No. 3 · The taxi driver

We escaped the Gulf War. But the taxi driver who befriended us in Baghdad was sent to fight in it.

My last story ended with my family leaving Kuwait behind. But I often wondered if that taxi driver survived the war he did not choose to fight.

So, let me return to Baghdad for a moment.

To one person I have never forgotten.

We spent weeks there, waiting.

A city bracing for war.

And here is what I remember most, all these years later.

The Iraqi people were kind.

Warm. Loud at times. Even lighthearted in the middle of their own catastrophe.

One taxi driver drove our family around the city.

He was a jovial man, probably in his forties.

Near the end of our time there, he told us he was being sent to fight.

Conscripted into a war he had not chosen.

Before we left, he drove us to the ruins of Babylon, the legendary home of the Hanging Gardens.

We saw the Lion of Babylon.

Thousands of years of history stood before us, unmoved, as a modern war gathered around it.

I have never forgotten our driver.

For years, I wondered whether he survived.

Eventually, we were allowed to leave Baghdad.

I still do not know why the Iraqi government suddenly permitted some diplomatic families to go.

But it did.

We flew to Amman just days before the bombing began.

We had made it.

We escaped the worst of it.

Our driver may not have.

A government can be at war with the world while its people are simply people.

Kind people.

Trying to get through the day, to survive, to raise their families, much like the rest of us.

I was still only 12, but I grew up considerably during those months.

I began to understand that the world was not fair to everyone.

That much of life was governed by chance. Where we were born. What happened around us. Whether we escaped when others could not.

I think my philosophical meanderings began there.

But I also came to believe that leaving everything to chance is no way to honour the extraordinary odds of being alive.

The lesson:

Do not waste today simply because tomorrow’s forecast is foggy.

To be continued…

WAYPOINTS · No. 3

A series of inflection points on a journey still being written.