20 Putting Down New Roots

After our wedding, Dua and I left Amman to fly back Victoria, where I was still finishing my PhD. Dua began volunteering as a Qur’an teacher at the mosque, and we went to community potluck events. She was also taking English courses, and while this helped with her integration into a new town, the suspicious looks she received and the language barrier she encountered made it hard to feel comfortable. Gradually, we made our two-bedroom apartment on Gorge Road into a home, preparing a room for the child that was on the way. Soon, the baby book started to fill up with pictures of moments with Dana.

Parenthood inspired bittersweet reflection on the challenges my own parents had faced. The extremes of joy and fear that come with marriage and parenthood make everything important, and my focus became fixed on a small group of people. My parents and the community in Edmonton had struggled to fulfill their dreams for their families, yet, like so many Indigenous families in North America who have lost their land, the ghosts of the past haunted my father and divided us from each other. With the guidance of those who saw me struggle as a young man, my way of coping was to connect the past, present, and future through my family and faith. Victoria, BC was a haven where my future career started to take shape. My academic interests in engineering and business were clarifying with purpose—I wanted to pursue how using data could provide more efficient healthcare.

In 2006, I was at school, working on my dissertation when the phone rang at home. Dua answered. It was Bakheet al-Dossari, the chair of health informatics at a new university in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He was calling to recruit me for their university. After chatting about the department’s recruiting effort, Dua told him she would pass on the message to me. When I got home, I called him. I explained that I was still finishing my degree and that I would consider the offer after I graduated. Dua was excited about the prospect of moving closer to her family in Jordan, but rather than immediately making this move back to the Middle East, we went in a different direction—to northern British Columbia.

Rather than go to Riyadh, I accepted a contract as a planning and research analyst for the Northern Health Authority, working in an office in downtown Prince George. I helped develop health information systems, and my understanding of the situation in Palestine deepened as I witnessed the suffering of the First Nations people around me. I was trying to enhance health care services by gathering and interpreting data, but the chronic and acute health problems in First Nations communities—like diabetes, addictions, and suicide—were issues that could not be adequately addressed by the Health Authority. The source of the pain was much deeper—in the loss of land and family.

For Dua, these moves, first from Amman to Victoria, a small university city on Vancouver Island, and then to a very remote rural community in Prince George, came with major challenges. Dua was following a path similar to that of my parents, who had been among the first in our family to arrive in North America. As we approached Prince George for the first time, we could see and smell the pulp mill in the town that would become our home.

The past, present, and future of the land on which Prince George is situated is connected to the Lheidli T’enneh First Nation, and many people from the surrounding nations live in this northern city. We soon learned about the many Indigenous women who had been murdered or gone missing along Highway 16 between Prince George and Prince Rupert, and that this stretch of road had become known as the Highway of Tears. Our hearts emptied—how sad that there was such extreme suffering here and in other parts of the world. I was just beginning to understand the depths of care and responsibility of family life. Dua, as a new immigrant, saw these connections more clearly than I did, and it was her concern for people and the suffering she saw that gave her a reason to stay and complete her studies in social work. As my work exposed me to the realities of health and life in northern communities, it became clear to me that Arab refugees are not the only people who have faced forced displacement from traditional lands and intentional settler policies of trying to decrease life chances in emerging generations. Dua and Dana were the centre of my life, and we were determined to make a home in this Western world. One weekend in 2007, to expand Dua’s experiences of Canadian culture, we decided to check out Barkerville, a “historical” tourist village that is, according to the promotional website, the “largest living-history museum in western North America.” Going to this simulated frontier town, which celebrates settlers, felt surreal. I couldn’t help but think of Canada Park, an Israeli national park that contains the ruins of three Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel in 1967 and that is funded by the Canadian Jewish community. As Dua waited in line at a vendor, she noticed a stranger staring at her hijab. He said, “I guess not much has changed over the centuries.” Why, in public places where families go to enjoy fresh air, on the bus, or in the streets, is there a creeping entitlement to single her out and to mock her choices? As the remoteness of this northern region started to weigh on us, we began to plan our relocation closer to the traditional land of our people.

