Swanwick Star Issue No. 5 (2012)

One Step at a Time

I was born in the city of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1987, I lived there until I was four. In these four years my father was working in Libya in the hope that he would make enough money to move us there, that is, me and my mother. At this time there was a civil war happening and that is why it was urgent for my parents to move us somewhere else, eventually my father got enough money and we moved to Tripoli, Libya in 1991. Life was comparatively better, but with Gaddafi’s regime still in power it wasn’t looking good, in fact he decided that he no longer wanted any immigrants in the country so went on systematically kicking out anybody who did not have a Libyan citizenship. So we were on the go again, in 1993 we caught a boat and made our way to southern Italy as illegal immigrants. From there we went to the capital of the country and somehow got papers to stay for six months, altogether we ended up staying in Rome for six years.

These years were very difficult for me and my parents, probably much more for my parents, although the situation was hard for me too as, I look back I remember having a good feeling within me. The biggest difficulty was the fact that we couldn’t find a place for all of us to stay in, as a result of this I had to attend a Catholic boarding school, which was against my parent’s will because they are dedicated Muslims but since they had no other choice they had to do what was best. So at this point my father was staying at one location, my mother at another one with my sister who was just born and I was at yet another location in a city which was foreign for all of us. The Catholic school I went to was run by nuns, so I had the strange contrast of learning bible teachings on the week days and Muslim prayers on the weekend from my parents, although this fact, for some reason, I didn’t take any of these very seriously and for me they were just things that I had to memorize and recite at special events. In spite of all the tough times, my time in Italy was culturally rich.  I really felt at home there, loved the language, the football and the food, particularly the football. While I was growing up and dealing with the complexities of adolescence, my father was once again on the lookout for yet another place to live in. Italy was nice, but still very hard for them to live in as immigrants. So they contacted a sponsor in Canada, whom they had met in Rome at our arrival, and made it possible for our family of four now, with the birth of sister Wasila, to legally move to Calgary. At this point I was 12 years old, just in time to enter junior high school. We successfully made it from a so called ”third world country” to a ”developed country” and in the eyes of many this was a true success. And in many ways it was, the standard of living was considerably higher so in this regard it was good, but many challenges were awaiting us, as it is the same for any family immigrating to, and attempting to integrate themselves to a full blown western society.

I didn’t have such a good relationship with my parents to begin with and coming to Canada with the relative freedom that it gave didn’t help the situation. By the age of 13, 14 I was going out without asking my parents and even staying over at friends’ houses for the whole weekend and not calling. The communication between myself and my parents was horrible, most of the time I preferred spending time with friends than to be at home with family. This led to me getting into smoking cigarettes and also marijuana at the tender age of 13. I always feel that if more of the kids in my neighbourhood and school were more into things like sports and music, I would have done the same, in the sense I would have done almost whatever was happening outside my home, because almost anything was better than the energy at home. So from this point on I was having a lot of fun but living irresponsibly and therefore living in sorrow and pain. I got into a lot of trouble in this period of my life, from small things in the classroom to more serious things like shoplifting and vandalizing, but I seemed not to take any of it that seriously because to me everything was fun. And to make the story shorter than what it is, slowly but surely, the pain and the sorrow that came with the fun started overlapping the fun, so the ratio wasn’t so balanced if it ever was balanced.

At around the age of 16 I started making, what I look at now as being small adjustments to my way of living but probably were a huge step for me at the time. I started getting back into playing sports, enrolled myself into a better school and distanced myself from many of my friends who were distracting me from what I was trying to do. But in the meantime I was still smoking once in a while, still very sluggish and more or less without any real urgent or willingness to really have a good look at myself. My passive attitude didn’t last too long, in 2007 at the age of 19 my parents had a violent divorce. This really shook things up, basically forcing me to really look at my friends, family, school, future, myself, the world and just life in general. So a process of questioning assumptions and beliefs begin. For some reason at the time friends from my neighbourhood were listening to a hip hop group called the wu tang clan and that is the first time I heard anybody talk about the fact that self knowledge was a fundamental thing in life. From this point on it seemed that many things opened up for me. Now that I was out of school I started to be genuinely interested in educating myself, I found how important communication is in life and slowly started to get my vocabulary better and really try to understand communication in all its subtle forms. I developed a love for reading, writing, drawing and really just understanding things for what they were! So my life had once again taken a new direction. This is when I met a man on the bus going home one day, he approached me and said, ”hey you know the book you are reading, is very similar to mine” and then the conversation started effortlessly. There was an energy about him that was appealing to me, something in the way he listened to me, very attentive. At the end of the conversation he left me the name Jiddu Krishnamurti and we said our goodbyes. I wasn’t expecting to see him again, but indeed I did, we kept running into each other on the same bus, him going to work and me coming home from evening school. One of these times he said to me, ”if I see you again I will give you a book” and he did see me again and the book was Total Freedom. I still don’t know the man’s name and he doesn’t know mine.

Now I could say a considerable amount about how K’s teachings have changed my life, but I’ll just say that for me what he talks about points to a way of living that most people take to be impossible and don’t bother even trying to find out for themselves. I’m referring to a life with no conflict, fear or effort. This type of consideration has totally changed my priorities and the way I approach life. Through K’s book I found Brockwood Park School, enjoyed a wonderful year there full of learning and challenges, and among other things I discovered David Bohm, a great scientist whose life-long work I have a particular interest in.

There is a lot more that I could add, but I think this should be enough to get an idea of my life. I hope it wasn’t too long and sort of dramatic.     Ahmed