“Atifa? Won’t you eat? You must look healthy when the guardians come”. The nurse held the steaming hot bowl of porridge near my sister’s face as she looked away blankly. I had long stopped forcing her to eat and drink when the nurses had come with the meager bowls of food. I had forced down the bowl only a few minutes ago, so I would look “healthy”. The guardians who came for adoption often picked the strongest, the ones who looked “normal” enough to fit in with their privileged neighborhoods, ones that didn’t drag attention and raised questions.
That was hardly the case for most of the children who lived along with me at the orphanage. The colored migrants, the disabled, and the unattractive were left in the orphanage with their bowls of porridge, shivering with the blankets they had provided with the low budget. We sat in the dining room, all of us blank and thinking about life before, wondering what our life could have been like.
It was still better than the foster system. Bouncing around from house to house, never long enough to call one place home. Strict families who were looking for children as makeshift maids and helpers, to kind families with other children like us, but we could never stay with them too long. But no matter where we went, whose care we were under, how kind they were, we never felt like we could belong. We would always be the outsiders, the small weak children raised out of pity, but never really part of their so-called foster family. We ran around from each household, like nomads, blinking every day into another room, another life, another family. A constant identity crisis, trying to figure out why we were here and what we were a part of. The years seemed numb and vacant, but at least at the orphanage we could accept ourselves for what we really were. Orphans. Migrant orphans with no home, no one to love us, and waiting patiently for someone to feel bad enough after looking into our dead eyes and take us into a shiny white home in a suburban neighborhood.
We were happy once. Atifa and I. Living with our parents in our large house in Iraq. We were rich, we knew no pain, we were blind to suffering. We only knew power and lived a shallow, protected life. Those years seem to fade every day now, but I can still remember Atifa smiling in our expensive dresses, and my mother and father working in their marble studies. It all turned to ashes with the civil war. We watched our home burn down, carrying only our passports and small suitcases. The airport was closed and surrounded by fighter jets, so we clambered in the pathetic lifeboats, cold and shivering, and we rowed to the nearest landform. The boat ride was blurry and salty and when we finally go to land, we rode on a plane to America, and everything seemed to be perfect again
I say seemed. After two months, we heard a knock on the door and then the door was blown into splintered bits. I remember screaming my lungs out as they grabbed my mother by the arm and two more men in the same uniform dragging my father by the shoulder. Atifa watched silently, too young to understand what was happening, but knowing it wasn’t okay. They held us back, letting us stay as per instructions, but it was the worst thing they could’ve have done. I would give the world to see my mother smile back at me and to give my father a hug . Instead I stare out the window to see snow along with Atifa, waiting for someone to come claim us.
“NO! Stop that’s not what I asked. Please hurry.” I scream at the backstage workers as they adjust my mic. “Everything has to be perfect.”
My name is Atifa Alamah. My older sister, Adeela Alamah, is dead. I always thought she was the strongest person in the world. She had always looked after me, she had always kept a brave face. She reminded me what was good, and told me that everything was going to be alright. She had contracted tuberculosis, and sat in the cold orphanage, hacking blood. I believed in her, and I thought she was strong enough. But it wasn’t the disease that killed her. Maybe she was tired of always bearing the responsibility, maybe she missed her old life and our parents. Maybe she was tired of living a life of constant pain, loneliness, and never knowing who she really was. But we found her the next day, dead, with the medicine bottle completely empty. I hadn’t felt anything in years, and I couldn’t bring myself to feel for her death. I was too numb. Later that day, an old white woman came to adopt me. I could see in her eyes that she knew what had happened. I knew she felt sorrow, and pity. I lived a normal life again, in a middle school with other girls my age. I studied, and I acted how a normal teenager did. No one except my guardians knew about my past, until now.
The lights flickered on, and the spotlight hit me square in the face. I was standing on the Ted Talk stage, and I could feel my knees shaking. I opened my mouth. “Marginalized youth. Chances are, you don’t know what that is” I could see the auditorium become quieter. As I told them my story, I saw in their faces the same pity.
But I didn’t need pity. I was strong. I had overcome every obstacle, I had faced every challenge. I knew death, I knew loss, I knew racism and discrimination, I knew islamophobia, I knew it all. These people looked at me, a broken teenager. That might have been true once. But I had worked hard. My past was not my identity, though it shaped me into the person I was today. Despite not being the typical girl, I had achieved so much. I never had comfort, and had suffered from violence and mental health issues. But pain had given me something else. A reason to make sure no one else felt the same pain
I was now running a non-profit for children like me. I was speaking in front of millions of privileged people who would never know the pain I went through, but could help me end that pain. My eyes were no longer empty, no longer hurt, but instead, there was a fire. A passion. To make a difference for myself, my sister, and the millions of other like me.