We moved to Saudi Arabia in 2009, and we now live in the Middle East like our parents did. I work at the University for Health Sciences in Riyadh, which was established in 2005. My family in Canada is concerned about us living in the shifting political sands of the Middle East, but the conditions in Saudi Arabia and Palestine are like night and day.

After visiting Palestine and now working in Saudi with many other Palestinians closer to my father’s age, I am beginning to understand why my dad did not talk more about his difficulties and struggles. At times, he was enthusiastic about his memories, his face coming alive, his dark eyes bright. He is one of the few living Palestinian refugees who were born and lived in Palestine as it was in 1948. In my curiosity and need for connection, I try to drag information out of him. At times, I feel more like an interrogator than a son trying to discover his own past. I am not always sure of what my dad thinks about me raising a family in the Middle East. He is proud of what I have achieved, but every so often, he asks me questions that reveal his struggle to understand the new world he finds himself in.

“Tell me again … what is health informatics?” he will ask. “What do I tell my family and friends that you do? I really don’t understand it.”

My father may not have understood my reasons for moving to Saudi Arabia, but I had spent so little time in the Arab world, and I had such a strong desire to connect with the cultures and lands of my Arabic family. Dua and I had grown up in different environments, and I wanted to close the culture gap between us. In Riyadh, Dua was closer to her family and found herself in an environment she could relate to with greater ease. Moving to the Middle East was the right choice for me, Dua, and our children.

Living in Saudi Arabia helped me understand Arabic culture. I developed immense respect for the Saudi people. They taught me to be closer to my parents and to my wife. People were friendly and treated me with respect, which had not always been my experience up to that point in my life. We named our youngest daughter Loujain, which means “silver water” in Arabic. Loujain is our third child, and in 2017 we were blessed with a son, who we named Said after my father, as tradition requires. As parents, we try hard to bridge the gap between world our parents grew up in and the world our children will inherit. Time will tell how successful we have been.

I did not understand how North American I was until we started sharing a home in the Arabian Gulf. Moving to the Middle East in 2009 helped me understand Dua better, how she thinks, and how her Palestinian Arab identity that is connected to Jordan feels more grounded than my family, who ended up so far away in Alberta. As we criss-cross the ocean from Canada to the Arab Muslim world and back, we survive in places where we half-belong. Dua and our children have been changing locations, caught between push and pull forces; like my parents moving their children back to Jordan in 1985.

We have been trying to fit into an old new place, and not for the first time moving constantly, living with terrifying uncertainty and shouldering the burdens of uprooted children and lost ancestry. Dua and I pray this will work to the advantage of our children—they can already read both Arabic, right to left, and English, left to right. Like many other families here, Dua and I plan to benefit from our time in the Gulf and eventually, her family and community in Jordan.

Now when I return to Canada, I go as Dr. Mowafa Househ, presenting papers at conferences about health care and technology. In my research, I focus on the use of Artificial Intelligence, social media, and mobile technology to promote patient care, improve health literacy, and with a more recent focus on mental health. Health informatics is a combination of information/computer science and health care, health medicine, and biomedicine. It covers everything from clinical guidelines and medical technologies to communication systems. In one project, I explored Islamic e-health, showing that it focuses primarily on spiritual health. To complement this existing trend, I investigated health information systems used during the Hajj to monitor the blood-glucose levels of Muslim patients fasting during the month of Ramadan. Seeing the life chances of all my relations severely harmed by displacement and hostility, has motivated my interested in digital health innovation that can scale solutions in a way that leaves no one on the margins. No one left behind.

The sharing of perfume samples in the refugee camp in Jordan, the arrangements my uncle required to seek treatment outside of Palestine, the attention to my injured eye in Edmonton, the kindness of strangers shown to my mother, and the care provided for my growing family as we patched together our wellbeing across regions—these moments and many others shared in this memoir are behind my drive to survive and address the harm of illness as well as the injustice of this intergenerational international catastrophe.

My father tries to express the impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the violence on his life. He says “I did not grow up in a religious place. I grew up in a refugee camp.” Meanwhile, my independent mother has raised five children to value the peace that can be found in Islam to heal these wounds. Witnessing life under occupation in Palestine burned this need to heal into my mind, just as the grief and fear I felt standing outside our vandalized mosque as a teen in Edmonton remains in my heart.