Rouada, Rani and Rania are the three teenaged children of Iman and Sabah, Chaldeans from Baghdad who arrived not long ago in San Diego to join a large Chaldean community living in the citys green suburbs and along its freeways. They say that they feel at home in Southern California, where the dry climate and sandy soil reminds them of their country. San Diego, like Detroit, Phoenix and Chicago, is home to many of these Iraqi Catholics, descendents of the rulers of Mesopotamia, who still use the Aramaic language and follow the teachings of Rome.
The Chaldeans did not fare well under Saddam Hussein; thousands were arrested, imprisoned and tortured. Those who were able to escape fled for the most part to the United States, where during the 1980s and 1990s, they were accepted as refugees and resettled.
Imans family was not among those able to get away. Like many of the Chaldeans, he was a merchant and kept a furniture shop, making many of the pieces himself. Life in Baghdad was hard and often frightening, but the family had good neighbours, both Muslim and Chaldean. Then, in 1998, the repression of the Chaldeans intensified. One day their local church was stoned, and though the police were called, no one came.
No one came either when a gang of Muslim boys pushed Imans hand into the blades of a furniture polisher and he lost one joint of a finger. Then the day came when Imans shop was attacked and set alight and his entire stock went up in flames. What he did not know at the time was that his youngest daughter Rouada, then aged 8, was playing in the yard at the back. A piece of burning timber caught the side of her face and badly burned her cheek. Iman decided that the time had come to leave.
The days of applying to the US for resettlement and leaving Iraq in an orderly way were long since over. Iman used $1,600 of his savings to buy exit visas for Turkey, planning to travel on to Greece where his mother was already settled, living with cousins. Her own flight had been precipitated by a feud between her husband and Uday, Saddam Husseins son, over a trucking business, which had taken him into jail for a while. The family now took a bus and what belongings they could carry and left. It was March 1998.
It is Rania, who is 18 and speaks good English, who tells the story of what happened next. We settled in Athens, and my two aunts who had accompanied us got jobs working in a shoe factory. We all lived together, with my grandparents and cousins, but it was very hard. My grandfather got ill and had to have his legs amputated. For a while we tried to sell scratch cards on the street, and we children left school and went round with my father, trying to find people to buy them. He couldnt find any other work. Then my grandfather died, and we tried to think of ways to get to America.
The first to make the journey were Sabah and the two younger children. Using their by now much diminished savings, and borrowing from friends and relations, they flew to Germany, then to France, and on to Mexico. From Mexico City they caught a bus to Tijuana, on the border with San Diego and found a human smuggler to take them across. Once in El Cajon, the centre for the Chaldean community in San Diego, they asked for asylum. Six months later they were accepted as refugees and allowed to settle.
At this stage Rania and her father were still in Greece. Having managed to save a small amount of money, they decided to try the same route: Germany, France, Mexico. But when they reached Tijuana they were arrested by the Mexican police, together with a hundred other Chaldeans trying the same route. Because there were so many of us, Rania explains, because we were Chaldeans and Catholics, they thought we might be terrorists. They put us on a bus back to Mexico City and there they put us in prison. My father got ill, because he couldnt eat the food, and I wasnt allowed to stay with him. None of us could speak a word of Spanish. My father then developed heart problems. I was terrified he would die.
For three months, Rania and her father remained in jail. They saw each other once a day, during an exercise period. But they had got word to the rest of the family in San Diego, and arrangements were finally made for their release and transfer to California. To live, Iman got a job washing cars and Sabah went to work in a factory, packing fashion accessories.
That was a year ago. Since then, other members of the family have been arriving, asking for asylum, going through the process of acceptance and resettlement. The grandmother joined them, then the aunts, then the cousins. The children have started going to school, and Rani is learning basketball. They live in a series of interconnecting flats overlooking the Chaldean Church of St Michael in El Cajon , and slowly, day by day, they explore their new life. Rouada, who is 13, has joined the choir.
But it is not easy, and nor, they know, will it ever be. Iman cannot find work, though he goes out, every day, with his sister, in search of a job. And while they come to terms with what America is like, they think of those who they have left behind, other brothers and sisters and cousins, too poor to find the money for the journey, and whom they fear they may never see again.
