Debbie, called “Miss A” by her students, closed the door and went back into her classroom, to the tall bookshelf she had there. She picked out one of her favorite books, The Hundred Dresses, by Eleanor Estes. In it, Wanda Petronski, a poor Polish immigrant girl, is ridiculed by her classmates because of her funny name, imperfect accent, and limited wardrobe.
“Today we’re going to do things a little bit differently, class. Instead of reading independently, I’m going to read this story aloud to you,” Debbie told the squirming bunch before her. “It’s one of my favorites.”
“Mine too!” shouted a student in the back.
“Well, good, let’s get started,” Debbie said, smiling to hide the anxiety starting to build up in her body. She held the book open and out to the side so the students could get a good look at the beautiful illustrations as the story unfolded. “Today, Monday, Wanda Petronski was not in her seat. But nobody, not even Peggy and Madeline, the girls who started all the fun, noticed her absence.”
Debbie read these words, but all the while there was a second story unfolding in her increasingly anxious mind. She wondered who was responsible for the plane flying into the tower. Was it an accident? A recreational pilot somehow way off course? “Wanda did not sit there because she was rough and noisy. On the contrary she was very quiet and rarely said anything at all.”
Debbie tried to recall all of the recent terrorist attacks. The suicide bombing of the USS Cole in October of 2000 in Yemen came to mind. Could this be one as well? It was awful to even entertain the thought. She wondered if any of her students’ parents worked in the towers. “Then sometimes they waited for Wanda—to have fun with her.”
There was a second knock on the door. It was the same parent. Debbie set the book down gently and assured her students that she’d be right back, then headed out into the hallway again. “The second tower was hit. We no longer think it was an accident.”
Debbie shuddered.
“Debbie, don’t lose it!” said the parent. “You are fortunate that you can’t see anything from your windows. In the classrooms facing the skyline, the kids are by the windows, and some of the teachers are in a state of shock. You have to be strong for your kids.”
As she walked back inside, Debbie spotted smoke trailing far across the sky outside the hallway’s windows. She picked up the book again and said, “Now, where were we?” hoping the students didn’t notice that her arm was shaking as she held up the book. “Ah, I see. Here we were,” she said, and began reading again. “The next day, Tuesday, Wanda was not in school either.”
Just steps away from P.S. 261 lies the stretch of Atlantic Avenue known to the local Arab community as “Little Syria.” Tourist buses stop by every day to let their passengers buy baked goods, spices, and other treats at favorite vendors. The finger-pointing and scapegoating had taken hold just hours after the attacks.
As the children continued to get picked up through the early afternoon, one Arab American mother approached Debbie in hysterics. “What happened?” asked Debbie, trying to calm her down and find a quiet place to talk away from the other parents.
“As I was walking toward the building, a tall man came out from a group of parents standing there and said to me, ‘It’s you and your people who’ve done this to us! You bastards!’”
“People are angry right now,” Debbie told the woman, giving her a hug. “They don’t know how to deal with it.” Debbie wished she could do more to comfort the aggrieved woman. She hated to see the ways in which the attacks were already breeding misunderstandings between people who were otherwise neighbors, dependent on one another to keep their communities and schools vibrant.
Once all the children had been picked up by their parents or caregivers that day, Debbie was finally able to head home to West Midwood, Brooklyn, and tend to her own family. She hugged her two younger children—Shifa and Mohammed—extra long, with great relief, and then asked, “Where is Yousif?” Her eldest son was often the one she worried about most.
Naji, her husband, said sadly, “Well, he was here, but he’s already left . . .”
He went on to explain that Yousif, just eighteen years old, had already been deployed to the World Trade Center site in order to aid in the rescue mission. Upon his high school graduation, Yousif had convinced Naji and Debbie to sign papers permitting him to join the National Guard. Debbie hadn’t felt good about it at all but knew that keeping her stubborn son from something, once he’d set his mind on it, wasn’t a winning proposition.
Sitting at the dining room table that night after the attacks and staring at Yousif’s empty seat was unbearable for Debbie. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t calm down. She was flooded with guilt—why had she signed that stupid form? All she could think about was her sweet son, who right at that very moment was witnessing unspeakable carnage.
Her husband pointed out that her anxiety was upsetting for their other two children, and she tried valiantly, but not very successfully, to manage her fear. But soon, she would have welcome distraction from her son’s absence.
The following day she received a call from the president of the school board to request her attendance at a meeting. “We need your input in this whole situation,” he said, citing her history of leadership within the New York educational community on issues of diversity and justice.
There was silence as Debbie processed what was being requested of her, and then the superintendent’s voice chimed in: “Debbie, I need you to come in tomorrow, whether school is open or not . . . You need to help us figure out what we can do.”
Like her son who had been so suddenly called to action, Debbie was willing and able to pitch in.
