Okay, okay

So there are people reading. This is good to know. I got comments from everyone from my favorite NYC blogger (who should take her own sentiment to heart and post more often) to my high school physics teacher (who would like you to know that Berkeley High is amazing). And my mother, of course. I will keep posting on whatever happens in life, and at times when that's nothing I'll rail against bad media coverage and stupid politicians. Capiche?

I talked to a man this morning who has just sold his house in Baghdad. He moved to Syria when he started getting threatening letters at his home here, but it took him two years to sell the house. Even then, he sold it for less than one-third of its estimated value. In fact, he sold the nine-room home for just enough money to be able to afford the monthly rent on a two-room apartment in Damascus (his menial salary as a salesman pays for other life expenses). He is a Sunni whose neighborhood in Baghdad was taken over by the Mahdi Army, the major Shiite group. Fortunately for him, his Shiite next-door neighbor helped him sell the house and wired the money to him in Syria.

The man started crying when talking about his home, which his parents built a few years before he was born. He compared the feeling to losing a child -- not because he is materialistic (he clearly isn't), but because a lifetime's worth of memories were made there. He had planned to raise his children there, then pass the house to his oldest son, just as his father did. When I asked him to describe the house physically, he couldn't do it. He started to mention the backyard with the swing set and the bedroom with the secret crawl space, but he stopped and said he couldn't keep talking about it. He was in tears.

The people who have moved out of Baghdad have lost nearly everything -- family members and friends, their sense of security and freedom and the city they love. For this man, his home was the physical reminder of how much the last four years have taken. I nearly cried too.