Marwan Nassar “ sst! Su mu k h ! ” Marwan whispered. “You see that creek by the cabins? We should go down to it and check it out.” “You sure? Technically it is out of camp boundaries you know? I
Victim turned survivor
would hate for us to get busted” I tried to tell him. But Marwan was stubborn; “Sumukh, we are here at camp everytown to experience life, and life is all about taking risks. Let’s go!” Reluctantly, I followed him. We climbed over the wooden fence,
and started to make our way down towards the creek. The weather was slightly chilly, but that didn’t stop us from dipping our feet into the water. “Man! This water is freezing!” I yelled, but. As we waded through the water, I started to no-
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tice the greenery around me. It was as if Marwan had introduced me to a completely new world. “See, I knew it’d be worth it” Marwan said. Marwan is one of the most involved people in Mountain View High School that I know of. He is a part of ASB, he does track, he is a black belt Taekwondo player, he is a part of the cheer team, all while managing to keep a well maintained social and academic life. He is one of the most likeable people that I know of. Never once have I seen someone willingly end a conversation with Marwan. It is usually Marwan who has to leave either to meet with someone else on an unofficial appointment or go to his cheer practice. But he never parts ways in a rude way; every single ‘bye’ that comes out of his mouth is said with sincere sadness and guiltiness of being the one who has to end a good conversation. No matter what the situation is, he will aways try his best to encourage people and lift up their spirits. Marwan genuinely cares about his peers and makes sure to do everything in his ability to keep them happy. I always see him wandering around the school hallways with his ukulele in his hand; it’s almost like the ukulele is a part of Marwan. ad h e Marwan was born in Egypt and he spent his childs, w d r o “ We had sw hood years in Cairo. At first, he was a very a shy child, but he achieved fame among his peers because of his handball feats. He used to play the back right position, and he was unique because he played with his 2
everyo ne.” As time passed, the situation got so da ngerous that Marwan’s community had to set up barricades on one side of the neighbourhood and stand guard on the other side to keep the criminals from entering. “We had swords, we had machetes, we had this baseball bat with spikes on it and we made homemade bombs, and we just stayed there the most of the night to make sure nobody entered”, Marwan recalls. During the revolution, Marwan’s previously divorced mother had married a person who had spent most of his life in the United States. As the situation in Egypt kept getting tenser and tenser, eventually Marwan’s mother and stepfather decided that they needed to move to America, so that Marwan and t jus we
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left hand. This made him one of the top players in the country. When Marwan was in sixth grade Egypt started to experience large scale protests to overthrow Mubarak from power, and Cairo was the heart of these protests. The protests started off peacefully, but soon became violent. The situation really worsened when some people under Mubarak’s orders broke into two of the largest prisons in Cairo and broke all the prisoners out. Marwan recalls the helplessness the people of Cairo felt at the time, “So now all the criminals from two of the biggest prisons in Egypt were on the streets, and no one had any idea how to stop them as both the police and the army were busy trying to stop the protests.” As expected, the crime rate increased, and very soon it was unsafe for Marwan to leave his house. He couldn’t even attend school, as Marwan said “Schools in Egypt were shut down for a while, as people would just randomly come in and kill
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ent his sisere d ” ter could live a better life there. When he moved to America and had to start school again, Marwan realized that he was academically behind compared to other kids his age. He had spend many months in Egypt without going to school, so he had started to forget some of his math 3
concepts, and had to repeat those classes. “I had been out of school for so long that I had forgotten most of the math I had learnt. So I did really bad on that test, so I had to repeat a couple of math classes that I had already taken in Egypt.” Marwan recalled during our interview. Clearly, he must have felt a lot of pressure to make good use of the opportunities he had gotten from moving to America. Marwan also experienced being bullied a little bit in eighth grade. “The first week people were obsessing over me, ‘this guy coming here from Egypt, how cool is that!’ So then people were kinda mean to me, and I didn’t have very many friends.” Marwan said. Because of all the uncertainty and all the anxiety, Marwan used to act very shy. One of his good friends Young Kim recalls, “He was still
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shy in a way, he still didn’t really know how to open up back in that time, but as years progressed, it wasn’t really him opening up but it was rather him learning more things.” Marwan feels like he would’ve had a much better transition adjusting to the life in America if he hadn’t had to deal with all of the emotional trauma before leaving Egypt. As the days passed Marwan began to get more and more adjusted to his life in America. He started to learn more about the culture, and his language skills developed as well. As he started to open up more, people around him realize how mature and deep he was. He started enlightening his peers in many d i f fe r e nt ways, When I
was asked his peers about this, they didn’t even need to think; they instantly had examples at hand. I asked Young about this and he burst out an answer even before I had finished my question, “Oh all the time really, because we would talk a lot individually, personally, and then whenever I say something, he would try to ask me questions that would change my perspective to the other person’s perspective. If I would just blindly complement someone, like ‘Oh my god I love this person’ Marwan would ask me, ‘oh what about that person do you like, and if you were different from what you are right now would you still love that person?’ Questions like that helped me see the bigger picture.” Young said. This just illuminates how much Marwan had grown from when he was a shy kid struggling to speak.
Marwan carries his ukulele with him all the time. Cheer practice, school classes, be it day or night, he will always have his ukulele sticking out of his backpack. I feel like the ukulele is a part of Marwan, not physically but emotionally. The ukulele resembles his spirit, sweet yet strong. Everytime he plays his ukulele, it is as though he is spreading his good vibes, sharing his joyful spirit with others. The ukulele resembles the happiness that he is trying to spread to the world. When we started off our first interview I was completely clueless as to what Marwan’s future plans were. I always assumed that he wanted to live a normal life like the rest of us: a job, a house, a house, spending his weekends bowling with friends. Either that or going back to Egypt to get some clo-
sure from the way he was abruptly uprooted from there. But his answer surprised me. “I don’t particularly want to go back.” he said, “I’ve already been there, you know. I want to go somewhere new, somewhere in South America, to help out through the peace corps.” All the trauma he had suffered from the past, I thought that he would want to stay away from all the chaos. I was under the impression that Marwan was the victim and America was his saviour. But Marwan saw America as his way to transform from a victim to a saviour. I never imagined that Marwan would want to leave his peaceful life in America, but he does; he wants to help people, and that is his strongest quality.
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WORK CITED: Bhagat, Chetan. Five Point Someone: What Not to Do at IIT, a Novel. New
Delhi: Rupa, 2004. Print.
Kim, Young. Personal interview, 5 Oct. 2015. Knell, Yolande. “Egypt’s Revolution: 18 Days in Tahrir Square - BBC
News.”BBC News. BBC News, 25 Jan. 2012. Web. 05 Oct. 2015.
Mendoza, Mark. Personal interview, 8 Oct. 2015. Nassar, Marwan. Personal interview, 16 Sep. 2015. Nassar, Marwan. Personal interview, 12 Oct. 2015. Reed, Stanley. “The Battle for Egypt.” Foreign Affairs 72.4 (1993): 94-107.
JSTOR. Web. 05 Oct. 2015.
Shehata, Dina. “The Fall of the Pharaoh: How Hosni Mubarak’s Reign Came
to an End.” Foreign Affairs 90.3 (2011): 26+. JSTOR. Web. 05 Oct. 2015.
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