New York City educators were among the unsung heroes on September 11, 2001. Linda Lantieri, the director of the Inner Resilience Program, an organization that provided retreat experiences and ongoing support for teachers affected by the terrorist attacks and their aftermath, attests: “Miraculously, due to quick thinking, deep caring, and the inner resourcefulness of educators in the area, not a single student life was lost.”
After 9/11, countless educators were transformed overnight into grief counselors, recovery coordinators, and crisis-intervention experts for their students. As Lantieri visited schools in the aftermath of the attacks, she saw educators struggling to cope: “Many displayed the classic signs of compassion fatigue. In all the listening, they had not yet had the chance to check in with their own feelings and tell their own stories.”
Such was certainly the case for Debbie. Although she was experiencing her own season of trauma, she rarely spoke about it to others—instead focusing on her students, her community work, anything to make her feel a sense of purpose in such an uncertain time. Mary Dluhy, director of group initiatives at Georgetown University and a therapist in private practice in Washington, D.C., explains, “When you are processing a loss—whether of a loved one or for a dream shattered—your deepest fears of abandonment, of helplessness, and of loss of control are triggered.”
Being able to channel one’s trauma and anxiety into a compelling project, as Debbie did, can be very healing. But nothing could prevent her from worrying about her son. Yousif would call home to let his family know he was all right, but he offered few details of his duties other than that he had been helping to recover bodies and to patrol the area.
“It is a world without time,” he explained to his mother. “We don’t sleep here. You eat when you get hungry.” She could do nothing to protect him from the sights and sounds he was being exposed to. Though she had never witnessed such death and destruction firsthand, she could only imagine the way it must be embedding itself into her dear Yousif’s mind. She felt as if she could do nothing to protect him.
On October 6, 2001—twenty-five days after the initial attack—Yousif got his first opportunity to come home from Ground Zero. When Debbie opened the door at about eight p.m. that autumn evening, Yousif was just standing there. “I couldn’t believe it was him,” she recalls. “It didn�
��t look like him. His face looked so tired and so stressed; his clothes smelled. It was just so scary to look at him.”
He broke the silence: “I am hungry.”
The family sat together in a daze, watching Yousif eat. If Debbie had felt guilty before about allowing such a young person to join the army, now she felt sure that Yousif’s experiences at Ground Zero had aged him. “How is it out there?” she asked tentatively.
Yousif took a few more forkfuls of the food on his plate, as ravenous as if he hadn’t eaten once in the almost four weeks he’d been gone, and then said, “Mom, I can’t begin to tell you. I would never, ever want you or Dad to see anything I saw. Mom, it’s like going to hell and coming back.”
Debbie was spending her school days inside the comforting bubble of her little classroom, but working with the school district on what was equivalent to a second job after hours. She explains, “My newfound activism was a way to help me deal with my issues around my son not being home and being at Ground Zero in a dangerous situation.”
Her own mission was clear: promoting religious understanding during this volatile time. This included making sure that no one in the local school communities felt marginalized. She supervised the translation of school board communications with parents into as many languages as possible, did sensitivity training for fellow teachers, and gave talks to parents. She was also the first one that parents knew they could go to if their families experienced harassment or discrimination in or around school.
One of Debbie’s favorite projects involved organizing groups of diverse students to discuss their experiences of September 11, 2001, and then paint murals together. Participating children were asked to reflect on questions like these in small groups: Where were you on 9/11? How did you feel when you heard about 9/11? What are your thoughts today about 9/11? What are your thoughts about the upcoming anniversary of 9/11?
She’d seen many children break into tears, expressing their sadness and fear—sometimes for the first time—over what happened that day. “One of the children who cried,” Debbie recounts, “talked about the fact that his name was Osama Muhammed, and how his life was never going to be the same again. People will know he’s Muslim and will torment him.”
Debbie felt that the attacks had fanned the flames of ignorance, like that which she’d encountered as a little girl in Buffalo. It now had a grown-up name, Islamophobia, and it was becoming more and more rampant in the post-9/11 world.
According to the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, People of Middle Eastern descent experienced 354 attacks in 2000 and an astonishing 1,501 attacks in 2001. Among those who were victims of the backlash, a Middle Eastern man in Houston, Texas, was shot and wounded by someone accusing him of “blowing up the country,” and four immigrants were shot and killed by a man who claimed to be taking revenge against Arabs (although only one of the victims, in reality, was of Arab descent) for the September 11th attacks.
In the face of this kind of violence, Debbie believed, educating the public about diversity and religious pluralism was more critical than ever. It had also become even more important for Muslims and Arabs to have a strong, peaceful voice in public.
In the summer of 2005, Debbie was at a gala breakfast banquet at Gracie Mansion, the historic residence where the Office of the Mayor holds significant events. Thanks to the instrumental work of Debbie and others, Mayor Michael Bloomberg had declared the week of July 9 to 16 the first-ever Arab American Heritage Week.
Debbie had served as the liaison between the mayor’s office and the dozens of diverse Arab American organizations involved in the day’s celebration. Between safety concerns and everyone wanting to make sure their interests were represented and their work recognized, hers was no easy task.
