By JAN LARSON McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
Mohammed Al-Dailami gave up his career and all his possessions to get his family out of war-torn Yemen. Now he worries that he has brought his wife and children to a country where they are not wanted.
Al-Dailami, who created a language center and taught English in his homeland of Yemen, was one of 19 teachers selected from around the world to be part of the Teaching Excellence and Achievement program at BGSU in 2014. It was that visit to Bowling Green that convinced him that this would be a good place for his family. It also convinced BGSU that Al-Dailami would be a good fit for the English as a second language program here.
So Al-Dailami was asked to teach and take classes here starting in the fall of 2015. It seemed like a perfect way to continue his education and to get his family out of Yemen, where bombings by nearby Saudi Arabia were making life very difficult.
“The situation has gotten worse and worse,” Al-Dailami said. Saudi Arabia is bombing everything, “from humans and rocks, as they say in my country.” The American Embassy was shuttered, the airport in the capital city of Sanaa was destroyed and the seaport was closed. “They tried to destroy anything vital to the people.”
There are no jobs, no electricity, no water and almost no gas. Al-Dailami had to wait three days each time he needed gas.
“Life had stopped,” he said. “The middle class had become poor.”
Despite peace talks, the bombings by Saudi Arabia forces continued.
“We have a lot of oil in our country. They don’t want us to find it,” Al-Dailami said. “They are killing us.”
But now that Al-Dailami, his wife (an Arabic language teacher in Yemen) and three daughters (ages 10, 6 and 3) are safely in the U.S., he worries about the hatred stirred by President-elect Donald Trump toward Muslims from other lands.
“I don’t know what makes people hate so much,” Al-Dailami said. “I am a human being.”
He fears Trump’s characterization of Muslims as terrorists.
“My life, my wife and my kids are in danger again,” he said. “I hope that this is not true.”
That is a tough realization, considering Al-Dailami and his family gave up everything they had worked for in Yemen to come to America. He remembers nearly every detail of the horrific journey his family endured to reach Bowling Green.
Al-Dailami was told that when the Sanaa airport was repaired for flights, he would need to act quickly, leave everything behind, and be willing to spend his life’s savings on the journey.
“You need to prepare yourself and your family in one night,” he said he was told. “It was the matter of saving the life of my family.”
When they arrived at the airport, Al-Dailami was interrogated for a long time since his destination was the U.S. He was about to be arrested, when some of his former Yemeni students who were working security at the airport, vouched for his character.
“They helped me get out of that mess,” he said.
Al-Dailami’s young daughters were frightened to get on the plane, since their only experience with planes consisted of them dropping bombs into Yemen neighborhoods and killing people. “They knew planes came with death and destruction,” he said. “They connected the plane with death.”
The first leg of the trip went to Saudi Arabia, where Al-Dailami was interrogated again – probably due to his name being the same as many in the Houthi sect, which Saudi Arabia was fighting.
“I was very scared that in Saudi Arabia I would be arrested. It means I might have been killed,” he said. “I was counting the minutes, the seconds. In front of my kids, it would have been horrible.”
But he and his family were released and traveled the next leg to Jordan. There Al-Dailami had an interview at the American Embassy. He was told he needed to provide more money, but Al-Dailami could not get the money in the one-hour time frame he was given.
Meanwhile, BGSU officials in the program working with Al-Dailami to get his master’s, contacted the embassy and pushed for the family to be allowed to travel to the U.S. “He was an American who was calling, so they listened to him.”
But again, Al-Dailami was denied, with no explanation.
“We had sacrificed everything, for this,” he said. “I lost my hope.”
The family spent the next 15 days in Jordan, using the last of their money and putting off returning to Yemen. Al-Dailami went to the embassy five times, but the Visas were not approved.
“It meant committing suicide for me and my family,” Al-Dailami said of going back to his homeland. As they say in Yemen, the family was “between the wall and the saw,” he explained.
Al-Dailami decided to “face my destiny,” and contacted his advisors at BGSU to tell them he would not be able to make it. They told him they would welcome him in the spring, even though he had missed the beginning of the fall semester.
Then when his hope was gone, Al-Dailami got a message from the embassy this he request had been approved. “I couldn’t believe it. It doesn’t happen this way. If you are rejected, you are rejected.”
But the family was finally free to come to the U.S., and landed in Chicago where Al-Dailami was separated from his family. “I thought, am I arrested here?” After a few tense hours, he was released to go, and they took the final leg of their journey to Ohio.
Al-Dailami and his family have been welcomed with open arms in Bowling Green, he said.
“It’s been absolutely positive. Everyone tries to help,” he said, mentioning that people from BGSU furnished their home here. “I can never forget these things.”
Al-Dailami would love to remain at BGSU to get his doctorate. “It’s my dream to continue my studies,” he said. His ultimate goal is to become a professor at BGSU.
However, he and his family are here on two-year visas, with just nine months left. And getting visas renewed is getting increasing difficult, he said.
His children, who go to Crim Elementary School, have done well learning English – so much so that they sometimes correct their dad’s speech, he said. His wife is taking free classes to learn English. And the family has become part of the community.
“We are invited to many places,” he said.
Al-Dailami is still driven to become the person he was in Yemen, here in the U.S. He is not here for handouts, he stressed.
“I was successful in my country,” where he created a language center and supervised seven schools, he said. “I never thought I would be in this situation. I used to be a helper in my country.”
While Al-Dailami wants to remain in the U.S. for more studies, he also has a deep desire to return home once there is peace to visit his mother and siblings.
“I miss my mom’s food,” he said.
But the future is even more uncertain now, with Trump being elected, Al-Dailami said.
“I’m thinking things are going to turn to the worse,” he said. “How can Americans accept to be ruled by someone not like them? All the people have the right to live peacefully.”
Now his family left behind in Yemen is worried about Al-Dailami’s safety. “It’s so frightening. It is risky now,” being in America, he said.
