Letters To My Dead Father
Ten years after the U.S. invaded Iraq, NPR is taking a look back, revisiting people and places first encountered during the war. In 2006, NPR aired a story about a 9-year-old girl who loved her father so much, she wrote him letters to take to work with him. Even after he died, in a carjacking that appeared to have a sectarian motive, she still wrote to him.
We expected to find the angry, grief-stricken girl who had pounded her fists and thrown herself into the mud when she first heard her father was killed, back in 2006.
Instead we found a poised, tall, gazelle of a young lady. Now 16, Guffran says she spends most of her time studying.
Her father had hoped she would become a doctor. But the teenage Guffran has a different plan.
"I like science, I like physics, but I don't like chemistry," she says. "And medical [school], it's all about chemistry, and I don't like it."
Guffran says she wants to be another kind of doctor, a Ph.D. in English, which she insists on speaking with us. Her dream is to teach English language and literature at a university — and maybe to be a writer.
"I like to write, I love to write. And when I feel bad or feel sadness, I catch my paper and my pen and write what I feel," she says.
Moving To A New City
About a year after her father's death, Guffran and her mother and brother moved to the southern Iraqi city of Kerbala. They now live with an uncle and his family. They have exactly one room for studying, eating, receiving guests and sleeping.
The uncle controls everything they do.
"When we want to rent a house, my uncle doesn't allow us," Guffran says.
“ When my mother and aunt start crying, I move to another room and start writing letters, and cry deep inside as I write. ... I feel my heart will break when I remember him.