Marwan Hamza, once an energetic translator for U.S. troops in Iraq, sat slumped in a wheelchair in the lobby of a nursing home in southeast Houston, his eyes downcast on a worn, leopard-print rug.
Dario Lipovac, who befriended Hamza when he first arrived in Houston as a refugee in January, sat next to Hamza’s mother, trying to reassure her.
“That he’s alive is a miracle,” Lipovac said, “a big, big miracle.”
A little more than two months ago, Hamza was in a coma, breathing with a ventilator. He had broken bones in his face and what doctors at Memorial Hermann Hospital diagnosed as a traumatic brain injury. On top of that, he was suffering from kidney failure and had a creeping infection in one arm that forced doctors to amputate above the elbow.
Lipovac, director of refugee resettlement for YMCA International in Houston, visited Hamza at the hospital shortly after his Aug. 26 wreck, and later described him as being “as dead as you can be without actually being dead.”
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Hamza was a translator for U.S. troops for years after the Bagdad invasion. Threats eventually forced him to flee to Ankara, Turkey, before coming to the U.S. as a refugee.
Lipovac picked up Hamza from the airport in January and found himself delighted with Hamza’s nearly flawless English and easy smile.
Hamza, then 22, became a fixture in the local Iraqi community, which has grown significantly since 2007, when the State Department stepped up refugee admissions and funneled hundreds of new arrivals into Houston. Hamza volunteered to translate for refugees and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to help anyone, Lipovac said.
As soon as he was issued a Social Security card, Hamza hustled to get a job, applying to be a forklift driver, a busboy — anything that would let him save enough to buy a car and then start sending money home to his family in Iraq.
He eventually seemed on track to build a successful life in Houston, Lipovac said. But all of that momentum stopped suddenly on the night of his car accident.
Lipovac and Jeff Watkins, the director of Houston’s YMCA International Services, lobbied frantically to bring Hamza’s family to the U.S. on a temporary visa, fearing he would pass away without any relatives here to say goodbye.
With the help of U.S. Rep. Al Green, D-Houston, they secured a visa within a week for Hamza’s mother, Nahlah Qasim Radhi Hamza.
She left her husband and their younger children, ages 18, 13 and 10, behind in Baghdad and boarded a plane for Houston, arriving on Sept. 11 to find her eldest son still deep in a coma.
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Radhi Hamza, while well-received in Houston, was unable to work under the terms of her temporary visa. The landlord of a west Houston apartment complex, however, offered her free rent for six months, and she established a daily routine of taking a bus to the hospital and sitting by her son’s bedside all day.
About 40 days after the accident, Hamza opened his eyes, his mother said. He still had a tube in his throat and couldn’t speak, but she said he recognized her.
Over the next few days, she realized he thought he was still in Baghdad and remembered only pieces of the past that landed him in Houston.
He had no memory of the accident or of big stretches of his life in Baghdad, but he recognized many of his hospital visitors and was able to talk.
“I was very, very grateful,” his mother said.
Hamza eventually was transferred from the hospital to a longer-term care facility in Montrose, and then another one in far southeast Houston.
His mother now changes buses three times each day to visit him and has started looking for a nursing home closer to her apartment that accepts Medicaid and would care for Hamza.
She is planning to apply for asylum to bring her husband and Hamza’s siblings to the U.S., saying the separation is getting increasingly difficult and she’s having troubling caring for her eldest son on her own.
Hamza’s recovery is expected to take a long time, his mother said. He is still in a wheelchair and has shooting pains in both shoulders, but he can stand for brief periods. He also is working to rebuild his speech and responded to many questions in English with brief answers, mostly one or two words, though his Arabic is fast and fluent.
In his wheelchair at the nursing home, Hamza said he wanted to go “home.” Asked if that meant Iraq, Hamza quickly said no.
He looked to his mother, who explained that his home is in Houston — with her.
27-Dec-09 10:00 AM
