Page 14 - Desert Lightning News So. AZ Edition, Oct 5 2018

14 October 2018 Desert Lightning News www.aerotechnews.com/davis-monthanafb
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Airman refugee recalls horrors of life before
Story and photo by Senior Airman RIDGE SHAN
56th Fighter Wing Public Affairs
She remembers the smell. Without a functioning sanitation system, raw sewage lined the rows of tents in the camp. Families would shower by poking holes into cups and pouring small amounts of their rationed water into them. Not enough to clean a child.
She had no friends, save for her siblings. With no schools, the camp could not bring children together or teach them proper language skills, and spending time outside of her tent without her parents was unthink- able. Children would go missing. She had witnessed some being raped.
These memories are vivid for her. A recent trip to a Jamba Juice had stoked a particu- larly powerful one after a sip of a wheatgrass beverage. The fields around the camp were wheatgrass, and she could remember their taste, the way they felt against her skin as she ran through them in one of the few ways she could play.
“It took me back, and I saw myself run- ning through the fields, just this little kid running,” said Tech. Sgt. Odette Youkhanna Esho, 56th Communications Squadron knowledge management cell NCO in charge. “We didn’t have toys or shoes. We didn’t have anything. It was an inhospitable place, just mud and dirt everywhere, cold. It smelled nasty. But that [wheatgrass] was kind of my safe haven, to be able to run in it and eat it as a kid.”
Esho is a communications specialist at Luke Air Force Base. Her day-to-day respon- sibilities are primarily administrative in nature, but she manages a unit which guides the flow and distribution of communications and information integral to base cyber opera- tions. As well, she doubles as an additional duty first sergeant, a position in which she is responsible for the well-being and discipline of her entire squadron.
Her commander, Maj. Nathaniel Edwards, testifies to her crucial role and hard work in the organization.
“Tech sergeant Esho epitomizes what we should all strive for in terms of profession- alism and dedication,” he said. “Esho, time and time again, puts in maximum effort and ensures that customers are satisfied. [She] aims for the stars every time.”
Esho stands at a firm 5-feet 6-inches tall. With raven-black hair pulled neatly into a bun and sunken almond-eyes that flit from object to object as she speaks, she doesn’t impose a particularly intimidating stature. She is self-admittedly shy, with an unending propensity for politeness, even to complete strangers. She is quick to gratitude, and has no aversion to apologizing for perceived slights. However, these traits belie a stern professionalism and a determination that is uncompromising, and behind her unas- suming exterior lies a grittiness born out of extraordinary circumstances.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a series of deadly conflicts and wars, both within Iraq and involving its neighboring countries, displaced tens of thousands of Iraqis, primar- ily ethnic and religious minorities. Many of
these individuals were forced to flee into safer regions as refugees. As a young child, Esho and her family were among them.
“Iraq in general was an absolutely ter- rible place,” Esho said. “It just wasn’t very welcoming or accepting of you if you were of a different culture, or a different race, or a different religion.”
Esho is ethnically Assyrian and was born on the outskirts of the Iraqi city of Mosul, in what used to be the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh. Nineveh was the capital of the Neo- Assyrian Empire, an Iron-age civilization which ruled over a vast domain spanning from Egypt to Turkey between the 7th and 10th centuries B.C.
As a unique ethnic identity, the Assyr- ians have existed for thousands of years and continue to inhabit many of the places they originate from today, often as minori- ties and marginalized populations in their own ancestral homelands. To make matters worse, the primary religion of most Assyr- ians is Christianity, which has traditionally made them particular targets for oppression and violence by the various majority groups which have ruled over their homelands in countries like Syria, Iran, and Iraq.
Esho’s family faced these brutal realities doubly, living in Iraq under the oppressive rule of the regime of Saddam Hussein. Her father, under the threat of death both to him- self and his family, was forced into military service, where he eventually became an elite commando in Saddam’s special operations forces.
“When the Iraq-Iran war happened, he spent a lot of time in Iran,” Esho said. “Because he was Christian, they deployed him out with the other Christian men first, before the Muslims. The majority of the Iraqis who lost their lives during the war were Assyrians.”
Because of the danger of his forced service and the constant threat to his family, Esho’s father knew their time in Iraq was running out. While Esho’s siblings were born in Bagh- dad, where their father was stationed, Esho was born in Nineveh as the family moved north in preparation to leave the country.
