Geographical Brothers and Sisters

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The drone of this mechanical voice over and over when i so desperately want to hear Facil's quiet and familiar "hello." pick up the phone. pick up the phone. Every few days I wake up in a sweat with his eyes looking down at me in the black of my room, adrenaline racing, fueled with the wicked whys and what ifs. Why I haven't heard from him since December when he promised he was going to buy his ticket and visit? Why has his mailbox been full for weeks now? and then that dark question, the one i don't want to know the answer to...Is he traveling down that lonely road that took his sister in Sudan?

I don't really know how i first met Facil i just know he was everywhere and though i knew very little of him or of his country Eritrea I became his geographical sister almost instantly.

"Mooneeca my sister," he would always call me from behind a pair of eyes that i later learned witnessed some of the most gruesome unspeakables of war. A refugee forced to flee the battlefields of his country in the middle of the night, traveling by ship in a broom closet and then in the cab of an eighteen wheeler all the way to Utah, taking nothing but a few pictures in his wallet and leaving only caskets behind...

....of his mother the political activist, truth seeker, who one day disappeared

....of his father gunned down before his very own eyes

...of his baby brother who in pictures radiates the kind of innocence you want to bottle up and dab on your wrists

....of his wife whose death he kept secret for months guarding this lost love like an injured bird

.....of his dear sister who later killed herself in Sudan after the events of 9/11 made it impossible for her to reunite with her brother in the states.

"I have left 70,000 caskets behind," he once told me.

All that pain and you'd think this man could not get out of bed, would have trouble smiling, would have forgotten how to love....

But every day he wakes with the roosters, working a fourteen hour shift tiling floors, walls, ceilings with his bare hands doing what he learned from his father, the gift he took from his homeland.

In his kitchen all of us nestle in to sample the thick, red sauce he has made for us,
"Try this and tell me what you think?"
We nod our heads in approval, hugging him as he beams from ear to ear that we are all there crowding together in the kitchen like family.

I miss him. I can't get him out of my head for when i turn on the news or when i open the newspaper I see his face everywhere those haunting eyes... the eyes of Iraq, Dar fur.

Little Monkies wrote a very moving post about war about the insanity, the vicious cycle that it is and i'd add that it goes on in nations like Eritrea, places that most of us can't even pronounce or place on a map, that produce thousands of witnesses like Facil who can never look at the world with the same pair of eyes again. And i wish i could say i had a solution to stopping it. i wish. i wish. i know we all share this same hope. i know my friendship with Facil in one small way is the grief shouldering that Ally speaks about here...but its not enough, a band-aid if anything.

i can't sit here and wring my hands and i'm going crazy waiting for Facil to pick up the phone so i'm sending in my application to be a volunteer for the International Rescue Committee, an amazing non-profit that helps support displaced refugees who flee to this country. This year 2 million Iraqis will need this kind of support...and there are other ways to lend a hand to the Facils who come here who need their American hosts to help them get back on their feet... check them out.

Facil dear brother when you are ready to pick up the phone i'm here on the other end of the line waiting.