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GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) — The face of Iraqi refugee Muna Ahmed lights up with a smile as she recounts learning that another girl from Baghdad would be joining her English as a Second Language class at Covenant House Academy.
Ahmed felt out of place as the only Iraqi girl and the only student wearing a hijab at the charter high school for at-risk, dropout and homeless students. But when Ahmed heard the voice of the new student, Azal Saleh, she knew her worries were over.
The 21-year-old was getting a third chance at having a best friend — 6,300 miles and a world away from the Middle East — at her side again. Ahmed and Saleh, 22, had been neighbors in Iraq before war tore them apart.
"We started crying and hugged," Ahmed said of their reunion. "I was so happy and thankful. It was like wow, a miracle."
The winding journey to Covenant is filled with starts and stops and an inexact timeline that they are still sorting out. The pair split while fleeing from the violence, but remarkably each landed in Grand Rapids briefly in 2010 and were "introduced" to each other a while after arriving in West Michigan.
However, Ahmed and her family abruptly returned to Iraq in 2012 after her mother's brother died in bombing-related accident.
"We had lost so many family members," said Ahmed, who never had the chance to say goodbye to Saleh. "It was so hard for all of us. My mother was feeling so down and decided we should go back to just be with her family."
The continued sectarian violence and the inability of Ahmed to attend school led her father to bring the family back to the U.S.
In the meantime, Saleh had heartache and struggles of her own. She says only: "A lot of bad things happened to me. I came from hell, mistreated and abused."
The trauma was so severe that Saleh, known as Mary to classmates, admits she didn't recognize Ahmed immediately and had to be convinced she knew her. As Ahmed shared old times, Saleh said the light came on and the tears came out.
Crystal Rios, Covenant's ESL teacher, said the reunion played out in front of a class of students who stopped working and watched the interaction.
"All of a sudden they were speaking their language, hugging and crying and explained to us they were from the same village," Rios told The Grand Rapids Press (http://bit.ly/1EdsETe ). "Everybody was kind of tearing up and had goose bumps. It is a very touching story of how they ended up in the same classroom, literally right next to each other."
The old friends now routinely grab two middle seats in the last row during class. They smile and laugh after engaging in quips and shared glances of two best friends.
"We became great, best friends in Baghdad," Saleh recalls fondly. "I have no family here, and I found somebody I knew, and it was her."
Ahmed said the reunion could not have come at a better time because each can use the support and encouragement from someone who not only shares her culture but also has witnessed the horrors of suicide bombers.
Aged out of the regular school system, the women are determined to complete their high school diplomas and move on to college. Saleh, who has a 2-year-old daughter, wants to pursue a business degree while Ahmed has her sight set on pharmacy school.
"Friends are important in our life and this story shows that," Ahmed said.
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Information from: The Grand Rapids Press, http://www.mlive.com/grand-rapids
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