The Amherst Wire

It’s September 2003 in Iraq. There is a war going on. Huda Yehia is traveling unprotected on the streets of Baghdad, wary of everyone and everything around her. There is a bounty of $200 on her head.

Three years later she sits in the translation center at the University of Massachusetts, continuing the job that put a bounty on her head – translating. She also teaches and bakes at Rao’s Coffee shop in downtown Amherst. Her life has changed drastically but she carries dozens of stories with her about her work with Americans.

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“I was called a traitor in front of my face a couple of times actually. Not by Iraqis, but by other Arabs. I would tell them, ‘You don’t know me. You don’t know the quality of my translation, you’ve never served with me, and you’ve never been to Iraq in the first place. Why would you judge me, how dare you judge me?’”

Huda grew up in Baghdad with her mother and two younger brothers. After graduating from college in 2003, Huda was in need of a job. Finding a job wasn’t easy, as the war had just started months earlier with the American occupation of Iraq.

With a degree in translation, Huda went to the Green Zone looking for a job and was sent to the police academy in Baghdad. Despite rumors that women who worked in the army were “bad,” she took a job as a translator and kept it for 20 months. She kept her job under wraps, only letting immediate family know. It was too early to know how people felt about the Americans.

Huda may not have faced discrimination from members of the army, but she did from outsiders. In Iraq, she explained, the entrance scores to get into college are set lower for men than women, making it easier for men to gain admission. The assumption prevails that women will leave college to have children or do so just after they graduate, so preference is given to male applicants.

So one day when an Iraqi man came in to her office and saw Huda sitting with three bosses, all male soldiers, it was too much for him to handle.

He told Huda, “I don’t want you to translate for me. Go bring a man to translate for me.” Huda told this to her boss, who was upset by the man and said, “Huda, tell him, it’s either you or the door.”

Huda relayed the message. “I’m sorry, sir. You’ll have to deal, but all the other translators are gone,” she recalls telling the man. “They are either at lunch or went home.” He eventually agreed and she translated for him for about three hours. She made a good impression. The next day, the man returned and specifically requested her.

As a translator, Huda often had to sort out miscommunication along the language barrier. One particular incident sticks out in her mind.

“I had one of the soldiers running to me, running into the building,” she recalls, “And I said ‘Hey man, what’s wrong?’” The soldier told her a woman had taken off her shoes and chased after him. Huda asked what he had said to prompt this and he said, “I told her she was the most beautiful thing.”

Huda then asked him to repeat what he said in Arabic.

“He said the word and I said, ‘Man, you just told her she was a prostitute,’” said Huda.

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The job had its risks. In times of war, in an occupied country, people often have their backs up against the wall and few options, Huda said

“Back in ‘03 and ‘04 everything was under American control, so where would someone go? There was nowhere,” said Huda. “If you want to work with the government, the government is the Americans.”

Huda said she had never felt more afraid in her life as she was during her time spent working with the U.S. Army.

“The real nightmare started when I had to go home and leave the base,” said Huda.

She would have to walk home from the safety of the base in civilian clothing, in a time when translators had bounties on their heads. “There is nothing anyone can do to provide any protection … at the academy I was at there were 200 translators. If you assign two security guards to each translator, that’s 400 guards. They’d be an even bigger target.”

It was in part the American occupation that made the walk home so difficult and dangerous, she said. The infrastructure of Baghdad had been transformed by the occupation, placing civilians at risk.

“Honestly,” said Huda, “you didn’t change the circumstances to a better situation. I think now people are suffering even more because back in the day you knew who your enemy was. Not anymore. You don’t know who’s who. You have all these murders and assassinations going on that you don’t hear about, and people disappearing and being scattered and found later on in Baghdad. The entire numbers of those people, we really don’t know.”

In 2005, Huda received a scholarship to enroll at UMass. She accepted it and was the first and only one from her family to travel to the United States. She misses her mother and her brothers, who watched out for her back home.

“They are happy for me, and my brother says ‘It’s one less person to worry about,’” she said.

One thing Huda loves about Amherst is the safety.

“It’s a shame people have to go through wars to appreciate how much they can have, and what they have,” she said. “I feel soldiers have the most appreciation to what they have over here, because they have been to Iraq. And it’s a whole different story back home in Iraq. People are happy with just a few hours of electricity. But here if you don’t have whipped cream on your coffee you are complaining. And so it’s really a shame. It’s a shameful thing to [have to] serve in a war in order to appreciate what you have.”