“Things continued to get worse,” Esho said. “When 1990-1991 came around with the Kuwaiti invasion, the same thing hap- pened, here comes Saddam sending troops into Kuwait who happen to be Christian, and my dad decided that this was no life to live.”
According to Esho, the Arabs and Kurds in the region, knowing that Christian Assyr- ian families were leaving, would paint the letter N on the doors of Christian houses, representing the Arabic derogatory term for Christians, Nazarene.
“We left with nothing,” Esho said. “We didn’t take televisions, furniture, vehicles, nothing. Just whatever you could carry on your backs and through the mountains is what you left with. The ‘N’ painted on the door indicated that a house was free to be ransacked, and families returning to those homes were free to be killed. When ISIS took over Iraq, they actually continued do- ing that.”
Esho’s family left with several other families and traveled north by night, moving from Christian village to Christian village
Senior Airman Ridge Shan
Tech. Sgt. Odette Youkhanna Esho, 56th Communications Squadron NCO in charge of knowledge management, stands at rest for a portrait Sept. 9 at White Tank Moun- tain Regional Park. As a child, Esho escaped from Iraq with her family as refugees after her father deserted from Saddam Hussein’s military. After spending two years in a Turkish refugee camp, Sergeant Esho was granted asylum in the United States.
or taking refuge in caves in the mountains. Esho was the youngest of three children, and along with her brother, were young enough that they had to be carried.
Eventually, they reached Turkey. When they were picked up by authorities, their father was separated from them while they were placed in a refugee camp. They didn’t see him again for weeks.
“They actually separated all of the men,” Esho said. “It was kind of like a vetting sys- tem. The Turkish government was trying to control who they were allowing across the border. Some of them never came back.”
He was eventually brought back to the camp in a bus, where Esho and her family waited to greet him. When he stepped off, he looked emaciated and tired.
“My dad doesn’t talk about what happened very much,” Esho said. “Every now and again, he’ll say some stuff that is shocking. Stuff about how they were beaten, starved and stripped naked.”
According to Esho, life in the refugee camp was highly regimented. There were wake- up calls, and health and aid organizations would come to do wellness checks. Despite this, people often got sick. The lack of waste disposal meant that trash and excrement would build up, and diseases would spread. Esho’s mother would cut her kids’ hair extra short, to stave off the threat of lice. Each month, each family in the camp would be provided food rations, which included a bag of rice and some vegetables.
“We didn’t have the luxury of having meat or poultry or anything like that,” Esho said. “You had to be very careful about how much you ate, because you could run out.”
Esho’s family ultimately lived in the refugee camp under these conditions for more than two years, as her father worked to secure asylum for them in the west. Many of the families Esho traveled with, including relatives of her mother, were unable to deal with life in the camp and returned to Iraq. Esho says that they risked death in exchange
for a chance at normalcy again. Eventually, Esho’s father’s unique knowl-
edge of Iraqi military practice helped to secure her family asylum in the United States. When the day finally came for them to leave, buses arrived to transport them out of the camp.
“We got transferred to Istanbul, and from Istanbul we went to Germany,” Esho said. “That bus ride from the refugee camp to Is- tanbul was kind of a blur, but it was joyous. Music was being played. People were happy. I was sitting on my mom’s lap and everything was fine. I had my family.”
From Istanbul, the family flew to Frank- furt, Germany, and from there, boarded a plane to America. They landed in Chicago at O’Hare International Airport, where other relatives from her father’s side of the family who had previously escaped Iraq were wait- ing to greet them.
“Some of them had escaped the same way,” Esho said. “Through Turkey, or through Greece, or through Jordan. Different parts where they were able to seek refuge before making the journey to America.”
Esho credits her father’s bravery and perseverance for their survival.
“Honestly, everything that I have is be- cause of him,” Esho said. “The strength, the motivation, the inspiration. Everything is because of my dad and the hard work he went through. What I witnessed as a kid was horrible. I saw terrible things that you shouldn’t see as a child. I can only imagine the [post-traumatic stress disorder], what he saw, what my mom saw, what it was truly like from an adult’s eyes.”
During the early years of her time as an American, Esho’s father worked three differ- ent jobs in order to support the family, while her mother raised the kids from home until they were old enough to attend school.
After Esho graduated from high school, she moved to Arizona where her older sister
See Refugee, Page 16