My old School

I bet before vis­it­ing this Blog you already saw Fayrouz’s last post ” Salute To an Iraqi Catholic Nun” if not please go read it, in short it’s about an Iraqi nun “Beninia Shouk­wana” a head­mistress of a primery school and how she keep­ing faith in Iraq and this is typ­i­cal Beninia Shouk­wana as I knew her years ago when I was one of her stu­dents in the same pri­mary school.

The writer of the arti­cle made a mis­take with the name of the school, “IBTIKAAR”=“invention” is the good name for­mally “Mar John the beloved one for the Chaldean nuns”=” مار يوحنا الحبيب لراهبات الكلدان” ( if the trans­la­tion is not good please Fay­rouz cor­rect it. update fay­rouz cor­rected the the name of the school “St. John The Beloved For The Chaldean Nuns.”) one of few schools in Iraq which don’t have the name of Sad­dam or Baath ( lucky me) it was a pri­vate school at my time, the dif­fer­ent between pri­vate school and pub­lic school is, in the pri­vate school par­ents have to pay for the edu­ca­tion of their chil­dren, in pub­lic or government’s schools not, edu­ca­tion is free, the level of the edu­ca­tion in pri­vate schools is much bet­ter than pub­lic schools. When I was in the fifth grade a law from the gov­ern­ment made all the shools pub­lic and the name of my school changed to “IBTIKAAR”.

Back to “Masera Beninia” (Masera is Iraqis for nun), in the arti­cle she said “I’ve been accused of try­ing to con­vert lit­tle Mus­lims to Chris­tian­ity,” most of the school stuff at my time were nuns and I swear nobody tryed to con­vert me to any­thing but I had to sit in the Bible lessons because when I have been asked in first day of school about my reli­gion I answered “I don’t know”, it was really I didn’t knew what is my reli­gion so the nun con­cluded that I am a Chris­t­ian from the way I look and (being white skin with light bruin hair made me Chris­t­ian). My “Bible study“took 2–3 years before they dis­coverd that I am not a Chris­t­ian, “Masera Beninia” was very angry and keept ask­ing me “why did I said that I am a Chris­t­ian?” and keept answer­ing “I didn’t said I am a Chris­t­ian”, she apol­o­gized from my par­ents for this mis­take and my mother told her no need to because actu­ally they don’t care what kind of reli­gion I study.”

God bless you Beninia Shouk­wana your are in my visit list next time in Iraq and god bless you Fay­rouz for post­ing a part of life gone forever.