Project Rebirth (22 page)

Debbie Almontaser

 

 

 

D
ebbie Almontaser was disappointed on her very first morning in America.

“I went to the window, looked outside, and there was this huge blanket of white everywhere,” she remembers. Debbie, a curious three years old at the time, had just emigrated from Yemen. She ran all around the house and shouted out to the rest of her family: “You have to wake up! There's sugar everywhere! We have to get the buckets! We have to get the pans!”

Her parents giggled and explained, “Honey, it's not sugar.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“It's not sugar. It's snow.”

Her indignant retort: “No, this is America! This is where everybody comes. This is where you have everything you want.”

Her father then led young Debbie to the window, opened it, and let her touch the snow. The child was not so easily discouraged. She asked her father if she could taste it, thinking it might just be cold sugar.

“To my disappointment,” she recalls, “it tasted like nothing.”

Debbie's imagination, rooted in those early years, never really waned. It was part of what made her a fantastic teacher. One day, while giving a lesson to her fifth graders at P.S. 261 in downtown Brooklyn, she heard a knock on the classroom door.

“Can I speak to you in the hallway?” asked a PTA representative, poking her head in.

Debbie turned to her eager students and handed a marker to one of the boys, telling him, “Why don't you finish the math problem with the rest of the group? I'll be back in just a moment.”

She stepped outside and was immediately struck by how grave the expression on the parent's face was: “We have just found out that one of the World Trade Center towers has been hit by a plane. We don't know how it happened, but we're speculating it was an accident.”

Debbie's heart dropped into her stomach. The image of a plane crashing into a skyscraper played across her mind. The parent informed her that the administration was requesting that all children be kept in the classroom until further notice. “Don't alarm them,” she added. “You can do it.”

Left in the hallway alone, Debbie took a deep breath and then headed back into her classroom.

Debbie left Yemen at the tender age of three, along with her mother, to reunite with her father, who had previously left for the United States. He had gone in search of a job and had found one, as a steelworker at the Ford Motor Company in Buffalo, New York.

Debbie's only recollection of Yemen is her departure from it. “I remember the steps of the plane being very high, and in between them there was this hollow space, and it was really windy,” she describes. “And I remember my mother holding my hand and dragging me up.” Debbie was afraid that the wind would blow her tiny body right through the hollow spaces in between the steps.

As an immigrant child in Buffalo during the seventies, she struggled to fit in. While the other girls wore name-brand outfits and played with the latest and most expensive toys, Debbie was usually dressed in one of her mother's creations, with her nose in a book. Her parents encouraged her not to stand out as different among her classmates, and yet they sent her to Sunday school to learn Arabic language and culture. She knew that simply by virtue of being Arab, she automatically didn't fit in, and in some ways, it compelled her to stand out even more deliberately.

“One day in seventh grade, I decided to wear the
hijab,
” Debbie remembers. “I went to school and everyone was looking at me so strangely.”

Upon spotting her in her headscarf, her girlfriends shouted, “You look silly! That's not you! Take it off!”

“Why are you wearing that?” asked one of her usually supportive teachers. “Did you know that women are oppressed by wearing that? You wearing it shows you're inferior.”

“Inferior”—the word reverberated inside of Debbie, causing confusion and shame. In her Islamic cultural class, she'd learned that wearing the
hijab
was simply a way of signifying modesty and a desire for privacy for Muslim women—something that Debbie often craved in the chaotic atmosphere of her junior high school. And here her teacher was shaming her into feeling as if she'd done something terribly wrong. It took at least a decade for Debbie, then living in New York City with her husband, to embrace the garb of her tradition with renewed confidence. Still, the sting of her teacher's humiliation would stay with her for a lifetime.

Debbie, called “Miss A” by her students, closed the door and went back into her classroom, to the tall bookshelf she had there. She picked out one of her favorite books,
The Hundred Dresses,
by Eleanor Estes. In it, Wanda Petronski, a poor Polish immigrant girl, is ridiculed by her classmates because of her funny name, imperfect accent, and limited wardrobe.

