And apparently, NYPD intelligence officers and other types of agents came
into their buildings and basically were going around knocking on different
people's doors, and our people don't know their rights, and in fact open
doors for the law enforcement agents, and they basically were snatching
up people's husbands, and people's older sons, or their fathers, and what
they would say to them, "Oh, don't worry, they'll be back."
And then these women were claiming that it was almost four to five
days since they last seen their loved ones.
And so I brought them to the Imam office, and then
I was like, "I don't know what's going on here." And of course,
our Imams are not trained either, and many of them as you know,
particularly the ones in Central Park, they come from Al Azhar University,
they're Egyptian, they're immigrants, they have no idea. In fact they're
shell shocked because they come from authoritarian states where they're
like, "I didn't know this happens here in America."
I didn't know this happened here in America to be honest,
I was a very naive
young person, and to be like, "This doesn't happen in my country."
And then
all of a sudden went from
high school English teacher mode to became a translator.
And I started translating for women, helping them connect to legal services,
and at the time, a family kind of cousin, but a very dear
friend of my family had founded an organization called the Arab American
Association of New York, and she also was working at a hospital,
The Lutheran Medical Center at the time, now it's called NYU Langone,
but
at the time it was called Lutheran Medical Center,
and she was a patient relation rep. And because of her position as
patient relation rep and as an Arabic speaker, all of a sudden while
she's supposed to just help patients navigate the hospital, she became the
person that people went to to the hospital to be like,
"They took my husband, they came to our home."
And so
she began referring these people to this new organization, that by the way,
did not know what it was doing. So it wasn't like an organization
that had been set up with all the resources, it was just this
idea that we need to do something to work within our community.
And she called me up and she's like, "What are you doing?"
I was like, "I don't know, I'm a college student, what do you
mean what am I doing?" And then she's like, "I need you, you
speak English, you speak Arabic, you're from this community, you know a
lot of these people, you just have to come." So
in those moments, the community that I grew up in, you don't really
say no to people in your community, and not anybody that's related to
you nor someone that's very dear to your family.
And so I showed up at the Arab American Association of New York
just a few months after 9/11, and there it was when I discovered
that my country and all the things that I learned about historically were
actually the present, and I felt so naive knowing that this wasn't just
happening to my community, and then my horizons got broadened. And so,
I literally pivoted to all these things that I had to learn so
quickly to help my people. Certified interpretations, I became a certified
interpreter both a Arabic interpreter, but specifically around medical interpretation,
mental health services,
doing counseling services. People were engaging in the course of the year
and a half even after 9/11, I started seeing increased cases of substance
abuse within the Muslim community, even knowing that people will say,
"Oh we can't drink, we can't do drugs, 'cause it's against our faith."
But people were finding outlets, and we didn't have outlets in the Muslim
community. So being able to learn and pivot really quickly
reading policy, trying to understand how government works, there was nothing.
I came to a community where there were mosques, there were Islamic centers
that were built, and I always am grateful to our elders who built
that type of brick and mortar infrastructure, but that's all they had,
there was nothing else there. So I was almost over compensating trying to
absorb as much information as possible, and that was my first
unfortunate introduction into my own personal activism in New York around
things that impacted my community.