Now Ayad has to go home

i posted last week about the 13 y/o iraqi boy, ayad, who had been injured in an explosion and suffered serious facial and eye damage... two men, one a defense department adviser, robert reilly, reviled in gay circles for an article he once wrote calling homosexuality "morally disordered," and joe tom easley, a lawyer and well-known gay activist, worked together to bring ayad to the u.s. for treatment...

After two fairy-tale weeks of pampering, shopping, top-notch medical care and limitless Pepsi, Ayad al-Sirowiy, the 13-year-old Iraqi boy who came to the United States to get the tattoo of war removed from his disfigured face, is going home.

And - no surprise - he really doesn't want to.

"Ma arrooh, ma arrooh," Ayad shouted Wednesday afternoon, as he kicked and fussed in his hotel bed, a few hours before his flight. "I don't want to go. I don't want to go."

His face was shiny with burn salve, his lips were puffy and blistery and both eyes were swollen shut like a pummeled boxer's. It stung just to look at him.

Ayad has been quite a project. He was injured at the beginning of the Iraq war after his cow accidentally set off an American cluster bomb, which drilled tiny pieces of shrapnel into his face, blinding him in one eye and printing a map of pin-prick scars across his skin. The boys in Ayad's village call him "Mr. Gunpowder," and he was so ashamed that he dropped out of school.

But after a retired law professor in Miami Beach read about his plight and won him approval to come to the United States, a new hope was planted. Ayad began to dream of having his old face again. And he thought if it could happen anywhere, it was America.

[...]

But the miracle metamorphosis didn't happen. Ayad thought he was going to get a new eye; instead he got a contact lens. And the laser surgery that was promised to erase his facial scars will only lighten them, unless he can receive follow-up treatment in the United States or another modern country, which is highly unlikely once he leaves behind the silky sheets and first-class hotels for his mud hut.

[...]

"I thought the Americans could do everything," Ayad's father said.

Ayad stared at the carpet and whispered, "I hope we come back."

small beef with the nyt... the only mention of joe tom easley in the follow-up article is this: "retired law professor in Miami Beach..."

Submit To Propeller
Tweet