Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, to find my sweetie, Amina Alzahrani, either crying or tossing and turning. That's when I know for sure that she's dreaming of her old life in Yanbu, Saudi Arabia. As liberated as my sweetie says she is, I can see in her eyes that Amina is still haunted by the country and people she left behind. Those nightmares plague Amina, and I feel absolutely powerless to stop them. It's not a good feeling at all, folks.
My name is Tyrone Ferguson, and I'm a young African-American man living in the City of Ottawa, Ontario. I moved there a few months ago from my hometown of Buffalo, New York. I'm pursuing my MBA at the Sprott School of Business of Carleton University, which I transferred to after graduating from Buffalo State College. I'm back in school, and living with a wonderful lady, my sweet Amina.
The problem is that we're both damaged souls, in our own way. Amina Alzahrani told me about her control freak parents, Ahmed and Khadija Hassan, and her former husband, Samir Alzahrani, and the awful way they all treated her back in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We didn't get into too many details, but I got the picture.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a very different world from Canada and the United States of America, that's for damn sure. The things I read about Saudi Arabia's draconian laws restricting women's lives stunned me. Women can't drive over there, nor can they leave the house without a male companion. Supposedly for their own protection, of course. And last but not least? They cannot show their faces in public and must wear a burka everywhere they go. That is some bullshit if you ask me.
Amina Alzahrani doesn't like it when I criticize her ancestral homeland, so I don't bother. I just wish things would go back to normal between us. When I go to bed with my sweetie in my arms, I want to spend a lovely night with her. Being woken up in the middle of the night with Amina weeping and shouting panic-stricken words in Arabic doesn't make for a very restful or lovely night. Not at all.
Look, I'm not trying to be insensitive here but I do wish Amina would talk to me, or to someone, perhaps a professional, about the issues plaguing her. I can relate to some of what she must be going through. I'm an orphan and grew up in the foster care system of the State of New York. I bounced around from one foster home to another. You name it, I endured it. I got beat up, battered and worse. A lot of the people who take in foster brats like myself do so just for the paycheck from the government. They don't give a damn about us. I met a lot of people like that.
In spite of the hardships that life threw my way, I learned to be strong and overcome. That's why I won an academic scholarship to Buffalo State College, even though I never received any support from my foster parents. I graduated from B.S.C. with honors and came all the way to Ontario, Canada, for my MBA and also because I wanted to get out of America for a while.
Every five minutes a racist white cop shoots an unarmed black man somewhere in the U.S. and President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder refuse to use the Department of Justice to prosecute these racist bozos. As a black man, the U.S. seemed a very unsafe and treacherous place to me. Canada is supremely boring and full of annoying, passive-aggressive people but I don't hear about minorities getting shot left and right. I guess I'm in a somewhat better place.