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This was my ticket back to Kuwait. I held on to it for 30 years.

30 years ago today, we huddled around a dining table in a rented vacation apartment in Amman, listening to the radio as news of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait shocked the region. we had lived in Kuwait for my entire 8 years of life up until then, and I was too young to understand that everything we knew would be no more.

Soon after, my father went back to Kuwait while it was still under Iraqi occupation to retrieve some of our belongings, but I didn’t know the danger he had been in until I heard his story as an adult. He had taken out a life insurance policy before he wandered back into an apocalyptic scene of damaged and abandoned neighborhoods in Kuwait, and had a close brush with death as he was forced to flee mortar fire on his drive back.

Stranded in Amman, the mood of the country was one of preparation for war: We were taping up our windows to reduce the risk of shattering glass, watching hundreds of people line up at bakeries to stack up on bread, and discussing contingencies with our apartment building neighbors (we’d go down to the lower apartments in case of aerial bombardment, and they’d come up to our apartment on the top floor of the building if chemical weapons were used). This was over Saddam’s threats to bomb Israel with chemical weapons if Iraq was bombed (with Jordan stuck in the middle). On my 9th birthday, the US launched Operation Desert Storm (I remember my white birthday cake against the news on TV in the background), and Saddam did fire rockets at Israel, though they were conventional, not chemical, & Jordan was ultimately spared.

After the war, Kuwait became inhospitable to Palestinians (over Arafat’s expressed support for Saddam against US military intervention), so returning to Kuwait was not an option, and we were stranded in Jordan for a couple of years. My parents’ families were displaced from Palestine, of course, so this was round 2. My parents’ herculean efforts to shield us (me and my 2 brothers) from the magnitude of the disruption to our lives was remarkable, but it’s hard not to notice how much we had lost. We lived a relatively affluent life in Kuwait (my mom had 2 cars), and we had to cut up a single Snickers bar into 3 pieces to share as our weekly treat in Jordan (quite the decline in the standard or living).

The claim that times of adversity are often looked back on fondly sounds like poetic bullshit, but it’s really not, and I can’t help but remember this period of life with great nostalgia. In a time of danger lied an unparalleled sense of community, and we spent a ton of time with family and relatives, having sleepovers, experiencing our first snow fall (which happened to be a series of knee-deep snow accumulation that shut down the entire country), watching cartoons, getting cheap mana2eesh and falafel & drinking Pepsi out of old-school glass bottles.

That was the beginning of an epic journey that would take us through Yemen, Oman, the UAE, and ultimately the US, having lived in 16 different homes and attending 9 different schools by the time I was 18 years old. And here I am, weeks away from becoming a father, knowing my child’s journey will be absolutely nothing like mine, but eager to show him all the places I’ve been one day.

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