This was a huge setback for Amel. Without her passport, she couldn’t possibly get refugee status. Without that piece of paper, she could be deported at any time. Being deported meant being dropped at the Iraq border. To get back home she’d have to face the same array of militia forces that kept her prisoner in Baghdad for so long. At the border she had no place to live, no connections and no way to make a living. She’d heard the rumors about people dropped off at the border and who were later found dead with holes drilled in their knees and their heads.
One of the men in the group kept looking at her with a mixture of anger and lust. When he got her alone he said that since she was single she had to sleep with him. He said that he worked for the Interior Ministry and was in the Badr Army. “Saddam had his time.” He told her, “Now its time for the Badr Army.”
She refused to have sex with him. A man from Dubai who was also in the choir saw what was happening and tried to keep the Badr man away from Amel. The Badr guy warned the man from Dubai that he’d better leave them alone or when he got back to Iraq, he’d track down both him and Amel and ‘disappear’ them.
She managed to evade the man the entire week but time was running out. She went to the manager and explained the situation. He couldn’t help her. His job was to make sure that all of the performers made it back to Iraq. He couldn’t do anything about what she might face once she got back.
The last night in Amman there was a party for all sorts of high ranking politicians. Amel knew some of them from her days of working for the NGO. Her friend from Amman was also at the party but Amel was too frightened to tell her about her plan to leave. Amel found someone at the party to help her. She refuses to say who but someone went to the manager and got her passport.
She caught a cab to her friend’s house and waited. When the party was over her friend and her friend’s family were shocked to find her waiting for them. But they welcomed her with open arms and gave her a place to stay. For a while, at least, Amel was safe. But she couldn’t stay with her friend for long because during the day her friend worked. That meant that Amel and her friend’s father would be alone together in the house and it went against her friend’s values to have an unrelated man and woman alone together.
So Amel had to look for a place to live. She didn’t have much money and housing is expensive in Amman. Over the last few years it’s estimated that a million Iraqi’s have fled to Jordan. That’s about 8% of the pre-war population. In some neighborhoods, real estate prices have increased 100% since the war began. All Amel could afford was one room with a corrugated tin roof that leaked when it rained. Rats and junkies lived nearby.
With the help of another Iraqi refugee she was finally able to find a room in a nicer area of town. It was built as a storage unit on the roof of a building. There’s a bathroom that’s nearby but she has to walk outside to use it. There’s no shower or bathtub, just a toilet and a hose with cold water.
She has no work permit so she can’t work legally. Occasionally she gets work as a waitress at catered parties. It’s not enough to cover the rent and buy food. She had a job for a short time working as a maid in someone’s house. But her employer beat her. She couldn’t go to the police because even though she has a residency permit, she’s afraid that she’ll be deported.
She’s afraid to walk around on the streets because she’s seen the white vans that pick up Iraqi’s and take them to jail and then to the border. Even though her UN papers are supposed to safeguard against that, she doesn’t have a lot of faith in those pieces of paper. She has no recourse if she’d deported. She’ll be far too busy trying to stay alive. So for now, she sits near the electric burner in her room while the winter winds blow outside.
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