“Today we're going to do things a little bit differently, class. Instead of reading independently, I'm going to read this story aloud to you,” Debbie told the squirming bunch before her. “It's one of my favorites.”

“Mine too!” shouted a student in the back.

“Well, good, let's get started,” Debbie said, smiling to hide the anxiety starting to build up in her body. She held the book open and out to the side so the students could get a good look at the beautiful illustrations as the story unfolded.
“Today, Monday, Wanda Petronski was not in her seat. But nobody, not even Peggy and Madeline, the girls who started all the fun, noticed her absence.”

Debbie read these words, but all the while there was a second story unfolding in her increasingly anxious mind. She wondered who was responsible for the plane flying into the tower. Was it an accident? A recreational pilot somehow way off course?
“Wanda did not sit there because she was rough and noisy. On the contrary she was very quiet and rarely said anything at all.”

Debbie tried to recall all of the recent terrorist attacks. The suicide bombing of the USS
Cole
in October of 2000 in Yemen came to mind. Could this be one as well? It was awful to even entertain the thought. She wondered if any of her students' parents worked in the towers.
“Then sometimes they waited for Wanda—to have fun with her.”

There was a second knock on the door. It was the same parent. Debbie set the book down gently and assured her students that she'd be right back, then headed out into the hallway again. “The second tower was hit. We no longer think it was an accident.”

Debbie shuddered.

“Debbie, don't lose it!” said the parent. “You are fortunate that you can't see anything from your windows. In the classrooms facing the skyline, the kids are by the windows, and some of the teachers are in a state of shock. You have to be strong for your kids.”

As she walked back inside, Debbie spotted smoke trailing far across the sky outside the hallway's windows. She picked up the book again and said, “Now, where were we?” hoping the students didn't notice that her arm was shaking as she held up the book. “Ah, I see. Here we were,” she said, and began reading again.
“The next day, Tuesday, Wanda was not in school either.”

Just steps away from P.S. 261 lies the stretch of Atlantic Avenue known to the local Arab community as “Little Syria.” Tourist buses stop by every day to let their passengers buy baked goods, spices, and other treats at favorite vendors. The finger-pointing and scapegoating had taken hold just hours after the attacks.

As the children continued to get picked up through the early afternoon, one Arab American mother approached Debbie in hysterics. “What happened?” asked Debbie, trying to calm her down and find a quiet place to talk away from the other parents.

“As I was walking toward the building, a tall man came out from a group of parents standing there and said to me, ‘It's you and your people who've done this to us! You bastards!'”

“People are angry right now,” Debbie told the woman, giving her a hug. “They don't know how to deal with it.” Debbie wished she could do more to comfort the aggrieved woman. She hated to see the ways in which the attacks were already breeding misunderstandings between people who were otherwise neighbors, dependent on one another to keep their communities and schools vibrant.

Once all the children had been picked up by their parents or caregivers that day, Debbie was finally able to head home to West Midwood, Brooklyn, and tend to her own family. She hugged her two younger children—Shifa and Mohammed—extra long, with great relief, and then asked, “Where is Yousif?” Her eldest son was often the one she worried about most.

Naji, her husband, said sadly, “Well, he was here, but he's already left . . .”

He went on to explain that Yousif, just eighteen years old, had already been deployed to the World Trade Center site in order to aid in the rescue mission. Upon his high school graduation, Yousif had convinced Naji and Debbie to sign papers permitting him to join the National Guard. Debbie hadn't felt good about it at all but knew that keeping her stubborn son from something, once he'd set his mind on it, wasn't a winning proposition.

Sitting at the dining room table that night after the attacks and staring at Yousif's empty seat was unbearable for Debbie. She couldn't eat. She couldn't calm down. She was flooded with guilt—why had she signed that stupid form? All she could think about was her sweet son, who right at that very moment was witnessing unspeakable carnage.

Her husband pointed out that her anxiety was upsetting for their other two children, and she tried valiantly, but not very successfully, to manage her fear. But soon, she would have welcome distraction from her son's absence.

The following day she received a call from the president of the school board to request her attendance at a meeting. “We need your input in this whole situation,” he said, citing her history of leadership within the New York educational community on issues of diversity and justice.