My name is Rania. I am a 35 year old woman with 4 children, 2 girls and 2 boys. I am married to an American Muslim named Mohammed who is age 49. We lived and made our home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana until my husband decided that he wanted to take another wife.
The man I married has become a successful and wealthy business man with plenty of help from me along the way. In all of our 15 years together, I have served him as a wife faithfully as I should have. I made him a home and took care of that home. I bore his children and I raise and take care of them without much help from him. But I accept this as it is the custom of the religion, the wife must take care of her husband and his home and his children. I was happy to do this for him but he was very abusive and for many years he has mistreated me and whenever I tried to protest he would hit me and beat me, even in front of our children or whoever happened to be around at the time his temper flared. He even beat me when I was pregnant with his children. Still, I tried to be a good wife to him. In everything that we do, in all of the successes I helped him achieve in his life and in his business, he never once acknowledged me or thanked me. He only acknowledges me when something goes wrong or not as planned.
If ever I protest at the way he treated me his reply was always ‘you live in my house, eat my food, drive my car, work in my store so you have to do what I say’. It was never ‘our’ anything, only his, even though I worked just as hard to help him have all of those things. And still I took care of my husband and his home and our children. It is in the religion and the culture that if a wife is patient with her husband she will be rewarded in heaven so I tried my hardest but he would only treat me as a slave and not as a wife; merely as a woman to be used and abused at his will. Many times I suffered from black outs and panic attacks as a result of his mistreatment and many times I had to lie to the police and hospitals about the reasons for my conditions, only to try to protect my husband.
In May of 2009, my husband took me and the children with him to Gaza to visit with his family as he had not seen them for quite a while. On the way, he said to me ‘One day you will see me at my wedding, how are you going to take that?’ I didn’t take him seriously of course, as I thought he was just being mean to me again. When we arrived at the border city of Rafah, he just put us out of the car and said goodbye, he didn’t even come in to see his family. He left us there with no money and no transportation, in the company of his family with whom he had planned the entire thing. He called 10 days later to say that he was on vacation in Sharm Alsheik, Egypt and that he would be visiting his sister in Jordan. When I asked him about what we would do, he hung up on me, leaving me stranded with his family. He called again from his sister’s in Jordan to tell me that he was marrying another woman but that he got a bit sick so he took another vacation, this time to Turkey.
At that point, school was about to start back in the US so I was worried about getting the children back home so that they would not miss any school. Instead of picking us up and taking us with him back home, my husband went alone back to the US, again leaving us with no money and stranded with his family. When he next called, he instructed me to just put our children into any school in Gaza, which being the good and faithful wife that I am, I tried to do. The problem is that no schools would accept my children as they only speak, read, and write in English and not Arabic.
Then there are the living conditions in Gaza. Oftentimes there is not enough clean water, there are electricity outages, terrible sanitary conditions which cause rampant disease,# not to mention the constant danger from all of the fighting and conflict in the region. My kids and I became terribly depressed as we could see no hope of being able to escape from the situation that my husband and their father had put us in. I really believe that my husband left us here to waste away so that he would be free to marry another, younger woman. I intend to blow the whistle on him and let the world know what he has tried to do to his family.
When I next heard from him, he told me not to even think of trying to come back to the US until after the school year was over, even though I let him know that the kids weren’t able to attend school in Gaza. He said it didn’t matter to him, only what he wanted mattered. He said that he would come for us in November and to see his family and he did. The entire time he was there he beat me and treated me horribly in front of his family, who in turn treated me badly making my life even more miserable and hopeless. It was during these 3 months that he announced that he intended to marry another woman. In February, he had to go back to the US because of business and I begged him to take me and the children back home so that we could go back to our normal life and he again refused saying that it was my duty to stay there and prepare for him a new house for his new wife. As always, I complied with his wishes even though it was breaking my heart and making my life a living hell. He promised me again to take us home in a few months, after I prepared his new house.
In June, he called and I asked about the travel arrangements so that we could go back home and he got so angry with me and said that he was never going to allow me to go back to the US so I should just completely forget about it. He said he didn’t want me anymore and that I was going to be in Gaza forever, taking care of his kids until I died. At this time, the area where we were forced to live was Hamas controlled territory so there was always the threat of imminent violence. I tried to contact the US Embassy for help but they wouldn’t get involved because we had not yet been harmed or arrested by Hamas but even if we were, they most likely wouldn’t have helped us since they don’t deal with terrorist organizations. We were truly stuck in a hopeless situation with no end or relief in sight.
The next time we heard from my husband, he told my daughter that he had married another woman in Egypt and that she was better than me and would be their new mom. He told her that he had asked his family to be able to divorce me and they agreed. I was so shocked and hurt that when I was able to call him back and ask him about it he only laughed and said to me ‘It’s true, you will not be my wife anymore and don’t bother to try to prove that we were ever even married because I married you in the Islamic way and now you will have nothing.’
The last I heard from him, he was in Egypt with his new wife. He has wholly abandoned us to whatever dark fate may befall us here in Gaza but I will not give up on getting my children safely back home to Louisiana and to the life that they know and deserve. I want the world to know what this man has tried to do to his wife and his 4 children. I don’t want him to get away with abandoning us in a war zone. I want justice for everything he has ever put me and our kids through. It’s only fair and right for the whole world to know what he has done and what kind of a monster he his.
Over Please ,
Sami Mohsen