my family, including cousins, and throughout the year we would have wonderful celebrations of our culture and religion, which included all the family. Those times were enjoyable.

Looking back, I am so thankful and grateful for those times, the love that my parents had for me, and the relationship I had had with my relatives, but everything else around me always left me feeling uncomfortable and out of place.

The Turning Point

In high school, in the tenth grade, the government of Kuwait decided that it was in the best interest of the educational process of the country that all of the schools become schools of the government of Kuwait—unified as one school, instead of the PLO schools and the Kuwaiti schools.

The reason for this was simple. The PLO schools did way better than the Kuwaiti schools. Every year, we would take the same exams and knock the socks off them. We would take the top 100 spots in the country, every year, consistently. Never did a government-run Kuwait school take any of those spots while I was growing up.

They changed a lot of things, including our principals and teachers, and now I had to wear a uniform and salute the Kuwaiti flag instead of the Palestinian flag. If you did not wear the uniform, you were punished. My family was not well-off. We were just getting by. There were eight of us living in a very small, twobedroom apartment, which was made for one person or a couple, not a family.

Having uniforms posed a big problem, and I did get punished one time, with a bamboo stick that vibrated like crazy. It got cracked on my hand a few times; ten to be exact. I will never forget that event, and I can tell you that I couldn’t feel my hand for two days, not to mention the swelling. Thank God that capital punishment is now banned in schools.

The Palestinians are probably some of the highest educated people in the world. The only thing that they have to their name is education. They don’t have their own country. So, education became the way to having something that they could call their own.

My dad never made it to high school, only the fifth grade, and my mom never went to school at all. He stopped because he had to support the family when his dad died, when he was seven. By the time he reached the fifth grade, he could no longer keep up with school and work, so he had to make a choice, and work it was; otherwise, my grandmother and uncle would have starved. I am proud of my dad. Yes, he did miss out on opportunities in life, but he never stopped trying to make things better for the people he loved.

To watch my dad struggle, because of the lack of education and opportunities, affected me, but he was as smart as a whip. There were math problems that I had to do in high school, of which I had no clue how to solve, and he could do them easily. I can only imagine what my dad might have been if he could have finished high school. He passed away five years ago, on 7/31/2013, on the 27th day of Ramadan that year, one of the holiday nights of the month of fasting for Muslims. I am so proud of him for doing what he needed to do. I love you Dad, and I miss you so much …

High schools in Kuwait were very different than in North America. The last year of high school prepared me for one final comprehensive exam. Nothing else mattered or counted toward my final grade. This final exam determined my future in the Middle East, and in Kuwait specifically. It was a do-or-die moment for every graduating high school student and me. You have one week. Every senior student across the country takes the same exam at the same time.

I was in the science track, which means I had geology, biology, chemistry, math, physics, religion, English, and Arabic. I was very good in those subjects and always got 90 to 95% in those classes. I was sure that I was going to do great and have my choice of what I wanted to do, but there was one test I didn’t do well on, and my grade point average dropped. I was devastated.

When I was growing up, I wanted to be a heart surgeon. It was the only thing I wanted to be. When I did poorly on that one test, my dreams of becoming a doctor were shattered.

In Kuwait and the Middle East, the government and the universities decide what degree a person can pursue, based on the final grade they received. That one bad grade determined my future and career choices for me. It was a dictatorship that suffocated me and gave me no choice. Being a doctor was not an option. Neither was an engineer. I would be lucky to study history and become a history teacher.

Remember how I told you that to stay in Kuwait past high school, you need to be sponsored? That was not going to happen now with that grade point average. Not only was my dream of becoming a doctor shattered, I now had the stress of leaving the only home I had ever known.

That summer was stressful. I only had a month or so to figure out what university I was going to go to, and what to do with my life before I was kicked out of the country. I decided that I...