But Debbie was used to controversy. That past summer, she had intervened when the committee for the United American Muslim Day Parade printed flyers with the year’s theme: “The Koran: Salvation of Humankind.”
“I looked at it, and it just made me cringe,” Debbie recalls. She went to her husband, who initially didn’t see anything wrong with the flyer. She asked him, “What if you are a human being that does not believe in the Koran? What if your book is the Torah or the New Testament?”
“It didn’t even dawn on me,” Naji replied, but proudly threw his support, once again, behind his conscientious wife. Debbie presented her concern at a committee meeting, invited dialogue, and asked them to generate some new ideas.
“Well, do you have a title for us?” asked one of the committee members. She had come ready with a friend’s suggestion for rewording the theme: “The Koran: A Universal Message.”
It was her constant attention to the importance of language and her commitment to speaking in universal terms that made Debbie such a successful translator between the diverse Arab and Muslim American communities that she loved and the world of New York City politics. Debbie cried as the commissioner of immigration affairs, himself from the Dominican Republic, acknowledged Arabs’ contributions to the city since the 1800s. She saw the beauty of receiving recognition from someone of another underrecognized culture.
When the mayor took the stage in July of 2005 and said, “Ahlan wa Sahlan. Welcome,” Debbie smiled at the sound of Arabic and English intertwined in power’s mouth.
Meanwhile, things had been continuously difficult for Yousif. Since the end of his service at Ground Zero in February of 2002, he had been plagued by nightmares. It was also hard for him to commit to anything: Jobs came and went, he started college but then dropped out, and stable relationships eluded him. Debbie had tried to convince him to go to therapy, but he had declined.
Yousif had to go see a doctor when his hair started falling out in patches. He also suffered from skin discoloration around his lips, which made him extremely self-conscious. The doctor suggested that these temporary symptoms were probably stress related. Debbie couldn’t help thinking that these physical conditions were a result of the months he’d spent at Ground Zero, but she was even more concerned about her son’s mental well-being.
Debbie cringed when she remembered the moment in January of 2003 when two detectives had shown up at her home, unannounced, and told her two boys—in her absence—that they had a few questions. The detectives were especially interested in information regarding anti-American comments their mother had supposedly made. Mohammed tried his best to defend his mother: “We’re not that kind of family. My mom would never say anything anti-American. You don’t know my mom.”
In a conference call later that evening, one of the detectives explained, “Ma’am, we received an anonymous tip from a woman who had overheard you bragging about a son who went to train in Yemen and is now a National Reservist in the [U.S.] army.”
Debbie kept her cool but didn’t hide her indignation. After all, Yousif had not only admitted to them that he had visited his mother’s native Yemen in the summer, but he had also identified himself as a proud American who had served in the rescue at Ground Zero.
She responded to the investigators, “We are Yemeni Americans, sir, and my son loves this country, the country he was born and raised in, and wants to serve.”
At first, Yousif had been in support of the Iraq War, feeling that it was the necessary retaliation for the horrible carnage that he witnessed at Ground Zero. But when he sat, hip to hip, with his parents and watched the bombs being dropped on Baghdad, the reality of the violence set in. He came to see that America was creating more destruction, more Ground Zeros for other people’s young sons to sort through. He didn’t want anyone to see the things that he had seen.
He began educating himself more and more about the terrorist attacks, Al-Qaeda, the Bush administration, and all of the other complex facets of the moment that Americans were facing. Yousif’s newfound knowledge made it difficult for him to continue his military commitment, but he ultimately decided to see his time commitment through and be discharged honorably. In the meantime, the reality that he could be deployed to Iraq at any
time was paramount in his mind—perhaps part of why he had yet to plant his feet firmly on the ground.
Though Debbie continued to worry about Yousif, even larger opportunities to spread her message of religious pluralism were coming her way. In April of 2005, New Visions for Public Schools, a leading nonprofit in the education reform movement, contacted her to inform her that she had been recommended as the perfect person to head a dual-language Arabic and English school. It would be the first public school of its kind in the nation. “This will be your opportunity to bridge East and West,” the leadership at New Visions told Debbie.
At first, she was a bit skeptical. There was still so much violence, discrimination, and harassment going on toward Middle Easterners in New York and beyond. Getting Arab American Heritage Week had been a feat in and of itself; there was still a lot of opposition to anything that uninformed people associated with the culture of terrorism. Was it really possible to get such a school off the ground and running?
But for all of her skepticism, Debbie had too much excitement about the possibility not to dedicate herself—heart and soul—to this new project. She saw the school as the potential culmination of everything she had worked for in her career and a beautiful expression of her most deeply held values about the importance of education in pursuit of a more peaceful world.
She spent the next two years taking the school from a dream on paper to a bricks-and-mortar reality—a place destined to be filled with bright students, well-trained teachers, and a diversity of learning opportunities. “I’ve surrounded myself with amazing people who believe in what the school stands for,” she shared excitedly in 2006.
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